Any idea what this app is?

Android System SafetyCore.

Marx seems to have developed an early interest in Spanish in the 1840s, but it was only in the early ’50s that he systematically devoted himself to it. In 1853, he mentioned that he borrowed a concise Spanish grammar book from a friend. In 1854, he reported to Engels on his readings in Spanish and Italian:

At odd moments I am going in for Spanish. Have begun with Calderón.… I am reading in Spanish what I’d found impossible in French, Chateaubriand’s Atala and René, and some stuff by Bernardin de St-Pierre. Am now in the middle of Don Quixote. I find that a dictionary is more necessary in Spanish than in Italian at the start. By chance I have got hold of the Archivio triennale delle cose d’ltalia dall’avvenimento di Pio IX all’abbandono di Venezia [Three-year archive of Italian affairs from the time of Pius IX to the abandonment of Venice] etc. It’s the best thing about the Italian revolutionary party that I have read.

Marx’s immersion in Spanish helped him exploit original sources on Spain’s recent political past. Focusing on the first half of the nineteenth century, he was making preparations to write a series of articles for the New York Tribune. Looking back at his preoccupation with Spanish in previous months, he wrote that “I made a timely start with Don Quixote.… At least it may be counted a step forward that at this moment one’s studies are paid for.” One such payoff was that, in the Spanish sources, he could find ample evidence for a republican conspiracy in the French army when Napoleon was in command in Spain during the Franco-Spanish War. Much later, Spanish was going to be helpful in his studies of the colonial history of the Americas.

…

As Engels wrote much later, even “Italian is much better suited than French to the dialectical mode of presentation.” This impression was originally addressed to Pasquale Martignetti, who reached out to Engels in 1883, sending him his Italian translation of Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Not fluent in German, Martignetti translated Engels’s text from Lafargue’s French version. Writing back to Martignetti in Italian, Engels suggested making significant changes of the Italian text, though he admitted that he was not able to render the whole piece in Italian himself, for “my Italian is imperfect and that I am out of practice.” Martignetti also asked Engels to recommend him language resources to improve his German. Given Engels’s response, Martignetti seems to be familiar with Johann Franz Ahn’s German textbook, which gave special weight to bidirectional translation (between original and target languages) of short passages rather than memorizing vocabulary. Engels responded that he was not familiar with Ahn’s book but shared his own method of learning any language from scratch:

In order to learn a language the method I have always followed is this: I do not bother with grammar (except for declensions and conjugations, and pronouns) and I read, with a dictionary, the most difficult classical author I can find. Thus I began Italian with Dante, Petrarch and Ariosto, Spanish with Cervantes and Calderon, Russian with Pushkin. Then I read newspapers, etc. For German, I think the first part of Goethe’s Faust might be suitable; it is written, for the most part, in a popular style, and the things which would seem difficult to you would also be difficult, without a commentary, for a German reader.

…

It was in the context of political struggles against antisemitism that Engels considered Jewish voices particularly important:

anti-Semitism is merely the reaction of declining medieval social strata against a modern society consisting essentially of capitalists and wage-laborers, so that all it serves are reactionary ends under a purportedly socialist cloak; it is a degenerate form of feudal socialism and we can have nothing to do with that.… Thanks to anti-Semitism in eastern Europe, and to the Spanish Inquisition in Turkey, there are here in England and in America thousands upon thousands of Jewish proletarians; and it is precisely, these Jewish workers who are the worst exploited and the most poverty-stricken. In England during the past twelve months we have had three strikes by Jewish workers. Are we then expected to engage in anti-Semitism in our struggle against capital?

It is unknown to what extent Engels was fluent in Hebrew or Yiddish, but in his very late life, he continued pursuing still other languages, even learning new ones. As he wrote to Laura Lafargue in 1894, he was reading German, English, and Italian daily newspapers and was following various weeklies: “I receive 2 from Germany, 7 Austria, 1 France, 3 America (2 English, 1 German), 2 Italian, and 1 each in Polish, Bulgarian, Spanish and Bohemian, three of which in languages I am still gradually acquiring.”

In his reminiscences of Engels, Lafargue writes that shortly after the fall of the Paris Commune, he had visited the National Councils of the International in Spain and Portugal where he was told that a certain “Angel” (Engels) “wrote perfect Castilian” and “impeccable Portuguese”—”a fine achievement when one thinks of the similarities and small differences the two languages have with one another and with Italian, in which he was equally proficient.”

Edward Aveling recollected that Engels’s home was frequently visited by a large number of socialists from many countries: “Engels could converse with all of them in their own language. Like [Karl] Marx, he spoke and wrote German, French, and English perfectly; nearly as perfectly in Italian, Spanish, Danish, and also read, and could get along with Russian, Polish, and Romanian, not to mention such trivialities as Latin and Greek.”

