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[languageek]

It is a very hot summer here. 

My (Spanish-speaking) husband likes to turn on the AC and I (a Portuguese speaker who also kinda Spanishes) get super cold, so I said in a super joking manner with a very thick accent “me enfrio super fácil porque mis osos son finos.”  (EDIT: so what I said wouldn’t be right or sounds kinda weird, I picked the first word that came to mind. I asked him how he would say it, he told me frágil would be better than fino)

And he looks at me very weird

And says “bear?” 

And it took me a second until I realized, and said

HUESOS MIS HUESOS!!!!!!

Osso -> Bone in Portuguese Oso -> Bear in Spanish

and then for anyone who is curious: Urso -> Bear in Portuguese Hueso -> Bone in Spanish 

some words just 

in my defense I think I usually do an ok job at separating my languages but this just says no

[languageek]

A weird instance of not being completely literate in my heritage language:

Thinking that, for my whole life, that the -san in Fuij-san (for Mt. Fuji in Japan) was just the name of the mountain (Fuji) and the suffix -san (honorific titles) 

NOT 

Fuji-mountain （ふじ (Fuji) 山 (mountain)）

ふじ - Fuji (I know there is a kanji for Fuji but writing in hiragana for simplicity) 

山 - San (mountain, also pronounced “yama” because of different ways to read the same character in Japanese)

[languageek]

I did it. I have done it. 

I wanted to create a separate space for my heritage language stuff for those who are interested. 

I realize terminology may or may not be super common in the non academic sphere, but if you’re curious as to who would be speaking a heritage language (HL), it’s usually people who are bilingual to some extent from a young age in a majority language and a minority language. 

For example, in the US context, majority language = English (bc it’s the language of government, media, education) and a minority language could be an immigrant language and/or an indigenous language. 

You don’t have to be a balanced bilingual to be considered as having a heritage language. Even receptive ability is something! So if you’re interested in learning more about this topic / chatting more about it, feel free to give a follow. I am a heritage language speaker & learner, so I see fun times ahead 😂

Welcome to Speakroots 🌱 

For this blog, I (plan to) post information and content about heritage language(s) and their speakers. During my time on Tumblr, I’ve seen a ton of information and perspectives on L2 (second language) learning and acquisition, but significantly less on heritage languages (HL). 

I’ll touch on what a heritage language is and what that means a bit later, but this is just to introduce the blog. This idea is super fresh, so I’m not sure how much content will change over time, but for now, my main ideas are to post about… 1️⃣ Heritage language information from academic sources, studies, and perspectives. This includes academic definitions of certain concepts, results from studies, implications, etc. 2️⃣ Identity and feelings about being a heritage language learner/speaker. Growing up as a heritage language learner & speaker, I’ve faced certain thoughts and situations that have made me question my identity, as well as feel proud of it, and everything in between. 3️⃣ My academic journey as a doctorate student studying language acquisition of literacy (and any fun stuff I learn through courses and research). 4️⃣ My own heritage language learning journey! I know not everyone is a heritage language learner/speaker of the same language, but I hope documenting my own journey can encourage others to just…try. I plan to post about this aspect, not as an academic, but just as someone who is simply trying to reconnect with one of their first languages. My main goal in starting this is to make the academic side of everything (research, findings, expensive articles restricted to those in academia) more accessible for people who are interested in understanding and learning more about heritage languages (and maybe even themselves). But also just talking about…the “feelings” side of it all, like the frustration of trying to speak and learn it, what it feels like to be semi-illiterate, etc. I’m aware heritage speakers can have varying degrees of proficiency, but those were just examples. 

