#Ape-English Dictionary

[inbetweencoffees]

books, books and more books📚

My morning was rather awful as I was so tired I considered skipping first lesson. Got up anyways and attend every single class of that day. Yay :) I’m a bit sceptical of my english teachers approach regarding ‚The Circle‘ by Dave Eggers but to be honest, it can’t get worse than his Shakespeare lessons…

My library shift was unusually quiet today. Did inventory and put all the returned books back into their spot. My old ap english teacher came in to get dictionaries (I’m glad I got rid of a few-) and I had a surprisingly polite fifth grade come in with their teacher to pick up their copies of ‚Tom Sawyer‘, which reminded me of the time I played Huckleberry Finn (yes, Finn played Finn lol) in 8th grade English class. Time flies by…

Now I’m off to dinner and picking someone up from the train station :)

Highlight of the day: small amount of snow that survived the night!!❄️

[desigrrrl]

List of Telugu learning Resources

Writing

Script: about, history and development, impact of writing tools in its evolution

Alphabet: multibhashi, wikipedia, wikibooks, edzym

Reading

Textbook: intensive course (archive.org), ncert school books, ap scert school books, ts scert school books, hindi-telugu praimaru, grammar (written in telugu)

Prose: kids’ stories, stories, collected manuscripts, parikini, soundaryalahari, barrister parvateesam, history, translated quran,

Poetry: kinnerasani patalu, movie songs book, maha prasthanam, tyagaraja kirtanalu

Blog/Misc: chandamama kathalu magazine, kavithalu, saaranga magazine, hasam magazine, bharati magazine, swathi weekly, sakshi news

Dictionaries: andhrabharati, tel-eng by sankaranarayana, eng-tel by venkatacharyulu, tel-eng by percival, tel-sans, hin-tel.

Vocabulary

MyLanguages

MeaningInHindi

1000MostCommonWords

proverbs: sametalu (written in telugu)

Grammar

malik’s absolutely goated guide

praveen ragi

vakyam (written in telugu)

Apps

Mango

Multibhashi (android)

HelloTalk

Dasubhashitam (android)

Learn Spoken Telugu From English (android)

Websites

Languages Home

Goethe-Verlag

LearningTelugu

Learn 101

Desi Bantu

YouTube - Native

Telugu teachers: telugu vanam, teach me telugu, pr learning hub,

Beginner level/Kids content: koo koo tv, jum jum tv, paa paa tv, horror planet

General: permit room, sumakka, chai bisket, naa anveshana, my vilage show, ragadi, chitra alochana, thyview, mahathalli, vikramaditya, yevarra meerantha, aye jude, dhethadi, chari not sorry

YouTube - Learners

Mexico: Christina

USA: Kari, Isaac Richards, Manasa (Danya), Omar Crockett

Italy: Franchesca /Telugutalian

Denmark: BigAReact

Poland: Zbigsbujji Chetlur

Sweden: Karl Svanberg

Online Keyboards

lexilogos

typingbaba

branah

gate2home

[tokidokitokyo]

How to Improve Your Handwriting in Japanese

Learning to write in Japanese, teaching others to learn to write in Japanese, and watching Japanese people write in Japanese has taught me that it’s hard to write in Japanese. Remembering how to write the kanji in the first place is hard (especially with the ease of writing in Japanese on the computer or phone), remembering the stroke order and then figuring out how to fit the character into the space that you have - these are all difficult. And then on top of that, you don’t want these beautiful characters to look like you were bouncing up and down on a dirt road while you wrote them.

Handwriting in any language varies by person. There are people whose handwriting is sloppy in Japanese, just as in any other language. My handwriting in English isn’t perfect either, but I want my kanji to look less like shaky squiggles and more like, well, a native Japanese speaker’s characters. So I decided to break down how I go about improving my Japanese handwriting.

Practice

When you learn to write in English, you practice your letters over and over again. When you first learn kana and then kanji, it is also a good idea to write them over and over again. This helps many people to remember the characters (stroke order, spatial placement of each part of the character), and by writing the characters over and over again you will be able to write more quickly. You also won’t have to look up simple characters over and over again when you want to write a composition or a letter.

When I first started writing compositions by hand in kanji I remember looking up a character in the dictionary to check stroke order or to check how the kanji was written more often than not. This is a difficult way to write anything and takes a lot of time. Practice will help you to remember the characters and not have to stop to check your dictionary as often.

