rainy days and starry nights

ll minor ll she/theyll

[miiriya]

[shareddreamingexperiment]

yea bud! i was on the grind nonstop for a few months until my body said haha watch THIS! and took me out of work for 3 weeks

[rhube]

Sometimes, it will take the rest of your life.

I can’t stress this enough. I wish I could get through to everyone I know. If you try to organise and be productive with every minute of your day, eventually, your body will pull the rug out from under you in a dramatic fashion, and you may end up being able to do very little at all, in a world that has no sympathy for people who need to rest.

So rest now. And work on making sure the people around you know it’s OK to rest.

And don’t feel guilty for resting. Practice telling yourself that rest - quality rest, where you’re not stressing about something you feel you ought to be doing - is actually a productive thing to do for your body.

You are an animal. You need to respect that animal’s needs. That includes laying about doing nothing as much as it does enrichment and running about.

Even your fucking computer gets overheated and slow if you don’t allow it to shut down and update sometimes (which is actually a lot of what sleep does for humans, btw). You eve notice how sometimes your browser just crashes sometimes because you have too many tabs open, or one of the tabs is causing the whole machine to run slowly?

So don’t tell yourself you want to work like a machine because guess what? Machines fucking fall over all the time if you overload them, try to do too many things at once, or don’t let them rest.

Rest knits up the ravelled edge of care.

[mercurialmedusienne]

If you don’t make time for your wellness, you will make time for your illness.

[the-haiku-bot]

If you don’t make time

for your wellness, you will make

time for your illness.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[homunculus-argument]

You know, when you're young, people saying "it gets better" or "it will pass" sound like bullshit, and they don't help, because they're consolations of people who have forgotten how it feels to be in the middle of something.

When you're like 15 or 20, shit that's been going on for 15 or 20 years is shit that's always been, and as far as you can sensibly predict, always will be. It feels insane to try to work towards something that's never existed for you, that you're expected to blindly trust is supposed to be there, just because people who aren't like you or haven't been like you keep telling you that they are real and you should work towards them.

But you know what? The better is possible. It is possible to have a life you don't hate, to wake up in the mornings glad that you woke up, looking forward to getting to do the things you do today, and go to bed every night looking forward to things you get to do tomorrow. Being a person you want to be.

It feels like annoying nonsense to hear that 10, 15 or 20 years is "such a short time" when that's your whole life. It feels like nonsense to be told that there's ways out of despair when doing one good thing every day doesn't seem to build up to anything. But carrying one brick every day is seven in a week, thirty in a month, and over 3000 in ten years. You can build a lot of things with 3000 bricks.

Just doing the smallest thing every day, one day you'll blink and realise you've reached an age where things you thought were for good, things that were all you've ever known, suddenly have become "the way things were when I was a kid", and "the way I used to be when I was younger."

There is nothing harder than to go on when you've lost all hope that there is anything ahead. Time passes inevitably, but one brick every day builds foundations faster than you realise.

[mentalhealth]

thoughts on people who call themselves ‘mentally ill’ as a joke?

I think they need to be educated as to why that is offensive to people who experience mental illness.

I’ve been in positions with friends who’ve made jokes like that and most times felt immobilized by fear to communicate why it was offensive. I was always left feeling terrible for not standing up for myself and others, especially as someone who feels strongly about de-stigmatizing it. Other times I mustered up the courage to challenge that fear and communicated why it was offensive and it was more often than not received with an openness to listen and understand. That will not always be the case, but it’s something I’m committed to continue trying and I hope others do, too.

[mentalhealth]

Also, this is meant for people who don’t experience mental illness but joke about it. I’ve used self-deprecating humor when it comes to mental illness as means of coping or finding relief in having it. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about, though, in terms of whether it causes more harm than not. I respect anyone who doesn’t think it’s okay to use self-deprecating humor when it comes to mental illness even if the person using it has a mental illness themselves. Open to hearing thoughts about this.

[witherether]

the worst beauty misconception dark girls are fed is that they can’t experiment with their look

you can go as loud as you want

or keep it simple

stick to the neutrals 

or go on all out galaxy chic

go out sultry

or go out sweet

cause your skin is so versatile

that there’s no such thing as “the right colour”

be a goddamn mermaid if you like

 dress down

or up

go natural

or not

you’ll still look flawless

so go ahead and shower in gold

or do nothing at all

cause at the end of the day

you’re still a queen

[onlywhenimhonest]

You wanna talk representation? Before Tumblr, I never experimented with color, hair or makeup-wise. I’d heard too many people correlate black women and bright colors as ‘ghetto’. Posts like these are So important. So incredibly important. 