@speakroots on Tumblr @speak.roots on Instagram

[languageek]

I’m reading a (rather academic) book about Heritage Languages (heritage language learners, bilingualism, etc.) and thought about making an Instagram that breaks down the knowledge into tiny pieces for those who aren’t in academics and want to learn more about heritage languages in general (from the academic perspective, studies, definitions, etc) 

My research during my PhD will focus on Heritage Languages (mainly literacy and acquisition of orthography) so I’m super invested in this topic and hope that one day I can just kind of connect the academic side with the educating non-acdemics and parents and adult HL learners about this

if you’re interested lmkkk bc idk if this is super common but just had the random thought while reading ok thanks bye 

[languageek]

Heritage language (HL) stuff:

If your methods aren’t working, don’t be afraid to try something new.

Whether you’re taking traditional classes or self-studying.

Traditional classes aren’t normally created for heritage language learners. Traditional learning materials like textbooks aren’t normally created with HL learners in mind. 

So if you can’t effectively learn on that curriculum, don’t think that anything is wrong with you. 

The same thing goes for self-studying. 

A lot of learning materials are catered toward second language (L2) learners, but depending on what skills they target, you may have an easier time adapting to certain methods. 

If something isn’t working, try something else. 

It took me a long time to figure that out. I thought that if I took more classes, bought more textbooks and read more textbooks, that my Japanese would get better. 

But I realized that traditional classes weren’t working for me and diversified my studying methods to fit my own needs and level.

Relevant aside: I guess this also goes for L2 learners, but I feel like a lot of HL learners are more “aware” of different aspects of the language that are difficult. For example, when I was learning Mandarin in community college (just to choose a non-European language) and I just kind of happily learned whatever was given to us by the teacher, but in Japanese classes or just studying Japanese by myself, I notice all the little things that may not be explained until later and I know how much I don’t know. I’m not saying this is the case for everyone, but...just thoughts. Feel free to leave your own thoughts about this, too! 

[languageek]

Do any of you who speak a heritage language & another language besides your other native language feel guilty for knowing that language but not your heritage language?? 

Japanese & English were my first languages, never fully developed my Japanese, learned Portuguese to an advanced/fluent level and now my 2 strongest are English and Portuguese, followed my an intermediate-ish level of Spanish, then my Japanese. 

I know I used to feel guilty for knowing Portuguese better than Japanese, but at this point sometimes I feel like “why can’t I LEARNNN this language as well as I learned Portuguese?” 

[languageek]

It's nice meeting another heritage language learner!

Hello hello! Yes if you or anyone wants to talk about HL learning or struggles or wanna support each other feel free to send me a message 🤗

[languageek]

Some recent thoughts 

I’ve been wanting to just book like an hour or half an hour of conversation practice in Japanese 

It’s hard to tell where I’m at, because 1 I’m a heritage language speaker and learner and 2 I’ve been self studying (and feel confident I’ve at least improved a little or activated some aspects of my Japanese) 

but I keep putting off booking lessons because I keep thinking “oh I’ll wait until I’m good enough” 

but when is that even 

until I’m fluent and I don’t even need the lesson anymore? 

silly me 

I’ll go book it right now

thanks for listening to my thoughts

edit: booked it

[languageek]

Some weird

realizations: 

I’ve been studying/speaking Portuguese for 9 years now (!!) 

That’s not the weird part though. 

I was going through the textbook I had for a beginning level Portuguese class, and looking at all the rules is so weird because everything is just so explicitly stated.

And because I’ve been speaking it for so long, I kind of doubted that I knew these specific rules. I just “know” the language now? 

I drew out some conjugation tables and weirdly took too long to complete them because it’s so isolated from any context. But as soon as I start talking to someone, I just know automatically to ask them something like “como é que vocês se conheceram?” without having to think twice about it. 

Weird. 

[languageek]

How do you say

🗣 “Black lives matter” in your language? 

It doesn’t necessarily have to be...a direct translation but whatever is most popular in your country or language to say that equates to that. 

English: Black Lives Matter. 

Portuguese (Brazilian): Vidas Negras Importam. 

Spanish (Mexico): Las vidas negras importan.

[languageek]

langblrs and multilingual people of tumblr, 

here is a wonderful way you can get involved: 

Letters for Black Lives is a multilingual, culturally-aware initiative which is working to create a space to hold open, honest conversations about police brutality, racial justice and anti-blackness in immigrant families and communities predominantly in the U.S. as well as other countries. 

