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Comment by natural219 | Hacker News Reader

This is completely tangential and I'm not sure if this is off-topic enough to be considered breaking the rules, but you are by far my favorite commenter on HN, and perhaps even the internet. Every post you write is a joy to read, and I know that when I see a comment by "tokenadult" I am in for an informative and thorough break-down of the subject matter. Thank you, and please keep posting.

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I guess this is one of those cases where I wish that the commenter would submit a link to their blog, instead of posting an interesting-yet-not-really-on-topic-way-too-long comment. [1]

[1] To refresh everyone's memory, pg's essay is about what happens when founders have trouble making themselves understood, while tokenadult's comment is about how to learn a foreign language.

I think it's fine to post a comment like this to HN, absolutely we are better for it. However it should also be posted to a blog so it's not lost to the sands of time.

His comment was specifically about learning how to speak a foreign language with a reasonably "native"-sounding quality — i.e. what the stumbling blocks are that lead to hard-to-understand accents (and/or difficulty understanding native accents) and how to get past them. It seems pretty relevant to me.

That post was on topic. He explained why it is so hard to be made understood when English is your second language, which was what pg was talking about!

Conversely, I skimmed down the page, saw the list of references at the bottom, and knew it had to be a tokenadult comment.

Wow....just looking at his 'about' section in his profile - that's another essay with references.

Interesting!

I agree. Thank you tokenadult!

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