Gar1eth

You might be right. But I guess we'd need some natural bodybuilders for comparison. Gman

Do you get a jolt from having it manipulated? Gman

I am belly button jolt free. Maybe I need some-- http://previewcf.turbosquid.com/Preview/2014/05/23__01_25_35/jolt.jpgDE9230AC-A8EB-44F7-9BD1F6715447D5BC.jpgLarger.jpg To spark a connection!! Gman

I have a potbelly, but I've always been an innie even when I was skinny ( some few years before The Flood if I'm remembering correctly. Yes, I'm antediluvian!!). Could it be we don't notice outies on us full-figured guys because our bellies roll over the button. Gman

So I notice that the Forum is filled with frivolous posts. And I wanted to drag it back-whether kicking and scream or not-to something serious. And that serious topic is BELLY BUTTONS!! I notice that a lot of muscular guys, especially bodybuilders, often have outies. I was wondering whether you had to be an outie to be a bodybuilder to begin with-maybe only outies have the proper genetics. Or I was wondering whether developing your abdominals caused the former innies to convert to outies. And I guess an outie might also be a sign you've developed a hernia from straining so much to lift heavy weights. But I'm not talking about humongous abdominal/umbilical hernias-just normal innies and outies. And finally if outies are due to developing your abdominals, and if you stop working out as much, do the outies revert back to innies? http://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2011/07/13/a7596496-a643-11e2-a3f0-029118418759/resize/640x360/d5183103a722252bd7a223dc1f6bbe5f/bellybuttonsurgery.jpg Gman

To make sure I understand - there's virtually no difference but enough of one that people who speak the 'standard,' I'm assuming people who use the 'Amsterdam' dialect can hear it? I remember my German TA in first year German. A lot of German words end in -ig. In her dialect they pronounce it as we do. Technically it should be more pronounced as -ich with the 'ch' being that hard, breathy German 'ch' and not our 'ch' in ch-imney. Funny story. There was a not too bright girl in my 1st year college German. I can't remember if she was in my second year or not. If this incident occurred in my second year class, it's even worse. Oh and if anyone is upset at me calling her a girl, I would also refer to the other males in the class as guys -so I have a tendency to not use the terms men and women for my college classmates. Anyway the girl was not too bright. But she actually had mentioned she was thinking of majoring in German. I used to cringe when I heard that because she wasn't very good. So one day in our lab class, the TA who was Swiss mentioned William Tell. This classmate of mine said, "Oh, I think I've heard of him. " I just stared. I mean I don't know what percentage of college students know about him today. But when I was a child watching reruns of Disney or Merrie Melodies Cartoons-wasn't William Tell a fairly common theme for them to make a joke of? I can almost picture a Bugs Bunny cartoon with him shooting an apple off of Elmer or Porky Pig. And then at home we had a book of children's stories which told about him. Gman PS. There were also some not very bright guys in my class. But I can't remember any particularly stories about them. The 'William Tell' incident has remained stuck in my memory because of how unbelievable I found it.

We say er too with the r drawn out usually. But it's more of a 'put on'. I mean when we say er, we deliberately say it and know we are saying it whereas umm is more of a natural, unconscious utterance. The umlaut u isn't really that hard. For all the German umlauts pretty much you make the sound as you might in English but you round up and purse your lips. The umlaut u-is kind of like saying ew but through rounded, pursed lips. With the umlaut a I'd say you pronounce a as in apple and round your mouth without much rounding of your lips. For the umlaut o, say o as in hope but round and purse your lips again like for the u. Gman

Does it help if you 'round' your mouth like you were puckering up for a big fake kiss while still trying to pronounce it as ou in ouch? Gman

And intermediately from French. Gman

Krank means sick or ill. Schwester means sister. And Haus means of course house. So sick-sister = nurse and sick-house =hospital. The Swiss German word for hospital is Spital which I'm assuming is related to our word and ultimately comes from the Latin hospes = guest. Gman

