michellehasseb

[michellehasseb]

dear those who struggle to get out of bed every morning but manage to despite their exhaustion. dear those who feel lost and foggy and like they’re simply reliving the same day. dear those who put all their heart into relationships and friendships and so often feel alone in that effort. dear those who are fighting battles every day and continuing to pull through. im proud of you. i know it can so often feel overwhelming and exhausting and even pointless at times. but all of the fighting you are doing right now is worth it, because things will improve. this headspace will not last forever. you’re doing amazing and it will be worth it. i promise you are loved. even when you feel isolated and forgotten, there are people that love and need you and it is okay to reach out to them. it’s okay to admit you’re feeling low or you’re needing someone. that will never make you weak or needy. you have so much worth despite anyone who has made you feel the opposite. you’ve made it through every one of your worst days and every mental low point. and the good days will begin to outnumber the bad ones, sometimes it just takes time, love and patience. i see you and how strong you are. i am so glad you are still here because you make this world a better place. you’ve probably seen that on every positivity account there is, but that’s because it’s true. you’ve got this. im cheering you on. love, me.

[michellehasseb]

repeat after me:

even if i don’t like my body today i will take care of it

even if i don’t like myself today i will still be patient and kind with myself

even if i do not love myself i will still take care of and be kind to myself, despite not wanting to

[michellehasseb]

I have never been into dark academia but after 6 months of non-stop lockdown and 13 months of zoom university I have started to romanticize a new type of university aesthetic which I call

Just Normal Academia:

The taste of cheap vending machine coffee. The dusty smell of your library seat. Clothes that are not remarkable in any way, but hey, you are wearing actual pants. Trying to read books that are relavant for your essay but getting distracted by your friend who wants to chat. The feeling of being cramped into public transport with hundreds of other tired students in the morning.

I never thought I'd be the type of person to have an academia aesthetic but I'd do almost anything to live the Just Normal Academia life right now

[michellehasseb]

soon may the wellerman come, your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb

[michellehasseb]

*tea cup* Deutsche Bahn's use of Denglish

Ok, I am sorry that this is going to be a long one but it ties into some topics that have been bothering me for some time. Long story short: While phrases like “zänk yu for träweling wiz Deutsche Bahn” are hilarious, I would actually be happy to hear their Denglisch more often if that meant they put more effort into providing bilingual services at least in places where there are a lot of migrants, tourists and/or travellers. At least the Deutsche Bahn tries to provide bilingual announcements and services in some “hotspot” regions of Germany and even there it is not enough. One of my Brazilian cousins once missed a train in Cologne, one of our biggest and most international cities, because he couldn’t find a Deutsche Bahn employee who spoke English.

While many young people at least speak some English and might help you out if you are struggling, I think we have a huge problem with the use of English (or rather the lack thereof) in official institutions. Combine that with a culture of horrible customer service (which in my experience gets worse if you don’t look "German "enough and/or have an accent) and you end up with a culture that is oftentimes very hostile to people who don’t speak German. And it’s not even that people in my opinion don’t speak English “well enough”. As I said, I would actually have no problem with Denglish as long as it meant that people were genuinely trying to help out migrants/tourists/travellers and provide the services to them they are entitled to.

Apart from the racism (which is also a huge problem) I have witnessed many times that people in these positions turn hostile as soon as it required of them to speak English. My hometown has a huge migrant population and yet it is prohibited to speak English in the city administration when dealing with citizens???? Even in the offices that deal with migrant issues???? Like, even if you KNOW English, you have to speak German to people who don’t. But I have also worked professionally as a freelancer with our city administration and I feel like there are many people who at least on a subconscious level feel threatened by the increasing importance of English as they feel left behind. There were a few people who turned very hostile during a workshop when they were asked if it was ok to work with an English worksheet. And I don’t even mean in a “I don’t understand English” kind of way but what I mean is that one participant refused to TOUCH the English worksheet insisting that “Deutsch ist Amtssprache!”

If you have made positive experiences in Germany in that regard, I am happy for you! But sadly, I have witnessed many scenes over the years ranging from unfriendly to hostile and racist.

TL;DR: If it means that people who struggle with the German language have access to more services, I would love to listen to more cringy Deutsche Bahn-type Denglisch.

send me a ☕️ and a topic and i’ll talk about how i feel about it

[michellehasseb]

₍ᐢ◍˘(❢)˘◍ᐢ₎ 💭🍵 this is a protector bear. he will lovingly tuck you in bed at night and make sure you are safe… he is thinking of making some sleepytime tea to make sure your dreams are sweet!

