Thread 24781386

In a recent study published by John Hopkins University students were asked to write a translation of the first few paragraphs of Bleak House in clear, modern English. They were given dictionaries, access to the Internet, and as much time as they needed. Despite this, 49 of the 85 students failed to do so. Sentence after sentence, they could not grasp what Dickens was saying; i.e., they were incapable of figuring out who or what a sentence was talking about, did not understand the imagery or metaphors, could not translate long or complex sentences into shorter, simpler ones, and could not identify the main ideas being described. As such, the researchers deemed this group to be "problematic readers"

>>24781386 (OP)
It was a muddy, foggy, shitty day, but even the worst of it still wasn't as fucked as the High Court of Chancery (which deals with edge cases that don't have precedent in common law)
How'd I do?

>>24781386 (OP)
Just hearing about this now? We discussed this for over a week months ago.

>>24781402
Failed on account of being a lazy fuck most likely. It's suppose to be a sentence-by-sentence translation not a one sentence summary.

i started reading but the british faggotry was too much :(

>>24781386 (OP)
I don't know what Michaelmas celebrates. Otherwise no problems reading it. But I did find this striking correlation.
>Johns Hopkins University has a diverse student body, with 63% of students identifying as people of color

>>24781417
A good school for people going into medicine. Not sure about the rest

>>24781386 (OP)
About 10 minutes of toil turning it into modern, more digestible sludge

>>24781426
>if the waters were to suddenly vanish from the face of the earth
Fucking retard. He’s alluding to the biblical flood.

>>24781414
Translate to what language? It's already in English. I can see why 58% failed the test if the directions are as unclear and asinine as the High Court of Chancery.

Now translate my post line by line.

>>24781386 (OP)
I like its atmosphere. Though perhaps it would be a bit better, were it less overwrought.

>>24781417
>identifying as people of color
Can you still do that?

>>24781417
Indians should have no issues with it, they speak English as a lingua franca already. Don't they?

>>24781423
It does pubch above it's weight for medical and biological science. Not quite top 50 in the world for literature, specifically, but nothing that would indicate that 58% of their students can't comprehend the English language.

>>24781437
Sounds almost like a requirement.

>>24781446
Only 15% are international students. And no.

>>24781386 (OP)
I can read it but I can't enjoy it. All that dross just to say "it's a dirty world, but the court is even dirtier".
>you must translate it line-by-line
No!

>>24781386 (OP)
>rewritten in modern English
This is in modern English

>>24781386 (OP)
>it’s foggy and rainy
>some fatso is sitting at a bar
Woah

>>24781417
>Johns Hopkins University has a diverse student body, with 63% of students identifying as people of color

Jesus Christ, what the fuck. I graduated in 2006 and it was quite different back then.

>>24781386 (OP)
Is Dickens based?

>>24781386 (OP)
It's already in clear English. The problem is the fictional distinction for "modern" English. This study is fucking retarded and is haggard and drooping and rancid.

>>24781386 (OP)
London is so off right now. Michaelmas Term just wrapped, and the Lord Chancellor’s literally just hanging out in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. It’s November and the weather? Absolute disaster. The streets are just mud, like it rained for days and no one thought to clean up. I honestly wouldn’t be shocked if a Megalosaurus just, like, waddled up Holborn Hill, acting like it owns the place.
There’s smoke everywhere, making it feel like the city’s in a mood, coming from chimneys. It’s like this weird black drizzle that’s not even rain, just soot. Like, are we mourning the sun or what? Dogs are just blobs of mud, horses too, basically camouflaged in the dirt. People are straight up tripping over umbrellas, just all over it, sliding around every corner, adding to the giant mud pit. The day hasn’t even started yet, it’s so dark.
And then there’s the fog. Fog everywhere. It’s creeping down the river, wrapping itself around ships, meadows, everything. Honestly feels like pollution got its own vibe. Fog’s, like, literally in boats, in the old ships. The Greenwich pensioners are wheezing by the fire, trying to act like they’re fine, while the sailors are freezing in their fog bubble too. It’s even in their pipes. No escape.
If you’re on a bridge, you’re basically in a cloud, staring at a sky that’s about to swallow you whole. The gas lamps? They’re barely doing their job, glowing through the fog, looking all sad, like they know this is a mess. Shops are lit up way too early, just adding to the chaotic energy. The whole vibe is just tired.
But the worst part? Temple Bar. It’s like the fog is even thicker there, the streets are even grosser, and it’s just this gross dark mess around this old, cranky landmark. And right there, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, the Lord Chancellor is just chilling in the middle of the fog. Like, does he ever feel anything? The High Court of Chancery is basically a trainwreck, and it’s been like this forever. Straight up chaos, and no one's doing anything about it.

>>24781598
>London is so off right now

>>24781557
Like 90% of those POC students are probably Asian

>>24781446
Indians learn a technical and heavily Latinized English (so they can more easily displace white American men working in tech (by working for half the pay, sending it back to their family in Mumbai and making them the richest shitter on the block), and thus can’t read literature for shit.

>>24781386 (OP)
It was the start of the school year and people hurried to work. The streets were slippery and so muddy people fell onto the floor, go up, and walked the dinosaur!

