I was asked this by anon early june and only now got around to starting a response (sorry!) and in true tumblr fashion instead of it going into my drafts it vanished into the void.. so I'm making a post in the hopes they see it
if you reading rn asked me this: thank you for your patience :)
TDLR: a time blocking exercise to figure out what your average week can look like. the important part is to be realistic and not idealistic about it
I got the spreadsheet set up from my coach (lucinda livingstone, founder of fuzz culture club - highly recommend!) and it's been really helpful. when I was still unemployed in the first half of the year I used it to give my week a more defined structure by treating job hunting like work (less hours tho lol)
follow the steps of putting in your work (or job hunting, uni hours both present & prep/studying etc), then life admin, then transitions, then training/hobbies/socia
it's okay if the order of putting things in gets a bit messy i put life admin in partially depending on transitions (bc I need to know when I'm home to know when I can have dinner yk)
transitions can also be task transitions! if you need a 30min break of dillydallying between laundry & cleaning plan that in!
you can do the exercise twice: first put in how you actually use your time (be honest if instead of your planned productivity from 8am-10am you usually stay in bed in scrolling) and then see which needs are met in which way and which aren't and in the second round reevaluate where you want to switch things up to have your needs met sufficiently or in different ways (if nothing needs to change that's also fine)
I really can't stress enough how much this isn't about maximising productivity but about seeing where your time and activity goes and evaluating whether that fits your priorities, abilities and wants etc
the picture above shows 1 of the 2 versions I have since I work switching shifts each week. july has been tough on me for many reasons and tho june looked mostly like the above, july definitely hasn't
I find it ludicrous that some people think that having a B2 in a language isn't enough? That the CEFR is treated like a ladder where everyone has to climb to the C2 at the top to "master" the language. And that being at the B levels means you aren't smart enough, or doing enough.
I talked to a girl recently who asked me about my levels in the languages I'm learning, which I honestly never know how to answer because I'm learning by myself, I don't take any classes or tests or exams or have anyone who could tell me what my level is. And as usual, I told her I'm somewhere in the B levels. And she just responded with "if you've been learning these languages for so many years, why are you only at the B levels?" And I just... can't. Maybe I'm just not interested in academic and technical texts? Maybe I don't need to use elaborate and complex phrases and sentences to get my point across? Maybe because I'm learning multiple languages at the same time for fun?
I've struggled for years with feeling inadequate in my languages learning, like I'm not smart enough or learning fast enough. But this isn't a race to the top of the CEFR ladder. And I just don't have the time, energy or interest to put hundreds of hours into learning things I don't think I'll ever want or need to use. And even though it's my hobby and something that brings me joy, learning languages is HARD for me, and keeping all the knowledge in my head is even harder.
I usually tell my students that âclose readingâ means looking at what is actually on the page, reading the text itself, rather than some idea âbehind the text.â It means noticing things in the writing, things in the writing that stand out. To give you some idea of what this means, Iâve made up a list of five sorts of things that a close reading might typically notice: (1) unusual vocabulary, words that surprise either because they are unfamiliar or because they seem to belong to a different context; (2) words that seem unnecessarily repeated, as if the word keeps insisting on being written; (3) images or metaphors, especially ones that are used repeatedly and are somewhat surprising given the context; (4) what is in italics or parentheses; and (5) footnotes that seem too long. This list is far from completeâin fact, no complete list is possibleâbut the list is meant to begin to give you an idea of what sorts of things we notice when weâre doing close reading.
What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominentâelements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.
Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.
Jane Gallop, âThe Ethics of Close Reading: Close Encounters,â Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol.16, No.3 (Fall 2000), pg.7-8 (x)
there is no amount of language learning that is useless. I think it obviously scales up in wonderfulness as you learn more, but even just being at the point where you can recognize what language is being spoken or written is still a more useful thing than not knowing that. it is lovely to say hi to people in their language! any attempt to learn is important. you don't get fluent overnight. and you don't have to get fluent overnight. more knowledge is better than none. it isn't just all or nothing.