[michellehasseb]

fun bilingual things

- you know the word in second language but not first - your notes sometimes are in both languages at once. some words are quicker to write than their equivalents - phone autocorrects to wrong language - the words that are the same but slightly different in your two languages are always spelled the wrong way. no matter what. - certain memories only available in one language - music genres?? u like maybe alternative and pop music in your first language but like rap and musical theatre in your second - u know what verb tenses are called in your second language but not in your first - saying bullshit like “close the lights please” because it’s idiomatically correct but not in english

[michellehasseb]

Crash Course Linguistics - the full series

The full 16 weeks of Crash Course Linguistics are now available on YouTube. Crash Course offers a face-paced, light hearted, high-level introduction to major areas of linguistics, or you can use it in your teaching or studies as a warm up for these key topics.

This post includes all 16 episodes, which come with English closed captions. For each video I’ve also included a link to the relevant Mutual Intelligibility posts with additional resources and curated Linguistics Olympiad puzzles for you to try. The first five episodes are embedded in this post, but that’s the maximum that tumblr will let me add, so the rest are just screen shots with links to the videos.

I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to work as part of such a big team on this project. It’s been fun to get into a co-writing rhythm with Gretchen McCulloch, and to work with Jessi Greiser on refining the scripts. The Complexly team behind Crash Course are all enthusiastic educators, and it was also amazing to see the animation team at Thought Cafe bring Gav and all the other content from the series to life. Taylor Behnke has been the amazing host of this series. 

(Image: Gav, who even has their own Instagram profile)

Week 0 - Preview

Preview Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 1 - Introduction

Week 1 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 2 - Morphology 

Week 2 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 3 - Morphosyntax

Week 3 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 4 - Syntax

Week 4 Mutual intelligibility post

Week 5 - Semantics

Video: https://youtu.be/6geQjY8b7sA

Week 5 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 6 - Pragmatics

Video: https://youtu.be/MPwpk-YgvjQ

Week 6 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 7 - Sociolinguistics

Video: https://youtu.be/of4XzrbkknM

Week 7 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 8 - Phonetics, Consonants

Video: https://youtu.be/vyea8Ph9BOM

Week 8 Mutual Intelligibility post)

Week 9 - Phonetics, Vowels

Video: https://youtu.be/qPTL5x0QW-Y

Week 9 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 10 - Phonology

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imH7hdOgxrU

Week 10 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 11 - Psycholinguistics

Video: https://youtu.be/A5uNFKEn4_A

Week 11 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 12 - Language acquisition

Video: https://youtu.be/Ccsf0yX7ECg

Week 12 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 13 - Historical linguistics and language change

Video: https://youtu.be/dNkMC92kFLA

Week 13 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 14 - Languages around the world

Video: https://youtu.be/Nxyo83cQjhI

Week 14 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 15 - Computational linguistics

Video: https://youtu.be/3npuPXvA_g8

Week 15 Mutual Intelligibility post

Week 16 - Writing systems

Video: https://youtu.be/-sUUWyo4RZQ

Week 16 Mutual Intelligibility post

[michellehasseb]

general language learning resources

dictionaries:

wordreference - has spanish, french, italian, portuguese, catalan, german, swedish, dutch, russian, polish, romanian, czech, greek, turkish, chinese, japanese, korean, & arabic

reverso translation - has arabic, chinese, dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish

bab.la - has spanish, arabic, chinese, czech, danish, dutch, finnish, french, german, greek, hindi, hungarian, indonesian, italian, japanese, korean, norwegian, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, swedish, swahili, thai, turkish, vietnamese, & esperanto

digital dictionaries of south asia - has dictionaries for assamese, baluchi, bengali, divehi, hindi, kashmiri, khowar, lushai, malayalam, marathi, nepali, oriya, pali, panjabi, pashto, persian, prakrit, rajasthani, sanskrit, sindhi, sinhala, tamil, telugu & urdu

resources for learning words in context:

reverso context  - has arabic, chinese (in beta), dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish (in beta)

linguee - has german, spanish, portuguese, french, italian, russian, japanese, chinese, polish, dutch, swedish, danish, finnish, greek, czech, romanian, hungarian, slovak, bulgarian, slovene, lithuanian, latvian, maltese, & estonian

for learning different writing systems

omniglot - an encyclopedia with literally any language you could think of including ancient languages

scripts - an app for learning other writing systems with a limited amount for free (you can do 5 minutes a day for free) - has the ASL alphabet, Russian cyrillic, devanagari, Japanese kana, Chinese hanzi, & Korean hangul

Wikipedia is also helpful for learning different writing systems honestly!

pronunciation

forvo - a pronunciation dictionary with MANY languages (literally an underrated resource i use it all the time)

a really helpful video by luca lampariello with tips on how to get better pronunciation in any language

ipachart.com - an interactive chart with almost every sound!! literally such an amazing resource for learning the IPA (however does not include tones)

another interactive IPA chart (this one does have tones) 

language tutoring

italki - there’s many websites for language tutoring but i think italki has the most languages (i have a referral link & if you use it we can both get $10 toward tutoring lol) - they say they support 130 languages!