Thank you

[pouty-nymph-deactivated20180201]

But for real yall some goddesses

[thatsthat24]

Such absolute beauty here

[bulletnotestudies]

Winter Reading Challenge book recommendations ❆

…. we just couldn’t settle on only 4 recs for this prompt, so have 8 instead! to avoid clogging up people’s dashes, we hid some of the blurbs beneath the cut.

The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutskie

Cas Leung, a Reckoner-trainer-in-training, has been around sea monsters raised to defend ships from pirates all her life. But when her first solo mission goes awry and she falls into the hands of the pirate queen Santa Elena, she is suddenly training a Reckoner pup to defend the ship she was always taught to destroy. Or - sea monsters, morally grey lesbian pirates, enemies to lovers, there-was-only-one-bed, handcuffed-together central. (blurb by our brilliant @asteristudy)

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

A historical coming of age story, set in the 1950s San Francisco, following a 17 year old heroine, growing up as Chinese American at the time of the Red Scare, through family bonds and conflict, her sapphic awakening and so much more. Also, this novel really highlights the importance of representation. (blurb by the lovely @kkul-bee)

Snapdragon by Kat Leyh

A sweet and endearingly weird graphic novel following Snap, who just wants to rescue opossum babies but accidentally befriends the local witch. Things may or may not spiral from there. (blurb by our amozing @upside-down-uni)

People Notice the Rain by Cindy Paul

A beautiful, smoothly unravelling narrative meets truly atmospheric writing in this story of growth and trust, with the added sprinkle of the supernatural. Fresh and exciting, and most importantly, inclusive in a way that feels as effortless as breathing. Truly worth picking up, even if werewolf stories aren’t your cup of tea - this just might change your opinion (it did mine)(I still cannot believe it). Each book in the trilogy introduces more different identities, ending with, quite literally, a single token straight in the (found) family. Oh, there’s also d&d and gorgeous weather motifs that just tie the tale together perfectly. (blurb by yours truly, @bulletnotestudies)

Keep reading

[somespicyshrimp]

is it just me or is there something sad and kind of insidious about every call for help post having to have some sort of list of identities to persuade you to donate. “i’m a black nonbinary person” “help a disabled jewish lesbian”, that sort of thing. idk there’s just something depressing about struggling people needing to list out their Oppression Categories to strangers on the internet to prove that they’re worthy of assistance. like maybe it’s just me but i feel like if someone’s leaving an abusive partner or their dog is dying or they’re losing their housing in a week, you shouldn’t have to know that they’re also bisexual or autistic or whatever in order to make it worth helping them

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

you hear about recovery not being linear (”there are ups and downs”), but actually it’s more like a game of wack-a-mole. this is not a bad thing

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

to extend the metaphor: when you’re at the beginning of your recover (less kindly known as rock bottom), you have a garden full of moles. you have a mole popping up every 5 seconds, and maybe it’s the same hyperactive mole, maybe it’s a bunch of moles taking turns, but whether they all look the same, you have a garden full of the fuzzy bastards. 

so you pick up a mallet and start hitting. maybe you’re bad at using the mallet, maybe you get better over time, but after a while you get tired, bc you’ve been at it for ages and a mole is still popping up every 5, 10 seconds. what you don’t realize is, you’ve actually nerfed a lot of the moles. it’s just now there’s more space for the other ones to come to the surface and start making noise. but if you keep. swinging. the mallet. eventually they’re gonna slow down. 

My recovery began when I started treating my depression & moved away from an abusive environment. It took a long time for me to realize I was recovering, bc as soon as one thing improved, another popped up. As my depression improved, I became more alert and active–and discovered that my brain fog & self-isolation had inadvertently been covering up my sensory issues. I had enough energy to start school again–and bc I wasn’t sleeping & lounging all day, I was suddenly aware of my concentration issues. One mole bites the dust, another pops up. 

but the secret is: there are a finite number of moles in the universe. 

