#may study plan

[dopepoisonivyoncrack]

Astarion pencil study. Traditional art

[xxplastic-cubexx]

i would like to draw him more i think..

[dragonsbluee]

Me and my brother casually discussing how we would survive in One Piece/what we would do first:

Me: I'll pull a classic isekai move; find a stable island (somehow), open up a small shop, and stay the hell out of the way. Maybe I'll open a betting ring based on the newspapers, but there's no way I'm getting involved.

Brother: Bitch you went to theatre school. You're joining the Buggy Pirates the first chance you get.

Me: ....

Brother: I've had to sit through your MULTIPLE rants on how the series treats clowns and the logistics of how they would run a pirate circus.

Me: okay but-

Brother: YOU WORK WITH CLOWNS!

[basil-does-arttt]

been thinking about Trish a lot lately, and her connection to Eva

(Big ranty thing with some analysis into her character + my own headcanons about trish below)

She was created to be a carbon copy of Eva, right down to the most unimportant details. So much so that Dante recognized her immediately he didnt even do a double-take, as soon as those glasses were off he saw Eva standing infront of him instead of Trish. (I mean, blonde haired+blue eyed women arent uncommon and its not like Dante has never been into a public space before. Hes probably seen similar women to Eva many times throughout his life, but only Trish was so perfectly like Eva that he couldnt see anything else but his mother in her that first moment they met.)

But thats just physical features. It'd be too easy, too simple for Mundus to just create a look-alike to Eva. And i dont think that alone would've been enough to trick Dante either, Dante isnt an idiot no matter how dumb he acts sometimes. So, how deep into this "recreate Eva" thing did Mundus actually go?

Does Trish experience the same motherly instincts Eva had toward Dante (and Vergil)? Does she feel the need to protect them and cherish them like Eva did? Does she get urges to hold them, kiss and hug them and give them praise as Eva once did in their childhood? If so, does she ignore these feelings, pushing them down untill they're buried so deep within her mind that she's forgotten them entirely, or does she let them be and let them pass on their own, wether she acts on them or not. She's quite sassy with Dante in dmc4 and seems quite aloof in dmc5, so maybe thats how she copes with it instead - acting the total opposite to what Eva ever would.

Going even deeper into that, does Trish have any of Eva's memories? Even just vague snippets or imaginings of Eva's life, considering how well Mundus made Trish then that might not be an impossibility. If so, how much would she have the ability to recall? Could she even recall the fire, maybe? If she can, how would she feel about it. Would she grieve? Feel anger, regret, or nothing at all?

And how would she feel about all of this overall? Being a clone of Eva right down to the gritty details even Dante wouldn't know. Trish is so strongly contrasted to Eva in personality, style and tastes that i'd like to imagine she isnt that much of a fan, put simply. She's her own person, she wants to be her own person and she hates the person she represents. She hates how her existence causes pain to somebody she's wired to care so deeply for - sometimes against her will - and she hates seeing him cry or drink himself to death over that dusty old picture thats been sitting on his desk for decades, knowing that she'll only ever make it worse for him in the end, that his grief extends so far into the core of his being that nothing in existence will ever truly fix it.

She's conflicted.

She's Trish. But is she really? Or is that just who she says she is in an effort to push back and ignore the reality of her existence? Nothing more than a fake, a husk of a person who's time was cut short prematurely then taken advantage of by the very being that killed her in the first place.

She's Trish. Not Eva. She can't be Eva, and she never will be Eva. Nothing will change that. Not a dusty old picture, not an old man's delusions, not some dead demon king who breathed life into her form in the first place.

She's Trish. But who even is Trish? Her entire being has always been about Eva. She doesnt know anything else. So she overcompensates with acting sarcastic and sassy, looking hot and sexy and playing with guns and swords because those are things Eva wouldn't ever do herself. Eva. Again, it all comes back to Eva.

She's Trish. Devil hunter and the most 2000s representation of "hot blonde" one could get. Thats who she is. Or at least, that's who she's trying so desperately to be.