Hot take, probably, but take your time learning languages! It does take time! Learning multiple languages at once only increases the time you need to get them to a good level! I see so many people who claim they have A1 skills in 20 languages but sis... please pick one or two! You can come back later! It's all right!
A little late for the start of the year, but since one of my goals for 2026 is to be more present on langblr/studyblr -- you should reblog this post if you're active on either and we have overlapping interests! I'm especially interested in finding blogs that share language learning resources and other aspiring or current graduate students.
For reference:
I study German, Norwegian, Latin, and Japanese primarily, with some irregular dabbling in other Germanic and the Celtic languages (especially Yiddish and Irish).
I'm also in the process of waiting to hear back from History PhD programs, and study Early Modern European histories of marginality, with an emphasis on monster studies, trans/gender/intersex studies, and disability studies.
Looking back at the year and everything I've experienced, I'm actually surprised how much time I've dedicated to languages.
In 2025 I spent (around):
119 hours on Swedish
100 hours on Spanish
179 hours on German
60 hours on Icelandic
458 hours in total, which is almost 100 hours more than last year and my second most time spent on languages since I started measuring it in 2019.
This graph shows how much hours I spent on each language during the year. And this year I actually wrote down the things I did that might cause the spikes, because all the other years I looked at the graphs and had to guess what was happening that month. But this year with four languages, it's a bit messy and I don't know where to start.
German was my main language this year. I got inspired and wanted to try doing a B2 language exam, and just generally I felt like I should get better at German. At the end I decided not to do the exam, but I'm really happy I spent so much time on German. I certainly feel more comfortable with it. The biggest spike we see in the graph for German is in June-August. At that time, I borrowed a B2 textbook from the library, watched two seasons of Unsere wunderbaren Jahre and actually spoke a lot of German with people online. During those months, I joined a discord community focused on language learning and I think I spent at least 3 hours a week speaking German there. And a bit of Spanish too. Aside from that, I watched The Race on Youtube, Push, Maxton Hall, and read the book Der Vorleser (I'm so proud of myself!). And I spoke German in Germany! And of course, I've been listening to Easy German Podcast like 4 times a week, it's been my most listened podcast last year and this year too. I'm still writing/sending voice notes to a friend on discord once in a while and met the wonderful Jessica with whom we've been exchanging long letter-like messages in the summer.
I read 5 Swedish books again, watched two crime shows (Genombrottet and à remorden), Julkalender and SkÀrmfri, a documentary series about being without a smartphone. I was also in Sweden for a couple of days, but didn't really speak a lot. I was trying to listen to some podcasts here and there, but nothing has interested me enough to listen to it regularly. And I've been going very slowly through my B2+C1 textbook.
And this year was my first year of Icelandic. I think I started learning at the end of January and since I was supposed to go to Iceland in April, I tried to learn as much as I could in the first 3 months of 2025. And of the 60 total hours of Icelandic, 34 of them I did in those 3 months. I went through Teach Yourself Icelandic, tried to do lessons on Icelandic online, watched some (not enough) Viltu lĂŠra Ăslensku? and watched all Ăsas videos on her channel Let's learn Icelandic. I also listened to Ăsgeirs album DĂœrĂ° Ă dauĂ°aĂŸĂ¶gn on repeat (Heimförin was my 4th most listened song this year). Then I spent 8 months doing the bare minimum, vocab on anki, Clozemaster and YlhĂœra. But in December I discovered SnĂŠholt, originally a norwegian julkalender dubbed into Icelandic. I had a lot of fun watching it and I was surprised by how much I understood â I know it's a series for kids and it has easier vocab, sentence structure and topics, but that doesn't lessen my joy or how proud I am of myself. There is also this one person on discord who started learning Icelandic and so I've been trying to write very simple things in Icelandic to practice. I have to look up almost every single word to check the spelling or the grammar, but I'm writing.
This is the total time I spent on all of my languages in individual months. My most productive months were January and July (both with over 50 hours) and the least productive were August till October (with less than 30 hours) (which is still a lot). The drop in August is caused by spending a week in Germany and the drop in the autumn months is just me being sad and without the energy to do anything.