>no one can understand references to the liturgical calendar from just a century ago nor the most basic of allusions to the West's foundational text
>"No, modernity is not washing away anything. Capitalism and liberalism are totally consistent with tradition, don't worry about everything becoming a consumerist hellscape."

>>24781649
your desire to be right is only matched by your aptitude for evil

Is this going to be another one of those studies like the "nobody reads anymore" study where they discounted 95% of online reading.

I always suspect these studies with counterintuitive results.

i find every sentence very easy to understand, except the sentence with the megalosaurus. i have no idea what he's saying there.

>>24781705
Yes, yes, pointing out racial disparities that highlight an anti-white bias specifically is the greatest sin of the postmodern age. I'm literally the devil, which you don't believe in.

>>24781386 (OP)
I am probably one of the worse readers on this board. If I can do it, lit majors are retarded. I will not use google nor a dictionary. Here goes:
>It's November in London, and the weather is relentless. The streets are incredibly muddy, like if they had just been covered by the ocean, and it would be normal to see huge aquatic dinosaurs. The smoke is coming out of the chimnies, like it's mourning the death of the sun. The street is also filled with dogs that all look the same covered in mud. And horses, in the same state. And pedestrians are walking around, slipping in the mud, where everyone else who's been walking has also slipped since the beginning of the day (well, if you can even call this day), which added more and more mud to the pavement, as it accumulated on the feet of passerby.

>>24781408
Just noticing that bait gets recycled endlessly on this site?

>>24781667
>Indians learn a technical and heavily Latinized English
yes saar doing the intense latinized needful brahmin caste I am saar do not be the benchod blody bastard

>>24781386 (OP)
English, psychology, and business. These three majors always have a bunch of idiots that don’t know what else to do with their life, so they join these just to get a degree. I bet communications majors do way better at writing and could muster up better translations on average.

>>24781557
Whatever they are, white or black, none of them are gonna be able to write decent translations of these works. STEM kids just know how to write well enough to do good on the SAT.

Listen to the Cormac McCarthy, Lawrence Krauss, and Werner Herzog interview. That’s what your average STEM kid sounds like compared to a great writer.

Normie Republcians are gonna make this worse since they wanted to hate on taking “useless” classes. Academia was already crumbling. It’s just gonna become a service industry to get degrees with the slightest cream of the crop getting to do research and classic Academia shenanigans.

>>24781782
These are specifically English majors. What will be the next excuse?

>>24781727
Whoops

>>24781787
I was talking about the Johns Hopkins students specifically. That it doesn’t matter the race/major. None of them are gonna be able to translate these texts effectively. I know the one’s in the OP’s post are English majors. That just adds to my point. Education as a whole has been slipping for a long time.

>>24781823
When I was a freshman in high school, twenty something years ago, we were required to read A Tale of Two Cities. This was a public school mind you.
To say education is slipping is an understatement. It has fallen of a cliff and we are rapidly approaching the ground. You can not maintain a complex civilization without an educated technical class.

>the researchers deemed this group to be "problematic readers"
It's worse than that. They determined them to be at a level one literacy rate which puts them on par with kids in elementary school.

>>24781782
>It’s just gonna become a service industry to get degrees
As it should be.
I’m confident employers don’t give a shit if someone studying electrical engineering can re-write classic literature in casual format

>>24781823
>Everyone at John Hopkins is a STEM student
Lol, no. Education isn't the problem here.

>>24781843
Yeah, my point is that attaching such a model to academia is worse for everyone. Especially for Republicans that care so much about their heritage and the western canon. Learning stuff like that at Petersons retarded academy is gay.

I have trouble with present tense.

>>24781844
I’m not gonna argue with an autistic retard that can’t look at the lines I’ve written and infer information implied therein.

>>24781852
>Republicans that care so much about their heritage and the western canon
they never cared about anything but converting browns to christianity and shipping them here for cheap labour.

>>24781852
General education is what k-12 is for.
College is for getting a job.
Unless the education system in the US gets overhauled and made “free”,or at least significantly less expensive, I don’t think it’s fair to force more courses, especially irrelevant ones, on students who just want to get a job.

>>24781863
>General education is what k-12 is for.
>College is for getting a job.
says who?

>>24781386 (OP)
english majors are usually fucking retards
t. english major

>>24781866
I would assume the majority of people in college are there to get a job afterwards

>>24781874
only because of the false impression it leads to one

>>24781834
>the next wave of English teachers will know no more about the subject than a second grader
lol
lmao

>>24781386 (OP)
Is it his best book?

>>24781417
>>24781649
>>24781656
>>24781705
>>24781727
How did you guys live making everything about races? Jesus Christ, you didn't see topics anymore, only excuses to hesitate "That is Black", "This is white". It's so exhausting to read, can't imagine how it's live like this, in the race-centrism dystopia with inducted pattern recognition on skin color, who cares?.
The best thing you can do to yourselves is stop caring about race, searching about race, understand that a funny race number doesn't explain everything in the world.
God saves USA from whatever convince an entire country that race discussion is #1 problem and solution.

>>24781843
The students had access to a dictionary which means this is less of an English test and more of a problem solving and general intelligence test.
They could have given them something written in any language and with reference material a reasonably intelligent person should be able to figure something out.
These people should not be in higher education.

>>24781902
You may not care about race, but race cares about you.