4 years I’ve been wacking away at these fuckers with a mallet. I’ve taken turns wacking depression and its cronies suicidal ideation & self-harm, followed in succession by previous dormant crap related to anxiety, adhd, spd, c-ptsd, and other 👎 acronyms. And behold: progress. (Atm i’ve finally convinced the furry piece of shit called Executive Dysfunction to come out of the ground, which is exciting bc wrangling this bastard means finally getting to work on longterm personal projects again.)  Moles still pop up from time to time, but my life has a lot more space for me in it

the moral of this story is: if u hit a mole over the head for long and hard enough eventually it learns to mind its own beeswax. KEEP WACKING

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

look what @the-toadish-one​ made!!!

[ironmist]

Realising you don’t have to tell anyone anything about yourself or your life is.. a very liberating feeling.  Realising you can tell the trees and the rivers and the lakes and the mountains instead? Even more so.

[guerrillatech]

[nikkiscarlet]

This was intentionally manufactured by Facebook. Facebook implemented it’s “accountability culture” starting with its rule about only using your real name and photo on its service and encouraging you to disclose other information in your profile, and from there it just got normalized. It was entirely to gather data for advertising purposes, but now we associate that level of openness with “accountability”. Entire generations are now being raised with this as the norm. Privacy is no longer a priority, or even really seen as an option.

This is to your detriment. Your privacy protects you from predators of all kinds. You really should be guarding it carefully. Disclose what you feel is important on a case by case basis, but even your mental health status and beliefs are exploitable by big business and small-time bullies and abusers alike.

Even if you’re not overly fussed about what people know about you, just understand that not everyone has the luxury of feeling the same. Some people have stalkers and abusers they’re trying to evade, or don’t want to attract new abusers into their lives by being that vulnerable and open again. Some people have extreme social anxiety. Some people are protecting other people in their lives. Some people just don’t want their grandmothers to find their smutfics. Some people are Internet privacy advocates who keep their details private as a political statement and as a matter of principle.

You are not entitled to anyone’s information, and you do not owe anyone yours. You are allowed to just be an anonymous username until you feel safe to disclose more.

[octopuscato]

You are not entitled to anyone’s information, and you do not owe anyone yours.

[neurodivergent-noodle-deactivat]

this took me far too long to learn, so I’m going to tell you something that you need to internalise.

you don’t have to tell people anything you don’t want to tell them. it’s not rude or disrespectful to be private about things. you don’t owe anyone that information, so how could it be wrong to withhold it?

queer but don’t want to come out? don’t!

have a trauma disorder but don’t want to tell people what your trauma was? don’t!

disabled but don’t want to talk about it? that’s right, simply do not!

practice telling people to go away when they ask invasive questions.

the responses I’ve been using in particular are “that’s between me and my therapist/doctor”, and “why does it matter to you?”

you don’t need a “reason” to want to keep things to yourself. you don’t need to tell someone your entire history so that they can label you as “valid”.

don’t tell people information you don’t want to share.

[e-the-village-cryptid]

Recently accidentally discovered the best executive dysfunction hack I’ve ever found

Ok so we’ve all heard of tips involving lists, make a list of everything you need to do, cross it out when you’re done, etc.

Well recently next to each item on my list, I wrote down how to start that task. This can be as simple as “get out my notebook and the assignment” or a little more detailed like “open chemistry textbook to page 235 and review the section on gibbs free energy”

Basically, you do all the executive functioning all at once before you start your tasks! Now when you get to the task, your brain doesn’t need to access that executive functioning to figure out how to start, you’ve already done it. Even stupid stuff like “take the assignment out of your backpack” helps a weird amount when it’s written down. Like it helps more than you think it should. I was rolling my eyes up until the point where it worked

[hortensius-deactivated20240909]

what do you mean Just Standing There Ominously doesn’t count as socializing

[catasters]

[kkneesockks]

[productive-tips]

Follow @productive-tips for more tips like this, collected and posted daily! Handpicked and curated with love ❤

[bella-studyblr]

Task Management:

Creating + Maintaining a Schoolwork Schedule

Key elements

Your schedule suits your individual time/task management preferences.

It is flexible enough to accommodate sudden changes, plus fluctuating energy levels, states of concentration, symptoms and moods.

Daily tasks are not over-whelming; they are small enough that they are achievable.

You do not get “burned out.”

It allows you to be consistent.

Steps to create your schedule

Decide if you want your planner to be paper or digital

Find an “order” that’s logical and achievable for you (more on this later)

Refer to your addendum/syllabus and write down all the assignments, tests and other events taking place that week/month (and their due-dates).

