Qualcomm says Apple is $7B behind in royalty payments - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-26/qualcomm-says-apple-is-7-billion-behind-in-royalty-payments <comment><USER2> The article doesn't really mention the argument that Apple is making in court.

They are seeking a judgement based on the legal concept of patent exhaustion.

[https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S...](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S._law)

If Apple buys a cellular modem from Intel, for instance, and Intel has already paid Qualcomm to use their standards essential parents to manufacture those cell phone modems, then patent exhaustion holds that Qualcomm cannot force Intel's customers to pay to license those patents all over again.

Until a judge rules on this, you really can't say that Apple owes Qualcomm anywhere near that figure.

There is more information on the FOSS patent blog:

[http://www.fosspatents.com/2018/10/patent-exhaustion- keeps-q...](http://www.fosspatents.com/2018/10/patent-exhaustion-keeps- qualcomm-on-run.html)

Edit: I think this FOSS patent blog entry from last month does a better job of laying out the basic issues.

[http://www.fosspatents.com/2018/09/apple-foxconn-et-al- want-...](http://www.fosspatents.com/2018/09/apple-foxconn-et-al-want-to- end.html)

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't trust FOSS patents and the author Florian Mueller as far as I could throw him. He has a long history of being a paid shill, lying about it, and being flat out wrong.

(Paid by oracle) [http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120419070127103](http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120419070127103)

(Paid by microsoft) [http://techrights.org/2012/08/18/vile- lobbyist/](http://techrights.org/2012/08/18/vile-lobbyist/)

(Paid by apple? I can't find other/primary sources to back up this claim though it does seem likely.) [https://mrpogson.com/2012/08/21/apples-paid- shillconsultant-...](https://mrpogson.com/2012/08/21/apples-paid- shillconsultant-caught-out/)

(More examples of him being wrong) [http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120820111527257](http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120820111527257)

Refuting legal arguments takes time and expertise I don't have. He's good at his job, and I have no knowledge about this case. So while I put no faith whatsoever in his analysis I can't tell you how it is wrong, and yes this is an ad hominem.

<comment><USER4> I didn't spend time to read all articles related to him. But I read his blog from time to time notably because of his Oracle vs Google coverage. While he may not be impartial (and who really is?) he impressed me quite a few time notably when he was consistently stating against all odds and other analysts that ruling against copyrightability of Java API would be overturned on appeal.

He was right, and even if at time everybody was mad because it hurt Android. I think this ruling was ultimately a good thing for FOSS.

He was also one of the first to criticize half-FOSS approach of Android. Whereas today everybody seems to regret that we still lack a popular real FOSS OS for smartphone.

One can only wonder now if Firefox OS or another could have superseeded Android should Google reinterpretation of Java copyright had been deemed unfair sooner.

PS: sorry for this long rant about your ad-hominem. Next time I'd better simply downvote.

<comment><USER3> I'm strongly of the opinion that that is a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day. If you say every argument Oracle makes will go in favor of Oracle, and Oracle wins an argument, of course you will have predicted it.

You have to remember that Oracle mostly lost that case, and he was consistently predicting they would win. The copyright portion was a sideshow to the patent portion (originally) and only became a focus when they lost the patent side of things.

Either way, I appreciate the reply.

<comment><USER3> PS:

For those interested, there is still a possible supreme court appeal pending for the copyright side of the case. I'm not too familiar with supreme court scheduling but I think we should find out if cert is granted (the supreme court will hear the case) in March or April. Google files by January 25th, Oracle briefs in February (30 days after Google, though it's possible they will get an extension), Google files a reply brief (~10 days), then Cert review occurs. [https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/do...](https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/18a417.html)

The supreme court only grants cert in ~1% of cases, so assuming they deny cert this then goes back to the district judge for yet another trial on damages and probably new motions for attorney's fees. It wouldn't surprise me to find that one (or both) parties find something to appeal about that damages trial too.

This case started way back in 2010, the justice system moves very slowly...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > They're trying to destroy our business," Qualcomm lawyer Evan Chesler said > at a hearing Friday in federal court in San Diego.

If only they would succeed!

<comment><USER6> Why do you want Qualcomm to fail?

<comment><USER7> Qualcomm has bullied players like Samsung to prevent them from using their own LTE modems, and has done everything possible to ensure they are the only reasonable choice for LTE chipsets.

In Samsung's case, only Samsung branded devices can have their LTE modem per the settlement with Qualcomm, and US bound phones always ship with a Qualcomm SoC (part of that whole home territory thing for Qualcomm).

Another affected group is Mediatek, they only recently got LTE support, and their ability to get chips with LTE is entirely controlled by Qualcomm. There is no competition in the modem space, which is absolutely appalling.

<comment><USER8> "Qualcomm bullied Samsung" you got to be kidding. Samsung has internal Modem team working hard to replace QC chipsets, but never successful wrt performance, it was pathetic. So Samsung took approach of using QC chipset in premium market segments and dumped their own modem chipsets in countries like India, Korea.

<comment><USER8> can I know why i am being down voted. I gave the information that I am familiar with.

<comment><USER9> Because it's wrong?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Qualcomm is such an annoying company to work with. They are rapidly turning into rent-seeking trolls (I've heard co-workers joke that Qualcomm is a law firm with a few engineers)

<comment><USER11> Reminds me of a certain company who runs the most profitable smart phone app store. Except Qualcomm ask for only 5% per device.

<comment><USER12> Well not really a fair comparison, Qualcomm is only part of the 3GPP patents profile, and LTE is only part of the iPhone package function. Not to mention 5% is equal or more to all other 3GPP patents cost combined.

Having said that, looking at Samsung, Mediatek, CEVA IPs, Intel Modem, so far it seems Qualcomm's baseband and IPs is actually quite value for money in terms of performance and cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For perspective, $7Bn is 1.25x Qualcomm's quarterly revenue. This is a big gap.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/qualcomm- earnings-q3-2018.ht...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/qualcomm- earnings-q3-2018.html)

<comment><USER14> Except $7bn isn't for one quarter, it is for almost 2 years now.

<comment><USER15> 15% is still a big gap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Apple argues that Qualcomm is using its intellectual property to bully customers into paying excessive royalties even as it tries to duck scrutiny over whether its patents are valid. "You can't just let Qualcomm walk away from this," Apple's lawyer, Ruffin Cordell, told the judge at Friday's hearing.

<comment><USER17> Qualcomm did all of the groundwork to develop CDMA. No way are all of the applicable patents invalid. Seems like Apple dropped the ball on this one.

<comment><USER18> CDMA parents have probably all expired since it's over 20 years old.