I'm a bit sad I've stopped writing in my "languages" diary years ago and keeping recordings of my speaking since that's just less measurable data for me. Writing and speaking, activelly producing the language, are the hardest part of learning for me. But as I said earlier, I've spent the summer having group calls with people on discord couple of times a week, and I talked to myself on my lunch breaks. Not every day, but at least sometimes. And with writing, well⊠I'm still on Tandem, exchanging messages with people once in a while, and on Discord (with considerably nicer and more interesting people). I also tried Slowly after many years and thanks to a very nice person from Tumblr got to practice my Spanish in a long-form text twice.
This is time spent on individual languages compared to other years. I was surprised to see Swedish so low this year, I felt like I was constantly doing something in Swedish, and I was, it just was a bit less than other years. I can't go up with all the languages every year, I know that and I'm not bothered by it, just surprised. Last year I wanted to stop neglecting Spanish and I think I did. And well, I can't believe how much time I spent on German, it's never been this much.
Overall, I'm happy with my year, language-wise. I wanted to improve my German, get more confident at speaking, read a Spanish book, learn the basics of Icelandic and keep reading in Swedish. And I did all that.
And what do I want for 2026? I'm not sure. I want to keep reading 5 books in Swedish and maybe finish my Swedish textbook? But I have a long way to go there. I also want to continue with Icelandic. I know I'll probably never get to use it and I should stop "wasting" my energy on it, but⊠it's fun. I want to keep improving and do more of everything, but that's just unrealistic since I want to have a life outside of languages too.
If you have the time, I'd like to know about your language learning in 2025 and your hopes for 2026.
Time spent on languages in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024
Hej och vĂ€lkomna! Since 2020 Iâve occasionally done English fan translations of Swedish works, mainly of media that never got officially released abroad. Iâll try to announce my new subs (or updates to my old subs) here from now on and might share interesting tidbits during the process⊠That said, donât expect daily updates.
EDIT: Apparently some of the links in my header might not be visible depending on how you view the blog, so putting them below to be safe:
My profile on Opensubtitles
Dropbox with backups
Trello with media Iâve considered (+ decided not) to translate
A guide on how to browse SVT Play
If there is anything else youâd like me to translate, feel free to send an ask and Iâll see what I can do!
all academic writing is either addison rae reveals the meaning (see fig. 1) or a genre I call the "troubling industrial complex" where you identify something that engages hegemonic power in a way that is ambiguous and incoherent and instead of arriving at a coherent reading of it via the work of your thinking and writing (you know like the job that academic writing is supposed to do) you make a really emphatic but essentially contentless claim that it "troubles" that power structure. and often you start reading academic writing and you're like is this addison rae reveals the meaning or is it troubling industrial complex and they're like I don't understand and you pull out a diagram explaining what is addison rae reveals the meaning and what is troubling industrial complex and they laugh and say "it's good academic writing sir" so you read it and it's troubling industrial complex.
what a remarkably strange and condescending way to speak to somebody you do not know on the internet! I have read plenty of published academic work, thank you. If you, perhaps, âslow down readingâ my post and pay a little more attention to what I am saying, youâll maybe notice that I am not talking about bullshitting, or denseness, or struggling to understand what an author is arguing. I am talking about writing that locates its case study as the site where some kind of norm or power structure is particularly live, but rather than making an argument about what exactly is happening there instead makes its argument the having-located itself--by saying the case study "troubles" or "destabilizes" or similar verbs that allow one to make a claim that seems emphatic and decisive but sneakily does not describe any real action.
I will concede that this may be more prevalent in my field (lit crit, early modern studies, etc.) than in every single other field but first of all it's my blog, so, lol, and secondly the idea that this doesn't ever happen in published academic writing is frankly wild. I have read a lot of academic writing from PhDs and senior scholars and everyone in between. Everybody is doing the troubling industrial complex. For example:
Gina Bloom, The Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 17.
