languageleo

[languageleo]

Let's learn some Hebrew quotes! (^_^)

Haver (חבר) = Friend.

Okev (עוקב) = Follower.

Reshatot hevratiot (רשתות חברתיות) = Social media

Shalom (שלום) = Hello.

Lehitra'ot (להתראות) = See you soon.

Boker tov (בוקר טוב) = Good morning.

Tzhaoraim tovim (צהריים טובים) = Good afternoon.

Erev tov (ערב טוב) = Good evening.

Layla tov (לילה טוב) = Good night.

Halom (חלום) = Dream.

Halomot mitgashmim (חלומות מתגשמים) = Dreams come true.

Toda (תודה) = Thank you.

Bevakasha (בבקשה) = You are welcome // Please.

Slicha (סליחה) = Sorry.

Ken (כן) = Yes.

Lo (לא) = No.

Kamuvan! (כמובן) = Of course!

Atem col-cach metukim (אתם כל כך מתוקים) = You are so sweet.

Atem madhimim (אתם מדהימים) = You are amazing.

Mehamem (מהמם) = Stunning.

Hibuk (חיבוק) = Hug.

Ahahava (אהבה) = Love.

Ahot (אחות) = Sister.

Ah (אח) = Brother.

Aba (אבא) = Father.

Ima (אמא) = Mother.

Ahim (אחים) = Siblings.

Mishpaha (משפחה) = Family.

Hamud (חמוד) = Cute // Lovely.

Oy vey zmir! (אוי-ויי זמיר) = Oh my goodness!

Be'ezrat Hashem (בעזרת השם) = With the help of G-D.

Baruch Hashem (ברוך השם) = Thank G-D.

[languageleo]

Im just so frustrated bc it doesnt seem fair that your skills can degrade over time. i LEARNED IT😭

[languageleo]

Didn’t you also try to convince us that microwave was some ludicrous thing in Welsh?

EXCUSE ME. AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, ARE YOU INSINTUATING THAT I WAS PRO-POPTY PING?

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I WAS DOING THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF THAT THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

[languageleo]

coffee & ancient greek

[languageleo]

English has different words for mouse and rat but in Chinese they're both the same creature (laoshu) so I asked my mom well how do you differentiate between mice and rats. She, clearly having never felt the need to do so, was like uhh big laoshu and little laoshu I guess. Then I went online to see how the difference between (the English words) "mouse" and "rat" was being explained to CN->EN learners and there are numerous articles delving deep into the analysis. Bigger vs smaller, indoors vs outdoors, cute and favorable connotations vs evil and ugly, tail length, fear factor, emphasis on the fact that you cannot call it a "computer rat." Much thought is being expended on this little mystery of the English language

[languageleo]

It is somehow already November??! and I promised myself that in Nov I'd get back into language learning consistently again (since work - tutoring for uni - is done and I'll have time). I also promised myself that I would start learning Thai (because Jeff Satur and the Thai alphabet are both beautiful and amazing).

I won't have time for a lot of intense learning, since I am still working on my dissertation and it is my priority, so I've decided to kinda combine two langblr challenges I've seen! First is @/langvillage 's one sentence club and second, so I don't have to expend energy thinking of what to write, is @/spraakhexe2 's 30 day language challenge.

I have changed some of spraakhexe2's prompts because I don't think I have the ability or time for the more complicated ones lol, and my goal really is to just write one sentence every day.

The prompts are under the cut.

This is mostly just to keep myself accountable lmao, but anyone is free to do it as well lol (if you do, and esp if you're handwriting please tag me or smth, I'd love to see it!)

[1] Introduce yourself

[2] What is your favourite animal?

[3] What is your favourite song?

[4] What is your favourite movie?

[5] What is your favourite season (and why)?

[6] What is your favourite food?

[7] Describe your room

[8] What is your job/What are you studying/What language are you learning?

[9] Describe your morning or night routine

[10] What is your favourite colour (and what objects are that colour)?

[11] What is something that annoys you?

[12] What is your dream house like/what is something that has to be in your dream house?

[13] Write a grocery list

[14] Do you dream often? (Describe a dream)

[15] Describe a vacation (either one you have been on or would like to go on)

[16] What country/countries would you like to visit?

[17] What would you do with $1 000 000?

[18] What joke/idiom/phrase from your TL do you like?

[19] Is there a poem in your TL that you like/know?

