#these polyglot youtubers cannot be stopped!

[forgottenbones]

Apes Freaked Out When I Spoke Their Language

[ghostieblotts]

SAF Linguistics Lecturers AU

FINALLY I AM MAKING THE POST ON THIS.

So these are some of the initial ideas I have for a very random and niche Curtwen au where they are linguistics lecturers, which I came up with because of this post.

The premise of the au is reasonably simple: Curt and Owen are researchers and lecturers in linguistics. I might add in other characters as well, but for now, I've only really gotten as far as beginning to figure out Curt and Owen's research interests (and a brief thought for Barb). This is going to be a meandering and nerdy post, so I'm putting it under the cut :)

Apologies in advance to non-linguists for anything I don't explain clearly enough, and to linguists for anything I get wrong.

So! As part of this au, both Curt and Owen work in the same university department. Which university might that be? ...dear reader, I must admit that in my heart, this au takes place at my own university. However, given that I'm not going to tell you which one that is, kindly choose a university of your own, and we will chalk any inconsistencies that arise up to my own folly. Cool? Cool.

Something else to mention is that this is a modern au, for a few reasons - I am more familiar with the modern state of linguistics than the state of the field in the late 50s and early 60s, I don't want them to have to invent certain subfields that I want to see them in (though that would be funny!), and for one other reason that will become apparent later.

In terms of research interests, I would like to preface by saying that this is only one possible direction to take them in - I think there would be compelling arguments for either of them to be involved in a range of subfields. Do let me know which ones you would put them in! However, here are my ideas.

First, the elephant in the room: Owen Carvour is not a phonologist. I'm so sorry, but if we take the YouTube version's accent performances as canon, he is not a phonologist - this man cannot handle the allophonic distribution of a glottal stop. (Said with the utmost love for the original performances. Accents are hard.) No, this man does not do his work on the sound level of language. That's Curt's job!

Doctor Curtis Mega's research interests are a little trickier for me to pin down, so I would love to hear other people's thoughts on the subject - but I think he leans mostly towards working with sound. In the show, we see him criticise Owen's Russian accent, and he aims to toast with Tatiana in Russian (though I lack the experience to judge this performance myself). So, broadly, I think that his research interests would include sociolinguistics (language and society/social groups), translation, contrastive linguistics (comparing languages), and forensic linguistics (roughly, using sociolinguistics in criminal cases).

Part of my reasoning for having Curt have an interest in translation and contrastive linguistics is because of the kind of stereotype that a linguist is someone who knows lots of different languages - when, in reality, a lot of linguists are monolingual. To mirror canon Curt's James-Bond-superspy elements, in this au he therefore lives up to this stereotype about linguists in some ways. He's a polyglot, he's great at identifying and mimicking accents, and he's the kind of guy who knows the International Phonetic Alphabet inside and out (and can make most if not all of the sounds it categorises).

Forensic linguistics, in some ways, is where Curt deviates from the stereotype, as well as fulfilling another aspect of canon. Canon Curt channels the wants to "fight crime again" and "make a difference" into being a spy, so to me it follows that this au's Curt would be interested in forensic linguistics - using his knowledge of regional and social variation in speech sounds (as well as grammar and lexis) to help solve criminal cases.

So, if Curt's research leans towards sound, with some work on structure in there (dialect studies!), then what does Owen do? Thankfully, I think he balances Curt's interests quite well, as I see him leaning more towards the other end of the spectrum, so to speak - if we divide language roughly into sound, structure, and meaning, Owen works a little with structure, and predominantly works on meaning. Because, I swear, that man would be a pragmatician.

And yes, that is what it's called. Doctor Owen Carvour's research interests begin with, and always circle back to, pragmatics - roughly, looking at meaning in context - how words and sentences are used in interactions, how meaning is negotiated between speakers.

For the most part, I'm basing Owen's research interests on a specific line - "If it weren't for my spot-on aim and interest in foreign policy, well, I might have been an actor" - and also just generally what he's like as a character. Pragmatics relates to topics like implied meaning/implicature, conversational norms, joint commitment, cooperation, pretence - he would love it.

At the beginning of his career, I think Owen would have been solely focused on pragmatics. Over time, he gains an interest in Critical Discourse Analysis - carefully looking at things like how power is wielded and how ideology is embedded in language use, particularly in mass-media texts but useful in other text types too. And eventually, he gains another research interest, related to a particular methodology - corpus linguistics.

Modern corpus linguistics is characterised by the use of large bodies of text, called corpora, which are stored in formats that allow them to be analysed with the help of computer programs called concordancers. I think that Owen "I'd have all the world's secrets" Carvour would love concordancers. I think if you gave that man some corpora to sit down and analyse he would be content for hours.

This is part of why I want this to be a modern au, because otherwise I would need Owen to be inventing the machine-readable corpus in 1961, which would indeed be funny, but I'm not here to change the history of linguistics. Why do I want him to use machine-readable corpora, specifically? Well, before they were invented, corpora were on vast collections of paper, which took ages to analyse and required the hiring of large teams of analysts - and, well, what use will a massive group of analysts be when a box in a room can do their job in seconds?

(Another thing about corpus linguistics - it's quite handy for taking the guesswork out of linguistics. Barb designs concordancers is what I'm saying here.)

So - Curt is a sociolinguist, originally, who is also interested in translation, contrastive linguistics, and forensic linguistics, while Owen is a pragmatician who is also interested in Critical Discourse Analysis and corpus linguistics. What are they like as educators?

I think students generally like Curt's classes a lot. He makes the material engaging, and he's not super strict. I think he's also students' first port of call when struggling with referencing - since that did NOT come naturally to him, so he's generally very helpful with that. That's if you can get ahold of him, though - I don't think he's great at replying to emails, and students probably learn quite quickly that they're better off asking him questions in person.

Owen, on the other hand - instinctively I think he'd be the kind of lecturer that students are kind of intimidated by. He won't accept nonsense in his classes, and he's quite particular about the standards of student work. However, as soon as students have a class where Owen gets to talk more about his specific research interests, it becomes pretty clear that he's just a huge nerd at the end of the day. He's a lot less scary once you've seen him light up over some incredibly specific aspect of pragmatics, and eventually it turns out he's actually pretty funny. Jury's out on whether he actually sleeps, though - he's been known to have email response times under ten minutes at 2 in the morning.

Some students notice around their third year that if one of them is away at a conference or something, the other will be grouchier and have a shorter fuse. At events and sessions with the whole department staff, they are always sat together, and a few students have noticed them arriving or leaving at the same time. Around campus, in the earlier and later hours of the day, more studious students may notice that they are more likely to bump into both than just one.

Anyway. There we go! Do I have an actual story for this au? No. Have I properly developed the curtwen side of it? Also no. Have I gotten around to the other characters properly yet. Also no! But, if you read this far, THANK YOU, I hope this was at least somewhat fun or interesting - and if you have any thoughts on any part of this au PLEASE let me know as I would love to hear them! Is there a subfield they would love that I have missed? Do you have ideas for their teaching or their relationship? Do you have ideas about another character? Whatever it is I want to hear it!

[fluentlanguage]

De-Brief From An Organiser: Women in Language 2018

A few weeks ago, I was proud to co-organise and witness the first ever Women in Language conference, a unique online event designed to champion, celebrate, and amplify the voices of women in language learning. It was not my first online conference about language learning, but certainly the first I partly created and the first one ever to feature an all-female line-up of speakers.

In today’s article, I am going to lift the curtain and share my official de-brief as one of the three members of our organising team.

What I Felt at Women in Language

Let me start with the most important thing: I enjoyed every single presentation that I saw. And as I was often online making sure everything went smoothly, those were almost all of them. The quality of our many speakers at Women in Language was excellent, and the range of topics kept things interesting and inspiring.

Women in Language delivered on a few extra levels too. It felt as inspiring and intense as every offline conference could feel, with the added bonus of allowing me to sleep in my own bed. I adored seeing #womeninlanguage posts on social media, and to hear from our attendees in the live chat and Facebook group. And most importantly, I got SO inspired and motivated to learn languages in a brand new way!

If you want to learn more about languages, join the extraordinary four-day online conference #womeninlanguage with presentations by 50 incredible women! Day 2 has just started 😉 #language #onlineconference #cpd #neverstoplearning #alwayswanttoknowmore #passion

A post shared by Barbara TRANSLATIONS (@barbara.peckova) on Mar 9, 2018 at 4:09am PST

What I Learnt About Language Learning

A lot of the impact of four days of language love cannot be put into words. It’s a boost in motivation, a renewed commitment, a burst of energy. And at Women in Language, I got all of those out of it and more. I got to know more of our conference attendees and boosted my own desire to learn and teach languages in new ways.

Here are the most important lessons from Women in Language that will be essential for all language learners:

1) Dabbling Is Legit

At Women in Language, we celebrated the huge diversity of how people learn languages. You can choose whatever language you want to learn, and you can learn it for 2 weeks or 20 years, and you can dabble in a handful of languages at once if you want to. This is all “allowed”, and won’t make you any less of a language lover or polyglot.

