Has anyone else felt like this? **WARNING: TEEN ANGST**

The phrase..."Get this off my chest."....is specific to the English Language and I cannot see any translation software getting this from any other language.

AA

 

And also, a great many school systems have done away with middle schools so it is an increasingly dated reference well on its way to obsolescence.

 

Please name 5 systems. I have yet to hear of middle schools being eliminated.

 

Baltimore, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, NYC, Charlotte. Those are not the only ones, but the most prominent systems that have or are converting to the K-8 model. Our city and county school systems have also done it. It is because there is a measurable drop in performance when students move from elementary schools to middle schools that is not seen in K-8 schools.

 

Thanks for the info. As a parent, my problem would be that I wouldn't want my 5 year old kindergardener in a school with 15 year olds (8th graders that have failed once).

 

That probably was the logic behind middle schools--keep the puberty kids away from the little angels. There have been various studies on the subject and they have all pretty much consistently found that the drop off from elementary to middle school in test scores and retention rates becomes permanent for the student body as a whole, but deferring the transition to high school sees some drop off, but the student body's performance as a whole recovers after about that first year. It is probably the same reason we see headtstart's boost to student performance crater once they reach middle school.

There are logistical problems which likely keep some systems from making the jump yet--mainly bus scheduling and meal service. The latter is probably also why we have increasingly poor school lunches. The little old ladies have to churn out more meals and zip them kids through to make room for the next wave.

 

Er...how is translation software relevant in the slightest?

With regards to the specificity of the expression, you might want to read this again:

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Thanks, I was unaware. "Equivalent to 8th grade" in that case (we call it Year 9, rather confusingly, or Lower Fifth in snobby schools like my own).

 

Now try and post the French or Dutch or German version and words used in those languages that is the USED IN THAT LANGUAGE EQUIVALENT of...."Get this off my chest."

They are not the literal same words used in English and when they are translated by software the result is NOT..."Get this off my chest."

Go ahead.

Post right here in YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE....the equivalent.

AA

 

This is how Google translates the German equivalent to the expression:


And this is the Croatian equivalent (used in Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin too, as far as I know), but without an object or pronoun:


But it's worth noting that machine translations are notoriously unreliable. As soon as I added an object (nešto = something) and a pronoun (svoje = genitive form of svoj, the possessive pronoun used to refer back to the subject of any sentence, so in this case it would be translated as "one's"), thus making the sentence "to get something off one's chest" the software screwed up:


Skinuti can have a tonne of different meanings; I have no clue why Google translated it as "to download" there (actually, not even to download - it missed out the infinitive -ti ending completely). And sa + genitive is "from" not "to"; sa and s never mean "to." Basically, take software translations with a handful of salt.

Anyway, how come you brought up this point about the expression "to get something off one's chest" being exclusively English? I could talk about language all day; I'm just curious about why you brought a point which was not explicitly related in an obvious way to the discussion, or to your crusade to prove me to be some adult bloke.

 

Is there evidence that K-8 schools do any better? My wife worked for the last two years at a K-8 school. She saw the same dropoff that we associate with middle schools. In other words, is the problem the schooling structure, or is the problem that 11-14 year olds are going through puberty?

The poor school lunches are all due to money. Right now, pretty much, most schools just heat up the crap Sysco (or similar companies) produces for them. In the old days, they actually cooked it at the school. I do agree that the small size of cafeterias in comparison to the school also plays a role--many schools have expanded since being built, but the cafeteria/kitchens are rarely, if ever, expanded. That's why when my sons were at the same school, one ate at 10:45 am, the other at 1 pm.

 

Yes, if you google it. Florida is particular has seen the sharpest difference between K-8 and middle school performance I think but I don't have the link for the story any more. sorry.

 

Is it smart to promote the most violent, bloodthirsty political ideology invented, an ideology that in practice targets its own people for abuse and death?

No, it is not.

 

Interesting. I know by looking at general stats, that our standing compared to the rest of the world drops in middle school. Our elementary school students do as well as most elementary school students. Our middle/high school students not so much.

 

Hey Deckel, do you believe me now? ⌒.⌒

 

As I have said you very well may be what you say you are and be the exception....but probability is against that.


Holen Sie sich etwas aus meiner Brust ...is Get something off my chest.

My point is if you are even a word off in German then it will not translate to...Get something off my chest in English.