>>24781386 (OP)
>Husband-Man and Ploughboy, the dynamic duo!

>>24781902
>How did you guys live making everything about races?
name any general metric with better raw explanatory power

>>24781902
>>>/v/722720639

>>24781902
America is an Ethnocracy

>>24781386 (OP)
is bleak house even good? never hear it discussed and is it the same as most of his other novels with poor boy becoming rich through inheritance?

>>24781902
MOST ANONS WHO YOU SEE BRING UP RACE NEVER GAVE A SHIT ABOUT IT UNTIL THEY WERE VILIFIED FOR THAT VERY THING YOU CLAIM THEY SHOULDN'T CARE ABOUT

>>24781904
Yeah, I know.
I was having a different conversation

>>24781904
Don’t bring so much nuance into a conversation full of retards. If any information one can realize simply by thinking about what was written isn’t written in one’s message, they take that as a fault. When really they’re just autistic retards who’s only talent is memorizing a bunch of information. They’re who the study is about.

>>24781932
Most anons who bring up race also conveniently ignore or paper over any fact/statistic that might indicate that they are not the superior race

Most curious

>>24781939
no they don't

>>24781857
>no argument
>ad hominem
>M-my argument was i-implied
Lmao.

>>24781902
America was forced at the end of a gun to try this little experiment that knowingly and falsely posited that all people are equal and, in spite of it's overwhelmingly apparent, miserable failure, it continues to reach all new lows to the detriment of all.

>>24781917
Money lmao

>>24781920
Ethnocracy sounds wild.

>>24781932
Yeah, think I'm being baited most of the time but some people, in this and other sites, repeat that behaviour. It's almost sad.

>>24781955
Why don't they stop?

>>24781986
>Money lmao
wrong again. We can adjust for income and blacks are still violent chimps, for example.

They had the internet and no strict deadline? Fucking sad

>>24781986
Cool it with the anti-Semitism.

>>24781386 (OP)
>Despite this, 49 of the 85 students failed to do so
Universities are oversaturated, not every retard should be allowed in university, I understood what he wanted to say as an ESL, although the guy is insufferable and I don't know why anyone would like to read that word vomit.
Still, half of native speakers failing this tasks shows how retarded mutts really are. I'm assuming it's an American university based on the general retardism.

>>24781929
it's more like a grisham novel, a courthouse thriller

It's so fucking shitty and muddy outside the horse has mud in his eye
And he doesn't have a hands to scratch so he's missrable booo hooo.
But not as miserable as the Court of Buttfuckistan where criminals such as cunny ejoyers are unfairly sentenced

>>24781955
You fucking autistic retard. Why do I have to include that Johns Hopkins has more than STEM. It’s not my fault your brain is the size of golf ball and your mom took too much advil. It wouldn’t change my argument if I added that information you cretin, you imbecile. You WORTHLESS SPAZZ.

I'm ESL and understood it perfectly, even if I had to infer the meaning of some words by the context. Why can't english majors?

>>24781386 (OP)
I'm outing myself as one of the illiterate majority.

I may invoke the excuse that I'm not a native speaker and only recently started actively reading fiction. I'm sure I'll get there, but for now I'll continue with The Great Gatsby and some history and theology on the side.

>>24781386 (OP)
It's November in London, and the Lord Chancellor is sitting in Lincon's Inn Hall. Shitty November weather. The streets look as if the waters of the Flood have receded mere moments ago. It won't be surprise to meet a dinosaur the size of an elephant waddling up Holborn Hill.
Smoke lowers down from chimneys and turns into a soft black drizzle. Its flakes are as big as snowflakes in December in Maine. They are so black it seems as if they're mourning the death of the sun. The sooty mire is so thick you can't see dogs in it. You can recognize horse only by their blinkers. Miserable and irritated pedestrians bump their umbrellas and slip at street-corners where others pedestrian have slipped and slid since morning (if the morning ever started on this day). Each fall adds fresh layer of mud unto the old and crusty layers that smear the streets on these corners.
It's foggy. Fog crawls up the river and flows amidst islands and meadows. Fog slides down the river and rolls among rows of ships and polluted water of a great but dirty city. Fog hangs on the Essex marshes. Fog covers the hills of Kent. Fog creeps into kitchens of ships. Fog lays on the shipyard. Fog covers the rigging of big ships. Fog droops on gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog hangs in the eyes and throats of Greenwich old folk that wheeze by the fires of their wards. Fog is in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of an angry captain down in his cabin. Fog pinches the toes and fingers and contracts the balls of a shivering apprentice boy on deck. Random people on the bridges peep over the edge into a fog, and it looks as if they are in a balloon high up among the clouds.
Gas looms through the fog in manifold places on the streets in the way the sun reflects from wet fields and accompanies farmers and plowers. Most of the shops were lighted two hours before the schedule, and the gas has an exhausted an unwilling look as a result, like Betty, 13, with perky blossoming teats, when she comes into my office every Friday, at noon.
The afternoon is rawest, foggiest, muddiest near Temple Bar. The gray look of this threshold represent well the gray and old corporation within it. The Lord High Chancellor sit in his High Court of Chancery near Temple Bar, in Lincon's Inn Hall, in the epicentre of the fog.
The thickest fog and deepest mud and mire doesn't come close to the lost and struggling state of the High Court of Chancery. Nothing in the Dark Tower multiverse holds a candle to the blind and grasping and most wretched and sinful state of this place.