In 2016, they published letters in these following languages. 

Arabic

Bahasa Indonesia

Bahasa Malaysia

Bengali

Brazilian

Chinese (Simplified)

Chinese (Traditional)

Hindi

Hmong (Green dialect)

Hmong (White dialect)

Farsi

French

Japanese

Khmer

Korean

Russian

Spanish

Tagalog

Tamil

Telugu

Thai

Urdu

Vietnamese

Young Asian Americans and anyone else who comes from a different cultural or linguistic background can utilize these resources to start conversations with their families about the Black Lives Matters movement and racial injustice. They’re working on 2020 version of the letter and they are looking for volunteers to translate this new letter in as many languages possible. Even if you aren’t proficient in another language besides English, you can still contribute. 

[languageek]

For the past 6 months, I’ve been taking studying Japanese more seriously. From the time I quit studying Japanese in elementary school until now, I had very little formal schooling in Japanese, and whatever was formal, wasn’t very effective.  *Run down for people who don’t know: I grew up speaking Japanese outside of Japan so my knowledge of it is like..half there half not. 

After learning Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese to a relatively high level many years ago, coming back to Japanese now, I realized that I forgot what it felt like to learn another language.

For the past few months, I’ve been trying to study the kanji for words I already knew — that way, I would only have one thing to learn on top of old knowledge, as opposed to learning a new word + new kanji for that new word. For example, I grew up hearing the word とおい (tōi, kanji: 遠い) so I would practice writing and visualizing the kanji.

More recently, I flipped from studying kanji to studying more (new) vocabulary words. Obviously studying a language like Spanish or Portuguese from English won’t be as difficult as going to Japanese from English, especially in terms of vocabulary (and orthography). 

What made me think about this was something as “simple” as school subjects. For example:

English-Portuguese-Japanese

Psychology — Psicologia — Shinrigaku (心理学)

Literature — Literatura — Bungaku (文学)

Geography — Geografia — Chirigaku (地理学)

Engineering — Engenharia — Kōgaku (工学)

Having English as a native language, to learning Spanish and Portuguese, once I “learned” about the rules that certain words took from one language to the other, I could pretty much guess that psychology and literature would be something like psicologia and literatura, respectively; and if I was wrong, I would be corrected, simple. But from something like English to Japanese, you can’t just “guess” for languages that don’t really share any kind of history together.

I never learned (or at least retained) something like the names of school subjects in Japanese for multiple reasons, the first being that the acquisition of that vocabulary was never really enforced, even if we went over the words. Second, because I guess I personally never felt the need to know it as a kid, since I wasn’t formally schooled in Japanese in those subjects, and third, because it didn’t have a high enough frequency in my household for me to have known how to say chemistry, biology, math, literature, etc.

What scared and prevented me from learning Japanese for so long, I think, was the fear of kanji. I knew that on- and kun-yomi gave kanji so many different readings in different contexts, and how could I memorize and effectively recall more than a thousand characters, if I could even get that far?

My perspective on that changed when I recently tried to learn new vocabulary. In my notebook, I wrote the school subjects in English, then in hiragana for the Japanese version, since originally I intended to learn the words by how they sound first. I would learn the kanji after I could successfully recall the words.

But what I realized that the kanji actually helps me remember how to say the words.

For psychology, shinrigaku written in hirgana is just a cluster of sounds to me. But when written out in kanji, shinrigaku (心理学) is heart (心), logic (理) and study (学), all of which semantically, I could see being related to the idea of the field of psychology.

The same goes for geography (chirigaku, 地理学). In kanji, it’s ground/earth (地), logic (理), study (学). What helped me even more with this one, was that I recognized the first kanji 地 as the same kanji (and luckily, sound) that appears in map, 地図 (chizu).