A high school friend told me that her mother would sit her down at the table every night and force her to work on her penmanship until it was what her mother deemed suitable. When we wrote our AP English essays in class, her penmanship was impeccable, although it took her much longer to write the essays than most of the other students. The result of what she considered torturous practice was amazing handwriting that made me jealous. If I had spent every night laboriously perfecting my penmanship I might also have attained that kind of handwriting - but I did not.

This is an extreme example, and I’m not saying you have to have perfect handwriting, but if improving your handwriting is something you would like to accomplish, taking the time to practice will certainly help your penmanship.

Books

There are Japanese books dedicated to this, because beautiful handwriting is desirable in all languages, but they are written in Japanese and I personally didn’t want to buy a book for this purpose.

Websites

Websites are a bit more difficult to come by because most people want to make some money off telling you their penmanship secrets. However, there are a few websites with some examples of good penmanship.

Links

Here are some online links for handwriting practice:

Chibi Musu Drill is where I look for kana practice for my toddler. They have a variety of drill print-outs that you can use to practice writing the characters correctly. This is especially helpful if you are self-studying as it helps with the shape of characters and the stroke order, and how the stroke should be finished (i.e. abrupt stop or drag and fade out to a tail). There are also tests you can print out for kanji. The site is all in Japanese.

Hiragana | Katakana | Kanji 

Seiho’s YouTube Calligraphy School - VIDEO - Only in Japanese but the videos are easy to follow since she uses a red pen to highlight where to pay attention. This is more in-depth but has helpful hints on improving your kanji balance, but you can search 字がきれいに書く方法 to get more results.

Yumefude Penji on Instagram has videos showing how to write kanji properly.

How I Practice Handwriting in Japanese

For Kana

To practice handwriting kana, I find an example of good penmanship from a website. It’s best if the example is larger, or if I can blow it up. Then I print it out with darkened font. Drill print-outs also work well as they have characters for you to trace, then space for you to practice on your own.

I put a sheet of clean paper on top of the print-out and make sure I can read the characters through the clean paper. You can also get tracing paper. Then, I trace the characters multiple times. I try to feel the flow of the character as I trace it and to note if the stroke ends abruptly (とめ), has a kink in it (はね), or if it fades out to a tail (はらい).

Lastly, I practice on my own. I use the feel of the character I traced and try to replicate it. I compare my own work to the original sample, and try to determine how to get the characters to look closer to the original sample. My character might be too skinny, too round, or have a stroke out of place. I usually only do one character at a time until I am satisfied, and then move on to the next.

For Kanji

When practicing kanji, first, I use blank paper, download genkouyoushi (Japanese composition paper), or a notebook with wider line spacing for writing practice than I would for simply writing down vocabulary or notes. You can also buy special kanji practice notebooks. I do this so that I have the space to cleanly write out kanji with more strokes, rather than having to bunch together the strokes so that I can hardly read it. This way, I can practice the strokes with more room and pay attention to how the kanji fits together.

Then, I write the character several times. I try to get a muscle memory going for the character, remembering the individual parts, the radicals, the stroke order and what the kanji means. This helps me to remember the kanji, and then to understand how the individual parts fit together.

I am careful to not copy the typewritten Japanese characters, for these are often different than the handwritten characters. Using a kanji textbook or a website where they teach handwritten kanji is the best way to learn to handwrite kanji. Some dictionary apps also show stroke order and will show the handwritten version so you can see the difference.

9 Tips for Better Handwriting

Source

1. Hold your pen properly / ぺんを正しく持つ

2. Sit with proper posture / 正しい姿勢で座る

3. Create a calm setting where you can concentrate / 落ち着いて集中できる空間を作る

4. Write using the correct stroke order / 正しい書き順で書く

     a. From the top to the bottom / 上から下へ

     b. From the left to the right / 左から右へ

5. Take care with the Stop - Wing - Sweeping Stroke / とめ・はね・はらいを丁寧に

Showing stop - wing - sweeping stroke in kanji

6. Modulate the size of the character and write slowly and carefully / 大きさにメリハリをつけながら、ゆっくり書く

7. Make sure the characters rise to the right / 右上がりになるようにする

8. Make sure the spacing between lines is equal / 線と線の間隔が等しくなるようにする

9. Write with the intention of being read by others / 人に読まれるつもりで書く

My handwriting in Japanese is far from perfect, but when I have a chance I like to hand write characters to get a better feel for them and for their meanings. I hope this guide helps you to improve your penmanship!

[gingersnaptaff]

12, 14, 17, 20?