Then break these down, assigning tasks to each day of the week (more on this later).

Break down your tasks even further (more on this later).

Decide if you want to follow a simple daily to-do list or a timed schedule (more on this later).

Find your “order(s)”

Mandatory: Schedule assignments around other commitments (work, social, hobbies, etc.).

Do the hardest task first to get it out of the way (so that the rest of your tasks are less daunting, and because your smaller tasks require less energy therefore can be done even after completing the hard task).

Do the easiest task first to build momentum (give yourself a feeling of accomplishment which will motivate you to continue, and boost your self-confidence early in the day to establish a positive mindset for the rest of the day).

Do the task that’s due first to minimize deadline stress, and so your assignments don’t fall through the cracks (causing you to get discouraged and lose momentum).

Plan according to your energy level throughout the day and week: Do you have Pilates once a week? Maybe you can reserve that day for easier assignments. If you know you’re going to be tired for whatever reason, account for that in your planning.

Consider your state of concentration: If you know you’re too groggy or spaced out for the first hour of your day, you can either schedule easy tasks in that time, or none at all. If you take a medication in the afternoon/evening that makes you tired, schedule easier tasks or none, and get harder tasks done earlier/later in the day. If you have ADHD and crowded places mess with your concentration, but you like studying at a café, go when it’s not busy.

Be mindful of your emotions and symptoms: If you have depression, or are prone to depressive episodes, you’ll need to consider that when scheduling. You might have to rework your entire schedule when you get into a depressive episode (like adding lots of breaks). If suddenly you’re going through a big life event (like a breakup), you need to account for that when scheduling. For instance, if you can’t stand to be alone, maybe you can go out instead of staying in, and if your motivation is low, you may need to up your reward-system or break down your tasks even more.

Break down this week/month’s tasks

Refer to your addendum/syllabus and write down all your due dates for the time period you’re scheduling for.

Based on due dates, outside commitments, predictions of energy/mood/symptoms, assign assignments to the days of the week/month that make most sense for you.

Break down daily tasks into sub-tasks

You can do this (in advance) for your full week/month’s assignments, or do it every morning/evening.

Generally, your assignments will follow a variation of this formula: brainstorm, create an outline, research, write rough draft, edit and revise. Test/exam prep will look something like: check to see what the test is based on, pinpoint important sections, review to see how well you know the material, create a list of items to study, rewrite select notes, make flash cards, study topic 1, study topic 2, etc.

What are the individual components of these steps? Here are some examples. Brainstorm: what should my topic be, what should my thesis be, what points can support my thesis, what do I need to research, what questions do I need to ask my prof? Outline: topic, thesis, points, conclusion. Research: write down all the important parts from each source (separately), then sift through to sort into Supporting Point 1, Supporting Point 2, etc. Rough draft: opening statement(s), intro, point 1, point 2, etc., conclusion, closing statement(s). Edit/revise: read and check for grammar only, then read again and check for spelling only, read again and check for cohesiveness only, etc. Topic 1: Part A, Part B, etc.

Each of these small components can be individual items on your to-do list. Big tasks like, “write essay” are too big for most people. Even “write rough draft” is daunting. If you start with something specific and small like brainstorming, and work your way up, it’s a lot easier to approach. Plus, being able to check off tasks more often and more easily will boost your confidence and your sense of competence, thus building momentum.

Here is a sample to-do list: Research X for Point 1 of Literary Essay, create outline for History Essay, Edit/Revise Assignment 1, study Topic 1 and Topic 2 for Test 1.

To-do list or time-based schedule?

To do list: Write down all your assignments for the day. Put them in the order you want to do them, or go through them intuitively (based on what you feel like doing, or what’s most practical at the time/place you’re at).

Timed-based: Write down all your assignments, then write down the time you’re going to do each of them. You could set reminders or alarms if you want, or simply refer to the list. There’s an awesome app I recommend if this is your thing. It’s called Structured (iOS only).

Curate your study environment for maximum focus

Eliminate distractions such as uncomfortable clothing, sounds (or silence), phone and computer notifications, clutter in the room and on your desk, people who may try to talk to you (shut your door and/or inform them that you’re busy).

