[Wellsy]

I find Megos' vids to be very entertaining, largely due to the understated, slightly odd but genuinely very funny humour in them

The very slow one armer with a completely straight face, eyes staring blankly into the camera, in complete silence, just totally cracked me up

[36chambers]

Ondra's written a good post about the grade (can also write well in English):

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cxvax5ft-F7/

"All things considered, I support Jakob's 9c proposition. The only other possible solution is a slash grade."

I can't help but think the entire post was to just to let everyone know that Silence is harder

[Muenchener]

Compared to some of the post "send" claptrap posted by some native English speakers, they all write pretty well.

But try convincing any of them that the b in climbing is silent, no matter how good their English is otherwise.

[SA Chris]

Given my command of any foreign languages (even my Afrikaans is getting rusty through lack of use) I'll not criticise anyone!

[jwi]

Compared to some of the post "send" claptrap posted by some native English speakers, they all write pretty well.

But try convincing any of them that the b in climbing is silent, no matter how good their English is otherwise.

(Unfair, buy funny. Unfair because english spelling is ... a lot more irregular than French.)

For most impressive command of a foreign language, all categories, I nominate Amin Maalouf who despite speaking Arab as his native language yesterday got elected to the be the perpetual secretary of the Académie française — the governmental institution charged with defining the French language.

[SA Chris]

French - "every living thing is born without reason" - and every single thing, living or otherwise, has a gender, and there are no rules as to what gender it is you just have to know.

[jwi]

Quite. That the gender of a noun conveys absolutely no semantic information seems hard to wrap the head around for speakers of languages with ungendered nouns (Afrikaans as well I guess?). The good news is that if you learn the genders of French nouns you can guess the genders of Spanish nouns with near 95 % accuracy (exceptions like la tomate <> el tomate are quite rare). Swedish has four genders, but two of them are for things with biological genders and the other two convey no inherent meaning and are not completely stable across all dialects . Norwegian and Danish only have three, poor people.

[mrjonathanr]

French - "every living thing is born without reason" - and every single thing, living or otherwise, has a gender, and there are no rules as to what gender it is you just have to know.

Well, there are patterns which help. Recognise the suffixes -sse and -ion for example, and you have yourself a feminine noun. French, Spanish (and the other Romance languages) are a corrupted C21st form of Latin. And Latin feminine noun = French/Spanish feminine too. *

* as jwi says, there are always oddities eg la mer/ el mar

[jakk]

Norwegian and Danish only have three, poor people.

Luckily, some Norwegian dialects simplify by just ignoring the feminine gender other than in the cases of specifically gendered nouns (eg woman, girl, etc), effectively turning it into normal vs neutral, which is much easier!

[SA Chris]

Useful knowledge thanks guys, but unless I immerse myself in it I doubt my French is ever going to progress much.

[mrjonathanr]

This should help get you started:
https://youtu.be/X5hrUGFhsXo?t=1

[jwi]

Useful knowledge thanks guys, but unless I immerse myself in it I doubt my French is ever going to progress much.

Hang in there, after all the only way to find out which restaurants are good in an arbitrary location is to buy the francophone guidebook for the area (sometimes googling "meuilleurs addresses en XYZ" also work).

Apparently there's no other language in which this information can be reliably conveyed.