<comment><USER17> The original ones, but I will bet that there are follow on patents that still apply.

<comment><USER19> But nobody uses CDMA anymore except for some fringe, legacy operators.

Everyone else is on the GSM, UMTS and LTE bandwagon.

<comment><USER20> Verizon still operates a legacy CDMA network which iPhones are compatible with, no? Or are newer models now only compatible with their LTE network?

<comment><USER21> not all iphones are compatible, tough. List is here: [https://www.apple.com/iphone/LTE/](https://www.apple.com/iphone/LTE/) i.e. for america there are special models that support cdma, but most countries do not need that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When Apple owes you $7 in royalties, that's Apple's problem. When Apple owes you $7,000,000,000 in royalties, that's your problem.

<comment><USER23> It's also your problem at $7, because extracting that isn't worth the time it takes.

For $7,000 you can use small claims and probably make it their problem. But the range where it's in your favor might be pretty small; they can afford a lot of lawyers.

<comment><USER24> I think they were being witty:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=thats%20the%20banks%20problem&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=thats%20the%20banks%20problem&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

<comment><USER23> I know that.

I'm just giving a few more data points to show how in this situation it's extra biased toward Apple.

It's often quoted with a million and a billion and I think Apple has the advantage for both of those...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Would it ever be worthwhile to do this as a means of devaluing a company so that you could purchase it? In this case, if Apple wanted to buy Qualcomm, would this be an effective means of reducing their valuation?

<comment><USER26> Apple isn't doing this because they want to acquire Qualcomm. They don't like having their biggest competitor in their supply chain but there's few viable modem vendors.

<comment><USER27> I doubt it would pass antitrust review were that the case. Qualcomm is the only viable US market chip company that high-end phones can use. All the existing patents and agreements don't go away if it were to be acquired.

<comment><USER26> Maybe you misunderstood my comment, here's some additional context for what I wrote: (1) Apple competes with Qualcomm today (indirectly via many vendors who ship snapdragon-based phones). (2) Apple is pretty good at supply chain controls. (3) Apple uses [until recent designs] Qualcomm modems in their iphone/ipad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Apple should have dealt with Qualcomm when they first started to make a smart phone and wanted to base it on the Apple Newton:

[https://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2013/01/qualcomm- newton-c...](https://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2013/01/qualcomm-newton-could- have-been-first.html)

Apple could then patent the Newton IP for Qualcomm to use and Qualcomm would pay Apple for it.

</comment><comment><USER29> [https://outline.com/DHJaLL](https://outline.com/DHJaLL)

<comment><USER30> OT, it's useful sometimes, but is outline legal? I mean, whatever the purpose it looks like stealing somebody's else content.

<comment><USER16> how come no one complains when it's an archive.is/ link?

<comment><USER31> Iceland based hosting is often suggested for sites with potential copyright issues because of their freedom of speech laws. No idea if that's actually true, but it is used as a selling point. See [https://www.orangewebsite.com/articles/freedom-of-speech- ame...](https://www.orangewebsite.com/articles/freedom-of-speech-amendment/) for one example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Apparently the royalty terms predate Apple's entry into the marketplace! I was pretty surprised to learn that Apple's manufacturers are the ones [still] paying this royalty that existed before the first iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER32> Apple complaining about others abusing patents always makes me laugh

<comment><USER33> Didn't they patent the corners on iPads and iPhones? Just a rumour that I've heard as a reason we couldn't get parts a few years back, but still.

<comment><USER34> A design patent and a utility patent are utterly different things; about the only thing they have in common is the trace of the Elizabethan term "Letters Patent".

Q'comm is asserting that Apple isn't paying for _utility_ patents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> They're still looking for a sufficiently large truck to repossess Apple Park...

</comment><comment><USER36> apple should definitely reconsider itself, if true it is very unethical for this company to simply give out code it doesn't have a right to share. It would simply be that apple has to pay the fee and a fine.

</comment><comment><USER37> Get an injunction to prevent Apple from selling their products with stolen Qualcomm tech until they pay. I mean, it's stolen if they didn't pay for it, right? You know, just like Apple does to companies like Samsung who they claim use stolen Apple IP. [https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/09/17/apple-v-samsung- samsu...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/09/17/apple-v-samsung-samsung- slapped-with-injunction/)

<comment><USER38> If they think they are correct stopping Apple selling products would have a huge negative effect on their royalty collection, they need to walk a line that does not impact revenue but does not undermine their belief that Apple are wrong.

<comment><USER37> I'm not in this business so I don't know the answer to this. Does Apple only have to pay Qualcomm a royalty for sold devices, or manufactured devices? To me, it seems it should be for the quantity of manufactured devices since the tech is in the phone regardless of whether it has been sold or not.

<comment><USER39> That should be up to Qualcomm how they price their royalties / construct their payment agreements

<comment><USER40> Their FRAND Agreements with the standards bodies says other wise which Qualcomm voluntary committed to when they submitted their patented technology for consideration into international standards

<comment><USER39> learn something every day thanks</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recommended Math Primer for SICP - <AUTHOR> Can you recommend a decent math primer for those of us who did not earn a degree in CS and would like to undertake the SICP text? <comment><USER2> When I first read through SICP I stopped early in the book when it got the bit that required Calculus and took a massive detour to understand Calculus. Then I returned to the book, solved the problem, and discovered that the rest book had hardly any difficult math - certainly nothing that required me to know anything beyond high school math. C'est la vie.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know this might not be so helpful for you, but I don't think it requires anything above a basic understanding of math. The "deepest" math was in the beginning, when it covered Newton's Method for square root approximation.

SICP is used as the introductory CS text at many universities (Berkeley included) and has no official math prerequisites. I think you should try reading it first, and if you get stuck on a concept like Newton's Method, you can just read about it on Wikipedia.

But otherwise, there was basically no math involved, except as simple illustrations. Good luck! It was a great text.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are other replies that detail the strict math requirements for getting through the SICP text and how to build up in those requirements.

But in case you are additionally interested in further self-education in mathematics related to computer science, or other onlookers in this thread are, I'll recommend some resources in discrete mathematics,

[http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?pa...](http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?page=discretemath)

especially those directed toward the interests of computer scientists.

One book with good online support is the Art of Problem Solving book on Counting and Probability.

[http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=i...](http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=intro:counting)

MIT OpenCourseware has a mathematics for computer science course.

