Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Fish wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 25, 2018 12:00 pm

However, I do agree with your other comment regarding spoken Danish. I wasted an hour at near-zero comprehension

are these different dialects of Danish, or did Fish attempt to understand to a Danish show without knowing Danish?

Thanks for reminding me that SWR is not related to COL. Note to self: don't post while distracted with other stuff. Multitasking apparently really doesn't work for me.

Y'all weren't making your own detergent yet? This is doing wonders for my DIY ego. You can use liquid soap so you don't have to shred the bar. Get liquid soap without the fragrance.

I haven't been, but I also barely use laundry detergent as most of my laundry is done by my employer. It comes free with the gym service they offer for employees.

After watching the documentary (very cool!) I remembered that I wanted to share some further thoughts on my experience at the meetup.

For one, Jacob is funny, engaging, and talkative. As someone who once described his adjusted Maslow’s hierarchy of needs thusly:

jacob wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 28, 2018 1:18 pm

On my pyramid, social needs are at the very top. Like a little antenna broadcasting the Drake equation.

I was surprised at how adeptly he socialized and that he seemed to have a wonderful time hosting everyone.

The group as a whole was smart, curious, and generous with their time. The more experienced people seemed happy and willing to give detailed answers to the questions of the noobs. It was great getting so many perspectives and personal anecdotes in such a short period of time.

The highlight for me was probably seeing the garden. Jacob’s wife gave a few of us a tour, lovingly pointing out all the different crops they are growing. It was quite impressive. It was all the more awesome because you can see over their fence and into the backyards of many of their neighbors. For as far as the eye can see it was the same patch of lawn with nothing growing on it. The contrast was stark. I was surrounded by squash, berries, and a bunch of other stuff while looking out on barren plots. It felt like a good metaphor for ERE as a whole — the neighbors had the same exact space as Jacob, but they didn’t have the time or inclination to do anything with it.

@brute - I have minimal experience with Swedish which helped me "read" a few Danish FIRE articles with the help of online translators and dictionaries. Another forum member describes spoken Swedish-Danish as "related and sort of mutually intelligible, but not really" which is also borne out by research.

Mutual intelligibility is highest between Norwegians and Swedes (82.6% and 83.7% correct answers for the Swedes and a little higher, 88.9% and 88.3%, for the Norwegians); Danish is hard to understand, especially for Swedish-speaking listeners (24.3% correct for Stockholm, 21.8% for Mariehamn and 6.7% for Helsinki).

Source: "The Contribution of Linguistic Factors to the Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages" by Charlotte Gooskens. It's an interesting paper if you're into this topic. If native Swedish speakers have 24% listening comprehension then zero seems right at my level of proficiency. I do find the written language highly intelligible though.

@Smashter - Nice observation about the garden at ERE HQ and the contrast with the surroundings. Thanks for sharing your meetup experience with those of us who couldn't be there.

@cimerone12
Mine worked without any extensions and without even knowing it was doing it as it was before your comment and I simply thought that the website offered english captions, didn't know Chrome could translate captions on a video too. They were good enough to clearly understand what was being talked about.

What a great tv-show and the chrome translation worked fine, although I did understand quite a lot of the audio because I'm fluent in Swedish.

@Jacob: You are working on a new book?! That's some great news ! Is there some information regarding this new book somewhere here in the forums or is it still somewhat of a "secret"?

watched the whole thing.

The TV- dinner scene was quite shocking for me to see, as someone who was read all 300 pages of blog entries on Jacob´s website. Like the most non-ERE thinng

I enjoyed the documentary. Thanks for the translation tip. I used google chrome per the (=) instructions above and no plug-in was required. It worked pretty well.

@void Can a man not have a seat while he eats? Less ERE would be to pay to have a dedicated room for eating in, sometimes called a dining room, to be used no more than an hour each day. He's a cult leader not a monk

It was a nice watch to see in the new year. I felt like I was renewing my ere vows Jacob, family and all of the folk at the meet up came across really well. hashtag represent.

The Chrome translation worked well - I was able to follow the documentary without any issues. Jacob has a nice woodworking area.

...

I missed the 2018 meetup. Are there any planned for 2019?