火炭

Studying Chinese and Korean🌼我学习中文🌼한국어를 배우고 있습니다 (she/they)

[andhumanslovedstories]

There's something about lazily studying Mandarin Chinese that's made language learning seem far more approachable. It would be cool to be fluent one day, but I've always been clear with myself that I don't have an actual goal with this besides maintaining a streak in my language app for a certain amount of days. I can quit whenever I want, which is remarkably good at making me not quit. Sometimes I study Chinese for hours because I'm having a good time, but mostly I'm lazily plucking at this language for sometimes literally a minute. After a year of doing this, even though Chinese is so difficult and different from English, it turns out I can still get from knowing absolutely nothing to knowing slightly more than nothing in a pretty short period. An incredible jump in knowledge with not that much work. In fact, the gap between English and Chinese is so vast that microscopic progress feels incredible. When I have to write out literally any pinyin by memory, and I get 75% of the letters and none of the tones correct, I feel like a genius. Today I almost spelled 音乐会/yīnyuèhuì correctly on my first try, and I wanted to call everyone over to see how I effortlessly nailed two-thirds of it.

It's much more encouraging than any of the "easier" languages I've studied. My primary emotion when studying Spanish was embarrassment that I was still so bad at Spanish. Meanwhile, now I'm like, "If I can suck at Chinese, I can suck at anything," which is very inspirational because doing something really, really badly means that you are in fact doing it. I saw an ad for Hebrew language learning course and had the realization that I could probably get really, really, really, really bad at Hebrew in what, a couple months? The thought made me very excited. I could get horrendous at any language in a couple months. I could get horrendous at anything. With a little time and not that much effort, I could nail two-thirds of shooting a basketball. The sky's the limit, but if you don't care about getting all the way up there, one inch off the ground can still be pretty impressive.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

How do people living in rural Northeast China stay warm in the harsh winter （Someone asked why they don’t just use electric blankets. A kang warms up the whole room when it's fired up, so you don’t need any other heating. An electric blanket only keeps the bed warm.

[mawofthemagnetar]

Cold take but all languages are beautiful actually. Every single one. Every single human language on earth is a collection of stories interwoven into the very fabric of the words that are spoken.

“Oh but this language sounds scary-“ have you heard a child speak it while pointing at a butterfly?

“Oh but this language sounds silly-“ have you heard someone’s grandma recite a recipe with such practiced ease it comes off as poetry?

“Oh but this language is really weird-“ and yours isn’t? Everyone’s language is weird, dumbass, it came free with your fucking humanity.

Every tongue that is spoken is a work of art. Every language a unique window into the world.

Isn’t it wonderful?

[organsizing]

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.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

Seal Script (Zhuànshū 篆书) is the oldest form of Shufa(Chinese calligraphy) still in use today. It emerged during the Zhou Dynasty and was standardized in the Qin Dynasty. The characters are often elongated and composed of balanced, curved lines. It can look complex and retains a somewhat pictorial quality, reminding you of its origins in ancient inscriptions on bronzes and bones. In short, it's a highly artistic and historical style, often used for seals and formal inscriptions. OP is writing the Chinese idiom "能歌善舞neng ge shan wu" describes a person who is both a skilled singer and an elegant dancer. (cr 云舒先生)

[karijote]

[fixyourwritinghabits]

I reblogged one of these but this one is even better.

[fire-fira]

Here’s your reminder that the US doesn’t have an official language.

[elle-smells]

this is a longshot but

Is there anyone in this void that could possibly answer questions about an upcoming trip to China? I'm going for 3 weeks in March and well. help? lmao

[theoryofarson]

@bytebun 👀👀

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: Difference between winter in southern, northern, and northeast China (dongbei area).

[weiyuheng]

someone made a song about That One Staircase that's in every guzhuang drama ever so i translated it LOL

it's very rushed and i haven't watched all of these shows so idk how the official subs translated certain place names but i did my best

all errors are mine <3

source

[dribs-and-drabbles]

@colourme-feral I've got a feeling you'll appreciate this 😏

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

traditional chinese firework huohu火壶 by 江寻千

[gnars-house]

[hollowedskin]

This is beautiful. Is this the same lady that learned the iron fireworks technique too?

[melliabee]

Okay, poll time. How many languages do you have a smattering of? This includes everything from fluency all the way down to knowing just a word or two.

(Proper nouns and adopted words don’t count.)

Including your first language, how many languages do you know some words in?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11-15

16+

Voting ended onSep 13, 2025

[what-even-is-thiss]

Here’s how to tell if a language is easy to learn

None of them are easy

They’re all stupid and terrible and will kick you in the nuts

That being said

Languages similar to ones you already speak

Languages you have a lot of motivation to learn

Languages that have a lot of resources and media to watch and/or listen to and/or read

So, if you’re reading this with relative ease (aka you speak English fluently) probably French or Spanish

Do whatever you want though idk

Don’t just choose a language based on how easy it is

Unless that’s what it takes to keep you motivated idk

Go learn Frisian or something

[superlinguo]

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: This is the first time I've seen the Yellow River's sediment discharge with my own eyes.

[jingyuanyuan]

There's a Chinese meme that the Yellow River doesn't need rituals to present sacrifices because if it's hungry it'll come onto the shore and eat the sacrifices itself.