While I believed for the longest time that kanji would be the most difficult aspect of learning Japanese, I ran into a roadblock that briefly made me think vocabulary would be even harder than kanji. But taken together, with just a bit of knowledge about certain kanji, thanks to my childhood experience of growing up with it, my kanji has been able to help me expand on my vocabulary.

This experience has been a rather cyclical one. When I was a kid in Japanese school, I believed my strongest area was vocabulary. I always struggled with kanji. Studying Japanese as an adult, I dove head-first into studying the kanji for words I was already familiar with, but when trying to expand my vocabulary, kanji has stepped in and stepped up to help me with my vocabulary by helping me visualize and associate certain sound-meaning pairs with new vocabulary.

I realize that for beginners, kanji is a daunting thing and takes a lot of time to learn and retain. I realize that not everyone has the same background as I do with Japanese. But once you’re familiar with kanji, you can see it popping up in new places, whether it’s embedded within another character or in a compound (words with more than one kanji character) and it has the ability to help you. Not hinder you.

It’s not easy learning a new language, and in my case, it’s not easy trying to add on to a language that comes semi-easily and semi-not. Some languages are hard on multiple fronts, like how I thought Japanese was, especially the kanji and vocabulary. But interestingly, I think it’s all starting to come together like the coherent language it’s supposed to be. And it’s beautiful when it does.

It just may take a while to get there.

[languageek]

I am CRYING

So I was attempting to read this Japanese children's book to my sister (who is 23 years old) over Facetime and my husband comes over and asks if that ら (sounds a bit like 'ra', see arrow) is a question mark

I laughed so hard I cried

He speaks Spanish so he has the ¿

Upside down question mark

Not exactly the same but I still thought it was cute 😍

[languageek]

this is kind of a weird message and I'm sorry for that, I just want to say that your blog is absolutely AMAZING!! (I'm also very glad that you also do the repetition thing, I feel a little more justifiable in my actions rn 😂) .... sorry for any english mistakes, english is not my native language 😊

lol no worries! I’m glad you’re enjoying it! :) 

Repetition (assuming you mean my Japanese post) is how I’ve read Japanese students in Japan learn kanji and I’ve had teachers for my Japanese and Chinese courses assign homework with repetition too. It’s one of *the* ways to learn how to write. 

Good luck with your studies! 

[languageek]

What essay topics do you recommend to write in a foreign language for beginners? Give me at least one if you’re bored to make a list please ❤️

Assuming this isn’t academic: 

You can write an intro about yourself (e.g. who you are, where you live, your family members, what you like to eat/drink/do, daily routine – good for practicing the first person singular) 

You can write a letter to a new pen pal (good for asking questions and the second person singular) 

You can write a story about a random character that you make up (e.g. introduce the character, describe what they look like, what do they do in the story, what are their goals, etc., this is good for practicing the third person singular or plural if you have multiple main characters) 

Try making a recipe with directions or writing down how you would give directions to a certain location in your city from another point (e.g. from the train station to the museum). This is good for practicing commands or suggestions. 

You can write a food/restaurant review or a review of something (a book, a trip, a location, anything). This is good for practicing opinions and learning to express what you do and don’t like about certain things. 

Write a screenplay (e.g. write a dialogue between a group of people). You control everything, you can make it crazy, dramatic, scary, anything. I think writing dialogue can be fun because it might force you to think about how to make things sound more natural (perhaps a bit more advanced than what you’re looking for, but just thought I’d throw it out there). 

Another fun idea: With whatever vocabulary you’ve learned or are learning, try to make a story (any structure or perspective or genre of your choosing) using those words. I did this recently with kanji (I had a new list of kanji I was practicing and made a story using the kanji on my list for that week) and it was really enjoyable and interesting to see how the vocabulary dictated the story.

I guess if you want to come up with your own prompts, think about the following: 

What do you want to practice? (E.g. do you want to practice verb conjugations for certain persons (example, first person singular/plural, second person singular/plural, third person singular/plural, do you want to practice adjectives, do you want to practice commands?) 

