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blickly

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Not only does Alfred, NY reportedly have more downloads than any other city in the world, or any other state in the US, but it currently has more downloads than any _country_ other than Germany and the US!

I think this has got to be a bug of some kind. Any explanations?

In case anyone is still curious how this got resolved, Monsanto gave up. From his wikipedia user page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto):

> Dear internet,

> You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion.

> I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability guidelines, my arguments for deletion were airtight, which is probably why the articles were eventually deleted. I'm not sure my actions warranted the kind of internet-hatred I received as a result. If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. Few took this route, and I am sorry that due to time constraints and an overwhelming amount of invective I could not reply sensibly to everyone.

> Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. I personally think a lot of the articles should have been deleted. I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages? Otherwise, some other naive editor will eventually try to delete them. Perhaps they won't have as much experience dealing with trolls and flamebait as I have had, and will become very hurt and confused. Nobody wants that :(

I think that when he says "Immersion doesn't work" he really means that "Immersion alone doesn't work". Of course immersion is helpful, but it doesn't produce results by itself (at least not in Korean; maybe a language with more cognates with English would benefit more from immersion alone). Non-immersed learners sometimes use the prospect of immersion as an excuse, along the lines of "Once I'm immersed in the language, it will be much easier to really study effectively, so it'll be a more efficient use of my time to take the studying easier now."

I've made both of these mistakes myself (overestimating the value of immersion and slacking off study when not immersed). When I first went to Korea, it was a huge ego boost since it felt amazing to actually be using the language. Because of this ego boost, I felt that "book-study" was suddenly beneath me and stopped. After a few months of immersion, though, I realized I was learning more slowly than just going through flash cards, so I picked them up again. Even though immersion was useful for me, it was really only effective as a compliment to other study.