Trish needs more love from the developers, her character is so interesting. I have other analysis' of the other characters too if anybody would be interested in that but for now, ill leave you with my take on the iconic blonde from this wonderful series.<3

[13eyond13]

I think the moment Light's crush on L first smacked him in the manga (like when it finally rooted and started blooming in his guts) was when L was like "you're my first ever friend" whilst smirking into his teacup. And not because Light fully believed he was being sincere about being friends, but because he KNEW L was slyly teasing him and speaking to him on more than one level at once. Nothing more unexpected funny flattering and intriguing than that for him right then

[hoziersredguitar]

I miss old tumblr in the sense that i could complain about board exams and worrying about not getting enough to be eligible for my medical entrance test and i'd have summoned half the indian side of tumblr to sympathize

[lateseptemberdawn]

Htttoh tae to htttoh jk

[bhaal-n-chain]

forgive me origins da2 inquisition but every day feels like 🫠🥱😴🫠🥱😴 and im just gonna have to finish ya after veilguard

[rigelmejo]

some basic language learning thoughts (based on some common questions i see on reddit forums). as usual, if you don't like the suggestion, feel free to ignore and throw it out! what works best for you will be what works best for you - everyone is different. at the end of the day, if you continue studying (hours add up), study some new stuff (expand your knowledge), and practice/review some stuff you've studied (improve comprehension of what you know), then you'll improve. You can achieve that in a ton of different ways, and any way which motivates you to keep doing it is great.

What's the easiest language to learn? My thought on this question is... it doesn't matter as much as it might feel like it does. If any language is going to take hundreds or thousands of hours of study, you will probably want to have goals that motivate you to study for THAT long, for years. If Danish 'takes less hours to learn' than Thai, but you watch Thai shows everyday and follow thai webnovel writers and twitter, and don't have much interest in anything Danish (and no friends that speak the language), then Thai is going to be 'easier' because you have more reasons to USE it. If Spanish and French seem to take a similar amount of hours to learn, but you're planning to go to school in a French speaking country and get a job there? Well you have a more pressing Need to learn French, that will hopefully help motivate you. The 'easiest' language to learn is the language you have REASONS to learn. The language you will use, and keep using. If you have no pressing reason to learn any language, but want to learn a language? Find reasons. Make goals that require the language.

(Here's one from me - I wanted to learn Japanese, in theory I can mostly do anything I want by just reading/watching/playing translations, however I am the kind of person that really enjoys reading originals in their original form... so that's motivating. My recent kick to study more? A show I want to watch is untranslated, so I better get to studying so I can still watch it.) Your goal can be anything from: I want to visit X, I want to talk to X friend/family better, I want to blog in multiple languages, I want to watch untranslated media, I want to sing my favorite musicians songs easier, I want to work in a country that speaks it, I want access to more recipes in X language, I am into history and want to read a history book from X time period in X language, I want to play a video game before localization, really the sky is the limit on goals you can set. Your goals, and how much you want them, and how often you do the sub-goals (so if reading untranslated cnovels by an author you love is your goal, maybe along the way you read easier webnovels to motivate you and find more writers you like), is going to push you to keep studying. Even if your goal is 'pass language B2 test' if it has a deadline, and it's a goal connected to other goals (like going to work in a country with the language, translating work, writing better), that will keep you motivated. Motivation is what will make a language 'easier.' If you can't find the motivation, even the languages which should take the 'least amount of time' will feel hard.

