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submaroon

9 karma · joined March 15, 2020

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submaroon··on Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
My first thought was to suggest finding multiple English translations of a piece of Hebrew Literature you like and comparing them. Then I remembered the linked article, which is a comparison of four different English translations of the verse novel Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. The article was written by Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science and comparative literature at Indiana University who has an essay collection called Metamagical Themas (an anagram of Mathematical Games). The first few essays are about self-referential sentences and a subset of those, self-replicating sentences, which you really have to read to believe. Maybe check out his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. It won the Pulitzer, but if you pick it up, just remember that when you get confused, it’s his fault, not yours.

But Winston Churchill said it best, and this is great advice: “short words are best, and old words, when short, are best of all”.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/r...

https://www.powells.com/book/-9780465045662

https://www.powells.com/book/-9780465026562

submaroon··on Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community
> Human beings do not intuitively understand exponential growth.

This layman has read that we intuitively think of numbers logarithmically, which makes him wonder if we human beings do, in fact, intuitively understand exponential growth.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-natural-log/