You also just used the word.....BLOKE.

This word and it's use is specific to male living in the U.K. and speaking English.

Now I will not go on with this IF.....you can PLEASE show me what WORD you used in your Non-English language you state you are having translated as you post into English on this forum that you typed that came out translated to BLOKE?

You do that for me....I will drop the issue...OK?

AA

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I wasn't talking about her ideological folly.

AA

 

As I indicated in an earlier post, it seems like eliminating the middle schools helps with high school performance in those places that do it, and lowers the drop out rate. It is something we are just a couple years into in our area so it will remain to be seen if it pans out for our snot-nosed punks. Our general catch-all high school has a lot of violence and general discipline problems. The magnet schools, hardly any.

 

Heh, that sounds so weird

That's sort of the point of idiomatic expressions, you know. That doesn't mean that the expression "to get something of one's chest" does not have an equivalent in another language.

Incidentally I do live in the UK, as I mentioned earlier in the thread. I'm not ethnically British and I consider myself culturally European, but I live in the UK. And women use this word just as often as men do in British English (and a few other varieties of English). It's like "mec" in French.

Er...I wrote the post in English? It's not a translation. I actually have no idea how one would say "bloke" in my native language (I don't think the concept of a "bloke" even exists in the same way as it does in the Anglosphere and Francophonie). I'm fluent in English; I don't write everything out in my mother tongue and then translate it, and I think in English very often.

 

If you can write this effectively in English then why have you been talking about how you have been posting in another language?

Yes I know you live in the U.K.

A man such as myself knows a lot of things.

AA

 

Have I? I was just saying that the idiom "to get sth. off one's chest" is a standard, well-established idiomatic expression with equivalents in other languages, not some sort of weird masculine slang. It's the kind of idiom people learn in foreign language classes.

Ooh, so mysterious.

Seriously, I've explicitly said that I live in the UK a couple of times (although I try not to, since I'm not that proud of it) and I use British English and British slang. It's not exactly difficult to tell.

 

Look.....this is the last thing I will say about this......you could be what you say you are.....but it is highly unlikely.

There are too many conflicting issues.

AA

 

Ha, highly unlikely. Even though I've linked to other sites which back up the claims I've made and provided actual concrete evidence; though quite frankly I shouldn't have had to do that because your claims are based on nothing but subjective personal prejudices which you have failed to evidence in any way (probably because they are stuff and nonsense and if anyone had managed to establish a clear enough link between gender and vocabulary to warrant conclusions like yours, their findings would be all over linguistic and scientific journals). I'll just repost this, in case you didn't get the message:

I'm not going to ask for the thread to be closed, but I honestly regret that it just devolved into a discussion about my identity simply because people can't get their heads out of the sand and get over their preconceived and largely unsubstantiated notions of how women or teenagers "should" write.

 

What I post is not claims that are based on nothing but subjective personal prejudices.

You don't add up.

There is a specific methodology and science to profile and individual and after doing this the probability although not zero of you being what you claim to be is low in the extreme.

AA

 

Well you're wrong, and I've provided evidence. Such profiling might work as a last resort, when the only tools you have with which to profile someone and they've gone incognito, but when you're literally reading someone's posts on an internet forum and that person has been explicit about and evidenced her gender (and sex in this case) and age, there's no need for the former method, and your insistence on using it anyway is based on subjective personal prejudice. All that assuming that you're not just talking out of your arse when you talk about your totes super secret techniques in order to justify said prejudice, which I have no reason not to believe.

I don't think there's much more to say.

 

Not much.

And these techniques are used by the FBI and other groups so you can easily look up the basics.

But most of it is trade secrets.

I find it funny that you are not aware what a Profiler is as it is a position a person can obtain in the FBI as well as in various intelligence agencies civilian and military.

For instance.....we can tell by the amount of time it takes you to type out certain words whether you are a man or a woman or a child.

It is not 100% but because there is a difference in the ability of a person depending upon their age or sex to reach certain key's in a given time software exists that determines specific probabilities of who and what that person is.

AA

 

No, I would believe you even less now if that was possible, but I also don't care about whatever game you are playing. You persistently over-gild your lily which is a further indicator you are being deceptive. It is just a variation of the "I dropped out of high school and am now worth millions off the sweat of my brow" personas people on message boards make. Whatevers.