#I actually can read and understand French

[neil-gaiman]

Dear Mr Gaiman,

Today is my final final exam and then I'm free (can I get a wahoo for that?).

English isn't my first language but my exam today is English and if you had told me four years ago that I would decide that voluntarily I would have laughed in your face because I (and excuse my French) was shit at it. But then in 8th grade was the first time an English teacher that I actually had potential. And that same year we read Coraline and I was motivated to understand what was written there on that page.

So basically, you are a huge part of why I am now pretty decent in English and I wanted to thank you for that.

That's wonderful. I'm so glad.

[kimaisalloren]

Je suis obsession

Bonus: this doodle when I was listening to don mccleans Vincent 😔😔😔😔

[frostedpuffs]

guys i. i caved

i watched the movie

[coquelicoq]

i've gotten so used to my daily practice of reading french aloud that now when i have to read something boring in english for work i default to reading it aloud. which takes way longer and also i feel like i retain even less information than i would otherwise, somehow. the upside is that my oral reading cadence in english, even of dense scientific articles, is rather excellent nowadays. i could read scientific articles out loud for a living, if that was a thing people needed me to do. which they do not, because screenreaders are a thing. maybe i could read crusty PDFs out loud for a living? but anyway all this is to say shoutout to my man alexandre dumas and also my other man victor hugo for training me to read run-on sentences in my second language. after that, dry journal articles in my first language are easy peasy.

[imflyingfish]

Worst thing about learning a new language of my own violation though is that its made me a fucking nerd. I just found my friend's flashcards on quizlet and got excited. I get excited to hear some french words in everyday conversation. When my friends are reading a book i have to resist the urge to go WHAT LANGUAGE IS THAT. Im just super excited to consume french and spanish language and phrases and im a fucking nerd about it now

[mejomonster]

i still think about that post that mentioned different levels of reading comprehension... i’m going to look for it to reblog again...

just like. i don’t usually think of adult reading comprehension in ‘levels’. i tend to assume ‘oh everyone can understand when a narration is emotional, its biased and implying information about the narrator’s emotions and biases and is not necessarily reliable’ and don’t realize some people comprehend a bit less, just the face value of ‘narration says X is disgusting, so X is, narrator says Y is true so its true’ and interpret texts based on that. and some comprehend less than that, not noticing there’s even an emotional overtone anywhere, and the writing says X so X is simply true. 

A lot of these skills get taught to some degree in school, when english classes made us do literary analysis of texts. And perhaps more important since it involves factual information, when school would make us evaluate sources for our essays and figure out what bias writers have and evaluate which part of articles is writer’s opinion and which part is actual facts. Critical reading skills we need to determine if something is an ad trying to convince us of something or an informational update, to determine if something is trying to manipulate us, to determine if the information portion we read is backed up by other sources or likely not actually true, to determine the biases of all informational media we consume (because even simple stock updates and history books all have some tinge of the biases of the writer/presenter). These skills help keep us safe on the internet, help us look for information to make decisions, help us recognize when we are being manipulated, recognize various media’s goals toward convincing us of things and still being able to sort through for the facts connected. For example when there is a shooting at X with Y people injured, that’s a fact, and then everything the reporters say beyond that about ways it could be prevented/shouldn’t have happened is their opinion, and how the words they use to describe the facts themselves like if ‘kid’ or ‘criminal’ is used to describe the shooter and what words describe the police and victims etc all are still used to push the writer’s opinion.

I would like to hope, since figuring out facts versus opinions is such a vital skill for simple online safety (from malicious ads, propaganda, dangerous groups) and for simple real life safety (figuring out if a recall for food happened, figuring out if a location in the state is currently unsafe to travel to), that hopefully most people learned that ability to discern. I also realize now that I’m older, how useful that skill is, and how I still have more to learn and practice in being able to do it. 

Well, that skill is vital in discerning fact versus opinion of nonfiction and opinion media. But it’s also a skill needed to understand stories, fiction, and again it just. Surprises me how its not actually a given that readers who find something, watchers who find something, will actually have the full ability to discern the intent and meanings that a creator put into something. 