12. Where is somewhere you'd like to visit?

America. Not sure where I'd go but I've never visited.

14. What are your favorite apps besides tumblr?

I love Stellarium which is a constellation app!!! That's fun! It gives you all the constellations and u can swoop ur phone around and it tells u what constellations there are in the night sky! Also, OneLook thesaurus is super great if you're like me and just reuse the same words over and over again when you write. And Ap Geiriaduron which is a Welsh dictionary. It's bilingual so you can whack things in in English and it shows u in Welsh.

17. What is something you're really good at?

Writing, apparently. I have a degree in it so I guess it's that? Also, quizzes!!!

20. What's a totally random and useless fact that you know?

Bangor Cathedral has two Welsh Princes graves located in it. (Gruffudd ap Cynan's is by the high altar).

[hanasnx]

Hii Indy, there's a question I've been meaning to ask you. Where and when did you learn such elevated vocabulary? Sometimes when I read your words they sound straight out of a dictionary for smart people. Maybe it's because English isn't my first language and I was never taught such vocabulary but I just find it really interesting. I've had to look up or guess the meaning of some words you use, such as asinine. There's a ton more but that's the most recent one that comes to mind.

Stassie🎀

that’s so interesting. tbh i dont give it much thought but now that you mentioned it a couple things came to mind.

when i was in elementary school i won a spelling bee between three schools. for most of my education i was at the tops of my classes anything with aice/ap/honors was on my schedule. my mom and stepdad used to say i’d make a good lawyer.

i’m an absorbent person, i can’t help but soak in information. as for advanced vocabulary i try not to use the same word twice in a post, which means i used to highlight it and go back to it when i could glance at a thesaurus, which means now i just have a thesaurus in my head. my brain has learned to simply supply a word at the drop of a hat sometimes i can’t even tell you the exact definition or where i learned the word but it’s right

thank you for the message it was rly flattering

[elumish]

A number of people in the tags are talking about not being sure what counts as a good source, so here's some suggestions:

Do not use AI. It makes stuff up.

News:

Associated Press (AP)

Reuters

New York Times

Washington Post

BBC News

Agence France-Presse

NBC News

CNN

CBS News

Please note that the editorial sections or commentary are not the same as the news reporting. These are suggestions specifically for their news coverage. These sources are fact-based and generally in the middle in terms of partisan/political bias. A full interactive chart of media reliability/bias from ad fontes media can be found here.

Longer Form / Investigative / Research-Focused Media:

ProPublica

Bellingcat

Pew Research Center

538

Please note that some other sources in the news section also do great longer-form work.

Dictionaries (English Language):

Oxford English Dictionary

Miriam-Webster

Cambridge Dictionary

Dictionary.com

Wiktionary

It is incredibly important to train yourself to have your first instinct be to look something up.

Don't know how to do something? Look it up.

See a piece of news mentioned on social media? Look it up.

Not sure if something is making it to the broader public consciousness, either because you don't see it much or you see people saying nobody is talking about it? Look it up.

Don't know what a word means? Look it up.

It will make you a better reader and a better writer, but it will also just make you more equipped to cope with the world.

So often, I see people talking about something as though it is the first time anyone has ever acknowledged it, when I've been reading reports about it on the news for months or years. Or I see someone totally misinterpreting an argument because they clearly don't know what a word means--or, on the other hand, making an argument that doesn't make sense because they aren't using words the right way.

Look things up! Check the news (the real news, not random people on social media)! Do your research! You (and the world) will be better for it.

[littlewalken]

ap 17

Apparently it is a good time for spring cleaning physically, spiritually, and whatever it's called to finally let that domain name you've been holding on to but never used to go as well. So if the toy store buyer guy will give me a decent price for that baby buggy I'm going to let that go too.

On one finger it'll be lonely not going to that blend in with the humans club but there are just too many things that are not even in the ball park of what Tiggers remotely like to do.

Okay, yeah, there are places you don't swear or share some Urban Dictionary words but Satan in a sandwich you'd be surprised how much the septum pierced 'don't used gendered language' crowd and older church ladies have in common. We'll start with not understanding the joke about everyone telling Kurt Vonnegut that his opinions on Harrison Bergeron were wrong.

He wrote it.

Doesn't have to be that exact joke but bless the lady from Africa telling someone she calls her god Allah and stopping someone's roll.

Also enough of the ones who speak english were teachers or something of that ilk and I don't need that vibe.

