For those, like me, who suffer from a severe typewriter fetish? This test was easy. Can’t see how anyone could fail it, really. So I choose to find the mass failure-rate among my fellow humans somehow alarming. They shall end badly.
i feel a relative discussion to emergent writing and scribble scrabble would be intersting but im too tired to figure out the relation. But yay for this much interest in Letters. <3
I couldn’t provide you with a link, but Kathleen Madigan owns a typewriter she uses to type letters of complaint. The anecdote revolves around her defense of typewriters versus her techie brother’s disdain for them.
My wife and son are like that. My wife came away from her time spent in France with an excellent accent. I came away with a large and very diverse vocabulary, a decent grasp of how to string words together, and a good ability to understand what I was reading or hearing - but only a “not-too-American” accent, not the ability to mimic a French accent like my wife.
I think that I am more visually aware than my wife, and so is my son, but I don’t know if that’s a talent, or just patience and attentiveness.
As far as languages, I don’t have a great ear but I’ve been interested in them since I was a kid, I just didn’t know how to learn them. So when I had opportunities for an immersive environment I really worked at taking advantage of it.
If patience is a talent as well as a virtue then I do have a degree of that talent. My biggest challenge has been dealing with lifelong depression and anxiety, which cancel out the benefits of patience when I can’t bring myself to do anything.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me on this subject. You have given me more to think about.
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Right back atcha!
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Yeah I assume that’s how I got it. None of the other ones “felt” right to my eyes. But I couldn’t tell you the last place I actually saw a “g” in that typeface never mind, it’s on my Kindle. Heh.
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It’s on the main page article…
and I still fucked it up. 
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You are extremely polite!
I’m happy to write your Cliff’s Notes, any time. Especially if I can call it “distilling.”
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I can’t believe there are 108 in the comments in this thread!
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Proper typography is important man… THIS STUFF MATTERS!
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Too easy. Also, I’m thinking of making a supercut of every signature ever on What’s My Line.
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Your username suggests to me that you may be a copywriter or editor. If that’s true I could really use your skills. I normally do try to keep things brief and clear when I write, but I got carried away and blasted the BBS with overenthusiastic and unfiltered stream of consciousness. Thanks for the distillation. 
No chance you’d share a pic of it? Just letters or full keycaps? QWERTY, I assume?
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…ssshhhhh…don’t wake up the Trolls…
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That’s 𝕲aℊa. 𝓖ɑ𝄟ɑ, I tell you. 𝗀a𝗀a
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I remember this, but in the last two decades, I feel a real change has happened. Also in their relation to other languages. Even in the 90s, people just didn’t use them.
I met a lot of French people since then who were happy to answer in English, and understandable English it was. Also, when talking in French to them, they patiently corrected my grammar. My grammar is horrible: while I “learned” French in school, I actually learned how to speak it in several other countries - not France. In most of these, it is considered impolite to correct a foreigner. This lead to really awkward situations since then.
And you learned Mandarin in just two years, coming from a non-tonal language? I’m deeply impressed.
I don’t hear tones. I even have trouble telling the difference between valley speak endings and the “usual” RP. I simply don’t hear the lifting of the tone if I don’t pay proper attention.
If I can draw the comparison to what @sockdoll and @Melz2 said: I recognise the phonemes, in their order, and somehow also recognise some of the inflection enough to understand if a sentence. But I apparently take into account context to unconsciously decide what is a question, and what just valley speak? I’m not sure about this? But I really also can’t sing, even though I don’t have a bad voice, and even can intone an hit notes well? That is: unless there is someone else singing along on a different note - I just can’t help it to loose mine, then.
So, with effort, I could maybe, probably copy mandarin sentences. But I couldn’t speak it, since the tones would go terribly wrong.
(I just tried for some short time to learn some easy tonal sentence in a West African language, Bariba. To the joy of the local kids. The adults, again, were too polite to laugh to my face… 
)
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I switched countries and schools from france to the uk in the eighties, france taught cursive, the uk did not. It was rather traumatic for me, primary school age, excellent penmanship, but my new teacher didn’t like it and relegated me to a pencil and got me printing letters.
I pretty much hid my cursive writing ever since as people comment on it and don’t understand it, i only just started using it again moving to a french speaking country recently.
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Ah, yes. Overhead projector with the “endless” reel-to-reel foil. One hand at the crank, turning at an impossibly constant speed, writing with the other hand in an impossibly neat and tiny handwriting. Only pausing when he had to change the pen or the foil ran out.
My math prof at uni was like that.