[20] What superpower would you like to have (and why)?

[21] What is your favourite time of day?

[22] What is something you (have to) do daily?

[23] What is something you are scared of?

[24] What do you do to relax?

[25] Describe something you love

[26] Something you would tell your past self, or would like your future self to remember

[27] Favourite folktale/urban legend

[28] Favourite app

[29] What is your favourite book?

[30] Write a short paragraph - it can be a full intro in your TL, a little story, anything you want!

[languageleo]

[languageleo]

All foreign films/shows should have two subtitle options. A localized one that better serves the original intent of the story and dialogue and a more literal one that awkwardly translates phrases in a preserved state, specifically for perverts who want to learn the language (me)

[languageleo]

language-learning advice from a pro

(I started writing this post just now as a message to a friend who asked for language-learning advice. But I’m a GIANT NERD when it comes to language learning, so it got wayyy too long to be a message. So I’m posting it here in the hopes that it might help others as well. I have not edited this or even read through it all yet – it just poured straight out of my fingers – so please let me know if you spot any typos!)

Okay, first of all, there are two parts to language learning: active learning and passive exposure. You can choose to do only one or the other, but you’ll have the most success if you do both.

ACTIVE LEARNING

Active learning is pretty much what it sounds like: actively focusing on the language, learning new words, sounds, phrases, idioms, etc. It’s often centered around a textbook, sometimes with accompanying audio, but you can do active learning in other ways too. For example, you can read a news article online and check a dictionary for every word you don’t know. Or do the same thing with a foreign film – when you hear a word you don’t know (or see it in the subtitles), pause the movie and look it up.

Active learning makes you progress fast, but it also tires out your brain and overwhelms it with new information, making it easier to forget things you’ve already learned. That’s why it’s best to space out your active learning sessions and fill the gaps with passive exposure.

PASSIVE EXPOSURE

The goal of passive exposure is for your brain to randomly encounter words and phrases it learned recently and go “Hey! I recognize that!” This is SO important not only for reviewing and consolidating your memory, but also keeping up your motivation! If the only place you ever encounter your TL (target language) is in your textbook, on some subconscious level your brain will think it’s not that important… because after all, you never encounter it out there in the real world, do you?

Passive exposure can include any of the following and much more: listening to music in your TL; watching a movie in your TL (either with English subs, or with no subs at all and just don’t worry if you don’t understand everything that’s going on); skim-reading a book or a short story or a news article or a blog post in your TL and looking for words you recognize, even if you can’t 100% remember what they mean; finding speakers of your TL in real life and eavesdropping on them; watching instructional YouTube videos or short documentaries in your TL (the visuals ought to help you understand some of what’s going on, even if there are no subtitles); etc.

The idea is to let your TL wash over you without straining your brain at all. Zero effort, just relaxation and fun. You will inevitably notice and understand a few words or phrases, and that percentage will increase as time goes on, but you’re not actively studying when you’re doing passive exposure. Remember the two things you’re trying to achieve with passive exposure: 1) effortless review/practice, by inevitably re-encountering some stuff you’ve already learned; 2) reminding your brain that this language is a real cool thing out there in the world, not just a boring chore located in a textbook.

But there are also two more extremely important benefits to passive exposure that are drastically neglected by most language-learners: 3) picking up the correct pronunciation and accent; 4) gaining an instinct for natural, native-sounding language.

These are two things you will not learn in a language class or from a textbook. You can’t learn them except by doing a LOT of listening and reading in your TL. But the good news is that it doesn’t need to be the “Active Learning” kind of reading and listening; it can absolutely be the “Passive Exposure” kind, and you will still pick this stuff up.

The most important thing, above all else, is to figure out a method of passive exposure that works for YOU personally. This means: do NOT force yourself to repeatedly do something that you don’t enjoy, because you won’t benefit from it. To pick the right method, think of your interests and the things you like to do in your free time: watching movies? reading books? listening to music? writing in your journal? surfing the internet? You can do any of this in your TL, too. Yes, you will encounter a lot of stuff you don’t understand at the beginning. But A) that’s good for you, it helps you learn patience, which every language-learner needs, and B) the internet has free translation tools everywhere you look.