[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-042j-mathematics-for-computer-science-spring-2010/)

Princeton has posted lecture notes for a similar course:

[http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr10/cos433/mat...](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr10/cos433/mathcs.pdf)

ArsDigita University also posts math-learning resources online:

<http://aduni.org/courses/math/>

An Amazon guide to books for self-study and an Amazon list of favorite books may also be helpful:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/syltguides/fullview/R3NMQ39...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/syltguides/fullview/R3NMQ393VD5UAZ)

[http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Science-and-Math-books- that-I...](http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Science-and-Math-books-that-I- really-enjoy-reading/lm/RYORX8HPRBF6S)

</comment><comment><USER5> The SICP, from the chapters I've read, does not rely on mathematical sophistication the way, say, Knuth does. There's a little bit of calculus, but not much. If you've had a semester of calculus, you're probably more than well prepared. If you haven't you can probably focus instead on the data structures and algorithms.

Your best bet is just to grab a Scheme interpreter and dive in.

</comment><comment><USER6> Whenever I need a refresher I go to Khan ->

<http://www.khanacademy.org>

</comment><comment><USER7> If I remember well, the Math part is only in the first or second chapter to illustrate some more abstract concepts. I'll simply suggest searching the web if there's an algorithm or a math concept that you don't know about. Furthermore, SICP does a great job at explaining the algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER8> Have you tried reading SICP without a math primer? What's your current math background?

</comment><comment><USER9> If you haven't already, consider HtDP instead. It is designed to require no knowledge of mathematics beyond basic arithmetic. It fulfils a similar role to SICP. It is often argued that HtDP is a weaker text than SICP, but I found it a very useful course.

<comment><USER10> I disagree. I haven't read HtDP through, but it appears to be aimed more at designing and modularizing algorithms, whereas SICP first covers different ways to write an algorithm and then continues to different views of computing.

They get at somewhat different things, but I suspect that SICP talks about more fundamental ideas than HtDP, and is therefore a better choice if you're only going to read one of them. (If you're reading both, of course, do whatever.)</comment></comment>


RISC-V Community: "ARM Architecture: Understand the Facts" - <AUTHOR> https://www.arm-basics.com/ <comment><USER2> There's a big misunderstanding that open source, in and of itself, is more secure. Time and again this has been proven wrong (remember heartbleed?)

Where open source does benefit is a more timely and fair fix to a reported security bug. A company's closed source implementation may not be in as much of a hurry to fix security bugs if there isn't an immediate effect on the bottom line

Also, how's open source supposed to minimize fragmentation? Desktop Linux has a hundred flavors and even with a standardized ABI, there's no guarantees on a single binary working seamlessly across distros ( which is the reason for this like flatpack to exist)

<comment><USER3> Open source _can_ introduce a kind of de-factor standardization when some project becomes the go-to solution for some domain, with almost everyone using it and contributing improvements. It is a type of network effect, the feedback loop being made possible by the open source development model. Examples include the Linux kernel, the GCC compiler[1] and even OpenSSL (which is what made heartbleed such a big deal).

Of course there still exists a long tail of alternatives, there is no stopping that in an open source world.

1\. Arguably shifting to LLVM/clang these days. But note that clang for instance implements a huge amount of GCC compatible behavior (like commandline flags), instead of inventing their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How on earth is adding new features to the architecture in updates seen as fragmentation? Is everyone supposed to stick with v8.0? Moron.</comment>


Ramen profitability is easier in Asia: Travel is perfect for micro-entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://toomanytabs.com/blog/2422/ramen-profitability-is-easier-in-asia-how-travel-creates-the-perfect-situation-for-the-micro-entrepreneur/

<comment><USER2> Yes, but there are drawbacks as well. Frequent brownouts. Frequent internet outages. Slow internet. Large distance from other hackers in your home country (more expense to travel to conferences and other meetings.)

Also, some things are cheaper, some things aren't. Global commodities such as oil and food are just as expensive. Imports are more expensive. The big savings is from labor (which in turn helps drive prices for everything down) and in some cases land (some places in developing countries, especially big cities such as China have land prices which can rival big cities in the U.S.) Currency fluctuations can have a huge effect on fragile bugets, especially if your earning / holding currency is in a relatively volatile period (look at what the Austrailian dollar has done compared to the U.S. dollar in the past 12 months.)

For me, another big savings is not so much from being in a foreign country, but rather the mental shift I made. Living simple is the norm here. Most people who come to live here drop the majority of their personal possessions and move into a far smaller place than they might have had back home. At home you might feel you have to keep up with the Jones' but simplicity is accepted here. If you begin to make a shift back the other direction, then your expenses can rise to eat up your entire income, just like anywhere else.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am interested in doing this a little differently - I am trying to hire folks that have some of the skills that I have and outsource myself. I find the work here in the US and feed it to them.

I have only just made the decision I want to do this, so I am not sure where to start other than Odesk etc...

Anyone done this yet?

<comment><USER2> Depends on what you are looking to outsource. The term "yourself" can mean a lot of things. Simple tasks which aren't critical are fine. Technical tasks such as web development are a bit tricker. You get what you pay for. Someone who is good will understand that he / she is working in a global market and can charge accordingly. I live in the Philippines but my rates don't reflect this.

I live in a city which is a regional hub but not as big as Cebu or Manila. There are a lot of universities here, so the talent pool should be great. Even my local developer friends have a hard time hiring competent staff from the surrounding area, and they LIVE here. I imagine hiring a remote team that would function well would be even more difficult.

When I look at the types of jobs these low earners on Odesk pick up, I get the feeling they are working for people going for "low but good enough" quality and don't have a high standard.

Why not just jack up your rates, go for higher end clients and hire good developers? Your margin for profit could be as good or better.

<comment><USER3> Thats an excellent point, thanks - as I was specifically wondering about hiring someone from the Philippines. Are you in Cagayan?

<comment><USER2> Dumaguete, which is a hub of the southern half of the island of Negros.

Edit: If you are serious about this, your best bet is to move here and get it going. Then when you have it running smoothly, you can move on but still drop by occasionally. However, as I mentioned, I know people who live here and have a hard time finding good staff. Think about all those articles you see about businesses in India trying to hire good staff from the pool of college graduates. I imagine the Philippines is worse (smaller pool of people to choose from, schools on average are probably no better) except that English is an official language here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Neanderthals built cave structures – and no one knows why - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-built-cave-structures-and-no-one-knows-why-1.19975 <comment><USER2> _The researchers have so far found no remains of early humans, stone tools or other signs of occupation, but they think that Neanderthals made the structures, because no other hominins are known in western Europe at that time. "So far, it's difficult to imagine that it's not human made, and I don't imagine any natural agent creating something like that," Hublin agrees._

This is pretty much the same argument as "We don't know what's occluding that star, so it must be ALIENS."[0], or most of the speculation around sailing stones[1]. If you don't know what made them, and there's no evidence (other than that they exist), then you _cannot say_ what caused them.