All that said, I am now about to contradict myself. While I really think motivation is the biggest factor in if you'll keep studying and keep learning... there are languages which due to their similarity to languages you already know, will take less Total Study Hours to make progress. As an English speaker, it only took me 6 months of very lazy unorganized studying (half hour most days) to be able to start reading non-fiction French with only a handful of word lookups per page. A lot of that was because French (especially science words and proper nouns like places) has so many cognates with English. I basically 'had' thousands of words of French I already knew, just because I knew English. It took about a year to read fiction books in French only looking up a handful of words per page, for 'general main idea' comprehension. When studying Chinese, it took me also about 12 months to read fiction, look up a handful of words, and understand the 'general main idea.' But I was studying 2 hours a day. So I studied around 182.5 hours to read French fiction with word lookups, and 730 hours to read Chinese fiction with word lookups. And the Chinese also took longer to learn to read with NO word lookups, since there was no english-cognate carryover to sound-out and over rely on like with French. (Although at a wonderful certain point, you know enough Chinese hanzi that new words are built of mostly hanzi you know, and you can use that to guess the gist of a LOT of new words when extensively reading with no word lookups - that happened for me at about 2 years). My point is: Chinese DOES take more hours of study to reach language skill milestones as an english speaker, compared to French! It took me the same amount of months, because I studied Chinese more hours per day (to make up the difference - and I had a better study plan with Chinese). But if you are a total beginner, and unmotivated and KNOW you will study maybe 1 hour per day and probably not more, then learning a language that is more similar to one you already know WILL take less study hours total to reach skill milestones. And that will hopefully be motivating.

(Another example: I spent 3 months of 1-2 hours a day studying Spanish, and can read Spanish nonfiction - thanks to the similarities to French and English. I can read fiction too but it requires word lookups. Japanese, due to kanji, also got 'easier' to read once I had learned more Chinese hanzi. So if your goals include learning languages with some similarities, then once you learn some of those similarities it will make future learning 'faster.')

I spent a month once studying Esperanto (a constructed language). Do I ever use Esperanto? No. Did I find the experience helpful? Yes. Because Esperanto is designed to be fairly easy for european language native speakers, has no exceptions, it had 1. a lot of similar-words to english so I could practice 'guessing similar words' (a skill I'd use a lot with French and Spanish later), 2. practice guessing what word endings mean grammatically (since Esperanto has no exceptions the grammar patterns are much more obvious than say grammar patterns in French). 3. Practice recognizing spelling to sound connections. Those 3 skills are useful in learning any language, but natural languages will have more exceptions to the patterns.

After spending a month on Esperanto, I saw HUGE progress after studying a few hundred words, noticed a huge amount of grammar patterns and how to notice them, and just generally got the experience of 'this is what skill milestones feel like.' Later, when studying French, I used that experience to recognize French word endings and what they tend to indicate, word functions, patterns in pronunciation, guessing with cognates/similar words, and I knew what the first 'milestones' I was aiming for would be. In a similar pattern: French milestones took me a few months each to hit, so when I studied Chinese later and it was taking 2-3 times as much study time... I knew which milestone to expect myself to 'work toward' and achieve next, and knew what making progress should feel like (even if it felt like it was moving slower) so I didn't give up. I was aware that Chinese language skill milestones might 'take more hours' so I didn't panic when it was taking me almost a year of reading graded readers in Chinese to move on to simple webnovels, whereas in French I'd only been reading graded readers for half a year before I felt ready to move on. I knew the general process, because I'd done it before in a shorter timespan with French, with Esperanto.

Is Esperanto useful to you? Only you know that. I personally did not find it useful in general for me, and didn't continue to study it. But it did teach me 'how' to study a language, what progress to monitor, and gave me the confidence that I was capable of learning.

If you really feel you're incapable of learning any skill in a new language, then spending some time on a language more similar to what you already know (if possible - a language you have motivating goals with), may help you see you are capable and can learn. An addition to this: spend a LOT of hours studying as a beginner, if lack of progress demotivates you. Once you push past the beginner stage, you'll be able to do goal-related things in the language you study and that will keep you motivated. But in the beginning, progress feels slow and you feel very confused. So the more upfront studying you do, the quicker you will push through that hard-to-motivate stage.

Is learning a language that is more similar to ones you know going to take less hours of study? Probably. But either way, motivation over hundreds or thousands of hours, for years, is going to be needed. So the goals you wish to achieve will be more important in your success, rather than how many 'hours' it will take.

