languagesnacks

Hey! I'm learning Romanian, Polish, and Hindi... and Cantonese and Telugu and sometimes Persian and Russian and French and Spanish. This is where I store ideas that spill over from my Proper Language Blog, and where I get inspired!

[languagesnacks]

Ok I don't know if this is going to be particularly accessible advice, but for anyone who is like me and has 1) several (or one) languages at various states of disrepair and 2) a brain in various states of disrepair: keeping a journal in my target languages has been revolutionary. It allows me to get my thoughts in order while taking a step back from the self-criticism that has stopped me from keeping a journal in English (my first language), while also gaining constant little rewarding feelings from improving my ability to produce (and not just consume) the languages I'm learning. Also just doodling and making it look pretty when I don't have much to say has its own kind of value.

I really feel like I've found a language activity that gives me more dopamine than scrolling and I love it so much. Like it's not fixing my ADHD but I do think it's helping me process and sometimes even prioritise!

[catchymemes]

[peneigh-dzredfohl]

Can everyone who reads this PLEASE reblog it?!?!?  Libraries literally saved my life as a child!

Being abused at home, bullied at school and lost in the world, the library and all the books I could escape to the most amazing worlds, kept me alive!

I would walk to the library, and spend all day, from 10 am to 9 pm reading there!! I got special awards for how many books I read, I wrote little blurbs on why i loved the books (probably why I love to BETA and do ARCs) 

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE Just hit the green arrows and the reblog!!!

As a 50 year old woman, the library offers me so much. Digital art pads to borrow, 3D printing, book clubs that are face to face (yeah, the introvert likes face to face because a moderator will stomp on anyone getting snarky)

New books in LARGE PRINT! I’m visually challenged and as much as I love my kindle, The feel of a real book in my hands will always be a beloved feeling!

Our library also has quarterly books sales of almost free books!! For 5$USD we get in a day early and can buy as many as we want. Anyone else has to wait and there is a limit for the first 2 days.

[stevviefox]

Also many, many libraries have inter library loan(it may be called something different). This means if they don’t have the item you want, they can get it for you. This may include photocopy/pdf of articles. This can also include along with books and DVDs, microfilm/fiche which is also a huge resource. Check around for libraries that are listed as depositories if you want to look at government documents.

Remember that many colleges and universities have open stacks for the public. You will likely have to pay a membership fee but you will get to stuff.

[languagesnacks]

Reblogging to remind myself that I don't need to reinvent the wheel. I'm constantly trying to think of ways to create spaces that are already a library.

[cuyahogafalls-ohio]

"cost of living crisis" give me a FUCKING break it's called "unprecedented corporate greed and income inequality" fucking cost of living crisis like it's just a natural or unexplainable phenomenon Christ

[languagesnacks]

I use Google translate a lot when I'm learning languages, mostly to sense check by putting relevant words in a few different grammatical contexts, but also just for simple translation. Generally I find this very useful, despite the obvious limitations, but I just had a few wildly wrong translations in a row. One of them felt like Google translated the words from one language, into English, then back out into the other language with disastrous results. Another (which was my way of checking the first mistake) was just a really weird parsing of English:

It is making me very curious to understand better how it works. Especially the fact that it seemed to use English as an intermediary (really that is the only way I can explain the translation of "pędy" (plant shoots) to "गोली मारता है" (shoots a bullet)).

[languagesnacks]

Yes, there is so much more to Hindi cinema than SRK movies, but yes watching Don (2006) today does feel like the culmination of my life's work learning languages. Cheese level 1000 what an absolute treat.

[languagesnacks]

One day I'll be able to read this

[tsugarubecker]

This book/these linguists are reading us all for filth… but like, very lovingly 💓

[allthingslinguistic]

From Because Internet.

[languagesnacks]

I have spent way too much time watching polyglot videos on YouTube, but it's not the kind of language motivational content I want to see. That being the case I'm making my own. In the meantime if anyone has suggestions of language-themed content I'd love to hear them!

[languagesnacks]

For those people who are learning a third language through their second I am immensely impressed. I hope someday to give it a try.

