quasi-polyglot-blog

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09/01/2017 Starting the year off with some new stationery! Enjoy the sneak peek for the stationery haul that will come up this month! Note: I didn’t enjoy the new Stabilo Pastel highlighters as I wanted to. Found that some of them (the darker colors) smudge in the end and stain the page. Yellow is fine though.

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16 . 09 . 2016 // “A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them” — Liberty Hyde Bailey

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Using some adjectives with ser and estar can completely change the meaning. Take a look!

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!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m not sure how many of you know about this website - but bUT BUT - it has a TON of languages with awesome beginner/intermediate vocabulary lists - and as a bonus, it has the pronunciation of NEARLY ALL the languages offered which is super helpful! Languages like Ukrainian, Persian, Swahili, and even Amharic all have their pronunciations.

 The only languages without pronunciations that I found were Belarusian and Tamil

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Why Japanese is EASY

A lot of people want to study Japanese but think it’s too hard and that they will never succeed. That is really a myth, though. Here is why Japanese is actually easy.

1. All verbs are regular, there are only 2 exceptions 

If you know French, this must sound like a dream to you. In other languages [like French] there seem to be more irregular verbs than regular ones. Not in Japanese, though. There are 3 groups of verbs, the first 2 being regular and very easy to conjugate. The third group consists of only 2 irregular verbs!

2. Easy pronunciation 

Japanese doesn’t have any exceptionally hard to pronounce letters. Unlike Arabic, German or Finnish, Japanese should be quite easy to pronounce for English speakers. Also, Japanese isn’t a tonal language like Thai or Chinese. 

3. No genders, plural or articles

Anyone who studies a romance language [and many other languages that have that] knows how frustrating it can be when you use the wrong article or verb ending. In Japanese, it doesn’t even exist, so nothing to worry!

4. Grammar is easy!

That’s true. It’s just completely different from English, but that doesn’t make it hard. After a while, it will feel completely normal. The best part about the grammar is that you can build a whole sentence with just one word. For example, if you wanted to ask somebody in English if they did their homework, you’d say ‘did you do your homework?’ Kind of long, isn’t it? In Japanese, you can ask by using only the verb ‘to do, can, be able to’ - like this: ‘done?’ Also, spoken, you can drop many words if you don’t really need them, especially particles! So if you’re not sure what particle to use, chances are you can just easily leave it altogether without the sentence losing its meaning. It’s easy to build sentences that seem to end in ‘…’, but that’s completely normal in Japanese and everyone will understand.

5. Tons of resources

Sadly, there are some languages people don’t really care about or not a lot of people want to study/ are interested in. Japanese is not one of those languages. There are hundreds of books about Kanji alone! And so many courses for every level. Also, it doesn’t matter what you’re interested in - anime, manga, books, movies, game show, video games, dramas, music - it’s all out there and super easy to find, so you definitely will find something you can listen to or read to practice your skills.

6. Kanji/the writing systems are hard?

No. They aren’t. It’s just a huge workload, it takes time and effort, but they are not hard.

At first, having to learn 3 writing systems will seem exhausting. But believe me, later, when you start reading, you will be so glad! You can detect if a text has a lot of foreign words at one glance if it has a lot of Katakana, for example, and you could say a lot more on twitter because of the syllabaries!

So actually, the 3 systems put together makes everything easier to read!

So please, just start studying and go at your own pace, and have fun studying every day ⭐︎

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how start learn any language? 1h in every day :) 

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My first post + 2017 school/language goals

Like the title says, this is my first post!! I just created this blog because I want a place to put anything I feel like posting, especially stuff relating to my study at school and my language learning. I also want to be able to look back in the future and reminisce and see how far I’ve come. I want this to be something I can share, even if that means only one other person ever sees it.

Anyway, with that rambling out of the way, these are my school and language goals/resolutions for 2017:

- Reach a B2/C1 level in Spanish. No real reason... I just love Spanish

- Be able to hold a conversation with my Dutch family members in their native tongues, even if it’s a very basic conversation. I’ve been “learning” Dutch for about a year now, however I have been really, really slack about it. This year I really want to get into it and finally crack down on it, though!

- Obtain the (not-so) highly coveted Spanish subject award at my school. I was so damn close last year, just losing it because I accidentally swapped two words of a question on a test one time. But this time, oh this time, you’d best believe I’m gonna (at least try to) get it!

- Be able to actually remember Japanese vocab. See, I’m quite good at Japanese grammar, and I am good at getting my thoughts across if I have access to Jisho.com (it’s really good) or my trusty Japanese dictionary iPhone app (also really good, and it’s free so) imiwa?, but if you asked me to speak Japanese right now...

- Get better grades. Study. Come on Zach, you can do it!

Okay, well that’s me done for today. Bye!

(P.S. if anyone sees ever sees this, feel free to add me on Duolingo! I follow back! User: zakemon)

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summer is always kinda slow for me, tbh. i sort of like school bc it stresses me out in a way for me to constantly try my best