>>24781386 (OP)
that depends on which posters you are talking about. You see, 4chan is a very broad church of socially outcasted contrarians ranging from crayon munchers to computer scientists.

>>24781598
>Shops are lit up way too early, just adding to the chaotic energy. The whole vibe is just tired.
But the worst part?
obviously GPT, you shouldve hand written this you might've gotten a dozen (You)'s
>>24781726
The streets are caked with so much mud that you would think the biblical flood had just ended, to the extent that it would not be a wonderous occasion to meet a dinosaur because we are still in the jurassic period there is so goddamn much mud everywhere.

>>24781386 (OP)
lol @ american'ts

>>24781902
the niggers that broke into my car attend can college for cheap or even for free even though they don't pay taxes. Get mad about it that is reality and it will result in a third world war.

>>24781414
>Failed on account of being a lazy fuck most likely. It's suppose to be a sentence-by-sentence translation not a one sentence summary.
A number of the sentences only gain context from later sentences in the same paragraphs, and cannot really be translated into “Modern” English, without referencing those later sentences.
A number of the details which may seem like anachronisms to an American, are still standard in the UK, such as the “Lord Chancellor” and Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
Some of the terminology, such as “blinkers” is still routinely used in contemporary UK language, although not American English.
Are things like “Michaelmas” supposed to be expanded upon, or just translated as “September having just passed”, ?
Michaelmas also had other meanings, which may be needed for context, such as the fact that Michaelmas was the time of year when debts were typically expected to be paid, similar to the Ides of March in the Roman Calendar, when debts were also expected to be paid off.

>>24781917
Ma'at

>>24781941
Q.E.D.

>>24782466
Michaelmas term is the first term of the British Schoolyear

>>24782411
>Its flakes are as big as snowflakes in December in Maine.
this pleases me

>>24781955
>America was forced at the end of a gun to try this little experiment that knowingly and falsely posited that all people are equal
And London is the rape capital of the world now. Get fucked

>>24781386 (OP)
London in November. It's muddy. And foggy.

>>24781386 (OP)
>Is lit smarter than English majors?
Absolutely not. Much like the subjects in that study, many anons in this thread exhibit some of the same issues. They believe that the gist of things is sufficient. Hence the "durr, weather shitty" replies, which is not at all the purpose of the thing being asked of them. The gist is the easiest fucking part of ANYTHING; it is only by going from line to line that the critical thinking can both occur and be assessed, and where one is challenged to consider the ways in which the meaning and intent can be maintained whilst altering structure and diction.

In American-speak, they are asking you to try and think like a quarterback, but the overwhelming response has been, "just throw the ball lol."

ESL here, let's see.

I suppose that Michaelmas Term must but after a mass for Michael so after Michael's day in the calendar, and Term is something relating to a school year, so I suppose it's a specific time of the year that must mean something to english students at the time. There's reference to the Lord Chancellor, so maybe it's specific to law schools? Then it mentions it's november, so I assume Michael's Day is in October.

I also suppose that there evocations of dinosaurs because it's so muddy that it's reminiscent of a time where people thought dinosaurs lived in pic related. It's very muddy all around, people keep slidding in the mud and losing their footing.

The fog must be about the pollution of London at the time (I think it's London because it mentions Greenwhich and Kentish which I know of) since it's mentionned being in throats of pensionners and normal condensation fog doesn't make you sick.

Overall the page is to evoke a grim image of London in the mind of the reader.

Then we're back to the chancellery, so the story must definitively revolve about characters involved in the justice system.

Now I read the latest reply to the thread which says the students were supposed to translate or explain every single sentence which I haven't done, and I'm too lazy to redo all that's written above.

>>24781386 (OP)
± ± Londonistan. Recently past the Period of Sammichele, and Herr Kanzler is sat within Lincoln's Inn 'All. Unappeasable the meteo of IXber. Equal street muck as had, only recently, the diluvia retreated from the world's superficies, and no miracle would it be if one encountered a megalosaur, some twelve meters in length, hobbling up 'Olborn 'Ill as were it a gargantuan gecko. Fumes falling from the exhaust pipes of buildings, causing a tender dark mizzle, therein tarry specks large as adult snow-crystals – amourn, you could think, for Solar defunction. Hounds not to be told apart in their grime. Hardly better the equines; covered up to their blinders even. Pedestrians, accost at the brolly, in an epidemic of cantanker, their grip (of the foot) lost on block-edges, in which place myriads of different pedestrians have been gliding underfoot since start of day (if start of day there was, here), heaving on ever more layers of muck to the muck, becoming stuck to the sidewalk, hardily, there at those spots, and adding up in combined rates.
Mist everyplace. Mist upstream, where it streams round grassy isles and leas; mist downstream, where raped it spins out round stacks of harbour, and near the befouled banks of a big (also nasty) settlement-with-a-cathedral-and/or-university. Mist on the swamps of Essex, mist on the peaks of Kent. Mist stealing into the galleys of coalburner ships; mist sleeping on the docks, and floating in the ropes of big vessels; mist sinking on the gunnels of barks and punters. Mist in Greenwich OAPs' eyeussies and thrussies, gasping at their brood's hearth; mist in the iresome captain's p.m. pipe (bowl and stem), in his boudoir; mist dastardly nipping at pollex and hallux of his trembling wee novice femboy outside. Fortuitous folx looking over the edges of bridges to a firmament of mist below, with mist surrounding them everywhere, as though in a montgolfière, hung in the foggy welkin.
Breaking thru the mist in diverse street spots there is effluvium, quite akin to the sun observed, from porous plains, breaking by yeoman and plowlad. Majority of stores lit 120 minutes prior to what's apposite – and so too the effluvium appears to grok, as it's got a physog worn and unconsenting.
The crude p.m. is crudest, and the thick mist is thickest, and the mucky roads are muckiest, close to the lead-capped aged obstacle, a meet decoration for the limen of a lead-capped aged body, viz. Temple Bar. And right at Temple Bar, within Lincoln's Inn 'All, at the mist's core itself, is sat Herr Hochkanzler in 'is 'Oigh Cour' of Chauncery.
There can arrive no mist ever excessively dense, no muck or grime ever excessively profound, to mix with the stillborn shipwrecked state this here 'Oigh Cour' Chauncery – pestiferous'st of prunefaced peccators – keeps, to-day, in the eyes of the là-haut and ici-bas.