[0] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/34926314/nasa-may- have...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/34926314/nasa-may-have-solved- the-alien-superstructure-mystery)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones)

<comment><USER3> I agree the surface logical structure is similar. On the other hand there is a lot of evidence that geologically recent hominids build structures, manipulate fire, and can live in caves. One of the advantages of this theory is that it could more readily be verified by the discovery of artifacts nearby in the deep underground than a theory about a phenomenon light years distant.</comment></comment>


Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WhyTheAskObamaTweetWasGarbledOnScreenKnowYourUTF8UnicodeASCIIAndANSIDecodingMrPresident.aspx

<comment><USER3> "This is SUCH a classic sloppy programmer mistake that I'm disappointed"

Oh come off of it. This happens everywhere on the web on probably something like 25% of websites. And it's NOT always the consuming program's fault: very often somebody upstream, e.g. the hosting company, the person that wrote the HTML, the source of an RSS feed being inserted into the page etc. etc. forgot to encode something the way somebody else expected, and you as the poor guy at the end of the chain gets a document with multiple encodings improperly embedded into it. Inevitably you have to make some bad decisions and not all corner cases are handled.

Somebody once reverse-engineered the state chart for how Internet Explorer handles documents with conflicting encoding declarations and I kid you not, it must have had >20 branches spanning a good few pages. Officially, the correct order of precedence is ([http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html- encoding-d...](http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-encoding- declarations)):

1\. HTTP Content-Type header

2\. byte-order mark (BOM)

3\. XML declaration

4\. meta element

5\. link charset attribute

but that's not how every browser does it, because the W3C sort of declared that after things on the Real Internet (TM) had already gotten out of hand. I hate to resuscitate Joel posts but Unicode is not easy to implement right.

<comment><USER4> Twitter said that the message in question is UTF-8. The message recipient decoded the message with something that is not UTF-8.

That's a sloppy mistake and should without doubt have been caught in testing.

<comment><USER5> The company responsible seems to have responded in the comments:

"It was definitely a mistake on our part. The problem was _not_ the encoding on our data feed, but the HTML document was sent with ISO-8859-1. The second we inserted the twitter text into the DOM, the browsers interpreted the UTF-8 string as ISO-8859-1. Our visualizations are hosted on other platforms, and in this case the server was not configured to send UTF-8 with text/html even though the HTML file was encoded as such. It was the only issue (albeit a pretty obvious one) during an otherwise flawless event. I apologize to President Obama, Speaker Boehner, and Jack Dorsey for the mistake. If the readers of the blog think it was stupid, imagine how we felt. dev environment != production environment. If we would have just included a <meta charset="utf-8"> in the HTML head, then this would not have occurred.

The big take away is don't make assumptions about other platforms (especially when it comes to encoding), and always include charset meta tag." [emphasis mine]

<comment><USER6> Including <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> is like the first thing you do when starting front-end development.

Every time you don't validate...God kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens.

This has been a Public Service Announcement. Please code responsibly: <http://validator.w3.org/>

<comment><USER7> Just for the record, the correct spelling is now:

      <meta charset="utf-8">

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe I'm just a terrible programmer, but I think the author may be a little over emphasizing the seriousness of the bug. To me, this is one of those throw away issues that you keep in the back of your mind. Unless I'm coding something that is extremely datacentric and critical in that sense. But it's not like its on one of my "top 20 must run tests" or anything. It's always one of those issues I ignore or assume is correct until I find out it isn't. When I find out, it's simply a matter of tossing in a code page translation at either the input or output end and I'm done with it.

Or maybe I've just been fortunate enough to be in an environment where an occasional goof of this caliber doesn't have any serious consequences.

<comment><USER9> > Or maybe I've just been fortunate enough to be in an environment where an > occasional goof of this caliber doesn't have any serious consequences.

Primarily, this means you don't have to support internationalization - <USER2> is hardly a bad thing, especially if you work on a startup, where worldwide distribution should be the last thing on your mind. When your product is rendered in over 80 scripts, including right-to-left languages, you can't afford to figure encoding will sort itself later.

<comment><USER10> And Hanselman works for Microsoft, where i18n is a _big_ deal. So yes, for someone who's been at MS for a while i18n related issues become second nature. But if you typically are only targeting the United States, it's more understandable to not have these things on the brain.

<comment><USER11> On the other hand, Outlook still has a ridiculous bug that uses the wrong encoding when presenting HTML email - that is, it uses the encoding of the email's text-body when presenting the html-body, even if the html-body specifies a different encoding.

So, if the two bodies have differing encodings (charsets), then the HTML body will look wrong. Unless you force Outlook to always use UTF-8 for encoding emails (which is a setting, but not the default) then you'll end up sending emails that will look garbled to your recipient.

This "differing charset" scenario actually happens pretty frequently, because of the following scenario:

a) You write an email (or reply to an existing email - actually it happens most with replies).

b) Outlook's text editor decides to insert a non-breaking space (codepoint U+00A0). Perhaps it generates HTML with   but before transmission this eventually turns into the single UTF-8 character 0xC2 0xA0.

c) When generating the text-body, Outlook decides to just use a plain old space, so the text body is plain ASCII.

d) Outlook, in its cleverness, then says "ooh, I can 'conserve' encoding-ness and use plain old iso-8859-1 for the text body, but I need to use UTF-8 for the HTML body because of that non-ascii character"

e) Outlook generates this email (please excuse formatting woes due to HN).

Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0016e64dbd929784310488b2b082"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

\--0016e64dbd929784310488b2b082

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"

yo yo

\--0016e64dbd929784310488b2b082

Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<html> <body>

yo=C2=A0yo

</body> <html>

\--0016e64dbd929784310488b2b082--

When you view the above email in Outlook, you see "yo yo" instead of "yo yo"

<comment><USER10> You should file this at connect.microsoft.com. MS devs and PMs really do read and triage bug reports coming from there. The more details you put in the bug report, the better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 'So do political nerds get to moan because the author referred to Boehner as "the Senator"?'

<https://twitter.com/douglas/status/89080894018686976>

<comment><USER13> Touchée.

<comment><USER14> Are you female and awesome, or was that just a typo?

<comment><USER15> I can confirm that anigbrowl is not a female.

<comment><USER14> Ah, just a typo then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hey I work for the company responsible for the visualization behind the president and the content on <http://askobama.twitter.com>

Let me take this very excellent opportunity to say that we are looking to hire a full time "front end" developer. You'll get to work on badass projects like the Obama Town Hall. Ideally, you'd be located in Austin. Find me on Twitter @efalcao to learn more.