Designate a space to doing homework only and avoid spaces that you associate with other things (do not study in bed, as you will want to relax or sleep, and/or you will mess with your sleep by weakening the bed’s association with sleep).

Build associations: Incorporate other events and items into your study/homework routine that you only use while doing that, so that you associate those things with studying/homework (examples: specific playlists, pencils/pens, cups/bottles, scents, rituals, decor, etc.).

Ensure good lighting (preferably including daylight).

Get dressed in clothes that make you feel good about yourself. They don’t have to be “professional” and they should definitely be comfortable. Do not stay in your pyjamas. Believe me, I know this can be hard, and I love PJ’s. But they are not good for productivity.

Don’t “multi-task.” It may feel like you’re getting more done this way, but by splitting your focus, not only do tasks take longer, they also diminish in quality. Commit to the task you’re doing.

Meditate: You can even meditate for just 1-5 mins right before studying, homework and/or classes.

Practice self care (daily!)

Sleep (enough, well, and regularly).

Daylight: Get outside, work by windows, use a light therapy box. These can help regulate your sleep, improve and maintain mental health, and boost energy.

Fresh air: Getting outside even for a couple minutes can help you refresh and reset, and feel good about yourself and your life. Fresh oxygen can help you wake up and is great for your health. Even just opening your window can do a lot for your mood, energy and motivation.

Movement: Try to move at least once per day. The benefits of exercise are numerous and immense.

Healthy and consistent eating: Avoid spikes in insulin levels by eating regularly so you don’t have extreme dips in your energy level. Also, brain power uses calories too, so make sure you’re eating consistently, and try to eat healthy. There are so many other reasons eating consistently is good for your health (and by extension, your productivity).

Relaxation and leisure: Make time for fun and socializing, as well as intentional relaxation. Hobbies, movies/tv, time with friends/family, meditation, baths, progressive muscle relaxation, etc.

Therapy: Your therapy sessions are not daily, but you can do 5 minutes of inner-work per day based on what you and your therapist are currently working on. Working with a therapist is a great way to stay on track with your goals, and develop the skills and positive mindset required for success in school.

Reward yourself

Track progress: Reflect on all the assignments you’ve completed and your grades to remind yourself that you’re capable!

Completing to-do lists daily maintains a sense of accomplishment which keeps your momentum going. Check those items off! Or give yourself gold stars! ⭐️

Treat yourself with non-food rewards: Tie completed school work with fun tasks like video games, or take yourself out for coffee, or some other small (non-food) outing. What I’m trying to do right now is not do my leisure activities until my daily tasks are done.

Develop a positive mindset

Take promises you make to yourself seriously. The more you break promises to yourself, the easier it will get to continue breaking promises. You will lose respect for yourself which lowers motivation, and you will lose trust in yourself which can become debilitating as well. The more you keep promises, the easier it will get, the more motivated you’ll become, and the more you’ll trust and respect yourself. Your confidence will improve, and you’ll feel better about yourself. Productivity is choosing yourself. Discipline is choosing what’s best for you instead of what you feel like doing in the moment. Discipline is a muscle, and like any muscle, it can be strengthened, and it can atrophy.

Remember your “why.” What is the end goal of being in school? What’s your career path, and why did you choose it? What will your life be like when you have that career? What would your life be like if you gave up and didn’t make it to your goal? Aiming for your dream while running from your nightmare is a great strategy for maintaining motivation. Lighting a fire under your *** can be a huge motivator.

Remember how good you feel when you get schoolwork done, and let this motivate you to stay consistent. You can also remember how you feel when you don’t get work done, but definitely focus more on the positive!

Go to therapy and/or hire a coach. There are SO many benefits to therapy and I’d honestly need a whole other post to get into it. You don’t need to be depressed or mentally ill at all in order to benefit from talking to a therapist. They can even help you with time management, procrastination, motivation and more! If you can afford it, please do it. It’s such a worthwhile investment.

Be consistent

No “zero days.” Do at least a bit of homework or studying every day so you don’t slip into vacation mode. Make schoolwork a daily part of your life, so it just becomes the norm.

Build productivity momentum (track progress, check items off your to-do list daily, treat yourself, keep promises to yourself, remember your “why,” remember how success feels).

Stay on top of projects. Your assignments are made up of smaller tasks you assign yourself across time. “Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out.” - Robert Collier

Avoid burnout (more on this later).

Keep it interesting (more on this later).

