this ain't rock'n'roll

sideblog | In my 20s | she/her | posting random stuff | main blog: @theinsanityassassin

[gatheringbones]

tbh a lot of my advice boils down to “hey you know that terrible horrible looming thing you’re doing your best to avoid and distract and escape as much as possible but no matter what you do it just keeps looming and looming and ruining your life”

“just, fuckign, run straight at it screaming.”

[quasarkisses]

i needed this as a background

[spectrexviiii]

[naamahdarling]

It sucks more than anything has ever sucked but let me tell you. I did this recently. The relief afterwards is LIFE-CHANGING.

[konoko]

[camundongodebabel]

A great way to find vocab that's relevant to you is to read the wikipedia page for things you're already familiar with (your home city, a hobby, etc) in your target language ⭐ I'm on the Russian pages for my own home state and several neighbouring countries rn, and it's a lot more encouraging than a vocab list lemme tell you that much

[cosmogyros]

language-learning advice from a pro

(I started writing this post just now as a message to a friend who asked for language-learning advice. But I’m a GIANT NERD when it comes to language learning, so it got wayyy too long to be a message. So I’m posting it here in the hopes that it might help others as well. I have not edited this or even read through it all yet – it just poured straight out of my fingers – so please let me know if you spot any typos!)

Okay, first of all, there are two parts to language learning: active learning and passive exposure. You can choose to do only one or the other, but you’ll have the most success if you do both.

ACTIVE LEARNING

Active learning is pretty much what it sounds like: actively focusing on the language, learning new words, sounds, phrases, idioms, etc. It’s often centered around a textbook, sometimes with accompanying audio, but you can do active learning in other ways too. For example, you can read a news article online and check a dictionary for every word you don’t know. Or do the same thing with a foreign film – when you hear a word you don’t know (or see it in the subtitles), pause the movie and look it up.

Active learning makes you progress fast, but it also tires out your brain and overwhelms it with new information, making it easier to forget things you’ve already learned. That’s why it’s best to space out your active learning sessions and fill the gaps with passive exposure.

PASSIVE EXPOSURE

The goal of passive exposure is for your brain to randomly encounter words and phrases it learned recently and go “Hey! I recognize that!” This is SO important not only for reviewing and consolidating your memory, but also keeping up your motivation! If the only place you ever encounter your TL (target language) is in your textbook, on some subconscious level your brain will think it’s not that important… because after all, you never encounter it out there in the real world, do you?

Passive exposure can include any of the following and much more: listening to music in your TL; watching a movie in your TL (either with English subs, or with no subs at all and just don’t worry if you don’t understand everything that’s going on); skim-reading a book or a short story or a news article or a blog post in your TL and looking for words you recognize, even if you can’t 100% remember what they mean; finding speakers of your TL in real life and eavesdropping on them; watching instructional YouTube videos or short documentaries in your TL (the visuals ought to help you understand some of what’s going on, even if there are no subtitles); etc.

The idea is to let your TL wash over you without straining your brain at all. Zero effort, just relaxation and fun. You will inevitably notice and understand a few words or phrases, and that percentage will increase as time goes on, but you’re not actively studying when you’re doing passive exposure. Remember the two things you’re trying to achieve with passive exposure: 1) effortless review/practice, by inevitably re-encountering some stuff you’ve already learned; 2) reminding your brain that this language is a real cool thing out there in the world, not just a boring chore located in a textbook.

But there are also two more extremely important benefits to passive exposure that are drastically neglected by most language-learners: 3) picking up the correct pronunciation and accent; 4) gaining an instinct for natural, native-sounding language.

These are two things you will not learn in a language class or from a textbook. You can’t learn them except by doing a LOT of listening and reading in your TL. But the good news is that it doesn’t need to be the “Active Learning” kind of reading and listening; it can absolutely be the “Passive Exposure” kind, and you will still pick this stuff up.

The most important thing, above all else, is to figure out a method of passive exposure that works for YOU personally. This means: do NOT force yourself to repeatedly do something that you don’t enjoy, because you won’t benefit from it. To pick the right method, think of your interests and the things you like to do in your free time: watching movies? reading books? listening to music? writing in your journal? surfing the internet? You can do any of this in your TL, too. Yes, you will encounter a lot of stuff you don’t understand at the beginning. But A) that’s good for you, it helps you learn patience, which every language-learner needs, and B) the internet has free translation tools everywhere you look.

COMBINING BOTH

Personally, I like to pick a well-respected textbook with accompanying audio (Assimil is my favorite; Teach Yourself and Colloquial can also be very good, especially the older editions; Linguaphone used to be fantastic but I’m not sure if it’s still around) and work my way through it, doing one lesson per day if possible. That takes only about 10 to 20 minutes, so that leaves a lot of time for passive exposure. My preferred method is listening to music (I learned a good 50% of my German from just obsessively listening to German pop music in high school), but here are some other things I like to do:

find an internet talk radio station in my TL and put it on in the background

same deal with a podcast

translate a few keywords related to my favorite hobbies/interests into the TL and then paste that text into YouTube and watch random videos in my TL

read a news article in English, and then find a news website in my TL and see if I can find an article about the same topic in that language

watch bad reality TV or soaps in my TL with no subtitles, just trying to guess what’s going on from context

etc.