[aprofessionalwithoutstandards]

You’re over here fumbling over Demo, get yourself a malewife like spy who can cook. I will die on this hill, mans can whip up anything like its no ones business. To give Demo some benefit of the doubt though, i’m sure he’s a great taste tester after all the different kinds of alcohol he’s had. They man the kitchen together whenever Spy is trying out new recipes.

Marie I know this is you

[addictivewhispering]

idk how to explain this feeling to people who dont speak multiple languages but i really don't think that characters using terms of endearment in different languages is as cute/sweet/sexy as some people seem to think it is

[b4kuch1n]

7; A medium of art you don't work in but appreciate. 19; Favorite inanimate objects to draw (food, nature, etc.). 28; Any art events you have participated in the past (like zines)!

hiiii plaid 💕

ask game here

7. A medium of art you don't work in but appreciate

puppetry! and puppet-making, for that matter. miniature and diorama making as well. both requires delicate hands and patience I don't possess, but both are so magical to me that I really wanna try my hand at them anyway... I love illusions maintained with artistry and layers upon layers of mechanisms! I love artifice! show me fake things! it's so sexy when art commits to its bit!

feels like it goes without saying but I also immensely appreciate animation, of course. as a comic artist the process of animation makes me shudder, but also genuinely so many character designs would be nothing without the motions assigned to them in animation, doubly so with monsters.

19. Favorite inanimate objects to draw (food, nature, etc.)

shoes and glasses. glasses I can draw pretty much from memory in one go because I've had a pair sitting on my nose for almost two decades now, shoes treat me much more mercurially but they're always such a fun thing to coordinate in a character design that I brute force my way through drawing them anyway lol. books are another thing I love drawing, making up cover designs and putting jokes in the text/illustrations are my favourite thing in a piece whenever I get to do it :]

28. Any art events you have participated in the past (like zines)

I'm turns out not a huge event person haha, the more I do stuff nowadays the more I don't keep up with any of that anymore... I had two pieces in the Salt&Pepper TeruMob zine back in the days, I did a comic for the Wear the Mask ITSV zine, I completed witchsona week in... 2018? and the paint witch has been my little pocket rascal ever since... oh yeah! I did an all-comic JosuYasu week in 2017 I think, it's still my hardest play and biggest accomplishment commitment-wise. putting down the most colloquial of sketches for all the comics beforehand, inking and lettering every comic from 8PM to around 6-7AM next day, go to sleep, wake up at like 4PM to make dinner, rinse and repeat for a week except for day 5 I think where I had to re-sketch the whole thing. those comics are all under five pages and I basically cut out the second detail sketching step to ink right on top of the preliminary sketch, but it was still a huge sprint that I'm still pretty proud of. and will never, ever do again. it was not good for me. I do think it was kind of awesome that I managed that! but never again in my goddamn life

(more recently I put in a piece for a local ace community's contest and got a nifty price. it was fun! but that piece's not for this sphere I feel like. it was the first time I saw something I drew in a gallery tho, that was really nice)

[skywitchmaja]

also if anyone wants to talk to me about the science of reading my mom just explained it to me so I get it.

[supercantaloupe]

“but sasha you just spent like the past hour complaining about having to talk to other people in french why would you want to go back to europe” easy. i don’t speak german or italian or spanish. and the awkwardness of being an english speaker in austria or italy or wherever is far better than trying to speak subpar french to a french person

[suttttton]

i started learning french, which will be my third language after english and arabic, and after 5 years of studying arabic i am FLOORED by how easy this language is

[despite-everything]

unintended effect of starting to get into multiple languages at once is that sometimes ill talk to my cat and then have to think about what language i was using

[coquelicoq]

les misérables:

Cela même lui avait été plus facile qu'à Roméo; Roméo était obligé d'escalader un mur, Marius n'eut qu'à forcer un peu un des barreaux de la grille décrépite qui vacillait dans son alvéole rouillé, à la manière des dents des vieilles gens. (IV, 8, I, p. 341)

me: that's weird, isn't gens masculine? guess i'll look it up on wordreference in case it's also a feminine noun meaning something different.

wordreference:

Inflections of 'gens' (nmpl): pl: gens Toujours au pluriel quand gens = les hommes en général ou un nombre indéterminé de personnes. L'adjectif qui précède s'accorde souvent au féminin.

me: what the

frick frack

[punchholesinthesky]

