aliceslanguagediaries

[aliceslanguagediaries]

I wish the best of luck to anyone sitting the JLPT today 🤍 may your hard work pay off

[aliceslanguagediaries]

I have been given the opportunity to resit, which I didn't expect and I'm incredibly grateful for :) I've been working 6 days but I cut it back down to 3 and will begin studying today

I went from studying up to 12h a day for fun and being top of my class to now feeling incapable of writing my final essays for the year

[aliceslanguagediaries]

I'm looking for language audio samples for a conference project!

Hi! I'm Lila and I'm a sound artist! I'm showing a work celebrating language diversity at the 2025 International Music Conference in Boston and would love to include as many languages as possible! If you have a language you want to share and are open to recording a quick audio clip of you speaking (by yourself or with someone else), telling a story, a recipe, singing... Please submit here: https://app.vocal.email/collect/icmc-soundwalk

Thank you in advance and I'm open with any questions :)

[aliceslanguagediaries]

Hello, I am back! I’m very much still recovering but this is my third day of relative peace and no awful flare-ups, so I’m trying to start studying again. I’m starting off slow with just listening to podcasts in my languages again.

It will take some time to get back to where I was, but I will do my best 🤍

Hii, for anyone who was following my kanji or vocabulary posts, I am (hopefully) not giving up on this blog, but this has been the worst month of my life and studying has been very far from my mind. My chronic illness has been flaring almost constantly also, which affects my ability to think straight due to the pain and brain fog. I wish anyone reading this a wonderful and successful week, and I will be back posting if things get better for me 🤍

[aliceslanguagediaries]

learning non-european languages is only difficult cuz there's so little info outside of schools and textbooks. except for Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. they get special treatment. where are all the Burmese instructors online? or the lengthy explanations of Vietnamese idioms? or the videos explaining Kerala verse and rhyme? we need more sub-saharan african and non-east asian language learning material online damnit.

[aliceslanguagediaries]

Hii, for anyone who was following my kanji or vocabulary posts, I am (hopefully) not giving up on this blog, but this has been the worst month of my life and studying has been very far from my mind. My chronic illness has been flaring almost constantly also, which affects my ability to think straight due to the pain and brain fog. I wish anyone reading this a wonderful and successful week, and I will be back posting if things get better for me 🤍

[aliceslanguagediaries]

So, things kept getting worse and I got sicker. And I didn’t realise the 0% late policy applied. I’ve failed both modules, after how hard I worked on the dozens of exams I had throughout the year

I went from studying up to 12h a day for fun and being top of my class to now feeling incapable of writing my final essays for the year

[aliceslanguagediaries]

Business Japanese Review Part One: Emails!

I'm not sure how many posts I'll make about Business Japanese, but probably more than one so I say the part one is warranted, haha.

Feel free to add anything or any questions in the notes! Like I said, this isn't a fully comprehensive infographic. Also, what do people think of the lined paper style background for the title page/intro? I think they look kinda cute for the introduction, but not for the informative parts...

One thing I will add that I couldn't fit on the slides: I think some textbooks don't have super clear distinctions between 「謙譲語Ⅰ」　「謙譲語Ⅱ」 and 「��いねいご」, so I only specifically mention 謙譲語 broadly here. Parts of 謙譲語Ⅱ and ていねいご are both described as "extra-modest" in some things, for example! Just keep in mind that my post is a simplification, and if you're interested in formal language, maybe start at learning all of the different keigo categories and what they involve!

Vocab list note: The set phrases in the greetings and closings are all comparable to set phrases in English for greetings and closings of emails. I'm putting these set phrases in their entirety in the list, with a comparable English set phrase as the definition. Do not take these as equivalent phrases! They have a similar feeling, but I am not asserting that they have identical meanings. I'm just offering something comparable in case it helps a person make more sense of them!

The full vocab list + a transcript of the post is under the cut!

Vocabulary List

試験（しけん）－　Exam, test

質問（しつもん）－　Question

食事会（しょくじかい）－　Dinner Party, Dinner Meeting/Lunch Meeting/etc.

お知らせ（おしらせ）－　Notification, Notice

会社（かいしゃ）－　Company

営業部（えいぎょうぶ）－　Sales Department

部長（ぶちょう）－　Section/Department Head

「いつもお世話になっております」　－　This is a basic email greeting, similar to "Good afternoon" or "Hello, [name]" even though the meaning doesn't match at all!