There were several male German TA's at my University. One was married and I think one had dated a female TA for awhile. Of course that doesn't mean they were straight. But I'm thinking they were. And I took an intensive Spanish course one summer at Dartmouth-the Rassias Language Institute. Lots of males as instructors. Aside from some of them being married to women, I don't think any of them really pinged my gaydar. But maybe they were just being discrete. Gman

I am nowhere near fluent in German. And if any native speakers of Dutch or German think differently I will gladly concede, but I doubt in general that they could understand each other very well at all except for maybe the Germans/Dutch/Belgiums living right near the borders of Holland, Germany, and Belgium. I'm betting their native dialects might be more understandable in those regions. Dutch is pronounced very differently and the words have changed a lot in spelling compared to standard German. Gman

Devil's Island!! Gman

That was ausgezeichnet!!! Gman

And there is my experience of actually working with educated Brazilians-they even went to college together-where one of them was fine understanding and speaking Spanish and the other just about had no clue. Gman

There are pluses and minuses for hiring native speakers. If they do get hired, they need to know their own languages grammar from an analytical standpoint. Otherwise they can't really explain things to students when there are questions. Gman

Geoffrey seems to agree with you about bad accents. "There was also a nun, a PRIORESS, Who, in her smiling, modest was and coy; 120 Her greatest oath was but "By Saint Eloy!" And she was called Madam Eglantine. Very well she sang the service divine, Intoning through her nose, becomingly; And she spoke French fairly and fluently, 125 After the school of Stratford-at-the-Bow, For French of Paris style she didn't know." Gman

My 10 day intensive Spanish class at Dartmouth was immersive. But I have to tell you even though we were supposed to converse only in Spanish, being at the very basic level, if we hadn't cheated after class, myself and the others at my level would have been mostly silent outside class. Gman

I used to work with several people with Spanish as their native language. In this instance there were two from Puerto Rico -Angel and Enid with Rafael who was from Mexico. One night I was out with Angel and Rafael. They started talking and picking at each others Spanish-thankfully in my case they were doing it in English. It was so interesting to hear plus very funny. And at one point Rafael said something about Enid (who was not present) -that when she got going, he couldn't understand her- but implying her voice frequently became high pitched, whiny, and spoke extremely fast Spanish. From this I gathered that Puerto Ricans spoke faster than Mexicans. Gman

I understand how you feel. When I was in grad school, my parents still lived where I grew up. And I would visit 'Mama' ( that's what all of us called my Latin teacher) routinely on school breaks. And you have to understand-over my two years with her in high school we were studying for Junior Classical League Tests (Latin Competitions between schools). We studied during lunch and after school. And for the Nationals competition in the summer, we used to study at her house in the summer. My specialties were Derivatives and Vocabulary. I won some ribbons and trophies over the two years. Anyway at one point my parents moved away from where I had grown up back to our hometown. I never went back to where I grew up as I had no family and no real friends left there. The few friends I had had moved away. So nine or so years after my parents moved away, a friend of the family let my mother know that 'Mama' had pancreatic cancer. I didn't do anything at first. I wasn't sure how I felt. I mean I felt bad- but I don't deal well with death-and that's a fatal disease. I was trying to think about what to say to her. Finally my mother rightly said, if she dies before you talk to her, you'll feel very bad. My mom was right. So I called up my teacher, and we had a nice conversation. I also made plans to go back to where I grew up a few weeks later. I was able to get there on a Friday-visit with her in the afternoon at her house and then visited with her again on Saturday and left Saturday afternoon. I don't know if any of y'all have ever been around anyone with pancreatic cancer. I mean I've seen terminally ill people before. But my teacher was so thin and cachectic that I wouldn't have recognized her. And the cachexia was of fairly recent vintage with the cancer. She showed me a picture that was probably takes of her within the last three years. Even though I wouldn't have seen her for 6 years at the time the picture was taken, in the picture she looked very much as I remembered her. So the cachexia with the cancer must have happened only over a two year period or so. Anyway it was a really good visit. We talked about old times and gossiped about people who had been in my class. I was really glad I went, and I know she was glad to see me. I had wanted to try and get our old school group back together to go see Mama even though most of us no longer lived anywhere near there. But she ended up dying about 2 months later. But I was so glad I had gotten to see her before she passed. Gman