>>24782865
Were they clear on doing a close analysis, because if I was asked "what is this saying?", I'd probably give a one sentence summary too. If I was asked to write a paper, I'd look more closely at what it was saying about industrialization and its effect on London around this time and go in depth about the word choice and the repetition.

>>24783028
>I'd probably give a one sentence summary too.
lmfoa why?

>>24783013
How did you develop the ability to write in this rank, high-style pastiche? Tell me your ways.

>>24783013
plz tell me if this is AI so I can decide whether to be impressed

>>24783088
I really just stuck close verbatim and at the sentence level and sought to give it a kind of ridiculous rewording. Mostly it probably more formal in places, but elsewhere more current, more foreign, more British, whatever came to mind; and a little bullshit, surely, deliberate and in-. Reading widely and knowing languages helps.
>>24783169
It's not. I looked up a few synonyms but most was from what I know.

>>24783222
>*it's probably
And an oversight typo, the Muphry's Law kind of fate that will today get you called an esl jeet

>>24783222
>It's not. I looked up a few synonyms but most was from what I know.
thank you now I can rest easy

>>24781386 (OP)
>Normies can't read Dickens
Good, fuck Dickens.
That nigger tought factories were bad for kids as opposed to starving to death on a noble farm. Most immoral 19th century pieces of shit alongside Hegel, Hamilton and the entirety of Prussia

>>24781386 (OP)
not gonna lie, I had to struggle to make it through the text.
Is it over for me /lit/?

>>24783296
not unless you plan to become a novelist or english teacher (like they are)

>>24781902
the anti-intellectual rightoid epidemic in the US has reached basically any English-speaking site on the internet. Let's just hope that when they get their state-mandated Medicaid cuts, enough of them will die, so this place will be less annoying

>>24783231
>angry ESL jeet complains about being overtly stinky
no it's just you

>>24783296
Yes. If the greatest author of all time writing about these bad boys didn't grab your attention, nothing will.

>>24781386 (OP)
To be fair, this is terrible writing.

>>24783263
So, were you impressed?

>>24781386 (OP)
What is michaelmas? And what is the passage about the megalosaurus about

>>24783296
Everytime i try to read dickens i find it tedious despite being able to read what many consider to be more "difficult". English is my only language and I can read more archaic English.
I just haven't enjoyed any excerpt from Dickens

>>24781434
That is a deliberate style choice. Like the banging of a gavel or the formulation of a legal document. It's almost like a telegram message, very mechanical and cold, reflected both in the weather/atmosphere of the scene and the contents of it (pertaining to a court of law). It's meant to sketch an unpleasant scene, a scene that makes you uneasy and on edge against the injustices about to unfold.

>>24783888
He does have a particular style, but once you get into it, there is no one better. I like the whole first few pages of A Tale of Two Cities, but just consider this little excerpt:

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

>>24784045
>very mechanical and cold
my kind of literature

>>24784049
this is just the style of the time, which we generously do not formally refer to as 'deliberately embarrassing'

I use a dictionary when I encounter words I dont know, which the participants didnt do. So that alone makes me a better reader than these chucklefuck pinko commies.

>>24781423
Its has a famous governance and international relations school that is located in DC.

>>24781402
The part in parentheses isn't actually in the page and also false.

i'm a /g/entooman, I will try this tommorow, haven't read most of the thread yet, have a bump

>>24781902
>How
Don't tell anyone but capitalism

>>24785425
That's the part that gets me, they could've looked up anything they didn't understand, but chose not to because they believed they understood it well enough. This makes them the worst kind of moron.

>>24786805
it'll probably be archived by then rip

>>24781402
That's not what Chancery courts did. They dealt with equity matters before the equitable jurisdiction was absorbed into the normal court system. Trusts, injunctions, specific performance, etc.

>>24781386 (OP)
bleak house is so fucking kino

>>24786904
bump

Dinosaurs aren’t real. I lost interest after reading that part

>>24781902
Especially since all the majors who took part were English.