[languagesnacks]

Y’know I first started reading Teach Yourself Hindi 12 years ago and I never got past around chapter 14 because even though I absolutely love Hindi and I think it is the most engaging yet comprehensive textbook for any language that I’ve come across, I’m just not a big textbook person and I mostly watched a bunch of movies. But 12 years later I still want to know how the plot resolves, so that is how I will be spending my weekend!

Shout out to Rupert Snell (and all the older TY books)

[languagesnacks]

Tbh despite massive inconsistency on my part I'm pretty proud of what I've done in 12 years of language learning.

[languagesnacks]

I can't believe I've been learning languages for over ten years and I have only just discovered that changing my phone language is genuinely helpful. I'd always assumed it would make a very minor difference, it changes my app settings as well and forces me to interact with the language constantly (my screen time is a sorry sight).

[languagesnacks]

I don't know how to maintain a language... Actually I don't I think that is true, I think it is more accurate to say that I don't know how to maintain the languages I know (a bit) when a) I don't feel like I have actually learnt them properly yet and b) I have other stuff to do and in the end it is easier to watch cartoons than it is to manage my time efficiently.

[languagesnacks]

Impatience in language learning

I think it’s pretty normal to be impatient when learning a language. I am not of the mindset that there is anything wrong with learning slowly. I manage to convince myself fairly regularly (despite language students I know telling me otherwise) that my dabbling approach has been great fun and given me a lot.

That said I have become more consecutive in my approach: while in the past my browser never had tabs open for fewer than three different languages I now learn languages one at a time (discounting insufficient maintenance). That isn’t because I think there is anything wrong with dabbling, but because as my intentions have moved away from understanding everyone (yeah, everyone... I know it’s silly) to communicating with them I have become more of a completionist. I want to properly know one language before I move onto another. 

So my impatience is magnified tenfold. I’m learning Romanian, that’s fun and cool, but I need me some Hindi... and some Russian... and some everything else. Tamil, Somali, Polish, I’m coming for you! Slowly.

P.S. Now I live in a city I can actually give a justification for those particular language choices that isn’t just “I wanted to learn something that is spoken by nobody I know”.

[languagesnacks]

Like, I’m “fluent”, but a lot of the people I want to speak with can’t understand what I’m saying

My partner doesn't speak English as a first language and I do. I am also a master's student who has learnt to value a particular kind of speech complexity, and as a result he finds it significantly easier than I do to understand and be understood by other people whose first language isn't English (wherever they are from).

That encompasses the majority of both of our colleagues and mutual friends, and I consider him to have a kind of fluency that is important and that I lack, at the same time as I have a kind of fluency that he can't replicate (not least because he hasn't spent 8 years reading variously jargon-fuelled (often translated) sociology (etc.) texts). He has a kind of fluency that is particularly important to me as I intend to work support migrants in the UK and I can't quickly learn all languages.

If fluency is about communicating clearly, then mine is situational. The language flows in different ways.

[languagesnacks]

говорю по русски? - I can’t remember, but probably

Now my Russian was never really conversational - at some point I could understand some, sort of, but my attempts at replicating the grammar were slow and sketchy. Now, with a rapidly improving grasp of Romanian - the quickest progress I have ever made in a language, if slow by the standards of many - I have realised that I have forgotten almost all of the Russian I knew. Words I used to read every day are now... familiar, at best.

I suppose I should be worried, but one day, over the rainbow, it will come back. I am one of those language learners who watched a lot of polyglot videos before I could claim to speak anything other than my native language. Back then I largely ignored their warnings about forgetting languages, or replacing them with new ones. It is time to take them seriously, but for now I consider it a graduation - at least (and at last) I have learnt enough to forget some of it! And I’m sure, in the end, I will remember again.

[languagesnacks]

I like learning, wbu?

I’ve been talking a bit on here recently about the subjects I choose to think about in languages that aren’t my first language. For me there are across the board similarities in reading materials, but especially for my youtube-based-learning I am all over the place - possibly because I like to think I’m multitasking by learning two things at once! (I am, in general, unproductive, but if I am doing one thing you can bet I’m doing two things - long live educational podcasts!)

Anyway, though I imagine I don’’t have nearly enough followers to get much of a response, I will ask the question: what do you guys find interesting in your target language? Do your interests shift with the languages you are learning? What is really in your YouTube histories???