lambdadmitry

Something I didn't appreciate enough is that we don't actually hear sounds when we hear people speaking. We hear phonemes, which are clusters of physical sounds that make semantic difference in the language. The clusters themselves aren't fixed either, they are very loose and mostly defined through what they are not — i.e., the difference that we perceive in "lip" and "leap" is not absolute, the actual sounds might easily overlap between speakers, but we adjust to the particular accent/speaker using the fact that they probably still have two separate phonemes there.

It works very well until one starts to learn a second language that might have not just different "clusters", but a different number of them. My first language is Russian, and in Russian there are just fewer semantically meaningful vowels; I honestly thought that the word "milk", молоко, has three roughly equivalent sounds, whereas in English that'd probably be heard as two or three distinct vowels ([məɫɐˈko]). Similarly, Russian "soft" sounds like м in мята are widely heard as having "j" in them, "m-ya-ta", while native speakers just don't hear that.

Phonetics training helps to start actually hearing all those sounds, to adjust our inbuilt clustering and start perceiving things that natives do. You suddenly start understanding native accents much better, and gain a new appreciation for the language and its beauty.

It's just as much about perception as it is about accent.

Please tell me you didn't get a valuation for the whole plot HP123436 instead of the sliver that is actually in that title and is described on the page! Because while the text on the page says HP123436 and the reports were ordered for it, you are not selling the whole patch, you're selling a tiny piece of it, otherwise you'd include a bunch of other properties like [2] that are indeed worth way more

Edit: or maybe that's by design, the "complex deal" you are talking about actually does include those other properties, and the matterium page is designed to make a sale of a much larger property look like a sale of a £7k property to avoid SDLT and a bunch of other complications, while going through a shell company that clearly doesn't have nearly enough money for the whole thing. Surely you aren't doing that?

Reading through a sibling subthread with phphphphp, I just can't understand how you can tell that with a straight face. What "complex deal"? What "transaction fee"? The title literally says "last sold for", so unless you're saying the transaction involved elaborate tax evasion designed to hide the real price that's what it was sold for.

Then there is the other party in this $1m+ transaction that's supposed to be serious. Someone called Idris Anjary, whose only claim to fame on internet is a bunch of press releases for this deal, before that they're just a normal self employed person helping people get planning permissions for minor renovations [1] and building sheds [2] while operating from an office over an off licence [3]. All their companies together never saw more than one hundredth of the money you're saying that deal is worth.

Come on, let's be serious for a second. Either it's a sham, or the actual purchase and the person and the company doing it are just fronts, which is not exactly confidence inspiring.

Edit: btw, your environmental survey is off, the mini map on page 3 makes it clear the report is about the larger plot of land, not the part of it included in the sale. The Southern Water report is very likely wrong too, it says there's a public sewer there but the only connection on the map is from the larger plot.