☁️inspired bookworm

сари (she/her) 🪻 langblr | studyblr | bookblr | sharing my favorite things and trying to keep myself motivated 🪱 | es, en, ru, de.

[inspiredbookworm]

✨ 20 day language learning challenge ✨

Day 2: Which language/s do you want to learn while doing this challenge?

Hello everyone, welcome to day 2! Just as sunny as yesterday but colder (приветствую, осень) ☁️

I would love to learn German, but it's hard to study on my own. As I mentioned I'm not a fan and if it weren't for the uni classes I would be far behind. I want to learn it anyway, although I really have to find a better motivation. I don't hate it, yet something's pushing me back. I enjoy the uni classes probably because of the teacher, and the fact that I'm also learning Russian, because we're studying it from Russian. Today I'm gonna try to study a bit, at least some verbs or vocab 🫐

I want to learn Italian as well. One of my closest friends is italian and I told him I would study the language over the summer, but I was too busy (I went to another city and walked 22k steps a day). Nevertheless, the language is really beautiful and I know I would make my 15 year old self happy. I also have someone to practice with by default ☺️

Lastly, I'm gonna keep on studying Russian the way I am now. No grammar exercises, just talking, writing, reading and listening. I guess that's called immersion? I hope to finish the book I'm currently reading soon.

Have a lovely Wednesday 🕯️

[inspiredbookworm]

✨ 20 day language learning challenge ✨

I found it appropriate to begin today, given that I'm motivated to study, woke up earlier than expected and the day is sunny and beautiful 🌞

Day 1: Which languages can you speak besides your native language?

My native language is Spanish, and I've been appreciating it more lately. Off-topic but yesterday I read a study on Cortazar's word creation and I'm really intrigued now and hope I can re-read his books soon!

I can also fluently speak English (C1?) and Russian (B1-B2). I guess I've always been afraid of making mistakes while communicating but who cares in the end, really. I've been learning English my whole life and apart from school I've never had any language-oriented education. I like to believe that I learned it by reading books and watching commentary YouTube videos ☺️

I started learning Russian ~ 3 years ago in order to move to Russia. I love the Russian language and recently finished my first book in Russian. That had been my goal ever since I started studying the language, so I am indeed proud. (If you're curious about it, it was The Fury by Alex Michaelides (Ярость). I am currently reading The Jealousy Man and Other Stories by Jo Nesbø (Ревность и другие истории) and I've been enjoying it so far!)

Bonus: I am learning German as part of my uni curriculum, and have been doing so for a year and a half. I don't like the language much but I've been surprisingly enjoying studying it, and one of my goals is to actually speak it, so expect German posts 🤝

I think that covers the first day! If you read until the end, thank you! I hope I can keep up with the challenge and the posts. Have a nice day 🕯️

[caramelcuppaccino]

hi and hello everyone! my name is lunlun, i’m an english language teaching student. this is my last year. i’m learning german as my second foreign language. i’m now on my winter break and i want to motivate myself to learn german better during my break and do something besides duolingo. because i have around 25 days left before next semester begins, i decided to create a challenge for 20 days. i hope you will participate and this challenge will be useful and motivating for you too!

you don't need to do anything to participate. but i appreciate it if you reblog this post so that others can see the challenge. and do not forget to use the hashtag #languagelearningwithlunlun so that everyone can see your posts. good luck and i hope you have fun!

Day 1: Which languages can you speak besides your native language?

Day 2: Which language/s do you want to learn while doing this challenge?

Day 3: Are there any apps you use to learn languages?

Day 4: How do you improve your listening skills?

Day 5: How do you improve or practice your speaking skills?

Day 6: Are there any free online sources you use to learn languages? Please share<3

Day 7: Which language do you think is easier to learn: your native language or the foreign language you are learning?

Day 8: If you can speak English, where and how did you learn it?

Day 9: What is the biggest struggle of learning a language according to you?

Day 10: How do you enrich your vocabulary?

Day 11: Is there a certain method you use to learn languages?

Day 12: Which of the extinct languages would you like to learn if you could?

Day 13: How many languages are spoken in your country?

Day 14: Share an interesting fact about the language you are learning, or your native language.

Day 15: What is a misinformation about your native language or the language you are learning?

Day 16: Are there any words in your mother tongue that are borrowed or adapted from English or other languages?

Day 17: Briefly summarize what you’ve studied and learned today!

Day 18: What do you think about grammar? Is it fun to learn? Do you enjoy grammar activities? Does knowing your native language’s grammar help learning another language’s grammar?

Day 19: Do you know how many dialects your mother language has?

Day 20: The last day! Did you enjoy the challenge? Was it helpful?