Oh see my teacher was great. Plus she was one of those teachers who didn't care how popular you were. In fact she didn't really like the popular kids (athletes and student council) unless they were smart and worked hard. She liked the smart hard workers. She even liked the not so smart hard workers. She would even pass the not so smart if they showed they were trying. When my best friend and I went to college, we were both able to place out of the 1st two years of Latin by taking the department's test. Now the test was stupidly easy. But I actually understood Latin although I don't know how well I would have done as a freshman student taking a first semester junior level course as we hadn't had as much actual readings from Latin writers in high school as they did in the sophomore college classes. My best friend understood next to nothing about Latin. But my teacher was so good (and the test so poor) that he also placed out of 4 semesters of Latin. I will say she wasn't very flexible. She wasn't willing to teach English grammar -so that students who really didn't know or understand English grammar -parts of speech and types of clauses-weren't really going to do well in Latin. She would say the English teachers should have done that. Gman

I loved Latin-but part of this may be due to the fact that I loved my teacher. She was quite a character. And while I don't know a lot about French, my scant knowledge is that it's not really inflected very much-although I have heard verbs can be irregular-compared to German. If however you really understand the Noun Cases of Nominative, Genative, Accusative, and Dative in Latin along with the Latin parts of speech, the knowledge readily transfers over to German. The main problem with German being the endings have changed over time so that most of the endings are either -e, -en, -em, -es, or -er so it's easy to get confused. In Latin the endings are more varied and so easier to differentiate among them. Gman

In 1989 I remember finding it very difficult to find an English speaker in Paris. I'm not talking about the man on the street. I don't expect an average New Yorker to know French. But I was trying to make reservations to leave Paris for Amsterdam. Wouldn't you have thought there would have been an English desk somewhere in the Gare du Nord to help me? Thankfully there was a Canadian who had been living in some French speaking part of Africa or maybe the Caribbean next to me in line who helped me make the reservation. But I will say that my two years of high school Latin certainly helped me. I was always fairly good at grammar-but it certainly helped me improve. It also helped with my vocabulary. And if I hadn't learned about noun cases and declining in Latin beforehand, I'm not sure I would have done as well as I did in German in college. And it's funny, I remember a girl in my German class in college. She seemed intelligent. We were in groups one day. I remember remarking how I thought Latin was helping me in German. She said she had taken Latin in high school too but didn't see how the two were alike. I was stunned. I can only think her Latin class wasn't very good if she couldn't see the relationship in the grammar. Gman

'I love you' was the same in both Hochdeutsch (Standard German) and Schweizerdeutsch (Swiss German. Gman

I was going to say that while the average German might not understand Swiss German, I would assume that most educated Swiss who speak German-know standard German (Hochdeutsch). It's what books are ususally printed in. I mean I could envision an older person from a tiny village maybe not knowing Hochdeutsch, but nowadays I think that souls happen less and less. In my 1st year German class in college one of my teachers was Swiss. She was working on her Masters in German. I have a high school friend who is an ex-Mormon. He did his mission in Germany. He came back to the U.S. for awhile. But he married a German woman and lived in Germany for years. About 5 years ago he was transferred to Switzerland for his job. His Hochdeutsch is very good. But we were talking one day about when he 1st moved to Switzerland, and they were buying furniture. He said he had no idea what the salesman was saying. He said he was just nodding along pretending to understand. Luckily his German wife understood the salesman. Gman