Was also getting tired of at least half a dozen always saying hello by touching, someone in there hacking and wheezing, and the general noise.

It did help us get rid of the knitting machines and some odds and ends of crafty crap, a spare partial set of knitting looms, and made me clean out the extra crochet hooks. How the hell did I end up with so many N size? But I went with the plastic, or the light up because they have nice handles, over aluminum. Who knows how old some of them were but hopefully this way someone will use them as crochet hooks. They had some steel ones but nothing bigger.

Kept a couple of celluloid or some other 100 year old plastic that used to be white but has now yellowed. Even if I clean out the needles, which if I remember I don't need to do, there is a pair of roughly size 2 stainless steel (I presume) pair that has a patina on them. It's not like a sterling silver one and doesn't come off but you can literally feel they're old.

Got to take a picture of them because they're really lovely.

And I discovered that it was a good thing I bought 2 different sets of point protectors when I did. The cheeseburger and fries sets go on small needles, the cat paws on larger ones. Didn't even look when I bought them, I just wasn't going to pass them up.

Hoping for five minutes of sun to cure some resin today. Haven't started anything new. The pink teapot and cups came out of their molds but their insides were a bit sticky.

[vivplayseverything]

So maybe I’m just unlucky with what posts I see (as I am in all things) but I’ve seen plenty of “this is what you get for not paying attention in ___ class” posts. Sure, plenty of people out there have been given every opportunity to get properly informed about general topics over the course of their lives, but a lot of the responses to “I wasn’t taught this in school” tend to be “You 100% were, you were just stupid and didn’t want to learn” which always struck a nerve with me because, throughout my entire time in the American public education system and several semesters of college, I’ve encountered several bad teachers of varying nature.

Like idk, maybe they WEREN’T taught how to recognize media bias in high school English class. I was only ever taught it for 1 assignment in AP history, and there were no class discussions before or after. Just a list of 3 news sites to read about the same event from, and an offhanded “aren’t the differences interesting” the next day before moving on entirely.

Personally, throughout all four years of the U.S. high school system, plus the three college English classes I enrolled in before dropping out, only one of the college courses was this amazing exploration of how to think deeply about what you’re reading that people seem to think every 16 year-old was provided with and slept through. There was even a college English course I took where the instructor insisted that “insight” wasn’t a word, despite it being clearly present and defined in the prescribed dictionary.

People really need to understand that incompetence can be found in ANY profession, and most kids don’t have the resources to properly address shortcomings in their education, assuming they even have the frame of reference necessary to recognize when it’s appropriate.

Don’t even get me started on trying to learn biology in the Bible Belt

[vaguely-humanoid-form]

my ap lit class sucks so much. like hooooly shit.

my teacher doesn't teach us SHIT he just gives us textbooks to read and mandatory ap daily videos to watch

we had our midterm for that class and I got a 79 on it (multiple choice section anyways) when I KNOW -English is one of my best subjects because all the questions made no sense and/or had big ass words that I don't know the meaning of!!!! and we don't have dictionaries!!!!!!!! and these were as like answer choices!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! no explanation of what they meant nothing like that I'm so pissed

AND I still have a 39 in that class because my teacher WONT PUT GRAD----ES IN!!!!!

AAAGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[demon-birate]

Sometimes I think abt how my AP lit teacher in highschool was just like. The Biggest pain in my ass that year (got mad at me for saying dracula was bi (he is), complained that I complained too much abt the writer of the worst book we read (he sucked major shit??), etc.) and she fully marked a Bunch if ppl off bc we had been talking abt the difference between author and speaker and when writing essays abt a poem she'd given us For That Purpose we all used the singular they bc you know. Speakers gender Was Not Specified? And I responded by emailing her Oxford English dictionary's definition of the word "they" (which included its use in the singular) as she thought Websters was trash

She also got mad at me for that. Don't know why

[gramrgednangel]

Split infinitives: Not wrong, sometimes preferable

Split infinitives: Not wrong, sometimes preferable

I saw a generalization early this morning that got my dander up. The writer stated that “almost every style guide” says to avoid the split infinitive. To put it bluntly, that’s wrong; it’s a misrepresentation of what they actually say. That the post went on to explain and clarify doesn’t much matter when what people will remember is that initial statement: “Almost every style guide” says not to…

[deanmarywinchester]

showed the noelle stevenson tweets to my brother and he said “I don’t think anyone wants to see hobbits kiss” and that’s when I remembered he’s the polar opposite of a Fandom Gay

I said something about luke skywalker being gay once and he said “luke skywalker is GAY????” as if it never occurred to him to say characters are gay because I’m gay and I say so

[dellcomics]

Tarzan’s Ape-English Dictionary

Tarzan’s Jungle Annual No.5 (1956)

drawings by Tony DiPaola

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I got a decent haul at the big Friends of the Library book sale in Gainesville this weekend.