Sometimes it’s easy to feel self-critical as a language learner, and to tell yourself that you’re doing this wrong if you don’t use Anki or speak from day 1 or spend many hours on your project. But dabbling is perfectly legit, and you are allowed to feel proud of it.

2) Compassion Matters

Leading on from the previous point, compassion was a regular theme of the conference. When you’re faced with so many blog articles and Instagram posts and YouTube videos and language books telling you what to do, it’s sometimes hard to remember that everyone has a bad day.

You can’t always be happy and you can’t always be 100% gold in Duolingo. Compassion means allowing understanding and empathy for yourself when times are tough, but also for other language learners. No one method is the right one. Allow other people to feel good about themselves, and extend that same kindness to yourself.

3) Everyone Loves Transcribed Audio

Finding something interesting to watch or listen to, at the right level, and then with a transcription…that’s difficult. But it’s also what a lot of our conference attendees wanted, and you certainly CAN find it online. If you want to get a few ideas, check out Speechling, Glossika, Rhinospike, and Movieclips on YouTube.

And by the way: Just listening is NOT enough. If it’s just a wall of sound, you’re not doing much good. You’ll need to know what you’re hearing. Find input that you can engage with, and check against your own skills. For more about this, listen to my podcast episode about listening skills.

4) There’s So Much to Talk About

It’s never enough to practice speaking by doing the “Hello how are you where do you live” dance over and over again. Speaking practice is best when you’ve prepared something interesting to talk about. And lucky for us, there are tutors and learners who already discovered this too, and they’ve even put together lists (like this one) of questions and conversation prompts.

5) When Your Brain Is Having Fun, You Learn

All too often we think of language learning as a STUDY activity, in all caps. But it’s just not necessary to do things this way. Language can be learnt through story, through fun activities, through play. The most important things are exposure and repetition, not how hard you study or how much your language experience feels like work.

Though some of these lessons may read as happy-clappy positivity notes, I found that they often helped to ease a learner’s mind and allow them to take a break and come back to language learning with new energy and enthusiasm. After all, we want to get fluent while having fun, right?

What Do You Think?

Whether you attended Women in Language 2018 or not, what do you think about those lessons above? Are you a dabbler, or a hardcore study nut? Leave me a comment below to join the conversation.

In part 2 of this blog article, I will put on my co-organiser hat (a very stylish hat, for sure) to tell you more about how Women in Language was organised, what we learnt in the process, and what you should consider if you want to run or contribute to an event like this in future.

Organising A Successful Online Conference

I’ll start with what we looked for in our speakers and talks.

For this first ever conference, we used our own network of interesting women to ask if they wanted to speak at Women in Language. Their social media accounts, blogs, youtube channels, relationships with us were what put them on the radar. So if you’re dreaming of speaking out yourselves, making yourself very visible is good advice.

Before contacting our speakers, we considered some guidelines about the types of talks we would be looking for. In addition to practical topics featuring tips and techniques for language learners at “Beginner” and “Advanced” levels, we also chose the tracks “Living with Language” and “Working with Language”. Each speaker we contacted let us know which of the four themes they would like to address in their presentation, and was allocated one. This way, we ensured that no topics would be repeated and we could offer a varied programme on every single conference day.

Here are just three of the 25 talks we saw at Women in Language:

Some of our speakers came to us with a firm idea of the talk they wanted to present, while others found themselves unsure at the start. As our programme officer, I found myself receiving several messages saying “I don’t know, maybe I have nothing to say after all.” If you have ever hesitated to put yourself forward for an opportunity, here is the thought process that does stop them in their tracks: “Maybe I don’t have anything to say here.” Meaning “Maybe my experience, my voice, my passion are not valid. Others will have more to say.”

I extended offers of a little “talk surgery” to those who needed an idea boost, and without exception it was the speakers themselves who came to me with fantastic topic ideas, and who delivered on them 100%. In fact, I found that the most intriguing topics came from a place of passion and excitement in each speaker’s mind. Topics like “Learning With Crime Novels” and “Managing Motherhood and Language Learnings” are not a language learner’s most burning question, but that’s exactly why they make incredible conference topics: They are real, and invite us to think differently.

Some People Voiced Different Opinions

I won’t lie to you, at times it felt hard to be out there putting together this positive, kinda feminist event. Some commenters felt that it was a wrong move towards equality, unnecessarily excluding male voices. To those guys, I want to remind you that we welcomed and celebrated male voices throughout the event - it’s just that this time only women got to speak “on stage”, and every single one of them brought expertise, commitment, quality, enthusiasm, and outstanding topics. We set out to show the language learning world from a different angle, and I was so encouraged to hear from several male attendees who were enjoying the conference just as much as everyone else.

If You Want To Be a Conference Speaker

If you are considering applying to speak at a language conference, please don’t hesitate. Even if you were to hear a no, don’t worry and keep putting yourself forward - maybe the programme is full already or the conference can recommend a future event for you to try.

Don’t be shy about suggesting a topic outside the memory-boosting-fluency-fast-track-performance mainstream. Don’t wait until you’re fluent in 16 languages. You’re good enough right now, as long as you have a cool topic. And what’s a cool topic? Your own experience!

You are so cool when you are yourself.

I want to give kudos here to all those women who agreed to speak and trusted Shannon, Lindsay, and me with Women in Language. You absolutely killed it, and we appreciate all the hard work you put into giving a great online talk at an event you’d never heard of before.

Many of our speakers were new to presenting online. From my perspective as a blogger and podcaster, I’m used to speaking to an empty room and waiting until later to see if anyone connects with my words. But these guys were new to the whole environment, and they handled it brilliantly.

Tickets

When we put together our event, we knew that it was a risk to ask for payment from attendees of an online event. Many other online events are open to attendees for free, but we wanted to create an atmosphere where the sales pressure is off, and where our audience members were just as invested in having a great time as we were.

We found that the ticket sales achieved this goal, and allowed over 250 audience members to join us from all over the world. This reassurance also helped us relax and increase our commitment to Women in Language. So on the ticket selling front, we are happy to note that all went well and we are now able to give a donation of over $400 to our chosen charity, Kiva. The charity supports entrepreneurs who do cool things to alleviate poverty around the world.

Here I want to say thank you to our audience members, who went ahead and trusted us organisers with a brand new conference idea. Some purchased a ticket and even took time off work, others were unable to attend but joined the conference to support celebrating and amplifying women’s voices in language learning. We appreciated your trust and support.

About The Technology We Used

In terms of technology, we used a setup of Google Hangouts on Air for our live broadcasts and embedded them in individual Teachable lectures via YouTube. We also added individual Chatango chat boxes in each lecture.

At the end of any session, the viewers could click “Complete and Continue” at the top and move on to the next session in our packed programme. Credit here goes to Shannon for leading us on the setup of a gorgeous page and ensuring the information was up to date.

This format added to the feel of hosting a real conference, where you would often walk into the next room for another talk. But in addition, it made us into the Netflix of language learning, where any previous talk could be streamed from the beginning right after it was published.

All talks were offered on a single track (no two at the same time), which kept the conversation focused and helped create a live chatroom community. We also added an “after hours” experience through a dedicated Facebook group for Women in Language attendees.

Marketing Women in Language

Our marketing campaign, headed up by Lindsay, made it easy for Women in Language to get seen. We obviously talked about Women in Language in our own blog, podcasts, social media, newsletters, youtube, and wherever you see us.

Lindsay also prepared some beautiful pictures and tweets for the speakers and the attendees, so that everyone could easily spread the word about our event. We are so grateful that you guys supported us and shared your excitement before the event. It helped us so much.

Shout out to our friends How To Get Fluent, Language Learning Summit and Langfest for inviting us to present our new event, and to Mezzofanti Guild for hosting a guest post written by Shannon. Check those guys out - they are doing amazing work.

The Organising Team

Between three organisers, we found that we were able to play to our strengths and largely handle the large workload of running a conference like this one. We stayed in contact with each other through direct messages, but also weekly meetings, and the project management software Asana. When your organising team is living on three different continents, it’s helpful to ensure online communications are as good as they can be.

Our track record of collaborations was a key to our success. Lindsay, Shannon, and I were no strangers to each other’s work. We knew already that we appreciate each other’s work and that each of us knows how to use all parts of the technology and marketing setup. We had also met in person before and solidified our friendship. Throughout the organising process, we were able to stay supportive and open to suggestions from each other.

Sometimes, it can take courage and grace to reach out to a colleague and trust that they’re on board with your idea. From the minute Lindsay first mentioned the idea of Women in Language and Shannon hopped on the first Skype call to join us, that was something we committed to.

I am grateful that I had the opportunity to run such a cool project with two colleagues and friends that I respect so much.