<comment><USER16> FWIW, this was an intense project to pull off. 1000's of tweets per minute from Twitter, 8000 requests per second on <http://askobama.twitter.com> (where the same tweet was also delivered by us and rendered correctly).

We're not lazy or sloppy... It basically boiled down to one server sent down the right header...the production one didn't.

Unicode issues are sorta in the class of "gotcha" issue. They happen, you go "oh shit" and fix them right away. Our "oh shit" moment just happened to come at the most intense possible moment....in front of the president, with so many watching.

Wanted to reiterate once again: We're Hiring! @efalcao on twitter. Early stage startup looking for exceptional talent.

<comment><USER17> I think you did a great job, way to represent the Austin Tech scene!

<comment><USER16> Thanks so much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> tl;dr:

      $ python
      >>> print u"\u2019".encode("utf-8").decode("Windows-1252")

<comment><USER19> Also interesting, the Unicode Nazi:

      http://pypi.python.org/pypi/unicode-nazi

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Did they see the encoding mistake before they showed it?

Because I wonder how difficult it would be to create a string that says something innocuous in UTF-8 (e.g., "When will you bring the troops home #AskObama") but in ASCII would read as something totally different, but legible (e.g., "the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from his tomb to revive His subjects and resume his rule of earth...")

<comment><USER14> I imagine quite difficult, as each character triplet when decoded with Windows-1252 would have to be one letter in Unicode, and those would have to actually form words. You'd be restricted to maybe 30 triplets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Errors like this is what me and my coworkers jokingly refer to as US-UTF8 (no offense meant). In a country that's dominated by ASCII, "supporting" UTF8 means "emitting the same data as usual but declare it as UTF8).

Sure there might be some misunderstandings with special punctuation characters as evidenced by the article, but such issues generally get low priority.

In countries where the language isn't representable in ASCII, we can't use US- UTF8, but have to resort to "real-UTF8" which means dealing with legacy systems that don't do UTF8 (which is what happened in the article we're currently commenting on), dealing with browsers who lie about encoding, and dealing with the fact that a string length isn't its byte length any more even if it doesn't contain "fancy" punctuation characters.

All that makes me wish I could do US-UTF8 too :-)

</comment><comment><USER22> Proof that even completely ordinary string data used in the most USA-centric domain imaginable STILL needs proper encoding.

<comment><USER23> I wouldn't call the right single quotation mark "completely ordinary string data." As far as I know, the only way it would ever get into a tweet is through some "smart correcting" client, or purposeful manual entry.

<comment><USER22> A healthy amount of the writing of the world still begins life in a word processor.

Any string born of this heritage is likely to have single and double (curved) quotation marks. OpenOffice, Word, Pages – they all do it and are expected to.

For that reason, I consider them to be reasonably present in ordinary string data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What a cool shot. The prez with a common bug on his screen. And a bug I can fix! Still, even though this is an easy fix, he's going to need to open up a ticket.

<comment><USER25> My only regret is that I have but one upvote to give to this comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find it infuriating that this sort of thing is still a problem. I'm constantly seeing mangled apostrophes in places like Google reader too.

<comment><USER26> I would personally blame Wordpress for substituting a common apostrophe ' as the left ' and right quote ' respectfully. Same with quotation marks " and " instead of the traditional ".

There is an option to not use "Smart Quotes", but it seems to be enabled by default.

<comment><USER27> Wordpress is for writing, and writing should be properly typeset, and properly-typeset text has proper quotes.

BTW, a note on the term "smart quotes": that originated when word processors became "smart" about transforming the easy-to-type (but incorrect) ' and " to their proper equivalents automatically. The quotes themselves aren't smart…they're just quotes.

Typography nerd out.

<comment><USER26> For typography, yes.

For many blogs in the hacker community, source code snippets inside <code> tags can also be given "smart quotes", which completely breaks any strings that may be present.

You forget that Wordpress is used for many people outside of the writing community. When writing, and if the writer cares about having their word properly typeset, then the author can do so themselves. Wordpress tries to be smart about it, and covert them, but many people do not care about such features. The developers, however, do.

Also, may I remind everyone, downvotes on HN are not for disagreement, they are for factually incorrect statements.

<comment><USER28> IMO it's not bad that Wordpress auto-educates quotes, it's that it does it even within code blocks. Which is inexcusable, for precisely the reason you mention.

Markdown + SmartyPants are a better solution IMO. (And you can install WP plugins that do this and that disable Wordpress' default quote educator.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Part of the problem is that UTF-8 makes things really, really simple, and bulletproof, and then people have to go and create problems again.

Listen. Any time you use an encoding other than UTF-8, you are creating incompatibilities. If your stated intention is to facilitate communication, you are failing. You are a bad person. Stop doing it. The only possible excuse for using a non-UTF-8 encoding is to frustrate communication.

(It's too fucking bad HTTP mandates that the default charset is ISO-8859-1.)

</comment><comment><USER30> Zed Shaw, can you make a post called "Programmers Need To Learn Unicode Or I Will Kill Them All"?

<comment><USER31> Joel Spolsky wrote something that comes close, sans the threat:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What modern software stack uses Extended ASCII as its default encoding? The last time I dealt with this problem, it was in 2005 or 2006 and I was working with PHP.

<comment><USER33> My guess would be that it's a flash app. Flash is (or at least used to be) horrible at internationalization issues like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What bugs me is not the mis-encoding (though that's a fail), but that people "struggled to understand" it... surely everyone's seen apostrophes turn into these special characters on enough web pages over the past ten years to have recognized what's happening when it does.

<comment><USER35> Blame Hollywood. Non-tech folks have been conditioned to panic whenever anything out of the ordinary appears on screen, because that's how Hollywood visualizes computer viruses and alien space invaders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> An error like this should not detract from the value Mass Relevance delivers. Clearly an event like this or similar events like the Oscars in which they take part are better, more engaging because of their involvement.

</comment><comment><USER37> That's a lot of detail, but a very good explanation of what happened.

</comment><comment><USER38> thank you for the fascinating article! I've seen this bug in other places, and I never knew what it was (and usually brushed it off instead of digging deeper to find it).

</comment><comment><USER30> Well, it could have been worse. They could have shown \'

</comment><comment><USER39> Why does it say 3 hours ago under the tweet? Wasn't this in real time?

<comment><USER40> >Wasn't this in real time?

No. Questions were culled from Tweets with the #AskObama hashtag starting on June 30. Some of the questions did come in close to real-time. I think the most recent ones were 5-10 minutes old when presented to the president.

