racism in star wars will have wikis saying shit like "this species that is inspired on a real life non-white people is just too stupid to use the Force"
Basics of the Ukrainian Language and Culture - https://www.open.edu/openlearn/languages/introduction-ukrainian-language-and-culture/
Ukraine: History, Culture, and Identities; this course is available in English, French, Italian, and Norwegian on Coursera: https://ui.org.ua/en/sectors-en/the-first-online-course-about-ukraine-in-english/
The Making of Modern Ukraine with Timothy Snyder: https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-making-of-modern-ukraine
Crimea: History and People on Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/crimea-history-and-people/
If you're living in Brussels and want to improve your French language skills, you're in luck. As the bilingual capital of Belgium, Brussels offers a wide range of French courses to suit different levels and learning styles. In this blog post, we'll explore some of the top options for French courses in Brussels, including the innovative Kochiva approach.
No matter your level or learning preferences, Brussels offers a wealth of options for French language courses. Mastering French in this bilingual city is an enriching experience that can open doors both personally and professionally.
the person behind me is having a whispered conversation with someone and their desk and my brain keeps trying to go down the path “oh no it’s because they’re talking about how much they hate me!” and i keep having to drag it back to the extremely obvious and fully rational “oh they’re trying not to disrupt anyone’s work, super appreciate them for that”.
like human brains are for real the dumbest, most terrified little animals in existence. calm the fuck down my dude our colleagues aren’t going to kick us out of the cave to fend for ourselves against the cold and sabre-tooth tigers.
grappling with the question of "okay i've been too disabled to work for like a year with no signs of that changing, but what should i actually Do with my time that might be in some way slightly fulfilling without causing The Woes". getting back into music has been one answer, but i need at least one other. i'm thinking that learning a language really properly might be the most promising idea.
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I have an awareness of my own regional NorCal accent and I’ve picked up some other regional accent features from living other places and I’ve made efforts at different times in my life to alter my accent to fit social norms and/or be understood. For example when I lived in Italy I adopted a more enunciated version of an American accent with more emphasis on defining different vowel sounds, mostly because I taught young children and wanted to make myself understood by Italians (I observed personally that Italians have an easier time with American accents than British accents and that standard American accents have vowels that sound more familiar to Italians than the soft vowels of British accents. My own accent doesn’t tend to distinguish vowel sounds well and I ended up adopting a more vowel-differentiated pronunciation of English that made a lot of native English speakers think I was Canadian)
My (California) friends will occasionally make fun of me for the occasional southern twang or Minnesota Oh that slips into my voice…. I explained to them recently that in Baltimore I fell out of the habit of using a hard “T” sound in general and adopted the Badimoh Nord Avenue soft T/D sound generally while I was there…. It’s honestly a little embarrassing to me to rly pronounce the T in Baltimore but I don’t act like it’s my native accent so I say the goddamn T unless I’m in Bmore. You subconsciously do these things so you don’t stick out like a sore thumb, especially in working class environments where most ppl are local (I worked in restaurants for example.) I was in MN in pandemic times so I didn’t adopt the accent as heavily from work, but my grandparents who live in Minnesota have HEAVY regional accents (partly influenced I’m sure by the fact that many of my great grandparents are from sweden and the Swedish accent shaped the Minnesota one basically) and my mom is from MN also. I can switch hard into a Minnesota voice 😂 but I’m usually pretty conscious of it (Also as someone not from the Midwest I hate people thinking I’m midwestern… no offense to midwesterners but living there was the worst and I don’t want to be identified as that) my mom has a rly “standard American” accent until she’s on the phone with her parents (or back in Minnesota) and then it shifts to hyperdrive.!
alllllll that to say that my accent gets muddled and funny sometimes… I can tell my way of speaking is not 100% california, that’s for sure. However if you stick me with people from Northern California it gets almost embarrassingly stereotypical haha…. Vocal fry (I kinda always have vocal fry tho) blurred vowels drawn out inflection and scattered use of the words “gnar” and “hella” lmao….! I’m mildly proud of my accent like FUCK yeah imma NorCal girlie. But I can mostly switch it off too hehe. It’s funny tho bc accents r such an indicator of who is local and working class it’s almost like a membership card
I think it would be funny, if from Baumeister siblings only Tita would be able to wield equivalent of Mingrelian and she would wield it well enough to argue with her mother in Mingrelian.