What We’ll Do Even Better Next Time

So we were excited, we were buzzing, we enjoyed four days of a successful conference full of tips. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t any mistakes to learn from.

On the technology front, a few hiccups taught us the following lessons. Maybe you’ll find them useful one day, so I’m sharing them here:

When you want to embed your YouTube events in another page, it pays to set up a dry run so that you’re double sure the embed will show up the way you want it to.

When you are planning to invite someone to a Google Hangout, you cannot send them a “join link” in advance because the software will discard that link the minute you close the video window in your browser. And then your speaker’s link will be useless and they’ll be confused.

Don’t click “eject” when you want to reset your Hangouts partner’s setup as they joined your Google Hangout. They won’t be able to join again, and you’ll have to create a new event.

Power Point going full screen in Google Hangouts is a bit of a gamble, so stay calm, have a dry run, and prepare trouble shooting notes to make sure all goes smoothly.

In terms of the programme, we tried a new format of round table discussions which was successful at large. The two-hour time slot did discourage some audience members from watching it though, and that’s something I had not expected and we will look into providing shorter round table discussions next time.

Finally: I feel fired up to expand our commitment to diversity and ensure we include more global voices. Our line-up was international but still looked largely like us: white women who speak English a lot. Even if each of them is different in nationality or language line-up, this still gives our attendees an unintentional impression of what the “norm” is. We can add to that during future events, and I’m excited that we now have 27 speakers who can help us grow our network and look for polyglots and language experts from more diverse backgrounds.

What About You?

Did you enjoy the online conference?

Have you ever thought about becoming a conference speaker?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

[voxrepulsori]

The French Origins of « You Will Not Replace Us »