<comment><USER39> So how did they choose the questions then? Based on retweets, or the Twitter team just picked the ones they liked?

<comment><USER40> They had a group of moderators who were selected to find the best questions. I believe most of the moderators were journalists or bloggers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> He had to do a twitter townhall because El Jefe couldn't get a G+ invite :-|

</comment><comment><USER41> tl;dr -- mojibake

</comment><comment><USER42> So does HN support utf8 ¢ðrrꢆl¥?

<comment><USER19> ˙sǝʎ 'os ʞuıɥʇ I

<comment><USER43> (ಠ_ಠ)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> You have to give it to Microsoft. They use Word even for 140 letter documents now! (I understand spelling is a reason, but browsers have spelling now)

<comment><USER44> Downvoted, understandably perhaps, but nearly every time I see this sort of bug it's because someone has copy/pasted something from MS Word instead of using whatever native client input method was provided (usually a textarea or input field). Yes, blame the rendering script for not encoding properly, but I suspect this was Boehner's team copy/pasting from some internal MS Word doc. Cheap shot - they also likely copy/paste screenshots in to Word and mail those around too, instead of just mailing the actual graphic file. :)

<comment><USER45> _Cheap shot - they also likely copy/paste screenshots in to Word and mail those around too, instead of just mailing the actual graphic file. :)_

When I was in consulting doing software integration work, few things infuriated me more than client "bug reports" arriving in the form of an email containing a 15 megabyte MS Word doc with a bunch of un-annotated screenshots.

I really hope Google someday opens up the awesome bug report/screencap feature in Google+, that lets you highlight part of the screen and redact sensitive parts.

<comment><USER44> I _almost_ wouldn't mind, except the screenshots are inevitably shrunk down so as to be unreadable.

In OSX, the cmd-shift-4 (and 3) keystroke which screenshots right in to a file are near life-transforming. Snap, drag the file into an email, and it's done. I'm sure there are utilities in Windows which do this, but having it built in is great - no apps to start or install.

<comment><USER46> press "Print Screen" and paste into new email? Works well in desktop clients like outlook, less so for web-clients like gmail...

<comment><USER44> _NO ONE DOES THAT ON WINDOWS OUTSIDE OF TECH GEEKS_. EVERYONE pastes in to MS Word, then emails that document.

That said, from a geek standpoint, I still prefer having the raw image file that I snapped in a folder someplace so I can refer to it later without having to go through sent emails, but that's just a personal preference.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way for a foreigner to improve English to a great level? - <AUTHOR> My wife and I are Italian, and we live in San Francisco. She's trying to find a job but feels stuck because her English is not good enough (I think she's at an acceptable level, but clearly she can't speak or listen as good as a mother tongue). She's looking for advice on what's the best way to dramatically improve it in 4 months, 25 hours a week or so. Thanks! <comment><USER2> As a qualified, practising teacher of English as a foreign language, I guess I should be able to help.

For competence, once you've got past the basics of grammar, it's mostly about memory. Create a database of words, phrases, and example sentences, and use some kind of Spaced Repetition System (e.g. _Anki_ ) to keep reviewing them.

Fluency is harder. First, what does it mean to be fluent?

Last time you were in a shop and the shopkeeper handed you your change, what did you say?

 _Thank you._

Did you plan ahead? Did you think, "Oh heck. The shop keeper's just given me some change. What should I say now?" Of course not. The words just came to your lips. You were following a script that you'd internalised at a subconscious level. That's fluency.

So you need to internalise more scripts. How are you going to do that? Learn them. Seriously ... that's all there is to it. Just memorise huge chunks of text. Songs, movies, passages from your English textbook, and so on.

In particular, try shadowing. (I.e. speaking in synchrony with the audio version.) At first, do it with the printed version in front of you. Then do it purely from memory. Try exaggerating the accent when you do it, too. It may sound ridiculous, but to native speakers it will sound better than your normal Italian accent.

You'll see the benefits of all this hard work when you're in conversation. Fragments of memorised dialogue will pop into your head exactly when you need them, just like when you said _Thank you._ to the cashier.

By the way, children do this instinctively. That's why they love to watch the same movie, or hear the same story, over and over again.

<comment><USER3> It's nice to hear this from a professional. I am an English speaker who speaks a couple foreign languages. When I am alone in my car, I talk to myself in foreign languages or have mock conversations. I repeat them over and over again. Then in a real conversation, I mix and match large phrases from my vault of mock conversations rather than translate word for word.

<comment><USER4> Wow. When the NSA gets around to listening to their smartphone-recorded tapes of you, they're going to be very, very worried.

(Yes, "tape" is a colloquialism - I realize they probably use solid state media.)

<comment><USER3> Actually, one of the most common things I repeat to myself is the first chapter of the Quran (it's only a paragraph) just because I think it sounds lovely when lyrically recited in arabic. So their tapes probably sound something like me talking to myself in French, answering myself in Spanish, and then bursting into a minute of Quranic recitation...

Before going full force into computer programming, I was mainly interested in linguistics, and threw myself into learning languages and traveling. So I wouldn't be surprised if my digital communications set off various automated flags, since I chat with friends around the world (Europe, China, Latin America, some in the Arab world, notably Saudi Arabia) on a daily basis in ~4 languages. I hope they take me off their lists when they realize we are just making small talk or discussing English grammar or {{ their language }}'s grammar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd recommend taking an intensive ESL course, which you presumably have many options for at local universities. (My wife, who is Japanese, is similarly looking into options.)

If that isn't an option:

For listening comprehension, and eventually speaking, practice "shadowing." Have her listen to interest-appropriate TV shows and say exactly what the speaker is saying, in real time. (You can also do this exercise with transcription.) It will be _maddeningly_ difficult at first, but with literally hours a day of doing it, she will see radical gains.

This is a large part of the training for professional translators/interpreters. In my experience it works very well. It is also some of the most frustrating work I've ever done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks patio11 (you're one of my favorite HN commenters, BTW :D). I found out that Japanese and Italian, as languages, have a lot in common in terms of pronunciation, and IT and JP speaking people have similar issues when trying to learn English. I will definitively tell my wife to look into this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been in this situation in another language: nothing beats (1) reading and (2) listening and (3) forcing yourself to speak.

It sounds like (3) may be a problem for your wife because of her lack of confidence. Forcing herself to speak English, as if there is no option, will make the difference.

If you two were to speak English to each other, so that she could literally stay in English-only mode all day, every day, that would help. Don't call mom. Does she read a newspaper? Read the Chronicle or NY Times or Guardian. Listen to the radio? Listen to NPR, or BBC. Etc.