>>24783876
I always thought Michaelmas was the same as Christmas, but apparently I was wrong. The megalosaurus bit is referring to the Great Flood in the Bible, rather than any random flood, and so it wouldn't be surprising (he says "wonderful" but it doesn't mean "good" here; it means "likely to make you feel a sense of wonder") if you saw dinosaurs walking through this mud. Dinosaurs had only recently been discovered at this time, so assuming they must be in the Bible won't have been so retarded back then.

>>24781386 (OP)
>In a recent study published by John Hopkins University students were asked to write a translation
Why would it need a translation, it's perfectly clear. Maybe a summary. I can't see how anyone reading an Uni level cannot read it.
Maybe the odd word like aits would prove an issue. (green aits) Small islands of grass.

>>24785425
But if you looked up "divers", say, it would give you some guy in a snorkel with flippers. You'd have to read every possible one (of the divers definitions XDDD) and then work out which one was relevant. And I have never seen "wonderful" used to mean that.

>>24789197
Maybe they simply mean rewrite instead of translation.

>>24783296
This wasn’t that hard to comprehend at all and I’m black btw

>>24781735
There are some anons who could have missed out!!

>>24781386 (OP)
>49 students turned in ai slop

>>24781386 (OP)
You have to be a cute-ugly, potentially autistic woman to be into Charles Dickens I suppose https://youtu.be/XwZDFZRx-gU?si=quR1K3XfrfshRpBd

>>24789376
Probably. I'm having a hard time believing that a university student is THAT illiterate.

>>24789376
>>24789564
Here's an attempt by chatgpt

You’d need to be a 19th century Brit to understand a fair amount of this without any external aid

>>24789761
I have aids and I still couldn't understand any of it

>>24781386 (OP)
Sentence to sentence it was fine but overall I don’t get it since I have no clue what the High Court of Chancery is

>>24784049
This is kino
I’m a zoomer so I never even went to school but I liked this so much I’m gonna start reading A Tale of Two Cities now

>>24781386 (OP)
Walk. Fish. Farm. Construct. Pray.

>>24789781
There are just certain timeless authors who seem all the more relevant and captivating as time goes on. I'd also recommend John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which is in a similar vein. Here's an excerpt from that one:

And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.

>>24781386 (OP)
It was a dreary November day as the Lord Chancellor sat in Lincoln's Inn Hall.

The streets were as muddy as if the great flood had only just abated, and dinosaurs might still be seen roaming.

Smoke drifted from the chimneys, weeping down soot on the heads of mangy dogs, bedraggled horses, and ill-tempered pedestrians who slipped and slid and jostled their way along the treacherous pavement.

Fog hung heavy over the land, from the meadows to the marshes to the fetid harbor, where the outlines of ships could just be seen, cloaked in mist.

They all felt it: the old invalid at the fireside, the short-tempered sailor in his stuffy cabin, and even the little apprentice boy, shivering on deck.

The cold fog nipped their noses, strung their throats, and pinched their fingers and toes.

They were captives of the fog, guided only by gas-lit street lights which loomed heavily along the streets, like little suns suspended in a gauze of cloud.

And at the heart of this dreary city, where the fog was thickest and the streets were muddiest, sat the Lord High Chancellor, holding court in Lincoln's Inn Hall.

As dreary as the city was, nothing--in all heaven and earth--was drearier or more devoid of goodness than he.

>>24781446
Some castes speak it more fluently than most native speakers. But they probably have quite a helping of British in them as well.

>>24790393
>Some castes speak it more fluently than most native speakers
No, you don't.

>>24781577
There is a want for English to become a tedious language in which nothing is ever truncated and everything must be explained in some a hopefully universal atomization of communication. At least that is my theory.

>>24790401
Removing the soul of English.

>>24790399
I am an Anglo Canadian, never had a drop of brown in my line. But I have met many well spoken and well written Parsis and many more illiterate Canadians, Americans and English. No thanks to intelligence agencies and foreign interests of the last half and a quarter century.

>>24790408
Quite.
This is why I seldomly read anything published after 1950.

>>24783807
Dickens is pure British wankery. Dry, long winded, and boring as all fuck. Worst of all you can tell by his writings that he doesn't think his shit stinks.

>>24781386 (OP)
LONDON. Court's out. The Lord Chancellor is still posted. November weather is mid, fr. Streets are so muddy, it's giving prehistoric era, wouldn't shock me to see a Dino waddling around.

Smoke is everywhere, making a black drizzle. Dogs are unidentifiable. People are side-eyeing each other's umbrellas, everyone is slipping and big mad.

But the main character? The FOG. It's literally everywhere. Up the river, down the river. Fog creeping on boats, bothering everyone. It's giving main character energy.

And right in the heart of the fog, near Temple Bar (a whole mood), sits the Lord High Chancellor.

Let's be so for real: no fog is too thick for this Court of Chancery. It's the OG toxic system, just floundering. It's a problematic fave.

>>24790503
>Dry
I don't agree on that but long winded is fair.

>>24783013
This sounds like what I imagine the modern day sounds like. I'm impressed, but the writing also makes me want to kill myself.

Only thing I didn't know was what an "ait" was.

>>24781386 (OP)
Given access to the internet and dicitonaries and still failed? What? Surely they just half assed the test to get paid whatever the study was offering.

