Luna’s Adventures in English

the UK health system is fully state funded. You only pay for private surgery. If its something that is lifesaving then you'd have it on the NHS meaning you wouldn't pay for it since taxes do.

UK Dentists are NHS subsidised so you pay flat fees based on the tier of treatment, which is a max of £200 something iirc.

UK prescriptions is a flat fee unless your exempt
 
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Lambadelta said:
If its something that is lifesaving then you'd be dead before you'd have it on the NHS
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Had to be done.

Unfortunately the NHS is buckling under its own weight so people are increasingly moving to private healthcare for the essential stuff while still utilizing the NHS for everything else.
 
Luna said:
Got another one~ Though this isn't so much about language than location.

If I watch/read something, where medical issues arise and people have to worry about getting the payment for it together, for e.g. like a surgery (some organ problems, or accident injuries or so). Can I assume, that the setting location is most likely/definitely/very likely not in the UK?
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If it's a historical account (fiction or non-fiction) it could potentially be set in the UK prior to the establishment of the NHS in 1946.

Luna said:
medical care is free except for dentist stuff
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Somewhat off topic, but the fact you have to pay at the point of use for dentistry is a bad joke. It's expensive as all Hell, and how they can get away with still not including a particular medical treatment (and one which is actually like really bloody vital to people, at least people who want to do things like eat and drink) under the NHS I don't know. I guess dentists had good lobbyists back in the 1940s.
 
ayase said:
If it's a historical account (fiction or non-fiction) it could potentially be set in the UK prior to the establishment of the NHS in 1946.


Somewhat off topic, but the fact you have to pay at the point of use for dentistry is a bad joke. It's expensive as all Hell, and how they can get away with still not including a particular medical treatment (and one which is actually like really bloody vital to people, at least people who want to do things like eat and drink) under the NHS I don't know. I guess dentists had good lobbyists back in the 1940s.
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More like 80s and 90s as basic dental services and indeed opticians were on the NHS (had the black NHS specs as a kid, and my uncle had them well into his forties before he shelled out for a better pair)

EDIT: Another thing that has UK citizens grabbing for cash in urgency is when they need those drugs that NICE say that the NHS can't afford to prescrive, end of life cancer care and stuff like that.
 
Funny thing in regards to nhs, as far as eye stuff goes, you can end up paying for contact lenses under some conditions. Just like under others they’re paid via taxes.

I’m thankful for that latter part. Mine are paid via taxes and I’m very glad for that as otherwise mine cost around £1000, each.
 
Luna said:
Got another one~ Though this isn't so much about language than location.

If I watch/read something, where medical issues arise and people have to worry about getting the payment for it together, for e.g. like a surgery (some organ problems, or accident injuries or so). Can I assume, that the setting location is most likely/definitely/very likely not in the UK?

Don't really know much about the health system in the UK, but I think I've read an article about a comparison of health systems which was like: The UK has a standing budget financed by taxes which covers it more or less all, so medical care is free except for dentist stuff and medicine except certain kinds of medicine. In the US you pay all by yourself and because there is no standing budget everybody in the chain will try to extort as much money out of you as possible, which makes things terribly expensive. UK medical is, besides being covered for your, therefore also much cheaper. Is that true? It's been a while since I read that article, perhaps I am mixing this up with something else? ?_?
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That's the main reason why the US is more expensive than anywhere else in the world. But another factor for the UK in particular is that because the NHS is such a large customer for the drug firms it is able to negotiate very good prices. Indeed, private healthcare firms often buy many drugs through the NHS as even with the NHS as a middleman it's still cheaper to buy things that way than for them to buy directly from the drug companies.
 
unknownfate said:
Had to be done.

Unfortunately the NHS is buckling under its own weight so people are increasingly moving to private healthcare for the essential stuff while still utilizing the NHS for everything else.
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How does this show itself? Like, do they try to find whatever excuses to not give a a treatment, outright deny any problem or simply have you put on a waiting list and you wait and nothing every happens?

ayase said:
Somewhat off topic, but the fact you have to pay at the point of use for dentistry is a bad joke. It's expensive as all Hell, and how they can get away with still not including a particular medical treatment (and one which is actually like really bloody vital to people, at least people who want to do things like eat and drink) under the NHS I don't know. I guess dentists had good lobbyists back in the 1940s.
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So does that mean, there simply is no official reason for dental problems not included? Same for the optical stuff?
 
Luna said:
How does this show itself? Like, do they try to find whatever excuses to not give a a treatment, outright deny any problem or simply have you put on a waiting list and you wait and nothing every happens?
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The last of those is the closest - but it's not a case of nothing ever happening but that for anything that isn't urgent (even if it is something that absolutely has to be done, just not right away) a waiting time of several months is very much the norm - indeed, the target time is 18 weeks - and over a year is far from abnormal for certain things.

If it's something that is urgent then obviously waiting times are much shorter.

The amount of time people actually end up waiting varies over time, and how well the NHS is doing at any time depends on what figure you are looking at*. Whenever any waiting times get worse, the media kick up a storm about the NHS falling apart (particularly over the winter when things are always stretched) and this has been a news story basically every year for at least the last 40 years, but for the last 4 years or so the NHS has genuinely been getting worse at seeing people quickly by just about every measure, although it's worth noting that the situation is still far better by just about any measure than it was during the 80s or 90s.