BTW, do not set as a goal to speak American-accented perfectly idiomatic English. That will never happen, and is not necessary or even desirable. Italian accents rock.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will always keep "some" Italian accent, don't worry :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Accent can be a big perceptive issues for non-native speakers. It'd be worth it to look for an accent coach. Even if the rest of her English isn't perfect, being clearly understood for the rest of it might be worth it.

</comment><comment><USER7> The first thing to do is to always be listening to people speaking English. Try to be aware of how they pronounce things and compare them to how you do it. Be aware of little things like verb conjugations. People will still understand you if you do it wrong but you'll definitely stand out as a foreigner. Also, don't talk too fast.

In your case this won't work, but try to stay away from other speakers of your native language. I see students at UC Berkeley who end up getting roommates from their same country. This is a very bad idea because they won't be forced to adapt their brain to the new language. I always found that having a girlfriend who speaks the language I'm trying to learn was a good idea.

Reading books will help your vocabulary but it probably won't help your understanding of spoken language. What I did when I was living in a foreign country trying to learn the language was to watch children's TV shows. Once I was able to speak and understand at a 5 year old's level I felt like I was ready to expand my horizons.

</comment><comment><USER8> _What 's the best way for a foreigner to improve English to a great level?_

I wrote a FAQ comment about that a while ago that became one of my most popular ever comments. I'll link to that here rather than repeat all the text again.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816)

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks tokenadult!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Go onto Meetup.com and see if there are any relevant meetups in the San Francisco area for people looking to practice English. Alternatively, just go to any Meetup for a topic she's interested in (e.g. crafts, health, etc.) and she can talk and interact with the people there.

I would recommend that she volunteer somewhere (a non-profit or a clinic) where she'd be talking to people for most of the day. The best way to improve is just by practicing. I think that'll be more efficient and effective than any of these language sites/products.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is one situation where watching TV as a background activity might actually be helpful. The best way to learn English is to surround yourself with English as much as possible. So, read, watch TV, talk to people, and to speak English at home as much as possible.

On the other hand, I bet her English is actually better than she thinks it is. I've met a lot of non-native English speakers who have unnecessarily apologized for perfectly intelligible (if accented) English.

<comment><USER11> As a former ESL teacher, I think TV can be helpful but it's better to be very selective about which shows you watch. Pick shows that have a lot of dialogue in English.

Older TV shows tend to be more dialogue-centric. If you have the TV Land channel, I'd suggest: MASH, All in the Family, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Dick Van Dyke Show, &c.

Contemporary shows that would be good for this purpose might be: Modern Family, NCIS, Mad Men, Big Bang Theory, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development, Parenthood (advanced: lots of simultaneous talking).

<comment><USER10> Good point. I think I might actually avoid comedies at first though, because it can be hard to get the jokes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Only practice can take her English at the desired level somewhat quickly. I'm trilingual with a forth language under my belt and in my opinion she has to spend as much time as possible with native English speakers (or with people who speak English very well). Unfortunately you aren't a native speaker so more than likely she's exposed to Italian more than English. This is a major hurdle. Reading is good. Listening is great but nothing beats discussing. One- on-one conversation classes could be great. You could look for people willing to practice Italian in exchange for English practice. Check "meetup"s in your region so that you can meet people and discuss in English (in whatever topic that is of interest to you). There's no doubt that she has to study grammar and vocabulary. She has to read a lot (It is important to use tools/apps/dictionaries that can speak the searched words). But I would concentrate heavily on English communication.

</comment><comment><USER13> Talk to yourself (in your head or out loud, whatever floats your boat) and think in English. Do this constantly when you're walking alone, doing the dishes, folding laundry, etc. It's a good way to practice and get yourself used to not having to rely on your mother tongue during downtime when you cannot do focused study/practice.

</comment><comment><USER14> I believe the human brain is best capable of picking up a language by being subjected to it. Hence I prefer reading and speaking over artificial practice, at least beyond bootstrap level.

Here's what worked for me:

1\. Get an acceptable grasp using traditional methods (you are already here).

2\. Read about three books while looking up every single word you don't understand. This may be easier when reading on a tablet. Warning: This will be slow going. Perhaps pick some favourite books you've already read.

3\. Read another twenty or so books, but you shouldn't have to use the dictionary very often. Concentrate on flow.

This will take care of your vocabulary and grammar. To master conversational English and pronunciation you have to speak to people, but the foundation you built above will help.

Four months is an ambitious goal if you're looking for complete fluency, but you should see solid improvements.

</comment><comment><USER15> Even though I had my personal interest to learn English, back when internet was not common, or not very accessible due to dialup, i would buy English newspapers and study them, and always keep a dictionary with them.

However, that was bit silly and a lot more time consuming.

The best to improve English is to be part of a community (an online forum). it's up to you which you want to join. Only join the one which interests you. Get involved in lengthy debates and discussiona, I know it's not cool, but just for the sake of learning and improving your English.

If you follow up above advice, your English skills will skyrocket in a very short time compared to traditional methods.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you have friends or coworkers who are native speakers, ask them to please correct you when you say something that isn't perfectly fluent.

Otherwise most people will ignore your mistakes, rather than risk insulting you.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'll give you my honest suggestion? Do not waste 4 months learning the language. Just let her go to work. At work, she will interact with all kinds of people which effectively exposes her to the language. That way she will learn the language more quickly and naturally rather than coaching or lessons or whatever.

I live in Saudi Arabia and as a non Arab I had a very difficult time speaking Arabic. I too spent a lot of time trying to learn the language before hand but it's nowhere effective to what you learn in a real situation with people.

</comment><comment><USER18> I moved to the US 15 years ago. I thought my English was good (A+ in every exam I ever took), but I was sadly mistaken. Thankfully it didn't prevent me from getting jobs.

It took me about 2-3 years to get truly fluent. Get out there, speak English with everyone, get yourself in uncomfortable situations, immerse yourself in the language completely. That's the only way to really get it.

I think Pitarou's answer is spot on, if you need to improve the language skills in a short time though.

</comment><comment><USER19> Movies are a great supplementary source to actual ESL-type classes. It's difficult for language classes to teach turns of phrases, idioms, regional dialects, etc. Movies with subtitles are great -- Even better if you can find movies that offer subtitle files in both English and Italian. VLC can take multiple subtitle files and let you toggle pretty easily between the two languages.

(Set up hotkeys to toggle subtitle files, to go back 15 or 30 seconds. Space bar pauses.)