What do you do if you get demotivated that it's taking SO LONG to hit the next language skill milestone? Fair concern. I got demotivated OFTEN by how much longer it took to reach milestones in Japanese compared to in French. First: try to keep perspective. It's normal for it to take more hours to understand certain things, if the language is not very similar to ones you know. You have to build a bigger foundation of understanding for lots of totally new stuff. Second: you're going to hate me but I'd suggest upping the study hours per day (or week). Studying Chinese RARELY demotivated me, despite it taking more actual hours of study to hit milestones compared to French, and why? Because I increased my study time for Chinese so I was still REACHING milestones in a reasonable amount of months (very similar to the months it took to hit French milestones). 2 hours a day of Chinese study was more than 1/2 an hour of French study, but 2 hours was doable. And it meant I still got to watch shows and read within a few months, and watch/read without looking many words up (depending on difficulty) by the end of year 1. Once you are doing the goals or sub-goals you have, it becomes so much easier to stay motivated. Once I could watch cdramas before they got translated, or read any novel I wanted using Pleco or Readibu to help? It was very easy to stay motivated and do things I WANTED to do in chinese. From there it was just practice/learn using activities I had the goal of doing.

Finally, similar to the suggestions above, if you find yourself in a motivation rut what can you do? I personally try to do 'study sprints' when I'm getting demotivated and need to see significant progress. What I do is pick a small goal, then spend 1-2 months studying as much as I can to improve in that goal. Suggestions: A beginner may make the goal to study the alphabet, a pronunciation guide, and 300 common words and see how far they get by the end of the month. (If at the end of the month the pronunciation is easier to hear and alphabet is easier to read then they succeeded - and they likely will). Another beginner may make the goal to read graded readers 1 hour per day or more all month and see how much they can read. (If the first graded reader they read is easier to read at the conclusion of the month, such as less unknown words or faster reading speed, then they succeeded - and they likely will see progress). A beginner/intermediate learner into flashcards might try to study as many flashcards in Anki as they can for a month. An intermediate learner may pick an audiobook and try to listen to AS MANY chapters as they can in a month, or may pick a novel and look up every unknown word while reading for 1 hour per day or more, until the end of the month. The idea is to pick a goal where you KNOW you're current skill level, work HARD on studying to improve that skill for a month, and then try to do the skill again and see how much progress you've made. I find it very motivating. It can take months to broadly notice progress milestones like managing to improve in your overall reading skill to tackle more difficult novels. But it can take just A MONTH to learn a few hundred new words and make the current novel you're reading become much EASIER to read, or the current show you're watching to become much EASIER to follow, or for the listening skills you're struggling with to become much more instant and reliable.

Example: one of my most recent sprints was to improve my Chinese listening skills. So for a month, I listened to audio flashcards of chinese-english sentences audio, and audiobook chapters (re-listening to each chapter a few times). I saw progress in 1. The audiobook got easier to understand over time, and 2. I tried watching a cdrama I've watched before, only this time I watched it without any subtitles, and it is now much easier to quickly comprehend and follow the lines (even without chinese subs). A sprint I did after a 2 year funk with minimal japanese progress was to cram study 2000 words in memrise Nukemarine's LLJ decks (took 3 months) then try to play a japanese video game I'd tried playing before the sprint. Another japanese sprint I did was listen to japaneseaudiolessons.com free lessons for a month, to work on improving my listening comprehension and recognition of word-order faster, and it did really help with seeing an improvement in those things.

As a beginner, I think the sprints can help with staying focused on small achieveable goals and seeing your progress (like reading daily, watching a show daily, studying X new words daily, going through a chapter of a grammar book weekly, etc). And then as you get farther and can actually do some of your sub-goals, can help with pushing yourself to some significant improvement in a particular area. (Like if you reached a sub goal of reading easy webnovels, it might be a month where you read a webnovel with more unique words that's 'harder' and look all unknown words up, and by the end of the month you see that medium-difficulty webnovels now feel as easy as the 'easy' ones did at the start of the month).