*For instance from 2010 to 2012 the NHS got worse at hitting their 4 hour treatment/discharge time but considerably better at getting elective treatment appointments arranged within the 18 week target time.
 
So I've watched Broadchurch S1-2 the other day (month).
Apperantly it's littlered with all sorts of diffrent accents, but the only one I caught up on was the Scott one. (And that also just because I was marathoning Star Trek right before that.) Still trying to discern the proper diffrences, but have some trouble with it.

Well, recently I stumbled over this:

Snarly English? How's that snarly....?
And Posh English is supposedly the villian English? Could it be that the Star Trek Into Darkness Khan also has this accent? (I've read that a lot of people complain, that they made Khan talk British English. To my shame I actually didn't even realize that much...)
 
If you've not seen him in Jessica Jones it's worth a watch just for him. The posh English accent as the baddies was always America's way of not letting the war of independence go. That and English actors are cheaper. After a while it just stuck around as a stereotype.
 
I've got it on PTW. Is his role like a regular recurring villian or more like the big endboss, that shows himself towards the end?

How come they choose this one accent as a representative for all the British on that independence war issue?
 
Luna said:
I've got it on PTW. Is his role like a regular recurring villian or more like the big endboss, that shows himself towards the end?

How come they choose this one accent as a representative for all the British on that independence war issue?
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He comes in to it about four episodes in to the series and is then the baddie pretty much.
As for the accent, no disrespect to any American's on here but the US media (so films and TV etc) tend to promote two types of english accents - posh and cockney. Put that one down to Mary Poppins I think, but an english actor in a US TV show can be sent for vocal coaching because "they're english but they don't sound english", Dexter being the example that comes to mind.

This is a quite amusing example of them trying to do something a bit different and attempting a Newcastle accent but sounding Irish.
 
I seem to miss out on some references (Mary Poppins? Dexter?), but I suppose I just need to build of more TV/film knowledge.

Ok, that video example was just gibberish to me. Just about as much as any Japanese anime engrish and doitsu is like. At least good to know you don't have to feel bad for not making out much at all.

Still a bit hard to get a feel for it, when you have no idea who to distinct from the authenthic ones and the one that aren't. I had suspected the Start Trek Scott of being wrong, as it was said in an interview, that the Star Trek Russian English wasn't really right either. Though given that Broadchurch's Scottish sounds about the same, it probably wasn't totally off either. (And gives me hope it's not a hopeless case of bad ears but simply lack of exposure for mattern matching in my brain...)

So
can I safely assume that's Posh English, too?

Just have tried aligning the trailer of Gracepoint to Broadchurch. Apperanty Tennat is using an American accent in the former and while I clearly "feel" some diffrence in the sound I am somewhat clueless as to what exactly makes it diffrent.
 
Luna said:
Ok, that video example was just gibberish to me.
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It probably should be to most people. The point is that's what happens if they don't do posh or cockney (usually).
Luna said:
can I safely assume that's Posh English, too?
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You can.
Luna said:
Just have tried aligning the trailer of Gracepoint to Broadchurch. Apperanty Tennat is using an American accent in the former and while I clearly "feel" some diffrence in the sound I am somewhat clueless as to what exactly makes it diffrent.
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It comes down to his American accent being a bit crap is all :(
 
Adam-M said:
It probably should be to most people. The point is that's what happens if they don't do posh or cockney (usually).
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Was it just the accent or also the vocabulary that was off in that clip?

It comes down to his American accent being a bit crap is all :(
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Oh. I see. So I just overthought this...

I got another question. Or more like a plan and some questions about it.
My English pronunciation is crap. I don't even know what accent I actually have, I only know it's horrible. So I had the idea, to polish it up by doing some vocal training. Which consists of reciting English stuff in "Lunaish", record that and compare it with a correct English recording. Rinse and repeat. (A whole lot, because I'm probably tone deaf.) That being said I felt like using English material which to English territory people is common knowledge. So basically whatever you are being force fed in school and can be sure of everybody has to know that. Also pros to classics is the fact they are (should be) public domain so I might find audio recordings easier.
One obvious candidate is Shakespear. But similiar to how German isn't just Goethe - what else is there an English speaking person should have read at least once? (And is a little more closer to conteporary English than Shakesspear.)

(Going my recerences in novels, I've heard of William Blake (the Red Dragon Hannibal movie), through he seems to be more known as a painter? John Keats is notably mentioned in Dan Simmon's Hyperion saga and Simmons seems to be some sort of Keats-fanboy given how prominent Keats is in there. Simmons was an English teacher, so dunno if this is something everybody might get drilled into in school? Also Arthur Conan Doyle seems to have written a bunch of poems, but he's more known for his novels...?)
 
Shakespeare is the one author everyone has to do. I do remember doing Animal Farm by George Orwell:

There's also an animated film of it.

I also read War of the Worlds by H G Wells (I've still got the school copy I forgot to return):

There's also the musical version:
 
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