Movies

When I was in college, they had walls and walls of VHS tapes, but they've all gone the eay of the dodo and have been replaced by DVDs, which are a real gamble. You buy a 20 year old tape, it'll work good as new, but you buy a 20 year old DVD and it's a total crapshoot whether your player will even start reading the damn thing. The cases were all taped shut and there were big signs everywhere saying "SOLD AS IS," so caveat emptor, buyer beware, but I was still disappointed to find out that about a third of them are visibly unusable. Not all of them are scratched, but a lot of them are cloudy, VERY cloudy, they look like they're covered in smudges from fingerprints and greasy palms but it's all been baked into the plastic so I can't buff it out. A third of them are on the fence, probably okay, and a third of them look pristine, so it wasn't a total waste of money. Some of them are even brand new, still in the plastic, bound with stickers and everything, so they're guaranteed.

Books

As for actual books, my haul was less substantial

Some old dictionaries in English and Spanish, a collection of Horatio Hornblower books (Yahtzee Crowshaw of Zero Punctuation seems to like them, and they were cheap, so why not?), some old sci fi collections, some Michael Crichton, and a pocket atlas from 1989. I also got Calculus for Dummies because I've been meaning to catch up on what I missed in high school; my mom made me take AP calc without trig or precalc, so I went in blind and got the lowest grade in the class, and it killed me then budding love of math. I figure if I go back now and refresh myself on algebra and geomtry, I could probably pick up trig and precalc and calc, and get back into the groove of things. I have a useless BA, so maybe if I enroll in some classes online I can earn enough credits to focus on science like I intended in 2014. I wanted to be an engineer, but the math was too daunting. Baby steps.

Magazines

Some old Nat Geos from the 30s and 40s. They're not worth anything; they're all banged up and falling apart, none of them are particularly famous issues, they don't really mention the War outside all the "BUY WAR BONDS" ads. I got the November 39 issue specifically for my mom, because that's when her mom was born.

Overall, not too shabby.

[goldkeycomics]

Tarzan’s Ape-English Dictionary

Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan of the Apes 

no.142 (June, 1964)

[taperwolf]

I once got celebrated for hobbling the education of an entire AP English class.

I went to high school in a very small town; my graduating class had around 80 people. So my senior year was the first time it offered any courses aimed at prepping for the Advanced Placement tests that earn college credits, theoretically thus getting you out of freshman General Ed requirements. I ended up taking all four that were offered: AP Computer Science, AP US History, AP Calculus, and AP English. Because this was the pilot year, the teachers ran the courses with varying degrees of change from their previous versions; for example, the CompSci teacher used her regular Pascal syllabus until December, when she handed the two of us who expressed interest in taking the test the list of topics that would be on it, and which we'd have to teach ourselves in the next three months.

(I did not end up taking the AP Comp Sci test.)

But the AP English course was pretty well handled, following the designated syllabus in most ways, except for one thing. There was a weekly set of vocabulary words, which you were expected to be able to both define and use in a sentence on the quiz each Friday. This teacher had long been accustomed to doing this in her other Senior English classes, and she'd always had the caveat that if a student could do those things for a word when it was introduced on Monday, it wouldn't be on the list. I think the idea was to encourage being well-read, and to negate anyone's advanced knowledge.

The trouble was me. I invariably knew every word she came up with. Now, I learned to read early and habitually read anything within arm's length; this included, by that stage in my life, a lot of paperback fantasy and science fiction novels, with those genres' penchant for language games, but also mythology, meta-mythology like Frazer's The Golden Bough and Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God tetrology, books on science and technology, computer philosophy like Gödel, Escher, Bach, and, failing all else, encyclopedias and dictionaries.

Our Monday ritual was her writing a half-dozen words on the board, and me defining them. I knew every word on the lists she had, and then she struggled mightily to come up with new ones. She pretty much lost heart for the project by January.

(I tried offering a few words once — I remember specifically "anthropomorphism", which she recognized, but only from a theological context — but I don't think it helped.)

We never had a single vocabulary test the whole year. Everybody in class appreciated this, though looking back, it probably didn't help them in the long run.