And then... if you study like me, which tends to be periods of a LOT of study followed by lulls where I might watch/read/listen to the language but not do much active study, then the sprint goal months tend to help cram in 100 hours of study every so often. So that you'll still (on average through the year) have studied 1-2+ hours a day. I do not focus well, and sprint goal months along with more relaxed months where I just watch/read/listen to stuff when I feel like it, is the only way I can get myself to study regularly. If you can consistently study daily, then sprint goal months can help you make Significant progress in a very specific area if some slow-progress area has been demotivating you. (And you can turn the sprint goals into challenges with friends, or tests to see what study methods work great for you versus bore you).

[waffletheorist]

My mum's side of the family: Learn Greek so you can talk to us!

My high school Spanish teacher: You scored really high on the test, I hope you continue to take this class.

My high school French teacher: You're good at French, you should keep studying it.

Personal interests: You should study Japanese so you can learn more about me!

Me, nervously sweating, staring at my Duolingo realizing I might have to learn 4 languages.

[orchideae]

1) Opens up drafts with my head empty, ready to be flooded, not knowing where I'll go. 2) 30 seconds later: Okay but I will go feral any day of my life over Perilous Trail, and the fierce dichotomy of Xiao and Yelan. While they're far from being 'the same', they both view themselves as soldiers in one way or another (it's a very difficult word to use for Yelan, so I'm using it very liberally and very loosely), they have both suffered losses on the 'battlefield' and carry the burden thereof in their own ways. And yet they stand so firmly in opposition throughout the entirety of that questline up until the very end of the 'the end of the line' conclusion of the quest. Yes, I know that she offers him her gratitude in its aftermath and it is genuine, but she still never agrees with him and the decision that he made moments earlier. It simply 'worked out' because of Zhongli's interference, he's the only reason it worked out. And it's because of that, that she doesn't give him a hell of a hard time (obviously she can't go down there, but imagine the inner frustration of severe extents; when you condemn someone who you can't even see anymore). In the same way that she would do to anyone who would sacrifice themselves for others, but in this case, I think it's 'beautiful' that it's to Xiao; the one who seems most adamant to do so (which honestly, fits into the contract that the Yakshas chose to sign with Morax; 'the ultimate sacrifice' to protect for Liyue; 'for Liyue', and Liyue has always centered itself around its people), the one who everyone reveres (and so does she, as she notes in her voiceline, 'if I ever have the honor to fight alongside') and respects for good reason, she stands against him, because in that moment, regardless of his status, he makes a call that she considers wrong. And he doesn't even... fight her on it very fiercely, and that's what actually hurts me the most, it's as if the following line hit the nail directly on the head?

"Besides, if you were really so determined to end it all, you wouldn't have given us the opportunity to share our opinions."

[lzrdprsn]

I paid my enrollment deposited, figured out who my advisor is, and started looking into a class I might take. Grad school is feeling very real.

[fantasy-costco]

My passport got delivered yesterday and I just filled out my last scholarship application. I guess I really am going to Greece? Fucking wild

[n3wy0rkd011]

I have a feeling I’ll never get over this guy

[blissfulbliss]

May 1 2024

Been a day of organizing my thoughts, making routine but also resting. That's my planner over there, I really love it, it has a basic outline of my life haha. And then I did nothing much, watched Zoe Sugg vlogs. If you do too, I'd love to be friends. Her vlogs are so wholesome and has been lifting my mood up since I was thirteen. And now I'm posting this while drinking tea haha.

But here's to new me and new starts. And going to record my process here on tumblr and hoping to be motivated and motivate others. And also I'd love some friends (hopefully, crossed fingers). When I actually start studying for my entrance tests and college stuff, I'll post that as well but yeah a very happy may to all. 🤍

[solradguy]

The weather needs to stop being cold and cloudy and stupid and miserable so my brain gets back out of fart stink hibernation seasonal affective disorder bastard mode. I gotta draw Sol Badguy but my motivation is directly tied to how much the sun's been out like I'm some kinda sunflower solar panel