COMBINING BOTH

Personally, I like to pick a well-respected textbook with accompanying audio (Assimil is my favorite; Teach Yourself and Colloquial can also be very good, especially the older editions; Linguaphone used to be fantastic but I’m not sure if it’s still around) and work my way through it, doing one lesson per day if possible. That takes only about 10 to 20 minutes, so that leaves a lot of time for passive exposure. My preferred method is listening to music (I learned a good 50% of my German from just obsessively listening to German pop music in high school), but here are some other things I like to do:

find an internet talk radio station in my TL and put it on in the background

same deal with a podcast

translate a few keywords related to my favorite hobbies/interests into the TL and then paste that text into YouTube and watch random videos in my TL

read a news article in English, and then find a news website in my TL and see if I can find an article about the same topic in that language

watch bad reality TV or soaps in my TL with no subtitles, just trying to guess what’s going on from context

etc.

No Duolingo. No Rosetta Stone. (I’ve written a whole post about the latter here.) You don’t need to spend any money at all, though if you e.g. use a pirated resource to learn and find that it really helps you, I strongly suggest buying it from the original producer after the fact, to say thank you.

MEMORIZATION

This is very much a “YMMV” piece of advice, but: if you’re having trouble memorizing stuff, just don’t. Don’t bother trying to remember anything. Remember that “passive exposure” bit? It does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of memory. If you keep bumping into the same word or phrase over and over again, you will incorporate it into your body of knowledge almost effortlessly. Of course this is easier with more common words that turn up again and again – but you’d be surprised how well you can get by, especially at the lower levels, with only the more common words!

Intentionally memorizing vocabulary can of course be very beneficial, so there’s nothing wrong with it. But I notice that it’s often one of the biggest pain points for language learners, and I believe language learning should be pain-free.

FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT

Once you’ve gotten a good grasp of the basics of the language, a really effective way to consolidate the knowledge you’ve gained is to use it actively and creatively yourself, in speech or writing (or ideally both!). For speaking practice, besides simply making friends who are native speakers of the language, you can search for a physical or virtual tandem. This is when you meet up with someone who’s a native speaker of your TL and is trying to learn your own language. You can meet for, say, an hour, and chat together for half an hour in your native language, and then half an hour in their native language. So both of you benefit!

Don’t underestimate talking to yourself, too. Whether it’s narrating your actions, complaining to your pet (okay, I guess that’s not technically “talking to yourself”), or simply having an imaginary conversation with someone else, it’s actually a good way to practice.

I also really enjoy writing in my journal in my target languages. The act of hand-writing a word does a lot to help me remember it. If you like writing, of course, you could also look up penpals who speak your TL.

And that’s about it. As always, I am more than willing to answer specific questions on language learning, as this is something of a specialty of mine and I absolutely love to help other folks get started on their own language-learning journeys. Please feel free to drop me a line if you need any concrete advice or are struggling with some aspect of your current language-learning efforts!

[languageleo]

lien

[languageleo]

Got a question for all those who studied or know the history of the Japanese language, how come they've never discovered or added the f, v or l sounds? It's not like they're difficult sounds to produce, they are pretty basic so I don't really understand how, especially "la" is so easy to create as a sound.

[languageleo]

anyone else love grammar? i fucking love grammar. in every language i trudge through the base vocab until i can study something cool (grammar (grammar)) without being lost

[languageleo]

In America, “Lemonade” refers to a drink made with lemon juice, water, and usually a sweetener of some type.

In England, “Lemonade” is a fizzy drink more akin to Sprite or 7-Up.

In Japan, there’s a drink called “Ramune”, which is a japanification of the word “Lemonade” but it takes its meaning from England, so it’s a fizzy drink - though lemon is probably the hardest flavour to find, and it comes in almost and fruit you can imagine, as well as matcha and yogurt flavours. I have tried most of these. There are multiple companies that make Ramune and while the iconic bottle shape is nearly identical, the packaging is different.

Yesterday I went to a Chinese restaurant, in America for context, and on the counter as you walked in were three Ramune bottles, in pink, blue, and yellow. I didn’t have the time as I walked by to see what flavours they were, and I couldn’t tell by the colour of the soda inside either, so when I sat down I asked for a “Pink Ramune.”

Our waiter, an older Chinese man in a stylish vest, told us he didn’t have any pink, just yellow, so I figured they were out of the pink and blue and said “alright, that’s fine.” not having known what flavours any of them were anyways, and able to enjoy any except matcha, which tastes like burnt seaweed soda.