Avoid burnout

Self-care: shower and/or bathe regularly, maintain proper sleep habits, stay hydrated, take care of your skin, do relaxation activities like meditation and reading, do fun activities, pamper yourself every now and then with face masks or foot baths, take your meds as prescribed, eat well and regularly, get outside often, move daily, etc.

Break up study/homework sessions into small, manageable chunks of time, with constructive (refreshing) breaks in between.

Break assignments down into even smaller tasks so that you aren’t over-working yourself during the course of a day, and so that you don’t overwhelm yourself (the stress can lead to burnout).

School-life balance: Keep up with your social life as best as you can, make time for your hobbies, maintain self-care, say no to things that don’t serve you, etc. Try to follow through with scheduled schoolwork 100% of the time, but know that you won’t. Sometimes you’ll need to prioritize mental health over schoolwork (be careful though, this is a very fine line, and a slippery slope). Sometimes things will come up and it’ll be out of your control. But more than anything else, there will be times when you just decide to prioritize something else like fun and socializing over schoolwork. This is why your schedule needs to be flexible: to accommodate sudden invites to hang out and random decisions to skip a homework/study session, but more importantly, flexibility will reduce the odds that you’ll skip in the first place. If your schedule includes hobbies and socializing, and anything else that’s important to you, then you won’t feel deprived. If you have school-life balance, you’ll have more of yourself to devote to schoolwork when it’s time to.

Keep it interesting

Romanticize your life by putting effort into making all of your daily tasks a special occasion.

Make meals and drinks special by using your favourite dinnerware and cutlery. Perhaps even incorporate extra elements such as: a beautiful tablecloth, napkins, candles and/or dim lighting, music, wearing your favourite clothing, etc.

Pretend you’re the main character in a movie about a successful, productive student (because you are the main character in your life).

Make games out of studying if this is something that interests you (the Forest app comes to mind).

Use lots of colours in your notes and buy colourful stationary! 🌈

Vary your approach/methods if needed to avoid boredom.

Study with friends (online or in person).

Reward yourself often.

Remember your “why.”

[mirai-studies-languages]

How to self study a language without a textbook or course

Hi! I have a very short attention span, and I rarely find it in me to enjoy using only one resource to learn a language, so I often rely on immersion and actively using the language right from the beginning to learn languages. I’ve done this with pretty much all my languages, and it has worked out pretty well for me so far, especially with French! This is heavily inspired by this article on the medium, which changed my whole outlook on languages. I hope I can offer some helpful advice!

Starting off (A0 –> A2)

First of all, you’re going to have to set your goals in the language. What do you want to do in your target language? Do you want to be conversational or fully fluent? Do you want to focus on all the skills (reading, listening, writing, speaking), or only a couple? Which accent/dialect do you want to choose? Set your goals, and give yourself some habits to start sticking to.

In most cases, I would advice learning the alphabet and the pronunciation at first. For the alphabet, find a guide online and learn the stroke order. Keep on writing it over and over again. For languages like Mandarin Chinese or Japanese, where you have to memorise characters, try and memorise the most common characters. Also, find a pronunciation guide on YouTube or somewhere online, and immediately start working on it. Once you have a general idea of what the sounds are, start speaking and try to shadow natives (i.e. repeat what they say after them with the same intonation - you can do this with YouTube videos, or beginners exercises online).  To practice both of these at the same time, you can try reading out loud, and maybe try dictating what you hear sometimes.

Start listening to the language a lot. Try and listen to YouTube videos and podcasts, and get used to the sound of the language. You might even want to watch a TV show or anime in your target language with English subtitles. I’d also recommend reading and listening at the same time, so if you have subtitles in your target language, then that could be great too. The more exposed you are to the natural use of your target language, the less unintelligible they will seem. 

Memorise some basic vocabulary and phrases. There are loads of articles online that have basic vocabulary lists and phrases in different languages (there are even some on this website). Try memorising a few of them. In terms of what exactly you should learn vocab for, I would recommend learning vocab lists for these: numbers, subject pronouns, common greetings, the most common verbs (the first 100 should do) and their most common conjugations, days of the week, months, seasons, years, how to tell the time, how to talk about the weather, family, colours, house vocab, food, money and shopping phrases, common adjectives, common places,  adverbs, parts of the body and medical vocabulary (I got all of this from this post). It’s a lot, but it will give you a strong foundation. You can then start learning vocabulary for your interests specifically. You can do this using multiple methods. First, you could use flashcards, like anki, memrise and Quizlet. You could also play around with apps like Duolingo or Lingodeer. Also, you could write them down, and keep testing yourself on them until you have them memorised (both target language to english, and english to target language). Make sure that you have audio, and that you know how the word/phrase sounds, and the pronunciation.