「だんだん涼しくなってまいりました」　－　Similar to "I hope this email finds you well"

さて　－　Now, Well, Then

謙譲語（けんじょうご）－　Humble Language / Extra-Modest Language

下記の通り（かきのとおり）－　The Following

返事（へんじ）－　Reply

「お待ちしております」　－　Similar to "Awaiting your reply"

「よろしくお願いいたします」　－　Similar to "Thank you"

「取り急ぎお返事申し上げます」　－　Similar to "Please get back to me soon"

申し上げます（もうしあげます）－　To Offer, To Extend (thanks, congratulations, greetings, etc.), To Do, To State（謙譲語）

以上（いじょう）－　Since, Seeing That, Above-mentioned

なお　－　Furthermore, In Addition

日時（にちじ）－　Date and Time

午後（ごご）－　PM (Time)

場所（ばしょ）－　Place, Location

集会室（しゅうかいしつ）－　Meeting Room, Assembly Room/Hall

[aliceslanguagediaries]

I went from studying up to 12h a day for fun and being top of my class to now feeling incapable of writing my final essays for the year

[aliceslanguagediaries]

April 14th

Today's Hanzi of the day is 哈.

In Mandarin pinyin it is pronounced "hā" There is literally 18 etymologies with definitions on Wiktionary, but I think the most common may be as onomatopoeia for laughter.

It is a compound of two characters, 口 is the root of the meaning and means mouth, in the Oracle bone script it's more rounded so we can see how it is a pictogram of an open mouth.

合 is the root of the pronunciation and it's pronounced "hé" in mandarin.

[aliceslanguagediaries]

It's ready! My Anki deck for Devanagari Alphabet for Marathi! You can use this to learn the Devanagari alphabet as it is used in Marathi.

It has a whopping 500 cards, which include all the vowels including अ‍ॅ and ऑ, and goes through all the consonant combinations for the vowels, except ञ and ङ (which are included without their consonant combinations).

I trawled through dictionaries to find example words for as many letters as possible. I found decent ones for most of them, I think, and I omitted any that I thought were too rare to bother learning.

Additionally, the deck is fully voiced for both letters and words. Some of these pronunciations were really tricky but I think I nailed 'em. My recording equipment isn't the greatest, but hopefully it should be fine for this.

You can download the deck from AnkiWeb here:

If you like it, be sure to add a nice comment or two!

My next project is to voice the vocabulary deck for मध्यरात्रीचे पडघम [madhyarātrīče paḍgham]. Then, I'm considering creating a deck for Marathi numbers from 1-100. Look forward to them!

[aliceslanguagediaries]

Do they not handwrite essays anymore ??

We as a society have forgotten that school children were still hand writing essays in class not that long ago

[aliceslanguagediaries]

To celebrate a small achievement, I started learning Bangla last April and I remember listening to the first episode of this podcast a couple of weeks in and understanding absolutely nothing - I mean I would maybe catch a word every 20 seconds. A year later I can understand most of the episodes perfectly and there is only ever a couple of words I don’t recognise :)

[aliceslanguagediaries]

Kind of on a roll with the number thing so forgive me a name that's not a name! This restaurant is called 一㐂 Ichiki.

一 means one. It's read ひと-, ひと.つ, イチ, or イツ.

㐂 looks like three 七 seven radicals, but it's actually derived (probably) from the grass script form of 喜 joy.

I can see it! Kinda.

Like 喜, it can be read よろこ.ぶ or キ. However, 㐂 is technically a 表外字 (hyōgaiji) unlisted kanji, meaning it's not taught in schools or used in names, but you might see it on sake labels or in restaurant names like this one! Plus I think it's too cool not to know.

[aliceslanguagediaries]

Goro Kumada, “Alice In the Land of the Bees” by Natsuya Mitsuyoshi, 1949 Source

[aliceslanguagediaries]

Last week was a very difficult week for me, it was also my final week of university classes, so I am not very proud of the weekly study log ):

(Also there will probably not be a weekly log this week, because I am going to see my fiancé)

[aliceslanguagediaries]

Finished all of my classes for the year …