THE NEW YORKER | 04.12.2017 | Thomas Chatterton Williams

The European thinkers behind the white-nationalist rallying cry. The Château de Plieux, a fortified castle on a hilltop in the Gascony region of southwestern France, overlooks rolling fields speckled with copses and farmhouses. A tricolor flag snaps above the worn beige stone. The northwest tower, which was built in the fourteenth century, offers an ideal position from which to survey invading hordes. Inside the château’s cavernous second-story study, at a desk heavy with books, the seventy-one-year-old owner of the property, Renaud Camus, sits at an iMac and tweets dire warnings about Europe’s demographic doom. On the sweltering June afternoon that I visited the castle, Camus—no relation to Albert—wore a tan summer suit and a tie. Several painted self-portraits hung in the study, multiplying his blue-eyed gaze. Camus has spent most of his career as a critic, novelist, diarist, and travel essayist. The only one of his hundred or so books to be translated into English, “Tricks” (1979), announces itself as “a sexual odyssey— man-to-man,” and includes a foreword by Roland Barthes. The book describes polyglot assignations from Milan to the Bronx. Allen Ginsberg said of it, “Camus’s world is completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.” In recent years, though, Camus’s name has been associated less with erotica than with a single poignant phrase, le grand remplacement. In 2012, he made this the title of an alarmist book. Native “white” Europeans, he argues, are being reverse-colonized by black and brown immigrants, who are flooding the Continent in what amounts to an extinction-level event. “The great replacement is very simple,” he has said. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people.” The specific identity of the replacement population, he suggests, is of less importance than the act of replacement itself. “Individuals, yes, can join a people, integrate with it, assimilate to it,” he writes in the book. “But peoples, civilizations, religions—and especially when these religions are themselves civilizations, types of society, almost States—cannot and cannot even want to . . . blend into other peoples, other civilizations.” Camus believes that all Western countries are faced with varying degrees of “ethnic and civilizational substitution.” He points to the increasing prevalence of Spanish, and other foreign languages, in the United States as evidence of the same phenomenon. Although his arguments are scarcely available in translation, they have been picked up by right-wing and white-nationalist circles throughout the English-speaking world. In July, Lauren Southern, the Canadian alt-right Internet personality, posted, on YouTube, a video titled “The Great Replacement”; it has received more than a quarter of a million views. On greatreplacement.com, a Web site maintained anonymously, the introductory text declares, “The same term can be applied to many other European peoples both in Europe and abroad . . . where the same policy of mass immigration of non-European people poses a demographic threat. Of all the different races of people on this planet, only the European races are facing the possibility of extinction in a relatively near future.” The site announces its mission as “spreading awareness” of Camus’s term, which, the site’s author concludes, is more palatable than a similar concept, “white genocide.” (A search for that phrase on YouTube yields more than fifty thousand videos.) “I don’t have any genetic conception of races,” Camus told me. “I don’t use the word ‘superior.’ ” He insisted that he would feel equally sad if Japanese culture or “African culture” were to disappear because of immigration. On Twitter, he has quipped, “The only race I hate is the one knocking on the door.” Camus’s partner arrived in the study with a silver platter, and offered fruitcake and coffee. Camus, meanwhile, told me about his “red-pill moment”—an alt-right term, derived from a scene in the film “The Matrix,” for the decision to become politically enlightened. As a child, he said, he was a “xenophile,” who was delighted to see foreign tourists flocking to the thermal baths near his home, in the Auvergne. In the late nineties, he began writing domestic travel books, commissioned by the French government. The work took him to the department of Hérault, whose capital is Montpellier. Although Camus was familiar with France’s heavily black and Arab inner suburbs, or banlieues, and their subsidized urban housing projects, known as cités, his experience in Hérault floored him. Travelling through medieval villages, he said, “you would go to a fountain, six or seven centuries old, and there were all these North African women with veils!” A demographic influx was clearly no longer confined to France’s inner suburbs and industrial regions; it was ubiquitous, and it was transforming the entire country. Camus’s problem was not, as it might be for many French citizens, that the religious symbolism of the veil clashed with some of the country’s most cherished secularist principles; it was that the veil wearers were permanent interlopers in Camus’s homeland. He became obsessed with the diminishing ethnic purity of Western Europe. Camus supports the staunchly anti-immigrant politician Marine Le Pen. He denied, however, that he was a member of the “extreme right,” saying that he was simply one of many voters who “wanted France to stay French.” In Camus’s view, Emmanuel Macron, the centrist liberal who handily defeated Le Pen in a runoff, is synonymous with the “forces of remplacement.” Macron, he noted acidly, “went to Germany to compliment Mme. Merkel on the marvellous work she did by taking in one million migrants.” Camus derides Macron, a former banker, as a representative of “direct Davos-cracy”—someone who thinks of people as “interchangeable” units within a larger social whole. “This is a very low conception of what being human is,” he said. “People are not just things. They come with their history, their culture, their language, with their looks, with their preferences.” He sees immigration as one aspect of a nefarious global process that renders obsolete everything from cuisine to landscapes. “The very essence of modernity is the fact that everything—and really everything—can be replaced by something else, which is absolutely monstrous,” he said. Camus takes William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s injunction to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop” to the furthest extent possible, and he can be recklessly unconcerned about backing up his claims. On a recent radio appearance, he took a beating from Hervé le Bras, a director emeritus at the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, who said that Camus’s proclamations about ethnic substitution were based on wildly inflated statistics about the number of foreigners entering France. Afterward, Camus breezily responded on Twitter: “Since when, in history, did a people need ‘science’ to decide whether or not it was invaded and occupied?” Camus has become one of the most cited figures on the right in France. He is a regular interlocutor of such mainstream intellectuals as Alain Finkielkraut, the conservative Jewish philosopher, who has called Camus “a great writer,” and someone who has “forged an expression that is heard all the time and everywhere.” Camus also has prominent critics: the essayist and novelist Emmanuel Carrère, a longtime friend, has publicly reproached him, writing that “the argument ‘I’m at home here, not you’ ” is incompatible with “globalized justice.” Mark Lilla, the Columbia historian and scholar of the mentality of European reactionaries, described Camus as “a kind of connective tissue between the far right and the respectable right.” Camus can play the role of “respectable” reactionary because his opposition to multicultural globalism is plausibly high-minded, principally aesthetic, even well-mannered—a far cry from the manifest brutality of the skinheads and the tattooed white nationalists who could put into action the xenophobic ideas expressed in “Le Grand Remplacement.” (At a rally in Warsaw on November 11th, white-nationalist demonstrators brandished signs saying “Pray for an Islamic Holocaust” and “Pure Poland, White Poland.”) When I asked Camus whether he considered me—a black American living in Paris with a French wife and a mixed-race daughter—part of the problem, he genially replied, “There is nothing more French than an American in Paris!” He then offered me the use of his castle when he and his partner next went on a vacation. Although Camus presents his definition of “Frenchness” as reasonable and urbane, it is of a piece with a less benign perspective on ethnicity, Islam, and territory which has circulated in his country for decades. Never the sole preserve of the far right, this view was conveyed most bluntly in a 1959 letter, from Charles de Gaulle to his confidant Alain Peyrefitte, which advocates withdrawal from French Algeria: It is very good that there are yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen. They prove that France is open to all races and that she has a universal mission. But [it is good] on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are, after all, primarily a European people of the white race, Greek and Latin culture, and the Christian religion. De Gaulle then declares that Muslims, “with their turbans and djellabahs,” are “not French.” He asks, “Do you believe that the French nation can absorb 10 million Muslims, who tomorrow will be 20 million and the day after 40 million?” If this were to happen, he concludes, “my village would no longer be called Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, but Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées!” Such worry about Muslims has been present across Europe at least since the turn of the twentieth century, when the first “guest workers” began arriving from former French colonies and from Turkey. In 1898 in Britain, Winston Churchill warned of “militant Mahommedanism,” and Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech alleged that immigration had caused a “total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.” Anxiety about immigrants of color has long been present in the United States, especially in states along the Mexican border. This feeling became widespread after 9/11, and has only intensified with subsequent terrorist acts by Islamists, the Great Recession, and the election of the first black President. Meanwhile, white populations across the world are stagnant or dwindling. In recent years, white-nationalist discourse has emerged from the recesses of the Internet into plain sight, permeating the highest reaches of the Trump Administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the White House senior adviser Stephen Miller endorse dramatic reductions in both legal and illegal immigration. The President’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has returned to his post as the executive chairman of the far-right Web site Breitbart. In a 2014 speech at the Vatican, Bannon praised European “forefathers” who kept Islam “out of the world.” President Trump, meanwhile, has made the metaphor of immigrant invasion literal by vowing to build a wall. In Europe, which in recent years has absorbed millions of migrants fleeing wars in the Middle East or crossing the Mediterranean from Africa, opposition to immigration is less a cohesive ideology than a welter of reactionary ideas and feelings. Xenophobic nationalism can be found on both the left and the right. There is not even unanimity on the superiority of Judeo-Christian culture: some European nationalists express a longing for ancient pagan practices. Anti-immigrant thinkers also cannot agree on a name for their movement. Distrust of multiculturalism and a professed interest in preserving European “purity” is often called “identitarianism,” but many prominent anti-immigrant writers avoid that construction. Camus told me that he refused to play “the game” of identity politics, and added, “Do you think that Louis XIV or La Fontaine or Racine or Châteaubriand would say, ‘I’m identitarian?’ No, they were just French. And I’m just French.” Shortly after Trump’s Inauguration, Richard Spencer, the thirty-nine-year-old white nationalist who has become the public face of the American alt-right, was sucker-punched by a protester while being interviewed on a street corner in Washington, D.C. A video of the incident went viral, but little attention was paid to what Spencer said on the clip. “I’m not a neo-Nazi,” he declared. “They kind of hate me, actually.” In order to deflect the frequent charge that he is a racist, he defines himself with the very term that Camus rejects: identitarian. The word sidesteps the question of racial superiority and co-opts the left’s inclusive language of diversity and its critique of forced assimilation in order to reclaim the right to difference—for whites. Identitarianism is a distinctly French innovation. In 1968, in Nice, several dozen far-right activists created the Research and Study Group for European Civilization, better known by its French acronym, GRECE. The think tank eventually began promoting its ideas under the rubric the Nouvelle Droite, or the New Right. One of its founders, and its most influential member, was Alain de Benoist, a hermetic aristocrat and scholar who has written more than a hundred books. In “View from the Right” (1977), Benoist declared that he and other members of GRECE considered “the gradual homogenization of the world, advocated and realized by the two-thousand-year-old discourse of egalitarian ideology, to be an evil.” The group expressed allegiance to “diversity” and “ethnopluralism”—terms that sound politically correct to American ears but had a different meaning in Benoist’s hands. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” (1999), he argued: The true wealth of the world is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples. The West’s conversion to universalism has been the main cause of its subsequent attempt to convert the rest of the world: in the past, to its religion (the Crusades); yesterday, to its political principles (colonialism); and today, to its economic and social model (development) or its moral principles (human rights). Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernization of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness. From this vantage point, both globalized Communism and globalized capitalism are equally suspect, and a “citizen of the world” is an agent of imperialism. When Benoist writes that “humanity is irreducibly plural” and that “diversity is part of its very essence,” he is not supporting the idea of a melting pot but of diversity in isolation: all Frenchmen in one territory and all Moroccans in another. It is a nostalgic and aestheticized view of the world that shows little interest in the complex economic and political forces that provoke migration. Identitarianism is a lament against change made by people fortunate enough to have been granted, through the arbitrary circumstance of birth, citizenship in a wealthy liberal democracy. Benoist’s peculiar definition of “diversity” has allowed him to take some unexpected positions. He simultaneously defends a Muslim immigrant’s right to wear the veil and opposes the immigration policies that allowed her to settle in France in the first place. In an e-mail, he told me that immigration constitutes an undeniably negative phenomenon, in part because it turns immigrants into victims, by erasing their roots. He continued, “The destiny of all the peoples of the Third World cannot be to establish themselves in the West.” In an interview in the early nineties with Le Monde, he declared that the best way to show solidarity with immigrants is by increasing trade with the Third World, so that developing countries can become “self-sufficient” enough to dissuade their citizens from seeking better lives elsewhere. These countries, he added, needed to find their own paths forward, and not follow the tyrannizing templates of the World Bank and the I.M.F. Benoist told me that, in France’s Presidential election, in May, he voted not for Marine Le Pen but for the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who shares his contempt for global capitalism. Benoist’s writing often echoes left-wing thinkers, especially the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote of “hegemony”—or the command that a regime can wield over a population by controlling its culture. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance,” Benoist argues that white Europeans should not just support restrictive immigration policies; they should oppose such diluting ideologies as multiculturalism and globalism, taking seriously “the premise that ideas play a fundamental role in the collective consciousness.” In a similar spirit, Benoist has promoted a gramscisme de droite—cultural opposition to the rampaging forces of Hollywood and multinational corporations. The French, he has said, should retain their unique traditions and not switch to “a diet of hamburgers.” Despite Benoist’s affinity for some far-left candidates, “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” has become a revered text for the extreme right across Western Europe, in the U.S., and even in Russia. The crackpot Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who promotes the ethnopluralist doctrine “Eurasianism,” has flown to Paris to meet Benoist. “I consider him to be the foremost intellectual in Europe today,” Dugin told interviewers in 2012. Earlier this year, John Morgan, an editor of Counter-Currents, a white-nationalist publishing house based in San Francisco, posted an online essay about the indebtedness of the American alt-right to European thought. He described Benoist and GRECE’s achievement as “a towering edifice of thought unparalleled anywhere else on the Right since the Conservative Revolution in Germany of the Weimar era.” Although Benoist claims not to be affiliated with the alt-right—or even to understand “what Richard Spencer can know or have learned from my thoughts”—he has travelled to Washington, D.C., to speak at the National Policy Institute, a white-nationalist group run by Spencer, and he has sat for long interviews with Jared Taylor, the founder of the virulently white-supremacist magazine American Renaissance. In one exchange, Taylor, who was educated in France, asked Benoist how he saw himself “as different from identitarians.” Benoist responded, “I am aware of race and of the importance of race, but I do not give to it the excessive importance that you do.” He went on, “I am not fighting for the white race. I am not fighting for France. I am fighting for a world view. . . . Immigration is clearly a problem. It gives rise to much social pathologies. But our identity, the identity of the immigrants, all the identities in the world have a common enemy, and this common enemy is the system that destroys identities and differences everywhere. This system is the enemy, not the Other.” Benoist may not be a dogmatic thinker, but, for white people who want to think explicitly in terms of culture and race, his work provides a lofty intellectual framework. These disciples, instead of calling for an “Islamic holocaust,” can argue that rootedness in one’s homeland matters, and that immigration, miscegenation, and the homogenizing forces of neoliberal market economies collude to obliterate identities that have taken shape over hundreds of years—just as relentless development has decimated the environment. Benoist’s romantic-sounding ideas can be cherry-picked and applied to local political resentments. The writer Raphaël Glucksmann, a prominent critic of the French far right, told me that such selective appropriations have given Benoist “a huge authority among white nationalists and Fascists everywhere in the world.” Glucksmann recently met me for coffee near his home, which is off the Rue du Faubourg SaintDenis, one of the most ethnically diverse thoroughfares in Paris. The Nouvelle Droite, Glucksmann argued, adopted a traditionally German, tribal way of conceiving identity, which the Germans themselves abandoned after the Second World War. The Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt argued that “all right is the right of a particular Volk.” In a 1932 essay, “The Concept of the Political,” he posed the question that still defines the right-wing mind-set: Who is a people’s friend, and who is an enemy? For Schmitt, to identify one’s enemies was to identify one’s inner self. In another essay, he wrote, “Tell me who your enemy is, and I’ll tell you who you are.” The Nouvelle Droite was fractured, in the nineteen-nineties, by disagreements over what constituted the principal enemy of European identity. If the perceived danger was initially what Benoist described as “the ideology of sameness”—what many in France called the “Coca-Colonization” of the world—the growing presence of African and Arab immigrants caused some members of GRECE to rethink the essence of the conflict. One of the group’s founders, Guillaume Faye, a journalist with a Ph.D. from Sciences-Po, split off and began releasing explicitly racist books. In a 1998 tract, “Archeofuturism,” he argued, “To be a nationalist today is to assign this concept its original etymological meaning, ‘to defend the native members of a people.’ ” The book, which appeared in English in 2010, argues that “European people” are “under threat” and must become “politically organized for their self-defense.” Faye assures native Frenchmen that their “sub-continental motherland” is “an organic and vital part of the common folk, whose natural and historical territory—whose fortress, I would say—extends from Brest to the Bering Strait.” Faye, like Renaud Camus, is appalled by the dictates of modern statecraft, which define nationality in legal rather than ethnic terms. The liberal American writer Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in his recent book, “Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy,” quotes Camus lamenting that “a veiled woman speaking our language badly, completely ignorant of our culture” could declare that she is just as French as an “indigenous” man who is “passionate for Roman churches, and for the verbal and syntactic delicacies of Montaigne and Rousseau, for Burgundy wines, for Proust, and whose family has lived for generations in the same valley.” What appalls Camus, PolakowSuransky notes, is that “legally, if she has French nationality, she is completely correct.” Faye’s work helps to explain the rupture that has emerged in many Western democracies between the mainstream right, which may support strict enforcement of immigration limits but does not inherently object to the presence of Muslims, and the alt-right, which portrays Muslim immigration as an existential threat. In this light, the growing admiration by Western conservatives for the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is easier to comprehend. Not only do thinkers like Faye admire Putin as an emblem of proudly heterosexual white masculinity; they fantasize that Russian military might will help create a “Eurosiberian” federation of white ethno-states. “The only hope for salvation in this dark age of ours,” Faye has declared, is “a protected and self-centered continental economic space” that is capable of “curbing the rise of Islam and demographic colonization from Africa and Asia.” In Faye’s 2016 book, “The Colonisation of Europe,” he writes, of Muslims in Europe, “No solution can be found unless a civil war breaks out.” Such revolutionary right-wing talk has now migrated to America. In 2013, Steve Bannon, while he was turning Breitbart into the far right’s dominant media outlet, described himself as “a Leninist.” The reference didn’t seem like something a Republican voter would say, but it made sense to his intended audience: Bannon was signalling that the alt-right movement was prepared to hijack, or even raze, the state in pursuit of nationalist ends. (Bannon declined my request for an interview.) Richard Spencer told me, “I would say that the alt-right in the United States is radically un-conservative.” Whereas the American conservative movement celebrates “the eternal value of freedom and capitalism and the Constitution,” Spencer said, he and his followers were “willing to use socialism in order to protect our identity.” He added, “Many of the countries that lived under Soviet hegemony are actually far better off, in terms of having a protected identity, than Western Europe or the United States.” Spencer said that “clearly racialist” writers such as Benoist and Faye were “central influences” on his own thinking as an identitarian. He first discovered the work of Nouvelle Droite figures in the pages of Telos, an American journal of political theory. Most identitarians have a less scholarly bent. In 2002, a right-wing French insurrectionary, Maxime Brunerie, shot at President Jacques Chirac as he rode down the Champs- Élysées; the political group that Brunerie was affiliated with, Unité Radicale, became known as part of the identitairemovement. In 2004, a group known as the Bloc Identitaire became notorious for distributing soup containing pork to the homeless, in order to exclude Muslims and Jews. It was the sort of puerile joke now associated with alt-right pranksters in America such as Milo Yiannopoulos. Copycat groups began emerging across Europe. In 2009, a Swedish former mining executive, Daniel Friberg, founded, in Denmark, the publishing house Arktos, which is now the world’s largest distributor of far- and alt-right literature. The son of highly educated, left-leaning parents, Friberg grew up in a wealthy suburb of Gothenburg. He embraced right-wing thought after attending a diverse high school, which he described as overrun with crime. In 2016, he told the Daily Beast, “I had been taught to think multiculturalism was great, until I experienced it.” Few European nations have changed as drastically or as quickly as Sweden. Since 1960, it has added one and a half million immigrants to its population, which is currently just under ten million; a nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats, has become the country’s main opposition group. During this period, Friberg began to devour books on European identity—specifically, those of Benoist and Faye, whose key works impressed him as much as they impressed Richard Spencer. When Friberg launched Arktos, he acquired the rights to books by Benoist and Faye and had them translated into Swedish and English. Spencer told me that Arktos “was a very important development” in the international popularization of far-right identitarian thought. Whether or not history really is dialectical, it can be tempting to think that decades of liberal supremacy in Europe have helped give rise to the antithesis of liberalism. In Paris, left-wing intellectuals often seem reluctant to acknowledge that the recent arrival of millions of refugees in Europe, many of them impoverished, poses any complications at all. Such blithe cosmopolitanism, especially when it is expressed by people who can easily shelter themselves from the disruptions caused by globalization, can fuel resentment toward both intellectuals and immigrants. The philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has long embodied élite opinion on the French left, sometimes falls prey to such rhetoric. A 2015 essay, which attempted to allay fears of a refugee crisis in Europe, portrayed Syrian refugees as uniformly virtuous and adaptable: “They are applicants for freedom, lovers of our promised land, our social model, and our values. They are people who cry out ‘Europe! Europe!’ the way millions of Europeans, arriving a century ago on Ellis Island, learned to sing ‘America the Beautiful.’ ” Instead of making the reasonable argument that relatively few Muslim refugees harbor extremist beliefs, Lévy took an absolutist stance, writing that it was pure “nonsense” to be concerned about an increased risk of terrorism. Too often, Lévy fights racism with sentimentalism. Lévy recently met with me at his impeccable apartment, in a sanitized neighborhood near the Champs- Élysées. In our conversation, he offered a more modulated view. “I’m not saying that France should have received all two or three million Syrian refugees,” he said. “Of course, there’s a limited space.” But France had involved itself in Syria’s civil war, by giving support to opponents of the regime, and had a responsibility to help people uprooted by it, he said. Recent debates about European identity, he noted, had left out an important concept: hospitality. “Hospitality means that there is a place—real space, scarce, limited—and that in this place you host some people and you extend a hand.” This did not mean that he wanted an end to borders: “France has some borders, a republican tradition, it is a place. But in this place we have the duty to host. You have to hold the two. A place without hosting would be a shrinking republic. Universal welcoming would be another mistake.” A necessary tension is created between “the infinite moral duty of hospitality and the limited political possibility of welcoming.” When I asked Lévy why the notion of the great replacement had resonated so widely, he dismissed it as a “junk idea.” “The Roman conquest of Gaul was a real modification of the population in France,” he went on. “There was neversomething like an ethnic French people.” Raphaël Glucksmann made a similar critique of the idea of “pure” Frenchness. He observed, “In 1315, you had an edict from the king who said anybody who walks on the soil of France becomes a franc.” This is true, but there is always a threshold at which a quantitative change becomes qualitative; migration was far less extensive in the Middle Ages than it is today. French liberals can surely make a case for immigration without pretending that nothing has changed: a country that in 1900 was almost uniformly Catholic now has more than six million Muslims. The liberal historian Patrick Boucheron, the editor of a recent surprise best-seller that highlights foreign influences on French life throughout the ages, told me that he had little patience for people who bemoan the country’s changing demographics. French people who are struggling today, he said, are victims of unfair economic policies, not Muslims, who still make up only ten per cent of the population. Indeed, only a quarter of France’s population is of immigrant origin—a percentage that, according to Boucheron, has remained stable for four decades. Boucheron sees identitarians as manipulators who have succeeded “in convincing the dominated that their problem is French identity.” For Boucheron, it’s not simply that the great replacement is a cruel idea; it’s also false. “When you oppose their figures—when you say that there were Poles and Italians coming to France in the nineteen-thirties—they say, ‘O.K., but they were Christians,’ ” he said. “So you see that behind identity there’s immigration, and behind immigration there’s hatred of Islam. Eventually, it always comes down to that.” But to deny that recent migration has brought disruptions only helps the identitarians gain traction. A humanitarian crisis has been unfolding in Paris, and it is clearly a novel phenomenon. This summer, more than two thousand African and Middle Eastern migrants were living in street encampments near the Porte de la Chapelle; eventually, the police rounded them up and dispersed them in temporary shelters. “We don’t have enough housing,” the center-right philosopher Pascal Bruckner told me. “The welfare state is at the maximum of its capabilities. We’re broke. And so what we offer to those people is what happens at Porte de la Chapelle.” Many liberals have downplayed the homeless crisis, rather than discuss potential solutions. “We turn a blind eye to this issue, just to look generous,” Bruckner said. At one point in my conversation with Lévy, he flatly declared that France “has no refugees.” Far-right figures, for their part, have relentlessly exploited Paris’s problems on social media, posting inflammatory videos that make it seem like marauding migrants have taken over every street corner. Jean-Yves Camus, a scholar of the far right in France (and no relation to Renaud Camus), told me that there is a problematic lack of candor in the way that liberals describe today’s unidirectional mass movement of peoples. “It depends what you call Frenchness,” he said. “If you think that traditional France, like we used to see in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, should survive and remain, then certainly it will not survive. This is the truth. So I think we have to admit that, contrary to what Lévy says, there has been a change.” But what, exactly, does the notion of “traditional France” imply? The France of de Gaulle—or of Racine— differs in many ways from the France of today, not just in ethnic composition. Renaud Camus recently told Vox that white people in France are living “under menace”—victims of an unchecked foreign assault “as much by black Africa as it is by Northern Islamic Africans.” Yet feminism, Starbucks, the smartphone, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, the global domination of English, EasyJet, Paris’s loss of centrality in Western cultural life—all of these developments have disrupted what it means “to be French.” The problem with identitarianism isn’t simply that it is nostalgic; it’s that it fixates on ethnicity to the exclusion of all else. The United States is not Western Europe. Not only is America full of immigrants; they are seen as part of what makes America American. Unlike France, the United States has only ever been a nation in the legal sense, even if immigration was long restricted to Europeans, and even if the Founding Fathers organized their country along the bloody basis of what we now tend to understand as white supremacy. The fact remains that, unless you are Native American, it is ludicrous for a resident of the United States to talk about “blood and soil.” And yet the country has nonetheless arrived at a moment when once unmentionable ideas have gone mainstream, and the most important political division is no longer between left and right but between globalist and nationalist. “The so-called New Right never claimed to change the world,” Alain de Benoist wrote to me. Its goal, he said, “was, rather, to contribute to the intellectual debate, to make known certain themes of reflection and thought.” On that count, it has proved a smashing success. Glucksmann summed up the Nouvelle Droite’s thinking as follows: “Let’s just win the cultural war, and then a leader will come out of it.” The belief that a multicultural society is tantamount to an anti-white society has crept out of French salons and all the way into the Oval Office. The apotheosis of right-wing Gramscism is Donald Trump. On August 11th, the Unite the Right procession marched through the campus of the University of Virginia. White-supremacist protesters mashed together Nazi and Confederate iconography while chanting variations of Renaud Camus’s grand remplacement credo: “You will not replace us”; “Jews will not replace us.” Few, if any, of these khaki-clad young men had likely heard of Guillaume Faye, Renaud Camus, or Alain de Benoist. They didn’t know that their rhetoric had been imported from France, like some dusty wine. But they didn’t need to. All they had to do was pick up the tiki torches and light them.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