For Marx and Engels, fluency in reading, writing, listening, or speaking seems to have never been a goal for its own sake. Keen interest in various languages, yes, but always as part of a scientific purpose and political commitment. Socialist internationalism required, and, to some extent, still requires polyglottery.

Short video about current floods in Libya and how they are so much worse due to the deliberate sabotage of the NATO campaign.

Just came across this channel. Looks like one to keep an eye on for African news.

This site has a few Castro speeches and a letter (to Chávez). If you look through the site there are many other speeches, too (menu > proyectos > discursos). Could be a good way of getting some Spanish input.

(I can't guarantee the speeches are real ones!)

They insist on controlling the media, the publishing, the schools, the teachers, the curriculum, the judiciary, the museums, and the curators. But they only use their power for good. They hold themselves to the highest standards in the search of the truth and the presentation of the truth. Honest! Their independent watchdogs confirmed it. And why would they lie, anyway?

Looking back through my cursive handwritten notes, I noticed my past self was very concerned with hummus society. What could this mean?

It's not a Marxist list but that's perhaps to be expected from a list curated from other lists across the internet. I thought it was useful, still, as there are 200 entries, including lots of fiction, which could be a good way to engage with the topic or for recommendations to people who don't/won't read theory.

Here's a playlist on YouTube that includes 'game movies'. Someone has taken all the story parts of games and edited them together into movies. The whole list is in Spanish but note that some only have Spanish subtitles whereas others have Spanish subtitles and Spanish audio.

Invidious link: https://yewtu.be/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fplaylist%3Flist%3DPLWxBoZFZCce1LUbtciI2xzDvcXiI8WXH5

Anki is spaced-repetition software. It works on the basis of the 'forgetting curve'. The idea is that new information is soon forgotten but if you remind yourself an hour later, you'll remember till the next day; and if you remind yourself the next day, you'll remember till next week; and if you remind yourself next week, you'll remember for a month, etc.

I've heard that one of the better ways to use Anki is creating your own decks. Personally, I find this to be a lot of effort. Too much for me to bother making individual cards.

I am experimenting with new ways to make cards. I'm no expert but here's what I have found.

The first way is to use Google sheets. In column 1, include a native language word or phrase. There's a formula to translate each of these into your target language using country codes.

For English to Spanish, click cell B1 and enter =GOOGLETRANSLATE(A1,"en","es"). Tap enter. Now click cell B1 then click and hold the 'drag button' in the bottom right of the cell and drag this down column B to the end of the list in column A. This should translate everything. English column A, Spanish column B.

Save the document as a csv file with text separated by tabs or semicolons. Open the Anki app, create a new deck, and import. Find the csv file, play with the settings. Voila.

One way of making lists of useful (to you) words is through Calibre. Put an ebook that you want to read into calibre. Find it in the list, right-click and press 'Edit book'. When the new window opens, click Tools > Reports > Words. Sort by 'Times used'. This arranges all the words in the book by frequency. You can copy this list into Google sheets, as above. If you're new to the language, sort by most frequent as you'll get a better payoff for the effort.

(Be warned that a lot of high frequency words are functional and/or have many, many meanings. If e.g. Spanish is a new language, one or two key definitions is fine to start with. You can add nuance later. You can also delete the proper nouns: e.g. you don't need a translation of 'Marx' if it's the same in both languages.)

If you have a better vocabulary, scroll down and grab the words that are used only e.g. 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 times in the book. Getting Anki lists like this, you can front-load the vocabulary for a book that you want to read and memorise the relevant vocab on the bus or the toilet.

(What does Lenin's Imperialismo: fase superior del capitalismo look like word frequency-wise? The top 12 words are de, la, en, el, los, y, que, del, a, las, se, por. The most frequent substantive word, at number 13, used 369 times, is 'desconocido'. Later comes 'Capital' m, used 207 times. 'Imperialismo' 183. 'Bancos' 170. 'Millones' 155. 'Capitalismo' 131. …)

If you read the book at the same time, you'll recognise the vocab as you read. (It might take a long time to come across the less frequent words—one that's only used once might be on the last page.)

Another way of creating lists is using your favourite song lyrics. Get these from a search engine, search for 'song name+letra' then search for the 'song name+lyrics English' to see if there's a translation. If not you can decide how fun it will be for you to translate it yourself or you could use the Google sheets method. Then put one language in one column and the other in the next column. If you have a translation, you can probably use any spreadsheet software. But the cvs file needs to be in UTF-8, I believe.