He comes back to the table with a can of Minute Maid Lemonade, taking us full circle. It was so funny I didn’t even protest and accepted my role, because technically if you think about it he brought me the “right” drink.

[languageleo]

[languageleo]

I'm a big fan of extensive reading apps for language learning, and even collaborated on such an app some 10 years ago. It eventually had to be shut down, sadly enough.

Right now, the biggest one in the market is the paywalled LingQ, which is pretty good, but well, requires money.

There's also the OG programs, LWT (Learning With Texts) and FLTR (Foreign Language Text Reader), which are so cumbersome to set up and use that I'm not going to bother with them.

I presently use Vocab Tracker as my daily driver, but I took a spin around GitHub to see what fresh new stuff is being developed. Here's an overview of what I found, as well as VT itself.

(There were a few more, like Aprelendo and TextLingo, which did not have end-user-friendly installations, so I'm not counting them).

Vocab Tracker

++ Available on web ++ 1-5 word-marking hotkeys and instant meanings makes using it a breeze ++ Supports websites

-- Default meaning/translation is not always reliable -- No custom languages -- Ugliest interface by far -- Does not always recognise user-selected phrases -- Virtually unusable on mobile -- Most likely no longer maintained/developed

Lute

++ Supports virtually all languages (custom language support), including Hindi and Sanskrit ++ Per-language, customisable dictionary settings ++ Excellent, customisable hotkey support

-- No instant meaning look-up makes it cumbersome to use, as you have to load an external dictionary for each word -- Docker installation

LinguaCafe

++ Instant meanings thanks to pre-loaded dictionaries ++ Supports ebooks, YouTube, subtitles, and websites ++ Customisable fonts ++ Best interface of the bunch

== Has 7 word learning levels, which may be too many for some

-- Hotkeys are not customisable (yet) and existing ones are a bit cumbersome (0 for known, for eg.) -- No online dictionary look-up other than DeepL, which requires an API key (not an intuitive process) -- No custom languages -- Supports a maximum of 15,000 characters per "chapter", making organising longer texts cumbersome -- Docker installation

Dzelda

++ Supports pdf and epub ++ Available on web

-- Requires confirming meaning for each word to mark that word, making it less efficient to read through -- No custom languages, supports only some Latin-script languages -- No user-customisable dictionaries (has a Google Form to suggest more dictionaries)

[languageleo]

since mrs, ms, and mr are all descended from the latin word magister, i propose the gender neutral version should be mg, short for "mage"

[languageleo]

I need your help with a hypothesis!

For context: My linguistics professor and I got into a discussion after a test she did with us, and I was of the opinion that the reason for the results was different from the one she offered, so she encouraged me to test my theory.

What I need

All you need to do is draw a coffee cup (with a handle, not the disposable stuff) and then answer three questions.

I don't need to see the coffee cup. You can draw it wherever you like; on a piece of paper, digitally, in the sand, on a foggy window. Anything works. It does not have to be good. A doodle is fine.

You have to draw the coffee cup before you see the questions. This is very important. If you decide to help me with this, please doodle the coffee cup before you keep reading.

Assuming you have drawn the coffee cup, I now need you to answer these three questions:

On which side did you draw the handle?

Are you right-handed or left-handed?

Do you primarily write using the Latin alphabet or a different one? (please specify which)

More context

Most people will draw the handle on the right side. My professor says it's because most people are right-handed, so they draw the handle in the direction that would be comfortable for them to pick up.

I said drawing it on the right side just felt more comfortable to my hand and argued it's probably because we write a bunch of letters like that. B, b, D, P, p, R all look like a tiny "handle on the right side" and are all a straight line followed by a round one (so "cup first, handle second," like most people draw cups). The Latin alphabet doesn't have letters like that that face the other way, except maybe d, depending on how you write it, so it makes sense to me that people writing mostly Latin letters would go with the handle on the right side.

Which means that I need to know what Asians, Arabs and Greeks do and if the distribution of left and right sides of handles differs from the Latin alphabet group. Cyrillic seems to favor right, too, though it'd be interesting to see if there are differences.

If there are, my theory is right. Doubly so if there is a sizeable increase in a group whose alphabet has letters that benefit the left side choice.

So feel free to spread this to as many people as you like and put the answers in the comments or the tags of a reblog. The more answers I get, the better I can assess whose theory is better.

Thank you for your help!