there’s also preply and verbling which are also good but there aren’t as many options for languages - preply has 27 and verbling has 43

(obviously these are not free but if you have the money i think tutoring is a great way to learn a language!)

getting corrections/input from native speakers

hellotalk - an app for language exchanges with native speakers & they also have functions where you can put up a piece of writing and ask for corrections - honestly this app is great

tandem - language exchange app but unlike hellotalk you can choose multiple languages (although i think hellotalk is a little bit better)

LangCorrect - supports 170 languages!

HiNative - supports 113 languages!

Lang-8 - supports 90 languages!

verb conjugation

verbix - supports a ton of languages

Reverso conjugation - only has english, french, spanish, german, italian, portuguese, hebrew russian, arabic, & japanese

apps

duolingo - obviously everybody knows about duolingo but i’m still going to put it here - i will say i think duolingo is a lot more useful for languages that use the latin alphabet than languages with another writing system however they do have a lot of languages and add more all the time - currently they have 19 languages but you can see what languages they’re going to add on the incubator

memrise - great for vocab! personally i prefer the app to the desktop website

drops - you can only do 5 minutes a day for free but i still recommend it because it’s fun and has 42 languages! 

LingoDeer - specifically geared towards asian languages - includes korean, japanese, chinese & vietnamese (as well as spanish, french, german, portuguese and russian), however only a limited amount is available for free

busuu - has arabic, chinese, french, german, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, spanish, russian, spanish, & turkish, 

Mondly - has 33 languages including spanish, french, german, italian, russian, japanese, korean, chinese, turkish, arabic, persian, hebrew, portuguese (both brazilian & european), catalan, latin, dutch, swedish, norwegian, danish, finnish, latvian, lithuanian, greek, romanian, afrikaans, croatian, polish, bulgarian, czech, slovak, hungarian, ukrainian, vietnamese, hindi, bengali, urdu, indonesian, tagalog & thai

misc

a video by the polyglot Lýdia Machová about how different polyglots learn languages - this video is great especially if you don’t know where to start in terms of self study

LangFocus - a youtube channel of this guy who talks about different languages which is always a good place to start to understand how a specific language works also his videos are fun

Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb - this book is great and available online completely for free! 

Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner (on pdfdrive) - another great book about language learning

Anki - a flashcard app (free on desktop for any system & free on android mobile - not free on ios mobile) that specifically uses spaced repetition to help you learn vocabulary, it’s got a slightly ugly design but it’s beloved by many language learners & is honestly so helpful

YouTube - literally utilize youtube it is so good.

Easy Languages - a youtube channel with several languages (basically they go around asking people on the street stuff so the language in the videos is really natural) & they also have breakaway channels for german, french, spanish, polish, italian, greek, turkish, russian, catalan & english

there’s also the LanguagePod101 youtube channels (e.g. FrenchPod101, JapanesePod101, HebrewPod101) which are super great for listening practice & language lessons as well as learning writing systems!

[michellehasseb]

I find the term “loan word” amusing because it implies that one day you’ll have to return said word.

[michellehasseb]

terfs' bios be like "racists dni, my hate group is more epic than yours"

[michellehasseb]

[michellehasseb]

the overwhelming grief of losing an entire year to sickness, violence and pandemic fatigue is settling in so id like to remind everyone that: you are not a failure, yes there is still a happy future for you, and wearing a mask is very sexy

[michellehasseb]

Part of Nature by Stuart McMillen

[michellehasseb]

Just for anyone still thinking the civil rights movement was “SO long ago!”

Fred Hampton would be 72 this year if police hadn’t executed him at age 21.

Ruby Bridges is 65.

MLK would be 91 (he was assassinated at 39).

Malcom X would be 95 (he was assassinated at 39).

Claudette Colvin (the first Black woman known to refuse to give up her seat AT 15) is only 80.

Mary Louise Smith is 83.

Fred Gray is 89.

EMMETT TILL WOULD BE 79 (he was murdered at age 14 because of a white woman’s lie).

Ask yourself how old your grandparents are. Hell, how old your PARENTS are. How old are the people in most government seats right now?

Miss me with that bullshit of “It’S sO lOnG aGo. Things are better now.” These people and so many more who aren’t able to be here would be distraught at what is STILL fucking happening today. To say things like that is just willfully turning your head away from the injustices that we see today! That’s the that on that.

[michellehasseb]

Found this far funnier than I should have

[michellehasseb]

i miss people, places, and things <3 didn't know how good we had it encountering nouns all the time 😔