What are Bloom's verbs here? The boy actors' squeaky voices "challenge" the masculine ideal of vocal control, they "destabilize" systems of gender differentiation. What does it mean, materially, literally, actively, for something to challenge or destabilize? Having read Bloom's book a couple times, I can tell you she doesn't really answer that question. The observation here, basically, is that something specific (boy actors' squeaky voices) rubs strangely against something hegemonic (early modern gender norms). We should expect that friction to produce some kind of sparks. But it doesn't--the argument is the presence of the friction, that's all.
Now, let's turn to an example of the Troubling Industrial Complex at work at what I feel to be a much higher level, in the hands of a scholar whose book I liked a lot more than Bloom's. This is the central argument of one of the chapters:
Urvashi Chakravarti, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 15.
Here, Chakravarti has identified servants' livery as a site that allows access to early modern concepts of service, power, etc. She goes on to basically argue that livery was both a marker of servitude and also, paradoxically, of freedom. Are you starting to see what I'm getting at here? I am not doing justice to Chakravarti's argument, which is actually very smart and has many constitutive parts that offer really new and interesting and decisive readings of specific aspects of early modern livery--that read, to continue my earlier metaphor, for the spark and not just the friction. But, still, the top-level articulation here, the overall argument that all of this smart and subtle work adds up to is, basically, livery evokes power but also challenges to power. And this is the TIC: it's an argument that at its most basic and broad level is locating a contradiction. And in making that contradiction the thesis, you end up with a claim that basically cancels itself out. In TIC cases the obligatory "I argue" device often cues the least productive sentences in the whole piece.
Probably you will just block me for copping an attitude with you, but if you read this far I do want to say that I hope the next time you are tempted to assume that someone describing something that you don't feel you personally have experienced must be too stupid or young or illiterate to have had your exact experiences maybe you will think twice about expressing that directly to them in their tumblr notifications. Have a good one!
This is not copping an attitude, I'm genuinely unaware: who on earth is Addison Rae, does the outfit play into this (?) and what's an example of that?
Is it just explaining a thing directly?
Example:
While early modern curiosity cabinets and private galleries have received much scholarly attention as precursors to the museum, less is known about how inns and taverns were used as exhibition spaces. A type of attraction called a doolhof or labyrinth, was unique to seventeenth-century Amsterdam. [...]
What follows is in part an experiment in recovering what can be known about nonextant works and their modes of display. My larger claim is that the moving artwork, particularly the automaton, has the potential to put art history in motion, animating it and dynamically opening it up to a consideration of different kinds of objects, modes of engagement, and methods of analysis.
Or does that fall under the troubling industrial complex in this dichotomy? I guess they're saying it's going against a norm to consider these nonextant works and their modes of display within the field, but I feel like it *is* trying to point to specific things being done here.
Hi! Addison Rae is a singer/pop star; her music is extremely awesome and I love her. Here are some songs of hers you could check out. The "Addison Rae Reveals the Meaning" image is a meme from twitter that cuts off whatever the rest of the clickbait headline was originally (presumably she reveals the meaning of one of her songs) in order to create something that is funny for attributing a portentous and weighty vibe to a pop singer. Her outfit is relevant to that dynamic and also relevant insomuch as she looks amazing and I #needher.
I did my best to explain what Addison Rae Reveals the Meaning means in the context of academic writing in this post but the short version is that it's a meme my girlfriend uses to refer to what is basically Eve Sedgwick's idea of the paranoid reading--criticism that purports to reveal some hidden conspiratorial meaning. But "revealing," like "troubling," is a verb that does less than it seems to promise, in the end.
This article looks cool and I would have to read it in full to have a real sense of how its argument works, but I will observe that "my larger claim is that the moving artwork, particularly the automaton, has the potential to put art history in motion, animating it and dynamically opening it up to a consideration of different kinds of objects, modes of engagement, and methods of analysis," strikes me as having an interesting almost place holder quality. Like I would expect the larger claim of an essay like this not to be that the automaton opens up new modes of engagement but, rather, to be a claim produced by that new mode of engagement. This to me seems like not exactly TIC but maybe belonging to the same universe. But I haven't read the article. Maybe I should! One of my professors in undergrad worked on curiosity cabinets. Cool topic. Anyways I hope this helps.