This article appears in the print edition of the December 4, 2017, issue, with the headline ““You Will Not Replace Us”.” 

Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contributing writer for the Times Magazine, is a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is at work on a book about racial identity.

[aergiawrites]

hello lgbt rp net!! i thought i would introduce some queer content and oc’s i would like to roleplay. i play m/f/nb and every combination in between, especially queer folks of colour

this plot about karen fukuhara fc, a jrock musician falling in love with margot robbie fc, who works for her band’s label. they look so good how can u resist. 

a dev patel fc for my architecture student suraj sharma who is closeted, like long hair dev, maybe he’s some lumberjack hipster? they’re each other’s manic pixie dream boys

something super gay and tumultuous for my fashionista im jinah with commitment issues raised by hippies who loves deeply but cannot keep people around

a tiana tolstoi fc for my former olympian xiao wen ju, like a roommate, bff, lover, anything!! 

an angsty and tragic unrequited love for my stressed lesbian maia mitchell, preferably like a best friend or childhood friend. she’s socially terrible and has a smoking habit she’s gotta stop

historical m/m soldiers plot so like first/second world war, i’d like to use dylan sprayberry. please. 

m/m warm bodies plot imagine tol zombie boi and smol zombie hunter

my trans male sunshine hairstylist tyler posey needs some domestic and fluff

a fan friendship/relationship with my nb youtuber hayley kiyoko, inspired by this

asexual rep! my asexual eiza gonzalez who is a dental assistant and part-time strip club waitress needs some rad plots i can’t believe i have to beg @heteros 

i also have asexual comedian and polyglot algee smith/brandon mychal smith who is bitter and monotone but needs sitcom-like friends to bring him out of his creative slump. he’s biromantic but i think his character dev needs platonic

sci-fi / space verses!!! pls. gays in space, i love....

thank you!!! i hope u are interested and everything is negotiable/flexible. 

[jarzleninz-blog]

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At Your English is Awesome, we believe that English scholars are entitled to the confidence they’ve earned by putting in the immeasurable amount of time and effort it takes to learn a foreign language, let alone the time needed to be able to communicate in one! We are advocates and HUGE fans of the the English learner—we are humbled and awed by their ability, dedication, and hard work.  Those who have been able to make a life for themselves through their achievement and mastery of the English language are most lauded.  

Scholars from countries around the world including Korea, China, Thailand, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Russia, Brazil, and everywhere else wheres English language learners are fervently working to master their goals.

We’d like to give the gift of easy, simple, quick results, that work! Our techniques offer another way; a short cut, a back door, an all access pass to English speaking confidence.  Step inside and join us!

The Birth of a Mouth Hacker

I have had the distinct privilege of being a teacher, tutor, mentor, and friend to people who look, think, act, and speak differently from me.  I have lived among and interacted with people from cultures different from my own, and have played and adventured with people whose cultures and customs are so vastly different, being among them was much like living in an alternate universe.  And in all I have done, in everything I have seen, I have been humbled, moved to tears, heartened, disheartened, inspired, and awed by the experience.

People who I am very different from took me under their wings, invited me into their inner worlds, opened their homes and shared their lives and their sacred stories with me. Having found myself as a stranger in a foreign land on multiple occasions, I have also been struck and struck again by a common theme that seemed to connect the many people I had come into contact with.  It is simply put, the reverence and fear of the English language.

I have wanted to both shake and hug the people who uttered the sentence, “I’m sorry, my English is not so good,” as I understood what they where telling me and as I empathized so wholeheartedly with all that uttering that sentence implied.

As a polyglot and avid linguaphile, I understand that feeling. As if someone has pried open your jaws, snaked inside your throat and siphoned out all of the words that just moments ago were crowding your mind and moving and shoving past each other to try to race to the tip of your tongue, where they then just simply vanished.

I have taught high school students whose sense of self worth was directly tethered to their ability to speak English.  They enviously and helplessly looked on while the younger students who had been immersed in it from a younger age, out performed them in every category of their English learning. I have seen grown adults walking towards me on a crowded street, notice me, gasp, and literally run in the other direction out of sheer terror that I might come at them in English.

I have been approached by college students relaying their frustration and dismay at having to study and perform under the guidance of a lecturer whose English they could not begin to decipher. And I have sat amongst dear friends in silence, them refusing to speak out of fear that their words might come out wrong.

And I dreamed and dreamed of a way to help-of a way to connect confidence with learner.  I harnassed all of my experience and all of my knowledge of English teaching.  I slowed down and held each English word and sound in my mouth. I savored how they moved and felt rolling on the tongue, against the teeth, how they rumbled in the throat, and danced on the lips. I observed and researched and tested, and tested again.  And I came to find that many of the sounds that were elusive to English language learners, were there hiding in plain sight, just within reach, of nearly every English language learner’s grasp.  

I packaged it and tried to make it accessible, fun and quick, entertaining and easy to use.  If you are or know of an English scholar who is struggling to master pronunciation and fluency, send them my way and we’ll soon get them sorted and well on their way to being connected to their confidence.

[kundanlalchauhan]

April 10, 2020 at 01:24PM 100+ Important Vocab Words Compilation For SSC CGL And SSC CPO Exam 2020 : FREE PDF

Vocabulary is an important section of SSC CGL or any other exam preparation. Questions related to vocabulary are being asked in CGLTier 1 as well as CGL Tier 2. So, you cannot do without getting a hold of vocabulary. There are many books available in the market solely dedicated to vocabulary building for competitive exams. Nevertheless, there are also many effective ways of acquiring as much as the vocabulary you want to, given the surge of technology that surrounds us. These days everybody carries a phone, and every phone has a voice recorder in it. Let us shed some light on simple ways for vocabulary building and most important vocabulary for SSC CGL and other examination. To provide a vast collection of error-free content for SSC exams, we are extending the quality of study material to the apex. We wish you all the best for your exams.