>>24781902
Most of the race focused posters on 4chan are mixed. The race obsession comes from insecurity and the alienation that mixed people go through growing up, not being white enough for the whites nor brown enough for the browns

>>24790503
>Dickens is pure British wankery
The fact that places like the USA struggle to read it, yet in the UK it was classed as early-reader/young-adult should tell you something.

>>24791294
Americans have always enjoyed simpler language and more positive stories than the English. What of it?

>>24783013
>November
>IX

>>24781386 (OP)
ESL here.
I must say, I have somehow understand Dickens text. I would have interpreted it some different, since I would see a allusion both to the Biblical story about the flood and the theory of evolution at the same time. Maybe, my understanding is somehow false. I'm not familiar with English culture.

this is your brain on only reading social media posts and the subs to japanese cartoons
grim

>>24791381
What do you think nove means?
No, it is confusing, but I've seen frogs (a century ago) do it, e.g. writing Xbre for décembre.

>>24781386 (OP)
just another proof that mutts are tards...

>>24791013
Try Great Expectations.

That was the only class-assigned book which I disliked reading in hs. Never bothered with Dickens after that. I do like the media adaptations of of Christmas Carol but wouldn't read it. I like all sorts of English authors from the Victorian age though.

>>24781430
Debatable given the dinosaur mention

>>24781649
>Race: Unknown
What is that supposed to mean? Ayys?

>>24781386 (OP)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
The study is from 2015 and the students were at regional Kansas colleges for the lazy

>>24781386 (OP)
Gonna be honest, I often had to read sentences twice, and a few thrice, to parse them.

>>24791013
Being long winded is in part what can make something dry when it otherwise wouldn't be.

>>24781386 (OP)
The first term of school was over and a rush of bongs filled the streets. It was a peculiar sight. They wadded through the sticky brown mud on the streets as if a dinosaur, forty feet long or so, stomped up Holborn Hill. But it wasn't mud, it was excrement released from the browned skinned people of their former colony. Indians from Mumbai, Delhi, and Agra left piles of sacredness on the streets and the flow of the Thames, which once existed in the era of Arthur, ceased to exist. Piled high and brown, the matted floor spilt onto the cobblestone. Dogs and horses, once the common culprit, had muted condemnation when asked of such conditions. Gentlemen slipped on the sidewalks painted with a slick film of waste found nowhere but on the streets of London, Toronto, and South Asia. Ladies, once highly regarded and mindful of hygiene dismissed such notions, avoiding only the smaller piles littered across the pavement, as the spike on their heel speared through the crusted dried deposits left the day before.

Shit everywhere. Shit in the Essex marshes, shit in the Kentish heights. Shit in Piccadilly and shit in Westminster. Shit in the eyes and throats of the pensioners and shit in the doorways of the skipper that controlled the machinery operating the bridges of London. Even if they were high up in a balloon, not a single Londoner could avoid the sight of shit all around.

Never can there be too much crap from their dark-skinned citizens. The mud and mire thick to their ankles and more arrived upon their shores. Nonetheless, Bongs of North and south, proclaimed proudly of honor to live amongst them. The voice of reason and desire justified their plight. Part and parcel living in London. Curry and tikka masala, holds their days as if they believed they lived in heaven itself.

>>24793673
a faithful reimagining for the current residents of London I reckon

>>24781402
I felt it was more implying that no matter what comes, no matter what conditions, the cold cogs of the court turn on.

>>24781386 (OP)
Yes yes anon we know we should genocide and enslave the inferior and create a eugenic hyperborean space age utopia.

>>24793622
Moist pearls before swine.

>>24781386 (OP)
this thread is bait like those 'only 160 IQ can solve this connect three' ads. I reckon a majority of anons here can read and maybe even internalize a full page of dickens as textual interraction is literally all you do on this site. That doesn't mean this board isn't full of phone addicted morons with tiktok and instagram scatterbrain. They're just a little more used to reading.

>>24792643
Do they not speak English in Kansas?

>>24781386 (OP)
>English majors
>58% of them cannot read the first page of a Dickens novel
No way, I don't believe it. I'm a self-taught ESL (Europe) and I can read it. There is no way this qualifies as a difficult read. I actually love this sort of flowery, long-winded prose and I wish any contemporary instance of it weren't inexorably panned as purple.
I'm not too well read but I think the only one I really struggled with was Melville because of the sailor lingo. Really wish I had the vocabulary to enjoy the prose on my first go. Wish I could write half as well as he did.

>>24781386 (OP)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ynCVmw5AWk

>>24795189
qrd please I'm too retarded to watch an hour video

>>24796066
Watch it at 2x speed whilst doing something else you retarded goldfish.

>>24796066
>qrd please I'm too retarded to watch an hour video
The video is about retards like you, being retarded.

>>24781437
What's stopping you?

>>24781667
>Indians learn a technical and heavily Latinized English
Wtf is this “heavily Latinized English” that you see jeets speaking? Show bob and vagene?

from the thumbnail alone I can tell she has nothing to say.

