uneducatedscholar - Tumblr blog

[uneducatedscholar]

i love hatletters but i gotta say. ë is not wearing a hat.

ë is wearing these. beautiful. toptop.

im remaking the poll here tho. now with more hats.

oh noo

i forgor to add ë!!!!

:(

[uneducatedscholar]

Since I finished my MA today I am no longer a future translator. I'm a fully qualified translator.

[uneducatedscholar]

languages will make rules and then be like. actually nah

[uneducatedscholar]

How to find a language partner

Regardless of whether you're learning for fun, to boost your career, to get in touch with your culture, or for travel, you'll definitely need a language partner at some point, mainly for speaking practise.

You can repeat the same textbook dialogue all you want, but unless you actually practise what you learn with someone else, whether it's a native speaker, your grandmother or your classmate, achieving a near perfect or fluent level will be really difficult.

Here are my top suggestions for finding a language partner!

1. Your local language Institute

The German Geothe Institute, or the Mandarin Confucius Institute or any other Centre - they all usually hold mixers and get-to-knows, so attending one of their events is a great way of meeting fellow language learners and native speakers, who you can study with, and become friends with.

You don't necessarily need to be a member or a student of these organizations, but its always a good idea to check as different countries and regions may have their own specifications.

2. Use apps

Tandem, HelloTalk etc. Pretty decent way of meeting native speakers who want to learn your language, so it works out quite well.

The downside is that online platforms can be full of creepy people that will often derail the conversation into something unexpectedly inappropriate , so stay safe out there.

3. Your university or school clubs

Many unis have language or cultural clubs, so ask around to see if there's a club out there for your target learning language. You can learn quite a lot, and not just the language, but also about recepies, lesser known customs etc. Quite an amazing option, so try it out.

If not, chances are there might be a group in your city, so check out the Facebook groups. There's probably something out there.

4. Friend of a friend of a friend chain

That's the beauty of connections. Your friends cousin might be friends with a native speaker of the language you're learning, who's studying in the same city as you are.

Don't be afraid to reach out, or to ask your friend to pass along your request. If it doesn't work out, then hey. There are always going to be opportunities, so don't stress it.

[uneducatedscholar]

Duolingo going strong today

[uneducatedscholar]

German Is Weird

In German we have two words for owner: “Besitzer”, which is used for inanimate objects and “Halter” (which literally translates to “holder”), which is used for livestock and pets.

But sometimes we also call car owners “Fahrzeughalter” (literally translated: vehicle holder) and this means that, to Germans, cars are alive, similar to pets and livestock and I think that’s beautiful.

[uneducatedscholar]

Other langblrs: *Grammar books, vocabulary lists, artsy notes, nice stationary, language learning software*

Me:

[uneducatedscholar]

Accidentally discovered the word for smallpox misspelling ослепительно (dazzling)

[uneducatedscholar]

English spelling isn't that hard to understand as long as you also understand French orthography, Dutch orthography, the Great Vowel Shift, the Latin language, the history of the printing press, and the etymology of every word introduced to English in the last 600 years

[uneducatedscholar]

Geographical Distribution of Native English Speakers

[uneducatedscholar]

noticing as I learn different languages I tend to think using the shortest word from any of those languages, so for example instead of "this is" or "dette er", I'll just automatically think "c'est"

So my proposal is a creole of every language in which we find the shortest syllabic way to say every single word and speak at maximum efficiency

[uneducatedscholar]

A1-A2: man, there're so many words I need to know in order to say literally anything

B1-B2: wow, what I know is enough now

C1-C2: man, there're so many weirdly specific words I need to know in order to describe these weirdly specific things I've only seen once in my life. Also I forgot how to say ceiling.

[uneducatedscholar]

"¿Qué tiene de sorprendente eso?" But "¿Qué es soprendente?" What is going on that turns "ser" into "tener"?

It's an idiom

It's the difference between "what's surprising?" [ser] and "what part of this is surprising?" [tener]

If you say no tiene nada de gracia it means "there's nothing funny about this" or simply "it isn't funny"

tener de (algo) is very common as far as "to be" or "to have the quality of"

[uneducatedscholar]

Took me four hours but I was able to convert and format a Mandarin epub to include pinyin notation above the text:

Technical details below for anyone interested

I was trying to do this on my personal laptop, which is, unfortunately, Windows. I found two GitHub projects that looked promising: pinyin2epub and epub-with-pinyin and spent most of my time trying to get python to work. I wasn't able to get the second project to work, but I was eventually able to get some output with the pinyin2epub project.

The output was super messy though, with each word appearing on a different line. The script output the new ePub where all the tags that encapsulated every word and pinyin were on a new line, as well as having a ton of extra spacing.

I downloaded Calibre and edited the epub. With the help of regex search and replace I was able to adjust the formatting to what is shown in the picture above.

All in all, I'm fairly happy with it although it does fail to load correctly in any mobile ePub reader I've tried so far ( I have an Android). I think it's the <ruby> tags are either unsupported or cause a processing error entirely depending on the app.

Once I have motivation again I'd love to try to combine the original text epub with a translated epub. My idea here is that there would be a line of the original text above followed by a line of the translate text so on and so forth. I'd probably need to script something for this, maybe it could look for paragraph tags and alternate from two input files. I'd have to think about it a bit more though.

Unfortunately my Mandarin isn't yet strong enough to read the novels I'm interested in entirely in the original language, but I'd love to be able to quickly reference the original text to see what word or character they used, or how a phrase is composed

Feel free to ask if you want to try to do this and need any clarification. The crappy screenshot and lack of links because I'm on my phone and lazy.

[uneducatedscholar]

I just read a sentence in my target language without even realising that I was understanding it.

I just wanted to share that achievement with you.

[uneducatedscholar]

when you KNOW you're using the right kana but your keyboard is stubbornly refusing to give you the kanji you need

[uneducatedscholar]

3 is a common substitute for ꜣ, which is how Egyptologists romanise the Egyptian Aleph, which sounded like [ʀ] (similar to the French/German R and the Dutch G) so everytime I read stuff like ao3 and bd3 I read them like A'oRRR and BadaRRR.