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a story of a Korean boy who learned English after coming to the United States by watching Simpsons episodes with the subtitles on. He'd write down every word / sentence that he didn't understand, find it's meaning and learn it. Then when the same episode was aired again later in the week, he'd watch it again to make sure that he understood.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Quick update for everybody: my wife is really grateful for all the advice, and thanks you all!! I am also very grateful for all your help.

</comment><comment><USER21> She wants to focus on speaking and listening in a short time frame, so she needs to do both of those things – exclusively.

Materials: \- DVDs of several TV programs with multiple seasons (make them subject relevant if she has a specific subject-matter goal) \- Several regular talk radio/podcasts \- You. Apparently, you know English. Stop speaking to her in anything but English. Just stop.

Method: \- The goal here is to bludgeon the language faculty of your wife's brain with English. It'll feel kinda uncomfortable, but you want to create an experience that so surrounds her with English that the brain is forced to do work it's already good at – that is, figuring out language. \- So, every day, listen to talk radio. It creates the same experience as being dropped into a conversation in a foreign country where you don't know the language. She just needs to try to follow the conversation. This has the added benefit of not taking place in a bar or cafe, with a lot of back noise. Encourage her to take note of words that get repeated a lot, to look them up, and to listen again, but don't waste her time with exercises that answer questions about the content, b/c the content is irrelevant. \- Next, pick a TV series and start watching. Have your wife choose a character to 'follow'. She is to repeat everything that character says, in as close to the same accent as it was produced. Most TV shows are about 30-60 minutes, so have her do this with a few shows, just make sure the shows feature a few characters that do a lot of talking, so that she get's more practice. \- Lastly, go out together, a lot. Meet people. Language exists between people first and foremost, so the best way to build on her practice is in the field. Beforehand, she can prepare the 20 or so important things that she might want to say/talk about, and discuss them with you. Then, take her to an event to meet people and abandon her to fend for herself in a conversation.

All this sounds kinda ego-crushing, but it really is the fastest way to get to a high level of speaking/listening fluency. Think about this, a language class will be populated with other people learning English, whereas a bar will be filled with chatty people. A class will have her sitting, passively absorbing a lesson with occasional practice, whereas the methods described above involve active processes. Finally, if you cease to provide an Italian-language safe zone, her brain will naturally begin to adjust. It's an uncomfortable process, but I achieved a high degree of spoken/listening fluency with both German and Turkish this way, as a native English speaker. Compared to two years of classroom Arabic, and I can hardly say my name.

Good luck. Let us know how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have always believed that best way to learn a new language is to spend time with it. Read as much as you can. Watch subtitled movies and you will instinctively pick up on pronounciation.

Above all speak and write it. As you spend more time with it you will gain confidence.

</comment><comment><USER23> When I'm alone I try to describe my surroundings in another language, It great for identifying adjectives and verbs that I don't already know. Coupled with a good dictionary app it really helps fill in the blanks.

</comment><comment><USER24> 1\. Surround yourself with native speakers and spend as much time as you can with them carrying on daily conversations. 2\. Stop worrying about your accent or the fact that people won't always understand you.

</comment><comment><USER25> First identify what your weakness is (vocabulary and idioms, grammar, accent, comprehension). Then do something specific to improve on that: for instance for vocabulary the best is to read books or articles.

</comment><comment><USER26> Play Cards Against Humanity with a couple understanding, native English- speaking friends. My girlfriend's sister's boyfriend is Swiss, and CAH has helped him learn a number idioms rather quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> We just bought it a few weeks ago! We'll use it more often :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Read books out loud. My English, both speech and vocabulary, improved dramatically after I spent weeks sitting outside on the balcony reading Lord of the Rings out loud to myself.

</comment><comment><USER28> Take notes at all times; every time there's a word or phrase she should write it down and google it later. Learn idiomatic phrases and "think" in English.

</comment><comment><USER29> [http://www.memrise.com/courses/english/english/](http://www.memrise.com/courses/english/english/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Watch netflix videos w/ subtitles on. Mimic lead character's speech. Record your speech and compare it, repeat. It always worked for me.

</comment><comment><USER31> Listen to music she loves along with the lyrics. I learned Brazilian Portuguese just like that.

</comment><comment><USER32> I will assume that fluency here means spoken comprehension and speaking so you are easily understood by a vast majority of the population. In my data, these are both harder than reading comprehension for english. Reading comprehension also seems far more prevalent than spoken comprehension and fluency.

In my travels through language learning I have come upon two dominant models for language acquisition:

1- The academic model - learning about phonemes, IPA, SOV (Subject-Object- Verb) versus SVO etc. Somewhere along the line the hope is that everything will click and you will develop good pronunciation, comprehension and the rest. This works for some people but the vast majority do not end up with basic comprehension or even decent pronunciation. Fluency is rare and often a land far far away.

2- Mimicry - This is how infants acquire languages and also how we get our accents. This model almost invariably works - witness the billions of infants who speak the language(s) of the lands they were born into without any training in IPA. This is also why it is hard to learn english from a native english speaker who lacks formal training in imparting language education. Ditto learning to catch frisbees from dogs.

Mimicry has two steps namely discernment and replication. In discernment, just like in learning to play music one has to "hear" it before one can replicate it. The process below will help you learn to discern the sound. Once you get proficient at hearing it you can then try to replicate it. Again just like learning to play music, you now try to replicate the sound you have learnt to discern.

Quite a few commenters have suggested following along to tv/radio/movies in the english language to grok enunciation, syntax and vocabulary. FWIW, this is stellar advice which will serve you better than most language learning packages.

Here is a pragmatic way to go about the above advice:

#1 Voice of America (VOA) news readers are the closest to an American version of the BBC's newscasters "received english" accents. VOA has a great language learning resource where their newscasters read out news stories in carefully enunciated english: [http://learningenglish.voanews.com/](http://learningenglish.voanews.com/).

#2 Pick a news item for example "English Level 1 \--> "Remembering Nelson Mandela..." and download the mp3 file from "Play or download..."

#3 Download VLC player: [http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html](http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html).

#4 Play the downloaded mp3 and read the article aloud trying to replicate the enunciation. VLC player comes in handy wherein under playback you can slow down the playback speed to really understand the enunciation and replicate it. Stop and replay as often as needed. In some versions of VLC player like on Android you might have to turn on equalization in VLC to overcome the distortion when you slow-dow/speed-up the playback.

As indicated by many commenters, doing this for 1-2 hours/day will get you results in a very short period. Short period here would mean weeks to months. If you do try this please post the results of your process and what worked and did not work for you.

</comment><comment><USER33> First idea: [http://www.duolingo.com/](http://www.duolingo.com/) — there's Italian to English.

<comment><USER34> Duolingo is great to start learning a new language, not to become proficient.</comment></comment>