why can't I find one mandarin course anywhere

lin | she/they | brazilian @alien-with-headphones language learning and linguistics sideblog

[languagecollectorfreak]

intro post

about me

☆ lin ☆ she/they ☆ brazilian ☆

related blogs

☆ @alien-with-headphones - main

☆ @starman-loves-writing - shakespeare, books, dps, dark academia & my writing

☆ @lins-photoalbum - photography stuff

☆ @alien-bassplayer - music stuff

languages

☆ br portuguese - native

☆ english - fluent

☆ german - intermediary

☆ (egyptian) arabic - begginer

what you'll find here

☆ shitposts/memes ☆ translated posts ☆ encouragement ☆ learning tips ☆ linguistics stuff ☆

asks are always open, ty for stopping by!

[minovskyy]

becoming homophobic because when two characters in a scene have the same pronouns you have to say their names one william times

[minovskyy]

finally some good advice on this post

[existencebringsonlypain]

guys look at this wonderful thing i just made

swug

[hownottolearnalanguage]

[absolxguardian]

I'm kind of glad to hear that everyone does this. Because it means it isn't colonizer bullshit, it's what everyone does. It's just people discovering new things. Everyone goes:

"Oh hey these people have their own style of [language A's word for thing. Say, what do you call it?"

"Oh it's [language B's word for thing]."

"Got it, it's [language B's word for thing] variety [language A's word for thing]"

[house-of-crows]

added to which it is LITERALLY JUST LINGUISTIC SHORTHAND for 

[item] the way [culture] makes it. 

If you don’t want sliced bread, you want bread the way Eastern Indians make it you ask for Roti, not bread. Because Roti is bread THE WAY [EASTERN] INDIANS MAKE IT. Like fuck, it’s not that complicated a concept. 

OF COURSE it’s not colonizer bullshit! It’s just linguistic shorthand!

[chaifootsteps]

[just-shower-thoughts]

I hate that SEPTember OCTOber NOVember and DECember aren’t the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months.

[advanced-procrastination]

Whoever fucked this up should be stabbed

[languagecollectorfreak]

.............

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Why do homophones exist?

Eye halve know clew.

Its A reel gambol too chews witch whirred two yews.

[german-enthusiast]

ich habe mir für Montag einen Termin beim Frisör gemacht!

Ich hab seit ca. 5 Jahren den gleichen Hairstyles und war seit 4 Jahren nicht beim Frisör (mein Verlobter kann Haare schneiden) aber ich will mal etwas neues

bin aufgeregt aber auch nervös !?!?!!???

[horseimagebarn]

horsethoughtbarn 5 name

if horses werent called horses what do you think they should be called

[kaylmao]

quibbet /ˈkwɪ.bɪt/

from proto indo european *kswibʰ-éh₁-ti (to move quickly, stative form implying something moving quickly)

via proto brythonic *hwɨβid (to move)

spelling then latinized by roman empire to quibus, then frankified by norman invaders to quibbet

[horseimagebarn]

incredibly done my friend exactly the kind of thing i was hoping for

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[fairycosmos]

congratulations to people who are good at performing conversations and social interactions. did you take a class or is it just like genetics or whatever

[animate-mush]

The class is Intro to Linguistics and the chapter is Pragmatics. I am dead serious.

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[milf-adjacent]

The highest quality lieblingsfach you’ve ever seen

[starry-voidss]

i think more people should know about endangered languages. reblog or comment and i’ll send you an ask with a random endangered language and some basic info & fun facts about it. if you want any specific region specify in the reblog or comment

[tsarina-anadyomene]

As a kid, I was confused by the expression "Have your cake and eat it too" for completely different reasons from Ted. So Ted, he parses "have" to mean "possess." And then he's relying on your understanding of chronology in uses of "and" in expressions like "I'll grab my umbrella and go to the bank." But I was taking "have" to mean "eat." Like when we say "Let's have cake!" we're not saying "Let's possess the cake." We already have the cake. It's been sitting there on the dining room table all afternoon. What we're talking about is digging in. We're saying "Let's eat cake!" And it preserves some of the silliness of the expression: you've already had your cake and now you're trying eat it too. It's futile. What you've done has precluded the next act. But I was a stupid kid so I was like "Surely by having the cake you've necessarily eaten it." Not in so many words because I was like five. But that's the propositional content I was working with.

[tsarina-anadyomene]

In some ways I still like parsing "have" to mean "eat" in the expression. It provokes the thought of someone trying to conjure a second piece of cake by some verbal trick. And it makes it so the order of the conjuncts doesn't matter at all. Plus I think "have" just way more saliently means "eat" whenever we're talking about food, except in cases where you're asking about the availability of something. But in the declarative case it seems to almost always mean eat.

In some ways the metaphor becomes a little weaker, but I basically think the Unabomber is wrong about this too.

[dedalvs]

Suh Ankripton: The New Kryptonian Language from Superman

The latest from Jessie and me is Suh Ankripton: the new Kryptonian language from Superman (2025). It shows up in a key (but minor) way in the new film, though you'll hear it again in future (and a lot more of it). It's head-initial: SVO and inflectional, with verbs that are meatier than we expected... Eventually I'll put the dialogue from the movie up on my AO3, but I want to wait until people have had a chance to see it, as the dialogue plays a key role in the film. Look for that in the coming weeks!

[pusheenthenerdcat]

i don't like when people insult languages or dialects... they are all my fascinating little children and wonderful in their own ways. it's impossible to have a dialect that exists without a history and a cultural context and a community attached to it

even the most inscrutable idolect you can think of is a constellation of that person's loves and mentors and childhood jokes

How is that not the coolest thing youve ever heard

[mysticdragon3md3]

omg I've heard people do this! Several times!

[what-even-is-thiss]

Why does like every language do things with their R sounds that nobody else understands

[unpickled-olive-deactivated2025]

⟨r⟩ is out of control.

It's a chameleon, a turncoat. It's at the front of the mouth [ɾ] and the back [ʁ]. It's a flap, a trill , a fricative [ʀ], an approximate [ɹ], a retroflex [ɽ]. It's a consonant. It's a semivowel. It's a vowel. It's /ʐ/.

It's a color. It's nothing. It's the space between words.

It's tearing Sweden apart.

[pettson]

@svenskjavel

[linguistness]

The German <r> isn't even an <r> lots of the time. Sure, it can be an [ʁ] and an [r]. It can also be [ər].

Or... you know... an [ɐ] or [ɐ̯] because why not