Contents

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List Important Root Word

1.  Chron     =  time

     Chronology    =  arrangement of events in order of occurrence 

     Chronicle     =  historical record 

     Chronograph    =  a stop watch that records time with great accuracy

     Chronic    =  lasting a long time Chronometer    =  time piece 

2.  Morph    =  form

     Morphology    =  form and structure of an organism 

     Metamorphosis  =  change of form 

3.  Poly      =  many

     Polyglot    =  competent in many languages 

     Polygon    =  a geometrical plane figure with three or more straight line 

     Polynomial  =  used to describe a mathematical expression with more two terms

4.  Meter      =  measure

     Ammeter    =   device used to measure current

     Voltmeter    =  device used to measure 

     Voltage Altimeter    =  device that measure altitude

     Pedometer    =  instrument used to measure distance covered by walking 

5. Gam      =   marriage

    Monogamist    =   married to one person

    Bigamist    =  married to two people 

    Polygamist    =  married to many 

    Misogamist    =  one who hate marriage 

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List of Important Addiction to (Mania) 

Alcohol    = dipsomania 

Books       = bibliomania  

Bridges    = gephyromania 

Cats          = ailuromania

Crowds    = demomania, ochlomania 

Dead bodies  = mecromania 

Death        = thnatomania 

Dogs         = cynomania 

Drugs        =narcomania 

Eating       =phagomania, stomania 

Fire-raising   = pyromania 

Flowers     =anthomania 

Horses      = Hippomania 

Stealing    =kleptomania 

Surgery or under going surgery    = tomomania 

Talking   = logomania, verbomania 

Travelling   = dromomania, hodomania, poriomania 

Work   = ergomania  

List of Important Excessive fear of (phobia) 

Aeroplanes or flying     = aerophobia, pterophobia 

Animals                         = Zoophobia  

 Bees                              = apiophobia, melissophobia 

Birds                              = ornithophobia

 Blood                            =  haemophobia, haematophobia 

Bridges                           = gephyrophobia 

 Cats                               = ailurophobia, gatophobia

 Children                         = paedophobia

 Choking                         = pnigophobia   

Cold                                = psychrophobia, cheimophobia, Confined-spaces  claustrophobia

 Crowds                          = ochlophobia, demophobia 

Dark                                = Scotophobia, nyctophobia, achluophobia

 Death or dead bodies     =  necrophobia, thantophobia

 Depths, deep places       = bathophobia  

 Deserts, dry places         =  xerophobia 

Dirt                                  = rupophobia 

Dogs                                = cynophobia 

Drinking or drunkenness   = dipsophobia  

Fear, being alarmed         = phobophobia 

Fire                                  = pyrophobia 

 Loneliness                      = eremirophobia, autophobia, monophobia 

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List of Important One Word Subtitution 

Adapted for both land and water   =  amphibious

 Anything that lasts for a short time   = transient 

Area of land almost surrounded by sea   = peninsula

 One who is neither dull nor intelligent    = mediocre  

 One who works for the welfare for others   = altruist 

Organization with grades of authority   = hierarchy 

Person against the use of images/idols    = iconoclast 

Person who caters to the rich   =  sycophant 

A person who pretends to be virtuous    = hypocrite 

Person who rescue somebody from dangers   = savior

 A letter whose writer is unknown    = anonymous

 Government by a king   = monarchy

 Government by the people    = democracy 

A tank for plants and fishes    = aquarium 

A place where mad men are kept   = lunatic asylum 

A place where health is recouped    = sanatorium

 A person who lives in a foreign country    = alien 

Hobby of stamp collection   = philately 

Animals that live in water    = aquatic

One who is indifferent to pain and happiness    = stoic 

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[eurolinguiste]

The following post is a guest post from fellow language learner and musician Fiel Sahir. He came to me with this excellent idea on how to apply music study techniques to language learning and I just love what he came up with. 

So take it away, Fiel!

This is it.

Lots of crazy things going on in the world, so it’s time to bring in some positive energy. Let’s make 2017 something worth looking back on.

Losing weight is good, hiking up Everest is always prospect, as is finally getting to those cooking classes. There are always more ideas floating around than we realistically have time for. It’s hard to know what to choose.

Already, it’s February. There’s a pretty good chance that so far, you’re not quite where you want to be with your goals for the new year. Kinda frustrating, isn’t it?

Maybe trying to tackle Mandarin from scratch was too difficult, and now it’s crunch time at work. All those characters! UGH! If only the boss was more lenient so that you’d have a bit more free time. Or maybe you were still just wishing you had a better plan or strategy.

As humans we often tend to think too big. We love to dream about end results as if they were as easy as picking an apple off a tree. It’s easy to forget that there’s work that needs to go on behind the scenes to make those end results a reality.

I’m not saying goals and resolutions are bad. Not at all. It’s a sign that you are a responsible individual and that you want to take charge of your life! The world needs people like you.

The problem is that these goals are often too big.

As the days roll by, life happens. You’ve find your progress up that mountain has halted and you’re frustrated about why you aren’t at the peak yet. You start to wonder if you’ll ever arrive.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way to learn languages?

What makes ordinary people do great things is not because they themselves were great. Rather, it’s all about how normal people tackle great adversity.

If you’re short on time, and want to get to the specifics there’s a detailed video explaining how things work in this post.

What in the world is chunking?

I’ll let you in on a secret: Just doing something repetitively won’t solve your problems.

Instead, you need to be more mindful of how you spend your study time and develop a series of tactics that work for you. Chunking is a technique that musicians use and I’ve also found it useful in language learning and it may be the right choice for you.

For those of you unfamiliar with chunking, it is the practice of breaking things down into bitesize pieces. Whether you like it or not, your brain can only process a limited amount of information. You cannot absorb everything at once. But if you give it breathing room, the brain can absorb more effectively.

Let’s say you want to go to the US for college. It’s tempting to throw up your hands in desperation exclaiming, “OH MY GOD. I HAVE TO LEARN ENGLISH!!” While that may be your current mountain, take a breath. Do what Benny Lewis the Irish Polyglot does instead:

“Today I need to learn how to introduce myself. Tomorrow I’d like to order a coffee. Hmm… maybe I’d like to talk with a waitress at a café today.”

See how much less pressure that carries? You can even go further still!

You might find something similar to the following dialogue in your course book: Jack: Hey! My name’s Jack. Where are you from? Ann: Oh, hi! I’m Ann. Nice to meet you! I’m from Seattle. Jack: Nice… I’m from Nebraska. It’s a pretty cold place. I hear Seattle gets TONS of rain!

Let’s say this is your first ever English dialogue. What the heck is Nebraska? After looking it up, you breathe a sigh of relief. It’s just a place name.

You naturally read it over and over again from beginning to end and soon find the rhythm in your voice. After having done that multiple times, you realize it’s not sinking in as well as you hoped. You look at it and shake your head thinking, “How can I learn this in the most efficient way possible?”

Spending a lot of time on something doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get anything done…. Click To Tweet

Simple Repetition isn’t the Answer

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Unknown but falsely attributed to Einstein

I recently sat down with a polyglot friend over Skype who wanted some guitar advice before he recorded a video for YouTube.

One of his enduring questions was, “Do you ever get stuck in a song and then have to play from the beginning all over again? I never seem able to just pick up where I messed up!“

I then asked him how he was practicing, and therein lay the answer.

For anyone who’s studied music (particularly classical), this is a problematic reality. Many people look at sheet music and “practice” by playing from beginning to end.

While a Freshman at the New England Conservatory, that was my routine. I thought, as long as I spent two hours on this piece everyday, it would get better. Two hours of putting something on repeat and stopping to fix mistakes only once as you plow through doesn’t do much. Why? Because you’ll only make them again. You’re not giving your brain enough time to process and reprogram what you’ve learned.

Just as you can learn to play the right notes, you can also program yourself to play mistakes. And…

Mistakes don’t fix themselves. If they do, it’s never at the speed you need or want. This problem plagues everyone from the amateur to the seasoned professional. Music is enjoyable and it’s easy to get lost in it.

“Playing is simply intoxicating!” – Adam Holzman, Classical Guitarist and Pedagogue

One of the problems many musicians face is relying too much on muscle memory. On the other hand, language learners focus too much on the script in front of them. After spending a good amount of time with the music or text you begin to feel pretty great.

The reason is, no one is there to judge but ourselves.

Then comes the moment when you have to practice in front of our language partner or tutor. Half a sentence leaves our lips, and then our nerves kick in and you forget the rest. This happens multiple times within one session. It’s pretty embarrassing!

Everyone has problems and challenges. Nothing new. How you address them, especially through chunking will change everything.

Building better “practice” habits.

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” – Doug Yeo former BSO Bass Trombonist

Being a Classical Guitarist by trade, these are techniques I’ve learned over the years that push me in the right direction. I’m in the business of having to learn music for concerts and competitions. Without these ideas, I’d end up just playing my pieces over and over again.

What I’m about to describe is invaluable information. It’s the behind-the-scenes work of professional musicians and actors. It’s how they perfect their craft. I’m sure Shannon can attest to having used these techniques herself.

1. Take it slow, phrase by phrase.

Ignore the temptation is to take it in all at once. Don’t forget the brain can only process a certain amount of information.

As you look at a dialogue, feel the words in your mouth, and the weird shapes and sounds of this new language. Give your body time to adjust. It’s like stretching into a new yoga pose.

