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[CABL]

I stopped coughing every 15 seconds and I also regained my appetite. I guess I'm not sick anymore.

[AzyWng]

How many five stars you summoned yet? I have 8 at the moment.

Also, play the rest of the games, they're great. Except Gaiden.

Only Takumi and Ephraim. Takumi's the only 5-star I seem to need right now, heh

Also, the reason that Fire Emblem: Heroes got me into the rest of the franchise is because I don't own a DS, and I know for a fact my parents aren't gonna buy one for me.

I mean, I could try emulating, but that would probably qualify as stealing, especially regarding the more recent games.

[Twinwolf]

I started playing the game yesterday

My first summon included 5* Hinoka and Lyn. My third summon had 5* Hawkeye.

[Sirus]

I'm not sure the newest games have been adequately emulated yet anyway. The older games would certainly be easier to get running.
^{_{not that I would ever condone a thing like that, of course not}}

[Tawa]

From what I've seen, everything up to and including New Mystery of the Emblem works fine if your machine is beefy enough.

At the very least, I'd recommend playing Blazing Sword or Sacred Stones.

[Greiger]

There's this bicycle tunnel going from the city center to the university campus.
A graffity artist turned it into the tunnel of silly walks with a series of huge black shadow paintings of John Cleese in various silly walk poses.
Googling it, it turns out that it was officially opened by John Cleese himself last year. Shows how long I haven't taken that particular route.

http://www.ad.nl/binnenland/john-cleese-opent-silly-walks-tunnel-in-eindhoven~a48e9015/

He was surprised at the mass of people that showed up. He expected a few dozen, there were hundreds. I'm not surprised. Monthy Python was huge in the Netherlands back in the days. Every kid generation X and older grew up with it here as much as in Britain.

It astounds me.  I can't learn 2 languages if my life depended on it.  I can barely figure out a few words in spanish.  Yet that article has Mr Cleese speaking in english without subtitles as if everyone in the country understands english perfecly fine, yet the article itself seems to be in some language that contains entirely to many 'z's and 'v's.  How does an entire country perform such wizardry?

[Helgoland]

Decent public schools and not being French, that's all there is to it. Being a small country so there's no synchronised movies in your language helps*, as does having a history as a trading and seafaring nation.

*In Germany for example this would sort of work, but a lot of people wouldn't understand what he was saying.

[scriver]

It also helps being the language closest to English of all other languages, or so I've heard.

[Arx]

Dutch, you mean? I wouldn't say it's that similar. German usually feels much closer to me. Dutch has some things that are fairly radically different.

[Helgoland]

I'd wager that some of the creole languages would be closer. Oh, and Scots, too.

[martinuzz]

Dutch is both close to english as well as german. Gramatically it's more like english (except the conjugation of verbs). Idiomatically it's more like german. If you go back to the time of Beowulf, the contemporary english and dutch were almost the same.

But yeah, decent schooling. English is mandatory starting at age 9-10. Children who go to the lowest level of highschool get a total of 4 years of mandatory english lessons (2 in primary school, 2 in highschool), plus two years optional, kids who go to the highest level of highschool get 5 years of mandatory english (2 in primary school, 3 in highschool), plus 3 years optional.

A majority of university level education is taught in english as well. If not the classes, then at least the books.

English skill of kids is going down though, ever since the cancerous plague called redubbing. Back in my days, all cartoons were in english, with subtitles. I could understand and speak quite a few words of english before age 9, when we first got it in school. Nowadays, over 75% of cartoons and children movies are redubbed in Dutch. It's horrible. (Not just for the lack of language training, but man, those Dutch voice actors suck balls. Why do they have to make every cartoon sound like it's cutey cutey aww dawg with girly toddler squeaky voices? I mean I guess it works fine for the teletubbies, but for some reason the Dutch cartoon redubbing industry does not comprehend that some cartoons are actually made for children older than 4)

EDIT: it wasn't a gradual process either. At one point, there were no redubbed cartoons, and then suddenly, late 90s - early 2000 at least 50% was redubbed, and at the exact same time children's TV started showing commercials of some fat UK lady selling english lesson videos for kids. It made me stop watching cartoons.
I really could enjoy some cartoons into my twenties, like Eek the Cat (and the terrible thunder lizards). But watching the dutchified version just made my skin crawl.

That being said, I can wholeheartedly recommend watching the German redubbed version of the old A-team series. You will not stop laughing for at least a week, it's just that awesome to hear Hannibal "ich liebe es wenn ein Plan funktioniert" and B.A. speak german.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAl7ogAH-x0

EDIT2: The Germans started redubbing a decade or two before the Dutch. We used to joke about it. The dutch word for redubbing a video into native language is 'na-synchronisatie', which would literally translate to 'after-synchronisation'. We always mockingly called it 'Nazi-chronisatie', and used to take great pride in our own Dutch tellie not doing that. Damn, were we disappointed.

[Helgoland]

Ah, but there's a couple good ones, too. The German redub of Monty Python and the Holy Grail for example contained jokes not present in the original.

'Ich habe den Sachsen das Angeln beigebracht - seitdem heißen sie Angelsachsen!'

[ein]

danish is actually the closest language to english, fun fact. maybe not from a familial point of view, that probably is dutch, but in terms of ease of learning for a native english speaker

[redwallzyl]

isn't the closest language Frisian?

[Helgoland]

Maybe we should first ask whether there's such a distance function on languages...