You can tell netflix's tdf series is for newbies cause they focus waaaaay too much on crashes, we already saw fabio jakobsen's crash live and then repeated again and again, no need to repeat it. I'm still mad at fuckin groenegewen and idc if i spelt that wrong

[moinsbienquekaworu]

i am about to sleep but i wanted to ask what your favorite poem is? will you tell me about it? what you love and why it’s your favorite? do you like any of its translations? i love you. i hope you have a good day 🥰

(⁠〒⁠﹏⁠〒⁠) beloved thank you for the question!!! As per usual I am incapable of choosing just one of a thing, so I actually have two favourite poems, one in french and one in english (because poetry in french and in english can be pretty different since the codes and models and expectations aren't always the same!) They're the two poems I can recite and know by heart haha.

The english one is Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost. I really like the last stanza (like everyone else) but also just the way when you say it out loud it does feel like a quiet moment watching the snow fall all on your own. I found it recently accompanying a fic (two different fics actually but the second time I knew it) and it entranced me!

The french one is Chanson d'Automne by Paul Verlaine. It's a classic in France, some of its lines were used as a signal for saboteurs during WWII and there's an urban legend it was used to signal the landing in Normandy. I personally had to learn it by heart in primary school (I think in 4th grade?) and it just stuck with me. I like it for the way it feels to me and the images it evokes, but also just because it was the first poem I learnt by heart and being able to recite a poem is an easily overlooked comfort of life (insert those posts and quotes about art being vital and what we need to be able to turn to in dark or light times)

Other poems I like include Remords Posthume and L'Albatros by Baudelaire, Le Dormeur du Val by Rimbaud, Le Déserteur and Je Voudrais Pas Crever by Boris Vian, Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden, and Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath. The french ones I studied in school, and I found the english ones on my own (I feel like I found both in Johnlock fics?? but I might be wrong about Funeral Blues, it's been years) I included english translations where I could for the french ones, and they're not necessarily incredible but they should let you get the vibe. If one of them speaks to you I can try to explain what makes it tick! My personal anecdotes with those because that's half the fun: we had to analyse Remords Posthume for literature class with my best friend K, and what's really cool about it is the last line, "et le ver rongera ta peau comme un remords", because it plays on the homonymy between ver, the worm, and vers, the line of poetry, meaning she will be devoured physically by worms since she'll be dead but also that his verses, his poem, will make her feel remorse; I like the albatross analogy because I was a weird kid who felt comfortable with books but not with my peers; Le Dormeur du Val is extremely extremely sad and beautiful and I think Rimbaud was a very interesting guy; technically Le Déserteur is a song and not a poem but I first saw the text without knowing that so for me it's a poem forever now, and I love talking about the original versus final ending thing; the YouTube channel Le Mock did an excellent reading of Je Voudrais Pas Crever and it's a jewel, I love it so so much; Funeral Blues was the first english poem I ever liked (or maybe read honestly) and I wrote it on the cover of my 10th grade english notebook (because the teacher was great and said that if we forgot to do our homework he wouldn't punish us if we could recite a poem for him, so I wrote it down and tried to learn if by heart in case I forgot my homework); and Mad Girl's Love Song features in a fic I read a few weeks ago and I just think it's neat. I probably forgot some but those are the ones I remember right now (edit: ADA LIMÓN!! I FORGOT ADA LIMÓN!!! Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds (the I can't help it, I love the way men love poem) hit me in the chest the first time I read it and it's so so good)

My favourites (and most of the poems I like actually) are pretty popular because I'm not really into poetry that much on my own. I get attached to poems once I see how they work inside and analyse them, but I don't sit down and decide to analyse some poem from Les Fleurs du Mal at random because it feels like homework, and I don't go looking for poetry because I'm very hit or miss (I get bored at long winded descriptions in those 4-part 7-pages poems and a lot of things trip up my instinctual Pretentiousness Radar™, and while it's not necessarily accurate it does turn me off poems). So I just stay with the basics, but that's fine, because the comfort of carrying poems with you is there whatever the poem is y'know?

Also question, do americans learn poetry in school? I assume you must analyse some in literature class, but I don't know if you learn poems when you're young. I know we also do lots of La Fontaine's Fables, though I personally never did, but learning poems to recite in primary school is a thing almost everyone has done here I think.