For those studying ancient languages (like myself), resources can seem pretty scarce, so I found this awesome website that goes through the basics such as alphabets, pronunciation, vocabulary, sentence structure, forms of the language (such as nouns, adjectives, pronouns etc.) and lessons with writers in the ancient language (like Ceasar, Tacitus, Livy, Virgil, Homer, Hesiod, Plato and so on) so your totally immersed.
It covers languages such as:
Albanian
Armenian
Baltic
Old English
Old French
Gothic
Greek (Classical)
Greek (New Testament)
Hittite
Old Iranian
Old Irish
Latin
Old Norse
Old Russian
Vedic Sanskrit
Old Slavonic
Tocharian
Language learning blogs!!! Reblog (or comment) so I can follow you! Doesn't matter the language, I just would like to see more people studying and learning
I hope langblr existence isn't that dead.
(Reblogged this to a few of my side blogs for exposure)
Welcome to another month of polyglot adventures, everyone! Some of the most dreadful things that language learners experience throughout the year are lulls in learning, entire months where the mundane routines of everyday life, responsibilities, work and school suddenly swamp the learner and apathy & upcoming, pre-holiday deadlines force them to put their language learning on the back burner.Â
Which is why Novemberâs Polyglot Challenge is to play a little game I like to call Exchange Student, a perfect task for the polyglot whose Zeit ist knapp.
How To Play Exchange Student:
Situation: No matter where you are in the world right now, whether at home or abroad, student or not, you are now an exchange student. And what centuries of (bad) exchange students are notoriously known for ⊠is returning to their dorms to unwind and do shit in their native language.
Objective: Until 30 November, your target language will serve as your native language for part or all of your free time, depending on time and resource accessibility. It does not matter if you are already proficient in your target language or not, because this will up your all-around language skills no matter what level. But remember, you actually have to pay attention while youâre doing your fun immersion activities for the challenge, not just play an 8 hour podcast in your sleep and count that as a challenge completed - that means you too, beginners! Â
Goal: To immerse yourself in your target language as much as possible in your free time. Like seriously, weâre not even talking grammar here, just plan to screw around on Youtube, Netflix, Tumblr and Google until 3 am in your target language rather than in your native one. Kudos points if you start to regularly think or dream in your target language during this challenge!!Â
Choose a Level:Â
Beginner: Complete 10 documented hours of language immersion (outside of whatever you might have to do for a language class), namely a combination of watching tv shows and films, listening to audiobooks and music, writing and reading in your target language over the course of 4 weeks. Also good for people with busy schedules.
Intermediate: 2 weeks, or 14 days spread out, of solid little-to-no-native-language fun. If you wake up and say âTodayâs going to be an *insert language here day*, make sure that whatever shenanigans you get up to, the majority of them are in your target language. Â
Hardcore: All/heavy majority of material that you consume in your spare time every day (books, news, podcasts, studying, etc.) is in your target language. Note: I recommend trying to use this method for 2-6 weeks before you have to take a language proficiency exam. Also an excellent idea for bi/trilinguals whose language skills in their second or third languages are way advanced but not quite exactly at the same level of command of their native language. Â Â
Now whoâs ready to get started?!
I will be posting materials for langblrs who will be doing the challenge in either German or English as well as general ideas of fun activities to do throughout the month, and welcome everyone to share the resources you are using to immerse yourself in your target- I mean native language ;) for November!
i've been meaning to share my folder of celtic language pdfs for a while now, especially since duolingo has gotten even worse. the folder has pdfs of language-learning material, as well as some stuff on literature, history, indentity, etc. this is very much a work-in-progress, as i will add to the folder as i find more resources.
(also if you want online resources, fiction books, media, etc, then take a look at this website: https://www.celtic-languages.org/Main_Page - it has both free and paid resources for irish, scottish gaelic, manx, welsh, cornish, breton, old irish, and classical gaelic.)
Literature and Language Learning @budo-bujo - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
