learningthroughthegrapevine

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

i really think learning languages is like. good for your soul. net positive.

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

A Short Story

Social Anxiety

Me: *goes to a place to order lunch*

*Said place serves food from a country that speaks my target language*

Me: *starts panicking because I don’t want to potentially out myself*

Me: *casually avoids saying anything that I know is a word from my target language when ordering food* I am the world’s biggest coward.

My main concern is that I don’t know if I know how to say any of the words correctly. While at the same time not knowing how people who speak English would say it. So basically there’s a chance that I’d out myself as a nerd.

Why would this be a bad thing?

Because I am a white person studying an East Asian language in a state with a really bad yellow fever problem. So any time someone finds out, I get the stink eye because they’ll assume that I’m one of THOSE PEOPLE.

Fuck my life.

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

Studying linguistics is actually so wonderful because when you explain youth slang to older professors, instead of complaining about how "your generation can't speak right/ you're butchering the language" they light up and go “really? That’s so wonderful! What an innovative construction! Isn't language wonderful?"

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

One day you think: I want to die. And then you think, very quietly, actually I want a coffee. I want a nap. A sandwich. A book. And I want to die turns day by day into I want to go home, I want to walk in the woods, I want to see my friends, I want to sit in the sun. I want a cleaner room, I want a better job, I want to live somewhere else, I want to live.

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

Took me until about halfway through college before I realized “study” means “play with the material in a variety of ways until you understand it” and not just “read the assigned chapters and do the homework” and I think that probably should have been discussed at some point prior to that.

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

my friend and i were going to study a language together and wound up having to cancel our plans due to scheduling pressures, but! through research we came across a really cool resource for reading in a TON of languages: bloom library!

as you can see, it has a lot of books for languages that are usually a bit harder to find materials for—we were going to use it for kyrgyz, for example, which has over 1000 books, which was really hard to find textbook materials for otherwise. as you can see it also has books with audio options, which would be really useful for pronunciation checking. as far as i can tell, everything on the site is free as well.

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

Sentence Mining

Link

Linked above is the thing I’m making in Notion to help me and hopefully other people find videos that they can sentence mine easily.

If you don’t know what sentence mining is you can watch a video about it here.

Since I’m kind of on my own with this here. I figured I might as well try to help other people like me.

People who want to learn Korean, but can’t seem to talk to people no matter how hard they try. Getting started can be difficult, but as long as you keep trying, fluency is inevitable in my mind.

To me, humans are hard wired to figure out ways to communicate with each other.

We’re social animals. Communication is what we do. No matter how hard it gets we will always find a way to communicate. No language barrier will ever be too great to overcome. Success is inevitable as long as you never give up. Never forget that.

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

Korean Word of the Day

대신에

Instead

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

Migaku, Vivaldi and the Agony of Sentence Mining

I've been sentencing mining with quite a bit of difficulty for a few months and I finally figured out what was causing my issues.

Basically the Vivaldi browser has a feature that I loved to use while sentence mining that would eventually break Migaku almost every single time.

This feature is called web panels. I added Papago and Naver Dictionary to it since it incredibly easy to double check the meaning of the words I was mining. I have no experience with programming so I can't explain why this happens exactly, but my current theory is the web panels act like a different tab. Which is fine normally, but if you have recording turned on in Migaku it automatically turns off sometimes when I use the web panels.

When that happens I get a bit frustrated and turn recording back on. However if I use the web panels too much Migaku eventually stops being able to generate Anki cards. Unfortunately I haven't been able to fix the problem besides quitting sentence mining for the rest of the day.

So my advice is this:

Do NOT use web panels in Vivaldi while sentence mining with Migaku. Open your dictionary in a separate tab instead.

Please keep in mind that I use the legacy version of Migaku. (Which the devs have basically abandoned.)

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

Korean Word of the Day

고치다

To fix something

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

I’ve heard this word a lot and had no idea what it meant. This helps me out a lot. Thank you!

Korean Word of the Day

꼭

Tightly

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

My favourite part of learning a language related to your mother tongue (or to an L2 you’re fluent in) is the confidence with which you get things wrong

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

some people think im weird because i love czech and czech hat-letters so much. but ask yourself.... where would the world be without weird people or things?

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

Hello language learners!

Have you tried Librivox?

It's a website that has public domain audio books in TONS (47 to be exact) of languages! (my followers, yes, it has Finnish too!)

You can find loads of free books on there! I recommend it a lot!

For Finnish books, I noticed they even have Seitsemän Veljestä which is a must-read for every Finnish student.

Here's a link:

[learningthroughthegrapevine]

that feeling when you write a fckn essay of a letter on slowly to someone in your target language and even though oftentimes you have to dumb your wording down because you don't know that many idiomatic expressions yet you still get your point across and can discuss complex topics and Actually Communicate with someone. that feeling