Author: Rauf Aliev

Immersing ourselves in American culture

About the school meeting, vampires, dates, and date company

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/26/ptaevent/

Feel like a 10-year-old Russian girl in America by solving at least one English assignment!

An interactive exercise from the book Skulls for Super Writers on the topic “Action Verbs”, which was assigned to Masha from Wednesday to Thursday, is on my blog

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/26/englishexercise/

How many correct answers did you get?

About vocabulary in the English language and learning the language. Yesterday, for educational purposes, I watched the 2000 film “The Miracle Worker” about the childhood of Helen Keller. The English there is quite simple and understandable, with an interesting biographical plot.

Today, I decided to answer the question of how rich the vocabulary in the film is. How many words do you need to know to at least understand the subtitles?

Using simple tools (Wget, Perl, Bash), I did the following:

* Downloaded the subtitle file,

* Extracted only the dialogues. There were 1409 dialogues,

* Split them into words. Removed special characters, punctuation marks. Removed repeated words (left with unique ones). This resulted in 1095 words,

* Tried to remove word forms as much as possible (plural forms, past tense, adverbs, ing-forms). Ended up with 982 words,

* Fed them to the Lingvo translator. It recognized and translated 898 words,

* If you remove single-letter words, which I missed early on, it comes out to about 875-880 words.

The file with the complete list of words and translations, as well as a link to the film online, is on my blog http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/26/how-many-words-you-need-to-know/.

So, to understand absolutely everything in the film 100%, you need a vocabulary of only 880 words, right?

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/26/how-many-words-you-need-to-know/

From the Lives of the Insane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1NagZN2kjY

Boston Dynamics (Google) has made a public appearance with their new robot. Impressive. Here is a closer look at the previous model:

P.S. I think Skynet won’t forget the hockey stick and bat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY

“Masha asks: ‘Mom, why in Russia have I never seen the principal at school? But here, he walks around the halls as if he has no other business?'”

By the way, here every morning the principal greets the children at the entrance. And then he visits them too. // 23.02

* * *

Today, Masha’s class teacher came to school wearing a hockey mask with ‘Ovechkin’ written on the back. During the break, she asked Masha, ‘Do you know who Ovechkin is? He lives nearby. He even visited our school.’ // 18.02

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/24/schoolnotes/

Here is how they teach Virginia history to Masha in the 4th grade. Lots of photos of Masha’s workbook – follow the link to my blog,

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/23/история-вирджинии-в-4-м-классе-сша/

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/23/история-вирджинии-в-4-м-классе-сша/

Here’s something interesting: textbooks from an American school on Physics-Chemistry, Geometry, and Social Studies. That is, all textbooks – nothing else was given out.

Check our blog for what’s inside them.

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/23/лизины-учебники-за-8-класс/

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/23/лизины-учебники-за-8-класс/