[linguisticperspective]

tho fr learning languages is such a great source of reinforcement, you can do the bare minimum & still feel like you’re progressing in a meaningful way. came across a new word you haven’t previously heard of? learned an irregularity in conjugating a particular verb? figured out how spell something you’ve heard but never read? bam! you’ve increased how much you know by just that little bit & it’s so. intrinsically. rewarding!!!

[russianwave]

The Open University has over 1,000 free courses available. Of particular interest to my langblr followers (no Russian unfortunately :( ), they have a range of language courses available including courses on English as a secondary language, linguistics, translation as a career, and how to learn a language.

[thebackofthelibrary]

The Norwegian 1 hand alphabet for Norwegian Sign Language

[cynicademia]

microdosing on learning a language by reblogging resources masterpost

[icebluecyanide]

there’s this post going around that’s like ‘what if alien languages had pronouns that didn’t include gender information!’ and there’s about five different enthusiastic replies and like, i get the excitement but i’m begging you to learn about languages other than english

[icebluecyanide]

An incomplete list of languages that don’t have gendered pronouns (based on what people mentioned in the notes/tags):

Mandarin Chinese (spoken)

Cantonese

Japanese (they exist but are rarely used)

Korean

Indonesian

Malay

Tagalog

Maori

Swahili

Xhosa

Farsi

Turkish

Armenian

Finnish

Hungarian

Estonian

Sámegiella (& most other Sami languages)

Yaqui

ASL

[linguisticmaps]

Tenseless languages

Language that do not possess the grammatical category of “tense”, although obviously, they can communicate about past or future situations, but they do it resorting to adverbs (earlier, yesterday, tomorrow), the context (pragmatics), but mostly aspect markers, that show how a situation relates to the timeline (perfective, continuous, etc.) or modal markers (obligation, need, orders, hipothesis, etc.)

Tenseless languages are mostly analytic/isolating, but some are not. They occur mainly in East and Southeast Asia (Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Kra-Dai, Hmong-Mien), Oceania, Dyirbal (in NE Australia), Malagasy, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Ewe, Fon and many Mande languages of Western Africa, most creole languages, Guarani, Mayan languages, Hopi, some Uto-Aztecan languages, and Greenlandic and other Inuit dialects. 

[vikinglanguage]

Knitting in Danish

No one requested this, but I’m guessing that somewhere out there, there will be someone learning Danish who somewhat shares my niche interests! So here’s what should be a decently comprehensive list of what you need to read most basic patterns.

base vocabulary at strikke – to knit strikkepind (fk.) – knitting needle maske (fk.) – a stitch rundpind (fk.) – a circular needle strømpepind (fk.) – a double pointed needle garn (itk.) – yarn indfarvning (fk.) – lot strikkeopskrift (fk.) – knitting pattern uld (fk.) – wool akryl (fk.) – acrylic silke (fk.) – silk bomuld (fk.) – cotton base techniques at slå op – to cast on ret – knit(wise) vrang – purl(wise) retsiden – the right side vrangsiden – the wrong side strikkefasthed (fk.) – gauge retstrik – garter stitch glatstrik – stockinette stitch perstrik – seed stitch rib · ribkant – rib at tage (en maske) løs af (vrang) – to slip (a stitch) (purlwise) at strikke (to masker) sammen – knit together at lukke af – to bind off · to cast off at bryde garnet – to break the yarn at tage ind – to decrease at tage ud – to increase fancier techniques kantmaske (fk.) – edge stitch hulmønster (itk.) – eyelet pattern snoning (fk.) – cable drejet ret – knit into back of stitch at strikke (to masker) drejet ret sammen – slip slip knit at samle masker up – to pick up stitches at slå om – yarn over

[hilarioushumorfromouterspace]

[aim-and-ignights]

Same energy

[maxeth]

trifecta

[sighinastorm]

quadrifecta

[truffledmadness]

“Tortilla” would match to “torta”, which….is a real Spanish word that just means cake, y’all.

Tortillas are little flat cakes.

[doomedgirls]

in addition, mosca means fly

mosquito does mean little fly

lmfao

[anoctopus]

‘dump’ is an old adjective that meant “doughy” so “dumpling” is basically “little doughy thing”

[sighinastorm]

Yes but that’s not funny.

[nutwit]

Doro still at large

[twinicegiantorbiters]

i don’t know why but i’m really amused by the winner of some ‘new kanji’ contest:

compare with the real kanji

座 (seat/gathering), but the two 人 (person) radicals have been moved from next to each other within the 土 (earth) radical to diagonally from each other, making this “social distance(d seating/gathering)”

[jadethest0ne]

This is hilarious, but to further the hilarity, I’d like to point to the fact that half of the “A rank” (runners up) for this contest also are related to 2020 epidemic jokes

First up we have:

Compare with 太

The original kanji means “to gain weight”. But it adds the コ “ko” and ロ  “ro” katakana symbols at the top to represent the weight you gain while staying home due to the corona virus.

Then we have:

Compare with 会 

The original kanjij means “meeting”, but the lower radical is changed to look more like a “Z” to represent Zoom meetings. Thus, the new kanji means “web meetings” or “zoom calls”

And of course another social distancing one:

Compare with 話 

This means “to talk” or “chat”, but it’s changed simply to show the two radicals social distancing from one another as we should also while holding conversations nowadays.

At least we can have some fun language humor despite all of this!