Maybe your accent is really bothering you and you’re not sure how to fix it. There is hope!

I highly recommend Idahosa Ness’ MimicMethod or Gabriel Wyner’s Pronunciation-Trainers. What makes them work is the musical philosophy behind their methods.

“If you can’t hear it you can’t imitate (pronounce) it.”

2. Prioritize.

Scratch out words you do know and circle ones you don’t.

Take charge by deciding what is priority and work with that. Knowing how to say “Nice to meet you” is much more important than knowing what Nebraska is.

Sorry Nebraskans…

3. Drill it again and again.

Although it may sound like it, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do repetitions.

What makes musicians learn music quickly is by changing how you repeat! Artists make it fun and useful. Keeping it varied also helps avoid burn-out.

Try the following options:

Read a phrase syllable by syllable.

Again, but this time In different rhythms or speeds.

Use what opera singers and actors call “back-chaining.” Back-chaining is the practice of going backwards and building up a word one syllable at a time. (More on this in the video.)

4. Record yourself at normal speed to listen to and identify problems.

After practicing something for awhile it’s easy to feel proud of yourself. Sometimes you might even feel as though you can take on the world.

The fix for that is recording yourself. Why?

Once you hit the record button, something clicks. You’ll be making mistakes you’ve never made before and it’ll show you what to improve. Being under stress no matter how small, produces changes in performance.

Speaking of which, Lindsay Does Languages is doing what’s called the Instagram Language Challenge (#IGLC). I can tell you from personal experience that it’s nerve wracking. So why do I still do it? Because afterwards, I can evaluate my mistakes and fix them! The other participants are also quite helpful in correcting any mistakes. And best of all, it’s FREE.

5. Practice again with these new ideas

Review the various points as well as the video. As you wrestle with the ideas I’ve shared with you, adjust them to how you learn best. Our goal is to turn you into a highly effective independent learner.

6. Go public!

Assuming you haven’t already done this step, going public sets you up for accountability. When people are watching what you’re doing, you’re less likely to slack off.

One last idea. Never be afraid to keep asking for a second opinion. When you let others check your progress, you’ll find that their insight is priceless.

Now, enough theory. Go practice!

There’s a lot of information here in this post, so feel free to come back to it whenever you’re feeling stuck.

For now, get out there and apply what you’ve learnt today. Whether it be language learning, cooking, music practice, it’s time to do things better.

Here’s to a productive 2017!

Want more tips on language learning from a musical perspective? Be sure to check out Fiel’s presentation at the Polyglot Gathering in 2016.

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The post How to use Chunking to Fire up your Language Learning appeared first on Eurolinguiste.

[learnspanishfans]

How Do Spies Hide Their Accent?

Want to know how to improve your accent in a new language? In 2010, eleven people blew the minds of their friends and neighbours. Their arrests by the United States government revealed that they weren’t simply “normal” Americans, living the suburban dream. It turned out that they were intelligence agents, collecting information to send back to their native country of Russia. Many of them had gone undetected for years. How on earth had they achieved this? Put simply, they blended in. They looked, acted and sounded like any other American living in the United States. They mimicked the local culture. These spies achieved something that many language learners struggle with – they mastered an accent to the point where they were indistinguishable from native speakers.

How Exactly Do Spies Hide Their Accents?

A intelligence agent who had lived undercover in the United States for over 20 years gave an interview describing his experience after he’d returned to Russia. In the interview, he was asked how he was able to fool those around him for such an extended period of time. His answer was quite simple – he’d stopped speaking Russian and conversed entirely in English or French, no matter where he was at the time.

“ You cannot use your native tongue, even at home; you have to be a control freak. That said, after working for several years, it comes naturally to you. You even have dreams in other languages.” - Andrei Bezrukov

How do spies get to this point? This is information that countries such as the United States and Russia keep very close to their chests – but from general understanding, it’s due to hours upon hours of study in intensive training programmes. Intelligence agents are made to concentrate solely on their pursuit of mastering both the language and accent of the country they plan to infiltrate. Spies-in-training spend up to eight hours a day in language classes, along with at least a couple of hours of homework per night. It’s a hard slog that pays off when in six months’ time you may not be able to single them out as anything other than native speakers. Unfortunately, not all of us have the same amount of time on our hands. So what do you do if you want to master the accent of a foreign country, but your resources aren’t exactly in the same ballpark as those of the Russian or US military? I have a few ideas for how to improve your accent. Read on to find out more.

How to Improve Your Pronunciation and Accent (5 Steps)

Step 1: Find a Native Speaker of Your Target Language

Ideally, you’d want to find native speakers of your target language - then talk to them! You’ll hear the inflections and tones of the language and your ear will start honing itself to these sounds. Also, it never hurts to have someone on hand to help you when you get stuck on a pronunciation or are having trouble rolling your ‘r’s. However, sometimes this is easier said than done – particularly if you don’t live in a big city, or you’re learning a less common language. What can you do if this is you? One of my favourite resources for practising with native speakers is italki. italki helps you find language teachers to Skype with online. It’s helped me out in several situations. I used italki to learn Mandarin Chinese when I was living in Taipei, because it turned out to be a much cheaper option than having lessons in person. There have even been times where I learned a language before travelling, such as when I learned Egyptian Arabic while living in Brazil. I was fluent to the point where I could walk into the Egyptian Embassy in Brasília and apply for my visa – speaking entirely in Egyptian Arabic. Skype lessons were key in achieving this conversational fluency. What if you’re learning a language that’s not spoken by many people? I’ve heard about people learning less common languages who have had issues trying to track down a native speaker. Here’s an option: extend your search from native speakers to fellow learners who are at a more advanced level than you. You can use the language option on italki and untick “native speaker”. Alternatively, meet up in person. Couchsurfing and Meetup are great for finding other language learners in your town or city. Chatting with native speakers online isn’t the only thing you can do to improve your accent...

Step 2: Get Cultural Immersion with Radio and TV

Television is brilliant for language learning – if you approach it the right way. You can find many foreign shows (with subtitles!) online. Movies are handy too – as long as you remember there is a right and wrong way to use films to learn a language. Watching the news is particularly valuable. News anchors and journalists enunciate clearly and use correct pronunciation. Pro-tip: watch news shows on YouTube, and slow the videos down using the video settings button. You can slow videos to quarter speed. Similarly, radio is a helpful resource, particularly for learning on the go. The radio app TuneIn has radio stations in most major languages. Likewise, Spotify has an excellent selection of music from around the world. Through the use of these resources, you’ll be tuning your ear to the inflections, tones and general pronunciations of your target language, which will in turn make it easier for you to master the accent. REMEMBER: watching TV or listening to the radio is not an excuse to switch off your brain. Passive learning on its own does not work! You need to be actively studying what you are watching/listening to. Radio and TV should should be just one tool in your language learning toolbox – it’s difficult to maintain any progress if you rely on them alone.

Step 3: Stick Post-Its Around Your Home

A great way to improve your pronunciation of words is with forced repetition. Try this: label some key items around the house with Post-Its. Don’t forget to add the articles before the words if you’re learning a language that uses them, such as un/une/des in French. This will help you avoid confusion in the future. Beneath the name of the item, write how it’s pronounced. Soon enough, you’ll be able to remember both the word and the pronunciation.

Step 3: Record Yourself Speaking

Recording yourself - and listening back to it - is one of the most powerful hacks I know for improving pronunciation. Does the idea of it make you cringe? You’re not alone. Many people experience waves of revulsion whenever they hear an audio clip of themselves talking. Over time you’ll get used to it - especially once you’ve realised how powerful it is. Use the voice recorder on your phone to record yourself saying phrases or words you’ve had difficulty pronouncing. Then, get ruthless! Listen to yourself as though you were listening to someone else. Start with being kind. Celebrate the small victories – such as mastering a word you have previously had issues with. Then, pick apart the mistakes. Identify which words need improvement and go to town on them! What if you’re unsure if you’ve got the correct pronunciation? Find a native speaker, and ask them for feedback on your recording. You could even ask them to record a word that you’re having difficulty with, for reference.

Step 5: Check Out the Mimic Method

My friend and fellow polyglot Idahosa Ness has spent years developing a system that has helped thousands of people lose their strong “foreign” accent when speaking a new language. Mimic Method takes you through the component sounds of a language: the rhythm, the beat, the musicality and individual sounds, and how they all tie together. And it shows you exactly what steps to take to develop a more authentic accent. The Mimic Method offers accent training for:

English

Spanish

French

Portuguese

Mandarin

German

Italian

Japanese

Click the language you want to learn to find out more about how to improve your accent and pronunciation when you’re speaking.

You Don’t Have to Be a Spy to Master An Accent

Don’t worry – you can breathe a sigh of relief! You don’t need to go through intensive spy training to master a foreign accent. You just need to practise and tune your ear to the language you’re learning. Don’t be scared to seek assistance from those more advanced in the language than you. Do you have any tips or tricks for pronunciation that you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments.

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