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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

Must be a setup right? I've taken several years of French in college, never had a vocab set quite like that!

Another odd detail, TSA didn't randomly read a stack of paper in his carry-on. TFA says "handed cards to the agent" after being asked to empty pockets. How is a TSA lacky supposed to NOT alert a supervisor in that situation?

The only thing more ridiculous would be after handing the deck of flash cards directly to the agent is if the top cards were in the order "Bomb", "Touting", "Terrorist".

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I took Danish, and part of our course involved writing essays on things that were in the newspapers, and then discussing it in class.

Can you imagine the sort of words that would be in my vocab list if it had been done in the last few weeks ?

    > I've taken several years of French in college, never had
    > a vocab set quite like that!

I also did several years of French, and learned the phrases: "maladie de la vache folle" and "fièvre aphteuse". This allows you to place when I was learning French, because you could see when those were in the newspaper. If I was learning French now, I suspect I'd have a similar vocab set.

Don't you think it's more likely to want to have a conversation about terrorism with people that speak arabic, especially in the US where it must be a constant burden for the Arabs after 9/11? On a 80 words deck having 10 words related to a very relevant news and discussion topic strikes you as weird? You didn't learn how to say bomb, kill, kidnap etc after years of learning french?

I know a few people who speak Arabic as a first language.

Perhaps weirdly we don't chitchat about bombs and death and murder. We talk about the soccer and about the roadworks and about what they watched on telly and how their allotment-garden is doing.

Why, when you hear "Arabic", do you think a natural topic of concersation is "terrorism"?

"years of learning French" is not, however, "at the same time you're learning simple words like 'fat', 'thin', 'pink', and 'summer'".

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