[notvoid]

[singoallala]

This is a hilarious mistranslation actually. I suspect it originally said something along the lines of "Impregnerad mot vatten", i.e. "Water proof".

Impregnering is the process of making a material resistant to water/heat. The swedish word for water (vatten) is similar to the word for goblin (vätten) so I guess there was a mixup.

[demonindistress]

@norsesuggestions

[thevagueambition]

the way scandinavians modify their language when around another scandinavian group is absolutely fascinating linguistically

swedes who live in denmark often learn to say numbers in danish, for example. and there are words and expressions they’d use with swedes but not with danes. even though they’re still more or less speaking swedish, they are modifying how they speak it to be easier for danes to understand

similarly, when danes interact with swedes or norwegians in service work or abroad, some construct numbers the way you do in swedish or norwegian so it’s easily understandable. we don’t straight up say them in that language, we just apply their method to the danish words

eg for seventy: syvti (da, lit. seven-ten) instead of halvfjerds (actual danish word for seventy), but not sjuttio (sw, lit. seven-ten) or sytti (no, lit. seven-ten). 

I also noticed in Skam that the danish hotel worker uses “vældig” a lot, which is not the usual word to use in danish, but “veldig” is the usual word to use in norwegian, so again you have this modification of how we speak our language even while we’re still speaking it 

[thoodleoo]

the worst part about studying languages is knowing that you will never be nearly as good at it as a literal baby

[what-even-is-thiss]

The only reason babies are better at language learning is because it’s their full time job and they don’t get embarrassed

[what-even-is-thiss]

If you, a teenaged or adult human, wasn’t embarrassed and could study language full time you would learn way faster than a baby.

[sandersstudies]

In my defense, babies receive more positive reinforcement than I do as well. Babies will say ha ba bah dah ba hah and all the adults around them will be like 🤯 really? Wow 😱 that is so interesting 😁 great job! 🤗 and then what happened? 🤔

[computationalcalculator]

also people who are like “I’ve been studying for a year and I only have an eight-year-old’s grasp of the language”:

how long do you think it took the eight-year-old

[languagessi-deactivated20210423]

Me watching a movie in a language I’m still a beginner in: I UNDERSTOOD THAT WORD!1!!!

[confusionoftongues]

Was watching this show between doing Duolingo lessons and a character on it shot down another's idea of learning a language late in life because "the human brain stops developing at 25 and it becomes very hard to learn anything new. It'll never stick." And it hit hard 😔

[teacupful-of-languages]

Learning new languages is so difficult when you have depression. It’s hard to stay motivated. It’s hard to get started. It’s hard to concentrate. It’s hard to remember what you have learnt. But fuck it. I will not let my mental illness stop me from becoming a polyglot.

[eintsein]

An Overview of Note-Taking Styles

Note-taking is one of the most essential skills a student should master. It allows you to record and review information to be used in the future. But what’s the best way to do so? Here’s an overview of note-taking styles that can help you maximize your learning!

[nostrem]

I’m posting this here because I’m honestly so sick and tired of this kind of thing. Especially in regards to endangered languages

[nostrem]

But yeah. so funny

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

For those who don’t know, Scots language is not the same as Scottish Gaelic. They are unique from each other. Some people know Scots language better as being referred to as a dialect, so if you’ve heard about the Scots dialect before online, they’re probably referring to Scots language. 

UNESCO recognizes it as a vulnerable language (Gaelic is considered more severely as “endangered”).

The Scots Wikipedia is exactly what it sounds like, an alternate wikipedia where the articles are all written in Scots. There are other wikipedias that provide content for other languages the same way. It helps preserve and give access to a threatened and underrepresented language, which is invaluable.

About 16 hours ago, it was discovered that an American teenager has been editing and writing articles not in Scots, but in an American’s disrespectful phonetic take on what he thinks Scots sounds like. 

“The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots. I don’t mean this in a mean spirited or gatekeeping way where they’re trying their best but are making a few mistakes, I mean they don’t seem to have any knowledge of the language at all. “

This problem isn’t unique to this incident. Frequently on tumblr I see Americans making jokes about Scottish actors making what they’ve called “garbled Scottish sounds” and attempting (and failing) to type in Scots. Scottish languages have been decimated over the centuries, and Scots Wikipedia should be an amazing language resource.

The worst part? He’s apparently been at this for YEARS. He’s potentially (more info to come) edited or penned nearly 1/3 of Scots Wikipedia. Apparently when Scots speakers have corrected him in the past, he’s had a “haughty attitude,” claiming that other Scots speakers (who were never present, unsurprisingly) approved of his failed attempts at writing in Scots.

The damage is heart wrenching:

“Potentially tens of millions of people now think that Scots is a horribly mangled rendering of English rather than being a language or dialect of its own, all because they were exposed to a mangled rendering of English being called Scots by this person and by this person alone.

They wrote such a massive volume of this pretend Scots that anyone writing in genuine Scots would have their work drowned out by rubbish. Or, even worse, edited to be more in line with said rubbish.

Wikipedia could have been an invaluable resource for the struggling language. Instead, it’s just become another source of ammunition for people wanting to disparage and mock it, all because of this one person and their bizarre fixation on Scots, which unfortunately never extended so far as wanting to properly learn it.”

Even worse, many people are praising this kid as the all-time most dedicated “troll,” as funny, etc. It’s inexcusable.

They’re hoping Scots speakers will volunteer to help fix all of the nonsense articles he’s put up.