[asmuchasidliketo]

#some netizens also say chinese people like unification because only a powerful unified dynasty can survive the yellow river and sometimes #also the chang jiang when they decide to flood and change directions and kill and displace millions #also only large dynasties have the resources to do hydroengineering to try and control the yellow river #yellow river be like: if you don't hydroengineer you die #but if you do you might also die heehee #“we call these our mother rivers not because they are gentle but because we are too scared” tags on above post

(source: Wikipedia)

[setnet]

@mikkeneko

[cerithess]

👋 hi language learner! yes, you! have a favor to ask of you :)

for my graduation, i’m researching ways that technology can enhance the language learning process through visual media (series, movies, but also news etc.). for this, i need to speak to learners (of any language, genuinely, no matter your rate of fluency or how long you’ve been studying for) to interview and possibly test my prototype a few times through a link i’ll share with you. it’s also perfectly okay if you haven’t had experience with tools that help you learn through shows and such, but instead have worked with other things such as duolingo.

anything we discuss can be entirely anonymous and can be done via chat here or discord or whatever you prefer, that’s up for discussion. i don’t need to record your voice, provide your real name or show your face, so typing is also fine.

i’d love to hear your input on your wishes for language learning programs and your experiences if you have any so i can design something we may be able to use in the future to learn, that’s hopefully an improvement upon currently existing methods.

as i’ve mentioned, the language you learn is unimportant to me as any feedback is great feedback; but as i need to pick a language to prototype with to keep the scope of my project doable for the period of my graduation (even though i’d *love* to do it for all languages right off the bat ☹️), korean and arabic learners are somewhat preferable as these are languages that i’m familiar with. please don’t let yourself be deterred by this if you’re learning any other language though!

on top of that; i’ll be taking accessibility into account, so if you’re able to give me input on that front, i’d be eternally thankful as well.

if you wanna help me out (thank you so much), please react with a ❤️ to this post. if not, i’d appreciate if you would spread around the message by reposting.

thank you for your attention!

[thisbibliomaniac]

If anyone was wondering, Duolingo just got even worse.

[cazort]

Duolingo was already on a downward spiral for years. I discovered it in 2015 and it was an incredible tool and I used it for a few years but then I started to notice a decline. It got worse and worse in a lot of ways.

I actually ended up having a surreal and jarring one-on-one conversation with Luis von Ahn, the founder and CEO, who reached out to me after a scathing critique I posted on Reddit started to get significant traction.

Talking to him was like talking to someone who had been brainwashed by a cult. I told him how I and others in my life had found Duolingo so useful and efficient for language learning, and that its usefulness was evidenced by me noticing a real-world improvement in ability to listen to, understand, and speak the languages I had been practicing, but that recent changes had made it dramatically less useful to where I needed to put much more time in to get the same amount out.

His response was like "But all our metrics are up, our data shows that our changes are working." It was so frustrating. The metrics were all about engagement. He was showing people were spending more time practicing languages, not that they were getting more real-world ability to converse in those languages. Practice time was going up but actual language ability was going down. I tried explaining that to him but he seemed completely unable and/or unwilling to understand my point.

It was like talking to a wall.

I left the conversation with any remaining faith in the Duolingo leadership completely shattered, and I completely withdrew from using the site.

I now use Clozemaster to learn languages in place of Duolingo, and I think it is far superior it terms of efficiency, especially when combined with listening to material produced by native speakers.

[fixyourwritinghabits]

If you're looking for alternatives to Duolingo, here are some options that I'm aware of (and none of them are Babbel. Don't use Babbel):

Busuu - Busuu is what I used while studying Chinese and Japanese, and the app is comparable to Duolingo.

MangoLanguages - Many library systems are offering access to this to free! Make sure to check to see if your library card gives you access to this resource.

Great Courses Plus - They also have a ton of language material, and are often offered through libraries!

Linkedin Learning - Multiple language (and other!) options, also available through many public libraries.

Anki - Gives you access to thousands of flashcards and the ability to make your own.

Pimsleur - Pimsleur is one of the most highly recommended language programs, especially if you're working for a conversational level.

Other alternatives to consider are Youtube, often a great place for smaller schools and creators to post content. I supplement my classes with Easy German, and I used to be pretty reliant on EveryDay Chinese to practice my tones. If you're looking to learn it, there's bound to be a channel out there that is tailored toward your language learning.

A second resource to look into is textbooks with app learning. MaGraw Hill, for example, has a free app with practice material for the books you purchase. (QUICK EDIT: The app I was looking for only works on older phones, boo. But other textbook companies often have apps.) My German textbook is published by Hueber, and they also have an app. When you're looking to self study, it's definitely worth seeing if there's a textbook to work out of that has built-in app support.

[indigostudies]

studying thai is wild what do you MEAN you have to use a gender marker when saying “the weather is nice today”……..

[indigostudies]

ignore my chicken scratch handwriting. WHY do i have to tell the person i’m talking to that i’m A Man when saying “today the weather is hot”!!!!!!! (<- ungendered language native)

(this is not me being Genuinely mad i am actually somewhat amused. but mostly baffled. i’ve also decided i’ll use ครับ/khrap for myself for fun.)

(that said the only way i’m making it through these lessons is the bulk bag of skittles i bought the other day.)

[indigostudies]

the words aren’t actually that long! thai doesn’t divide words with spaces the way most languages do—this sentence, if you were to split it up into individual words, actually looks like [วัน][นี้][อากาศ][ร้อน][นะ][ครีบ]—six words in total, [day][this][weather][hot][softening particle][masculine referent particle] for “the weather is hot today, huh? (masculine speaker)”. it’s a bit of a hurdle when learning to read, but it’s actually not as hard as it seems! (and yes, fully agreed—it does look very cool!)