No Duolingo. No Rosetta Stone. (I’ve written a whole post about the latter here.) You don’t need to spend any money at all, though if you e.g. use a pirated resource to learn and find that it really helps you, I strongly suggest buying it from the original producer after the fact, to say thank you.

MEMORIZATION

This is very much a “YMMV” piece of advice, but: if you’re having trouble memorizing stuff, just don’t. Don’t bother trying to remember anything. Remember that “passive exposure” bit? It does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of memory. If you keep bumping into the same word or phrase over and over again, you will incorporate it into your body of knowledge almost effortlessly. Of course this is easier with more common words that turn up again and again – but you’d be surprised how well you can get by, especially at the lower levels, with only the more common words!

Intentionally memorizing vocabulary can of course be very beneficial, so there’s nothing wrong with it. But I notice that it’s often one of the biggest pain points for language learners, and I believe language learning should be pain-free.

FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT

Once you’ve gotten a good grasp of the basics of the language, a really effective way to consolidate the knowledge you’ve gained is to use it actively and creatively yourself, in speech or writing (or ideally both!). For speaking practice, besides simply making friends who are native speakers of the language, you can search for a physical or virtual tandem. This is when you meet up with someone who’s a native speaker of your TL and is trying to learn your own language. You can meet for, say, an hour, and chat together for half an hour in your native language, and then half an hour in their native language. So both of you benefit!

Don’t underestimate talking to yourself, too. Whether it’s narrating your actions, complaining to your pet (okay, I guess that’s not technically “talking to yourself”), or simply having an imaginary conversation with someone else, it’s actually a good way to practice.

I also really enjoy writing in my journal in my target languages. The act of hand-writing a word does a lot to help me remember it. If you like writing, of course, you could also look up penpals who speak your TL.

And that’s about it. As always, I am more than willing to answer specific questions on language learning, as this is something of a specialty of mine and I absolutely love to help other folks get started on their own language-learning journeys. Please feel free to drop me a line if you need any concrete advice or are struggling with some aspect of your current language-learning efforts!

[alien-with-headphones]

learning another language is always beautiful, no matter how long it takes. like, what do you mean you are crying because you had to read a sentence twice to get it, when at the beginning you had to do it five times? kicking yourself because you had to listen to an audio at .75x to understand it fully, when two months ago you could barely understand one or two words, even at your second try? getting mad because you had to research how to spell a word, when a few days back you didn't even know how to pronounce it? hell, that's amazing. keep going. you'll get there.

[bookwyrminspiration]

language learning is like yes I learned the word for "intestines" two months in. no I still don't know how to say "nice" after two years

[unearthitaly]

I very much agree with these suggestions. Forcing myself to write was the way I could finally start to become an active rather than a passive user of the target language.

[talesandfluff]

in an age where machine translation is getting better and better I BEG you to keep learning languages and keep your brain sharp and keep an open mind. learning a language is so much more than memorizing a bunch of words, it opens up ways of seeing the world you hadn't considered before that are inherent to the way things are phrased in another language. it gives you a new lens through which you'll view life. it will make your life fuller, more well-rounded, more fulfilling. please learn languages other than your own.

[mariean2inette]

Backstage at John Galliano, SS07

[angstics]

“are you guys… ready… for bon jovi?! youre very close, youre not ready yet. i can tell. a girl can just tell these kind of things… youre very very close though.” (2007)

[kosmogrl]

how the world feels when you listen to a song for the first time and immediately know you'll love it forever

[imatmywormrightnow]

I seem to be living a very expensive lifestyle called eating food regularly

[misscromwellsmonocle]

Art in the Age of Digital Puritanism (2022) by Iness Rychlik The artist reposted it in 2024 "because it feels relevant in social media today".

[thegryffe]

[princessparadoxical]

“You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy. You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like. If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way.”

— Julien Smith, The Flinch (via wnq-anonymous)

[ejacutastic]

never try to consider yourself one of “the good” privileged people because tbh that just is cutting you off from continually learning and continually deconstructing your privilege and learned bullshit. every time i’ve thought “ok i’m one of the good guys now” i’ve learned more fucked shit i’m doing and deconstructed more bullshit and if you continually cling to “BUT I’M NOT RACIST/SEXIST/TRANSPHOBIC/ETC” you’re refusing to face the possibility that you could still be doing really bad shit and that means you’re part of the problem. being aware of privilege doesn’t mean you’re absolved of it.

[oldbutchdanielmolloy]

you can literally listen to songs and think about whoever you want. and its awesome

[ahtokasano]

hello friendly reminder that you do not need a special occasion to use nice things! if you wait long enough your nice bath bomb won't be as fizzy! your favourite fruits will go out of season! candles are meant to be burned, not looked at! you're not enjoying your special tea if it's just sitting in your cupboard! you're allowed to have nice and special things on completely ordinary days! heck, it might just make that day special!!