Oh Yeah

Account that used to be a date everything can account. Now just regular bullshit

[imdatingeverything]

IM IN FRANCE AND IM MAYBE IM GONNA BE ABLE TO GET A TAMAGOTCHI PARADISE FOR £19 WHEN ITS USUALLY £45 FOR ME YAYAYAYAY

[imdatingeverything]

Update: nvm lol. They were sold out and we can’t go to the other places that aren’t. I got cool dice though!

[imdatingeverything]

ANOTHER UPDATE: an Argos had a clearance sale so when I got back I GOT ONE FOR 29 POUNDS LETS GO!!!!!

[seracadash]

(goverment voice) we need to protect the children from pornography so our plan is to remove their eyes so they would never see something so traumatic. if you are against removing children's eyes you are basically a pedophile

[imdatingeverything]

IM IN FRANCE AND IM MAYBE IM GONNA BE ABLE TO GET A TAMAGOTCHI PARADISE FOR £19 WHEN ITS USUALLY £45 FOR ME YAYAYAYAY

[imdatingeverything]

Update: nvm lol. They were sold out and we can’t go to the other places that aren’t. I got cool dice though!

[fintan-pyren]

academic who writes a paper and just puts "credit to original author :)" for all their citations

[fintan-pyren]

The WHOLE POINT of this post was that this would be a bad thing to do, so you shouldn't do it with art either. This is a PRO-CITATION post. Stop complaining about citations and saying that you wish you could get away with this.

[imdatingeverything]

In the future once the state of the economy inevitably makes AI have its downfall, I feel like AI images and items will be like. A commodity. Or like a collectors thing. Like the whole idea of ‘this thing was made using this horrible thing that nobody has access to anymore’ can be really interesting to some people I feel

[segamascot]

[snorazz]

[theatricuddles]

[ID: The first is an image of Canada and Mexico with the United States edited out that reads "Oh thank god it was just a dream". The second image is an image of North America with all lands labelled with the names of the tribes living on them that reads "Oh thank god it was just a dream".]

[theworsethingsgettheharderifight]

here is a REALLY detailed hq map of indigenous american nations if you're interested (you are.)

and alaska. and hawai'i.

[theakrus-fallen-deactivated2024]

This is actually the most important thing I’ve seen this year

[qucko-deactivated20151208]

reblog this for good luck

[feefal]

pH balance in your mouth, and how it affects your teeth! Inspired by my dentist scolding me for my daily energi drink consumption, cause it’s apparently detrimental to the health of my enamel… whatever that means

why does battery acid have to taste so good…

[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!

[helloilovefanfiction]

Bonus:

[polarolds]

I cried three times. 👎👎👎

[lost-and-kinda-dumb]

hello !!!!

could you possibly maybe draw a frog and a snail having a tea party ??

thank you in advance !!!

[stick-eridian-collection]

your blog is so whimsical holy shit. i hope you never stop being yourself

[twiggy-boy]

Posting this gif twice because I finally figured out how to make GIFs properly and it makes me laugh

[catcrumb]

[rocky-the-eridian-official-real]

Rocky I hope you know how stupid you looked when you didn't understand what a tape measure was lmao idiot

<Rocky hope anon knows how stupid anon looks when Rocky smother anon with pillow tonight.>

[aorish-deactivated20251222]

strangely common misconception that words have basically the same meanings in every langauge and that translation is just a matter of identifying which exact word in the target language corresponds to the word in the original language

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post