Once you have your objective, think about things in your daily life that require these types of language to be used. For example, letters often have first person and second person (telling someone about yourself and then you asking about them), recipes and directions often use command-type language, stories use a lot of description, etc. 

I can’t really think about any creative prompts within themselves (e.g. Day 1, talk about the weather) and if you did want that, I’m sure there’s a ton of creative writing prompts online that you could find. I’m all about goal-oriented learning so being practical and learning how to tell a story, give directions, or write a review is something that is important in any language. 

Keep in mind these are things you can do at any stage whether you’re a beginner or a learner. As you get more advanced, you’ll bring more advanced structures and words to your language use, so revisiting these topics once you are more advanced can be a good exercise (and you can compare to see how far you’ve come). 

Good luck!

Edit: I know not all languages have complex verb conjugations like Romance languages do, but those are just the types of languages I have the most experience with so those are coloring my suggestions. Definitely modify them to the specific language you’re learning. 

[languageek]

German for Beginners: Resources

I wanted to dabble in some German during this quarantine time. I have way too many tabs open so I wanted to save them somewhere but also share them if anyone was interested in doing the same. 

Good for complete beginners with absolutely no background in German whatsoever. I’ve been using Duolingo because it’s easy and interactive, but I’ve been using these resources for support and reading about grammar points that I’m just curious about. 

Disclaimer: I have no idea what (other) good sites exist, these are a result of narrowing down a Google search with sites that seemed to be the most beginner-friendly. 

German alphabet

Vocab & grammar site

Another vocab & grammar site (mostly grammar, linked to declensions because I was reading about it but it’s easy to navigate using the sidebar)

The German Project - Stories with audio/German/English translations and select mini lessons (they also have a Spanish, French, and Italian version)

German for Beginners - Complete A1 Course (YouTube video I found, total time is 1 hour and 21 minutes) 

[languageek]

How I’ve been Learning & Retaining Kanji

I posted this on my Instagram account (anticipating it to be a PhD/grad school account but while I’m waiting for it to start in the fall, I’m documenting my Japanese studies). Follow me there for more Japanese/eventually grad school inspo. 

1️⃣ I wrote a random story using the kanji from the previous week (purple in hiragana so I could recall in the moment). After I wrote the story, I highlighted some words I wrote in hiragana that should’ve been in kanji. Then, I wrote all the new kanji at the bottom and did some practice.⁣

2️⃣ The day after, (left page) I wrote all the new kanji in pink along with the word in hiragana and did the repetition practices. (Right page) The day after, without looking at the previous page (I had a list in hiragana of all the vocab I had to write in kanji), I had to recall the kanji on my own (pink). Even if I only remembered a PART of it, I still wrote it in pink. After, I went back and wrote the missing parts and kanji I couldn’t recall in blue with hiragana next to it.⁣

3️⃣ Repeat same process as the right page the next day. The kanji I knew got 5 repetitions and the kanji I didn’t know got repetitions until the line ran out. This time, I decided to throw in 先週の漢字 (last week’s kanji) in the free space to make sure I didn’t forget any of the previous week’s kanji.⁣

4️⃣ Today, I successfully recalled all the kanji (all pink kanji) and wrote 5 repetitions for each. Also included 先週の漢字 in the free space. You can see a part of my hiragana list in the corner. It’s a great way to cover up previous pages and allows you to not look at any kanji before you recall. ⁣⁣

For some people it may take longer to get a perfect list. Just keep working at it. But once you have a day where you remember all the kanji, it doesn’t stop there. You have to keep practicing and keep using it and seeing it so it’s retained. It’s easy to forget even just a few days later. 

Practicing kanji doesn’t have to take up a lot of time in your day. Each day, it takes me about 5-10 minutes, 15 minutes max to practice kanji, but it’ll take more effort if it’s a day when I’m writing the kanji story. One thing that helps me is that when I have some free time, or when I’m sitting in bed about to go to sleep, or just sitting in the car when someone else is driving, I’ll think in my head “what does [this word] look like? And I’ll draw it up in my head.” 

Good luck✌🏻