About the upvotes/downvotes: I frequently find your comments to be a little tiring. You frequently repost long comments with lots of links which are merely reposts of comments on a related topic (for instance, your standard "hiring practices" comment). When I see one of your long-winded comments, I always wince a little bit, because sometimes it is a long-winded repost that is not quite relevant to the discussion at hand, and so while it may have some good information, it feels a bit like a hijacking of the thread. I would not be surprised if there were people who started automatically downvoting your comments for that reason.
That said, this comment in particular is pretty much spot on, and is perfectly relevant to the discussion at hand.
One of the frustrations I've always had as an adult male trying to learn languages is that many of the teachers don't actually have the linguistic training to describe some of the phonetic and grammatical distinctions they are trying to teach. For instance, when learning French, I was trying to figure out the liaison and enchainment system; and for the most part, it actually adheres to some fairly universal phonetic principles (though there's a bit of confusion do to the fact that there are some prestige dialect rules which get over-applied to sound more formal, which actually cause you to break those more regular and universal rules; this is not dissimilar to English in which prescriptivists try to over-apply certain grammatical rules to cases in which they just don't make sense). But I could never actually discuss this with my French teachers, because none of them had any kind of education in phonology and so didn't know anything about the terminology or rules.
It surprises me that many of those who teach language don't have any kind of formal training in how language actually works, how languages differ, and the like. Mostly, they are someone who is just a fluent speaker who happens to have studied a good deal of literature in the language.
Edit to add: ah, I just realized that you were talking about your earlier comment, about the list of languages and their similarity. I'm not sure why people would have downvoted that. My experience is that asking or complaining about downvotes on sites like Hacker News (or others where people vote anonymously, like Reddit or Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange) is generally fruitless; if the person wanted you to know why they had downvoted, they would have left a comment about it. If you have to ask, whoever downvoted probably isn't paying enough attention to respond. And asking and/or complaining about it can lead to the thread being somewhat derailed, like this one is starting to be (which is partly my fault for responding). So I've since stopped asking about downvotes; if I know what to fix, I fix it, if not, I just move on with my life.
That said, this comment in particular is pretty much spot on, and is perfectly relevant to the discussion at hand.
One of the frustrations I've always had as an adult male trying to learn languages is that many of the teachers don't actually have the linguistic training to describe some of the phonetic and grammatical distinctions they are trying to teach. For instance, when learning French, I was trying to figure out the liaison and enchainment system; and for the most part, it actually adheres to some fairly universal phonetic principles (though there's a bit of confusion do to the fact that there are some prestige dialect rules which get over-applied to sound more formal, which actually cause you to break those more regular and universal rules; this is not dissimilar to English in which prescriptivists try to over-apply certain grammatical rules to cases in which they just don't make sense). But I could never actually discuss this with my French teachers, because none of them had any kind of education in phonology and so didn't know anything about the terminology or rules.
It surprises me that many of those who teach language don't have any kind of formal training in how language actually works, how languages differ, and the like. Mostly, they are someone who is just a fluent speaker who happens to have studied a good deal of literature in the language.
Edit to add: ah, I just realized that you were talking about your earlier comment, about the list of languages and their similarity. I'm not sure why people would have downvoted that. My experience is that asking or complaining about downvotes on sites like Hacker News (or others where people vote anonymously, like Reddit or Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange) is generally fruitless; if the person wanted you to know why they had downvoted, they would have left a comment about it. If you have to ask, whoever downvoted probably isn't paying enough attention to respond. And asking and/or complaining about it can lead to the thread being somewhat derailed, like this one is starting to be (which is partly my fault for responding). So I've since stopped asking about downvotes; if I know what to fix, I fix it, if not, I just move on with my life.