>>24781832
>To say education is slipping is an understatement. It has fallen of a cliff and we are rapidly approaching the ground. You can not maintain a complex civilization without an educated technical class
As someone that taught, has coworkers that are active professors, and pretty regularly interact with researchers and grad students, yeah, obviously the “quality” of the average student is down the toilet. Very easy shit take to say everything is going down the drain and all things are fucked with regards to education, but I like to see it as things operating normally. I’d have to make a contrived example, but take 1000 ahistoric 18 year olds and think: what % of these kids have what it takes to become a *good* doctor? Whatever % you come up with, let’s pretend you said 10%, take the leftover 90% of those kids and put them in med school, how many from that 90% will eventually become a good doctor? None. Is this a symptom that the quality of education is somehow worse than it was before? I claim no, and that this is more of an effect of more people having access to education than in the past. You have more retards going to school nowadays than ever before. Obviously, I don’t think that retards should be getting high school diplomas let alone entering college, but hey, if they want to blow their time and money going to college, go for it. And if the college wants to give them a piece of paper for all the money the retard blew on classes? Again, why not? At the end of the day, a retard can have any list of accreditations by their name: a diploma from here, a bachelors there, a pee ache dee from this school. All these accreditations do not change the fact that a person was, are and will always be, a retard. All of this is my personal cope so pls don’t burst my bubble or else I’ll seethe at the fact that most people in leadership positions at my company are a retarded white woman (and is why “traditional” American companies as a whole are failing, too many retards bloating the companies to bankruptcy).

I’m an ESL and I can read this though I don’t know a few individual words but I comprehend the meaning.

>>24781386 (OP)
The Harvest fete season was just wrapped up, and the Lord Chancellor sat in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable. November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters of the earth had all but evaporated, and it wouldn't be ideal were you to meet a Megalosaurus 40ft long or so, waddling like a gargantuan lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke blowing out of chimneys, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes attending a funeral, as if the sun itself had passed away. Dogs, unrecognisable in the swamp. Cars, not much more so; covered in mud up to their wipers. Pedestrians, bumping each other's umbrellas in a general display of irritability, and losing their footing on the street-corners, where thousands of other pedestrians have slipped and slid since early morning, (if the morning had even arrived), adding to the mud upon which they walked, at intervals remaining on the pavement where they could, each adding to the crowds.

The fog was all-encompassing, from the river where it passes over islands and grassy-fields; where it flows grimly across the shipping lanes and through the filth of the polluted city. Fog on the marshes in Essex, fog in Kentish town. Fog seeping into the rears of cargo-ships; fog hovering above the yards, and floating among the towers of large ships; fog hanging over the sides of the Dutch-barges and narrow boats. Fog in the sinuses of Greenwich OAP's, wheezing in front of the T.V. in their living rooms; fog in the vape of the afternoon toke of the moody manager, down in his small office; fog cruelly nipping at the toes and fingers of his apprentice in the smoking area. People stood at random on the bridges, and stole glances over the walls into a gloomy sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were up in a helicopter that flew through the misty clouds.

Outtake pipes of central-heating blew hot air through the fog in a variety of places throughout the streets, much as the sun may from the sodden fields, be seen to hang by a farmer and his son. Most of the shops turned on the heating two hours before opening time — as the radiators seem to know, for they have a worn and clanging start.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that ugly brutalist eyesore, a fitting ornament for the threshold of an ugly corporation, Temple Bar. And right next to Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the centre of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there be a fog that is too thick, never than mud and swamp too deep, to assort with the blind and clumsy nature of this High Court of Chancery, the most immoral of unethical people, views the day within the sight of the skies above, and the ground below.

>>24795189
dime-a-dozen reactionary grifter
it’s embarrassing that even VAUSH was both quicker on the draw when it came to reacting to this article and had a much more informed take:
https://youtu.be/wc7IS0lMjc8

>>24781386 (OP)
uhh the line about the soot being depressed snow was good

It's a shitty muggy foggy street and this dude things that it's really epic and horses are getting mud spattered on their blinders. Also there's pollution.
This writing honestly isn't that bad, does it really need translation into "modern" retard english?

>>24797773
>dime-a-dozen reactionary grifter
>VAUSH
I can tell that you didn't watch the video I linked.
Sad. Many such cases.

>>24797818
je suis mongoloid

>>24792643
Okay, some of these gave me a few hearty keks

>>24799547
>Facilitator: [Laughs]

>>24792643
What is the race of these students?

>>24800290
It's racist to ask.

>>24781386 (OP)
Ydont need to tell the details of the fog in the yards, in the eyes, in the ships, or even personified it into pinching someones toes and fingers after you said that 'fog everywhere, fog up the river and meadows' in the first paragraph.
Had this was someone essay or attempt at litracher, then some teacher or anon would redline the entire paragraph and say the same thing as me. But hey, its dickens, its 1800 something, they dont have editor back then and he was like the taylor swift of literature scene; doing a literal world tour of reading his own novel and sign autograph. No one had the rights to tell him the right and wrong about his book

>>24781386 (OP)
I'm not familiar with the proper nouns and it's rather bold to assume a quick glance at the appropriate Wikipedia page is enough.

>>24801928
That explains why modern writing is so choppy. All the fun filler to create flow is gone

>>24802033
It's not just filler it's what makes it a damn novel. Without being imaginative, without style, tone and characterization all you really have is an account of something like you would with a nonfiction history book.

>>24781386 (OP)
i have no idea what he means by leaden-headed obstruction or ornamentation, but I like his writing styel