I recently recommended Rosetta Stone to a new friend who just moved to Denmark from South Africa with his family, only to find that they had switched to a subscription model, and also scrapped their Danish course completely 😓

Was getting ready to raise the black flag and search the seven seas for the old Danish Level 1 course, when I discovered that it was available at the library, and he just had to put in a reservation and it would be sent to our local branch for pickup.

He has it now, and he’s super happy with it (as a supplement to Danish classes).

If you don’t know Rosetta Stone, its main feature is that there are zero instructions; everything is set up so you have to intuit what is going on, the idea being that you’re learning the new language “the same way you learned your first language”, as opposed to having to use your main language as a translation layer.

I did a little bit of their Japanese and Spanish Level 1 course some ~20 years ago, and I still remember everything I learned, even though I never used either language for anything since.

Anyway, my main point is that you might be able to get access to good commercial courses from your library, maybe check it out 😊👍

I’ve probably had great success with Rosetta Stone (not free in either way), but YMMV.

They are not paid, AFAIK. Confirmed.

I’ve been thinking about how a secondary revenue stream could make sense as a Mod Appreciation Donation source.

I think I read some Mod thoughts on merch a while back, but can’t remember exactly why it wasn’t in the mix at current time (difficult to source ethical merch or something?).

I, for one, would be happy to donate some time to create graphics for merch if it went towards Mod bonuses (or server upkeep, if nothing else).

@mods feel free to reach out if you have any thoughts on the matter, or any concrete ideas that a graphic designer might be able to help with ❤️👍

I agree with everyone saying “donations are for running the server, use as intended”, although I like the idea of the tiny mod-team getting a small monthly stipend or something. Maybe consider adding “5% of donations are divided among the mods for coffee and therapy” to the donation info text? 🤔

A compromise, in regards to charity, could be a community-based effort of some sort — everyone votes to pick a quarterly charity, and it’s promoted as a stickied post:

“The Beehaw community has voted to support X [insert charity] * for this quarter, please support it if you can”

* Ugh, can’t believe fucking Elon ruined a whole letter, and one of the cool ones, at that 🤢

Especially the social convention and belief of not firebombing other people. That one of pretty high on the list.

Yikes! That paints a pretty scary picture 😬

Side note - I really like how you crossed out your spelling error instead of just fixing it - I always proof-read my comments after I post them (because I always forget to do it), and this might actually, in s tiny way, be useful to someone who’s still learning the language, or just didn’t know a particular working is wrong. I’m going to try and start doing this as well, thanks 😊👍

Insert Bond Villain Plot™ where he’s secretly buying all the EMP-hardened server parks in the world, and it’s getting ready to orbital-nuke everything except Shitter servers back to the stone age.

And of course he will brick every phone and computer everywhere, so nobody will be able to use Shitter, but God damnit, it will be the only site left!