Another method involves reading books on Kindle. Every time you don't know a word or sentence, click it and get the translation. Then either highlight that word or the whole sentence (for context). Once finished with the book (because it's too hard, boring, or you get to the end) the highlights ('notes') can be exported. (If you read through your notes to recap all the words/sentences that you struggled with, and do it again a week later, it's spaced repetition.)

There's also a way to transfer these notes into Anki cards. There are some scripts/programs in GitHub that could be useful for this. I've not played with it yet but VocabSieve should allow you to import Kindle lookups, translate them, and export this data as a file that can be imported to Anki.

With all these methods, you kind of have to trust the translation software. I've found it to be good enough for English to Spanish. The odd translation is obviously wrong but otherwise, it's fine.

Hopefully these help someone else to avoid the tedium of making Anki decks but in a way that ensures the vocab in your decks is relevant to you.

You can, of course, do things the not-so-old fashioned way. Rather than importing your vocab to Anki, use your spreadsheet. You'll just have to work out the timings for yourself. Then you could hide the first column, and type the translation of the word in the second column into the third column. The next day, hide the first two columns and type the translation of the words in the third column into the fourth column. You can change the colour of rows of words that become too easy and create a colour-coded system for reviewing these monthly, yearly, etc.

Hola amigos,

Hay muchos videojuegos divertidos. Muchos menos con audio o subtítulos españoles. Pero hay algunos.

Skyrim y Fallout 4 continenen muchísimos textos y audios. También Batman: Arkham Knight, Dying Light, Civilisation VI y Dragon Age: Inquisition. Quizás Spiderman. Last of Us, Unchartered, tienen audios y textos pero no tanto cómo estos otros. Pienso FIFA también. (Ten cuidado con Batman y Spiderman porque es fácil que utilizo dinero real en los menus cuando el idioma está menos familiares. No caes en esa trampa.)

Divinity: Original Sin y Red Dead Redemption (y otros juegos rockstargames) tienen textos españoles al menos. Pensé que Divinity tiene audios pero parece que no.

Esto es un listo mas largo de R****t:

• Bethesda stuff (Elder Scrolls, Fallout)
• Blizzard stuff (Diablo, WoW)
• Cyberpunk
• Monster Hunter World
• Witcher 1 [Witcher 3 has Spanish menus, subtitles, etc, but not audio]
• Lost Ark
• Battle Chasers: Nightwar
• Bloodborne/Demon's Souls (maybe not enough voice acting)
• Fable series
• Neverwinter Nights 2
• Lord of the Rings: War in the North
• Sudeki…
• Playstation Studios stuff (God of War, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, Last of Us, Uncharted, Spiderman, etc.)
• Assassin's Creed series
• Destiny games
• Borderlands series
• Darksiders series (Genesis is an ARPG)
• XCOM series (also Gears Tactics)
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor/War
• Bioshock series
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Sekiro
• Death Stranding
• The newer Deus Ex games
• Ghostwire Tokyo
• Jedi Fallen Order
• Beyond Good and Evil
• Breath of the Wild (minimal voice acting)
• Child of Light (minimal voice acting?)

I'm unsure if all these have audio but they should have the text language in Spanish. Sometimes, on a console, you'll have to download a language pack. With some games the language can be changed at any time: it's either set by your console language or in the game settings. With e.g. [Assassin's Creed], I believe you get one chance to set the language at the start of the save file.

@[email protected] I found four text based games:

• Ord – this is very fun, very straightforward. Play it with a DeepL or Google translate window/app open on another device to look up words quickly.
• Darkside Detective (there's a sequel, too)
• A Place for the Unwilling (this is English-only audio but it looks mainly text-based so it might be possible to just mute the audio and play it as if it's solely text-based)
• Grim Fandango

There is also this list, but I am unsure how safe it is to buy from itch.io or to play the free games in your browser: https://itch.io/games/lang-es/tag-text-based (will you let me know if you have any luck/fun with any of these?)

Edit: forgot to add an example.

I like RPGs. Final Fantasy, Witcher 3, Fallout 3 and 4, Skyrim, Morrowind, Oblivion, etc.

Will I enjoy Monster Hunter: World? Is it good? Does it have a good story? Or is it (too) fetch-questy?

I'm looking at this one because it's available with Spanish audio and text whereas other Monster World games only have Spanish text, if that. So the others aren't an option, but feel free to compare this one to the others.

In 2018, Delta airlines unveiled new uniforms made of a synthetic-blend fabric. Soon after, flight attendants began to get sick. Alden Wicker explains how toxic chemicals get in clothes in To Dye For.

Employers caring more about image that health. Iconic duo.