[cartooncoyote]

There's just so much I don't know about Tolkien's work

[hamletthedane]

[hamletthedane]

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

[hamletthedane]

Want to learn something new in 2023??

Cooking with flavor bootcamp (used what I learned in this a LOT this year)

Beekeeping 101

Learn Interior Design from the British Academy of Interior Design (free to audit course - just choose the free option when you register)

Video on learning to read music that actually helped me??

How to use and sew with a sewing machine

How to ride a bike (listen. some of us never learned, and that's okay.)

How to cornrow-braid hair (I have it on good authority that this video is a godsend for doing your baby niece's black hair)

Making mead at home (I actually did this last summer and it was SO good)

How to garden

Basics of snowboarding (proceed with caution)

How to draw for people who (think they) suck at art (I know this website looks like a 2003 monstrosity, but the tutorials are excellent)

Pixel art for beginners so you can make the next great indie game

Go (back) to school

Introduction to Astronomy (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Principals of Economics (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Introduction to philosophy (free college course)

Computer science basics (full-semester Harvard course free online)

Learn a language

Japanese for Dummies (link fix from 2022)

Ukrainian

Portuguese (Brazil)

American Sign Language (as somebody who works with Deaf people professionally, I also strongly advise you to read up on Deaf/HoH culture and history!)

Chinese (Simplified)

Quenya (LOTR fantasy elf language)

[weirdwerewolf-deactivated-deact]

hey, if you ever wanted to learn russian, here is a online textbook called Между Нами and here is the pdf download link to the classroom activities workbook and the homework workbook. it has audio so you can listen and read and one of the first exercises in the homework book is teaching you how to write in russian cursive. it is for complete beginners and in my opinion is a way better (and ad-free) way of learning russian compared to the many language learning apps out there.

[somerabbitholes]

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

[stemacademia-deactivated2022061]

I know right!

[rawhoneybliss]

September will be filled with everything that I intend for it to be filled with, and that is nothing but good things. For this month and every month hereafter I attract nothing but good things.

[myhoneststudyblr]

my masterpost | my studygram | ask me anything | how to stop procrastinating series

[click images for high quality]

[transcript under the cut]

Other advice posts that may be of interest:

All About Procrastination

How To Study When You Really Don’t Want To

Common Study Mistakes

7 Strategies to Improve Concentration

Keep reading

[studensdocere]

online Latin and Greek resources

Not an exhaustive list, just some sites I’ve found especially useful studying and teaching. Scroll down for fancier Classics Masterposts. Updated August 26, 2015.

Latin

words

http://latinlexicon.org/ (my favorite; dictionaries (L&S) and flashcards)

http://archives.nd.edu/words.html (if I can’t convert you to latinlexicon)

http://nodictionaries.com/ (neat concept, sometimes misleading)

http://romansgohome.com/spqr (if you have the right devices…I don’t) 

http://www.wyomingcatholiccollege.com/faculty-pages/patrick-owens/lexicon/adumbratio/index.aspx

texts

http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/

http://latin.packhum.org/index

http://www.stoa.org/colloquia/anglice.shtml

http://vergil.classics.upenn.edu/

other fun stuff

http://bestlatin.blogspot.com/

https://la.wiktionary.org

Latin AND Greek

http://dcc.dickinson.edu/ & Latin core vocab & Greek core vocab (learn these)

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/

http://www.textkit.com/

http://linguax.com/lexica/

http://attalus.org/

http://lexicity.com/ (many other languages too)

Greek

http://www.greekverbs.com/ (identifies and provides the paradigm!)

http://www.typegreek.com/

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/Woodhouse/

Culture etc. (obviously this is not comprehensive)

http://www.theoi.com/

https://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/index.htm

http://digitalaugustanrome.org/

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/home.html

https://medium.com/eidolon

Teaching Latin (mostly CI) (good stuff for learners, too)

https://latinbestpracticescir.wordpress.com/

http://indwellinglanguage.com/ (Latin media)

http://todallycomprehensiblelatin.blogspot.com/

http://latinforeveryone.blogspot.com/

http://pomegranatebeginnings.blogspot.com/

http://www.johnpiazza.net/latin

http://www.latinahilara.com/

http://lapis.practomime.com/index.php/698 (embedded readings for AP)

http://www.practomime.com/content/verba.php (like Cards Against Humanity but in Latin and classroom-safe, though you can be creative)

http://www.practomime.com/picturae/

http://www.tcl.camws.org/ Teaching Classical Languages

http://www.ijflt.com/ Foreign Language Teaching

Other Lists

c-aesarion​‘s Comprehensive Online Resource List for Students of Classics (!!!)

aristoteliancomplacency​‘s Master Post of Classicists on Tumblr. 

clyternnestra​‘s Ancient Greek Masterpost