Start speaking with someone online. I recommend apps like Tandem and HiNative. Start trying to have conversations of basic topics straight away, and make sure you get corrections. Look up the words as you go.

Memorise a few basic grammar structures. This is especially important for languages like Korean or Japanese, which have extremely different grammar structures to English. Learn basic present, past and future tenses, along with basic articles and determiners, agreement, reflexive verbs, basic particles, negation and gender.

Immerse. I would recommend starting off with posts and videos that offer advice about things, since the language used in these tend to be simplistic, but topic specific. You can also use apps like LingQ. When practicing listening and reading, you can use the advice in these two posts (listening, reading). Don’t memorise every word you come across, and slowly try to ease yourself in.

Making the leap to the intermediate stage (A2 –> B1)

Vocabulary: I’ve already talked about methods of memorising vocabulary earlier, so I won’t talk about it again. As for what you should be memorising, I would suggest basing it on your interests and topical issues. When you immerse, and come across certain interesting words, then memorise them. You can also explore the tag for your target language on tumblr, and try and memorise some of the in depth vocabulary lists on here.

Grammar: I would suggest finding a specification, or list of grammar structures for the intermediate level, and learn all of them using articles and youtube videos. Then, try and use the rules regularly in your speaking and writing and receive corrections. Also, do practice questions. 

Listening: I have gone in depth on how to practice listening in the post I mentioned earlier, so I won’t elaborate too much. Overall, I’d say that it is better to make sure that you are listening to the language a lot, and that what you are listening to is comprehensible input. 

Reading: Find some learners exercises online, and keep doing them. You can also just generally try to read more, based on your interests. I would also suggest to apply the methods from the post I mentioned earlier.

Writing: Try and write a few sentences every now and then, and use your new grammar structures and vocabulary as much as possible. Make sure that you receive corrections. I have gone in depth on this subject in this post.

Speaking: Find a speaking buddy online, and try and organise meetings, where you just try and practice speaking. Look up words you don’t know, and be brave: most people are kind, and won’t mind if you make mistakes, so keep trying to move forward.

Going from intermediate to conversational (B1 –> B2)

Vocabulary: Focus on your interests, and areas that will be useful to you. Make sure that you actually use the words that you are memorising while writing and speaking. 

Grammar: I think the same advice as the beginner to intermediate stage is applicable here.

Listening: Listen to both intermediate podcasts and YouTube videos in the target language (innovative languages, iyagi, dreaming spanish, a piece of french, InnerFrench etc.), and also to native material (youtube videos, films, TV shows, vines, tiktoks etc.) that you find interesting. Use transcripts or subtitles (in the target language) to memorise new vocabulary, and then keep repeating the audio until you understand everything. 

Reading: Read whatever you can get your hands on, as long as it is reasonably simple enough. I would recommend kids books, and also translations of books that you have already read in your target language.

Writing: Try starting a journal in your target language, and also try writing letters/e-mails to people, and maybe write some essays on topical issues. Once again, make sure that you get corrections. 

Speaking: Continue having conversations with people in your target language. Let yourself make mistakes and be corrected, because that is the only way to improve. For your accent and pronunciation, shadow native material (I use Easy Languages for this). 

This is as far as I have gotten in terms of my self-study journey, so I’m afraid I won’t be able to offer much more advice. When I eventually reach an advanced C1 level in a language, then I’ll definitely make a post about that. Thank you for reading this post! I hope it was useful to you!

[desultory-suggestions]

Low Empathy =/= Caring less about people, being evil, less intelligent, more aggresive, unwilling to try to understand people.

Low Empathy = The lack of/impaired ability to percieve and detect other people’s emotions. Someone who has trouble putting themselves in other people’s shoes. Facial expressions do not translate as clearly into emotions, nor does tone of voice. One can understand what you are feeling, but they may just have to ask how someone else is feeling rather than detect it from cues! This means putting more effort into understanding other people. A person with low empathy is still kind, compassionate, loving, and good.