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[Frumple]

Any language you don't understand is going to look like a jumble of random letters.

Eehh, not necessarily. I've only noticed a few (that still use this alphabet, anyway) that really look particularly random or jumbled. Takes a bit more than just not being able to understand the meaning, heh.

... accent marks and letter combinations you basically never see in english are definitely contributors, though. Some things look like words or sentences you don't understand. Other things look like the alphabet just had a stroke and died on your carpet.

[ChairmanPoo]

Unless it's a Romance language, anyway.  They have serious pronunciation quirks but I wouldn't even call German a jumble.

But German isn't a Romance language...

[Rolan7]

Yeah, and thus it's a bit harder to parse...  It's still a heavy component of the English mess language though.

[scriver]

 ...Do you mean Germanic/Germanian instead of German?

[CABL]

The hardest part of the German language (personally) is masculine/neutral/feminine articles. For example, "knife" in German will be "Das Messer", which means it's neutral, while in Russian knife will be "Нож" (pronounced "Nozh") and is masculine (Russian language has no articles at all). And the problem is that there is no way to predict which word will have "Der", "Das" or "Die" ("Die" is a feminine article, it's pronounced "Dee"), so you'll have to memorize which article is correct for the specific word.

[Rolan7]

All those gendered words are a problem for me studying Spanish, too.  So arbitrary...  eggs are male, for example, so you better use "el huevo".
Vaguely bothers me that the language emphasizes gender to such a pedantic degree.  Glad that Russia doesn't bother with such redundant articles.

[Arx]

The thing I struggle with mostly in German is actually the cases. English kind of has a dative case, but I feel like it's much less developed compared to German and I haven't actually put in the time to wrap my head around how the articles change in the different cases.

[Neonivek]

I prefer to watch the game in question in order to make an opinion about it, or at least read the walkthrough on mechanics. Normal reviews are simply not informative enough.

I prefer to go the route Jim Sterling seems to think reasonable and buy every game that I find even remotely interesting then whine that Steam isn't spoonfeeding me and changing my diapers when it turns out I bought a bad game.

His opinion is more that Steam should be doing more work providing quality assurance with Steam Greenlight and be more choosey of what they let past the gates.

And proves his by buying every single terrible game released there... and showing how a lot of them are unfinished garbage, do nothing asset flips, or glitched to hell and back.

---

Because no offense... It would be like a store existing... and you go to the chip isle... And a few bags of chips are actually empty or infested with cockroaches.

Sure the store didn't make the bags... But why are they selling them?

I mean sure a bad bag of chips or two will always happen... But this store just does it regularly. To the point where even some sections of the chip isle gets labeled as the scam isle.

[redwallzyl]

the gendering is definitely the hardest part for me in German. then theirs the million different versions of "the" and "a" and the associated ending changes on words. the rearranging of sentence order is also confusing as hell. at least pronunciation and spelling is easier then in English, I'm a native speaker of English and even i have no idea how to spell or pronounce many words.

[Rolan7]

Because no offense... It would be like a store existing... and you go to the chip isle... And a few bags of chips are actually empty or infested with cockroaches.

Sure the store didn't make the bags... But why are they selling them?

I mean sure a bad bag of chips or two will always happen... But this store just does it regularly. To the point where even some sections of the chip isle gets labeled as the scam isle.

I suppose to be fair it's more like an open-air farmer's market.  But even then, hosting bad content hurts the market's reputation.  Or it *should*, and reviewers like Jim Sterling help make sure the public is aware of the...  heh... bad apples.

[Eric Blank]

Don't get what the problem with bad apples is. I try to get grocers to give me their spoiled fruits and veggies so I can feed them to my pig, even though a lot of them cite company policy or law regarding giving customers spoiled products. She loves getting something besides the regular food though


Anyway we got three more inches of snow last night when the fuck is winter gonna end its cold ;-;

[Rolan7]

...Related, also one of those "In hindsight, WTF" moments.
My mom had an arrangement with what we called the day-old-bread store, literally IIRC a store that sold bread (and nothing but) cheaply because it was about to expire.  We would pick up bread that finally expired, and take it to our landlady who loved animals.

Specifically, she would feed deer and raccoons from her hands.  In retrospect this was a terrible idea, ecologically speaking, but she was an old lady and also yeah our landlady.
One of my chores growing up was to go into the backyard and fling bags worth of honestly edible bread into the woods.  When she was on vacation.

[IcyTea31]

WTF even is the Finnish language.
I mean, "Ja kääriytyy tiukemmin Bossin buustereihin"? WTF is such a jumble of letters supposed to communicate? O-O   

"And wraps tighter to Boss' boosters." It's a subordinate clause, meaning it should have a main clause right before it to give it an actor and maybe some context. Otherwise it's a non-sequitur even in Finnish.

This reminds me of the D&D game I'm in that's playing the Forgotten Realms campaign "Hoard of the Dragon Queen". It's translated beautifully as "Lohikäärmekuningattaren Aarre".

[Eric Blank]

...Related, also one of those "In hindsight, WTF" moments.
My mom had an arrangement with what we called the day-old-bread store, literally IIRC a store that sold bread (and nothing but) cheaply because it was about to expire.  We would pick up bread that finally expired, and take it to our landlady who loved animals.

Specifically, she would feed deer and raccoons from her hands.  In retrospect this was a terrible idea, ecologically speaking, but she was an old lady and also yeah our landlady.
One of my chores growing up was to go into the backyard and fling bags worth of honestly edible bread into the woods.  When she was on vacation.

Yeah, we had a deer and her fawns (and a huge flock of turkeys) that would sneak into the yard behind the house we were renting and eat applies that fell to the ground or were hanging low enough. I got loads of pictures of them because they didn't look through the windows if they didn't see movement.

Actually we have the same situation going on now; deer have been sneaking into our yard at night and eating our garden and fruit tree saplings, and drinking from the pond right outside the house. I once walked out the door and there was a pretty big buck with his face in the pond not thirty feet from me, and we had been making a lot of noise that night.

My father reports the deer at his place of work also ignore people unless they think someone will hand them treats. They just browse the bushes on the hospital grounds all day. Don't even bother to run if you don't walk straight towards them.

[Neonivek]

Having watched a few videos of a experienced player teaming up with someone fresh to a videogame

I have to say... Carrying noobs (and I mean that in a definition sort of way... Someone new to a game) is a skill onto itself.

Not in terms of "be so good they don't have to do a thing" but rather what I notice the most is that people who reach a certain level of experience actually forget the barriers of entry or the little things that a new player would need to know. It has become so second nature that it is no longer conscious.

It reminds me of the difference between Driving Instructors and... say... Parents.. when teaching you to drive.

Driving Instructors know how to give directions to a new driver and always give clear rarely misinterpretable instructions. A Parent will say "Left!" which to a new driver can mean everything from "IMMEDIATELY GO LEFT!" to "Go into the next lane" to "Turn left at the stoplight".

Yet what is kind of funny is that Parents and Expert gamers will often outright forget what it is like just learning... and blame the learner for not immediately catching on. "I said left! don't you listen?"... and then heap more pressure onto them.