A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

My posts are labeled with: ScatterB*  Linguistics & Anthropology Major , French Minor (B1), Dutch A2, JLPT5, Swedish A1, 6+ other languages.

[ly0nstea]

Some books and other resources in and about Irish

Roinnt leabhair agus achmhainn eile i agus faoi Ghaeilge

Honourable mentions to focloir and teanglann but you cant learn a language from a dictionary, its like trying to cook a meal from the menu. They're great for finding words as well as conjugating and altering words into the different cases.

GRAIMÉAR GAEILGE na mBRÁITHRE CRÍOSTAÍ le Liam A. Ó hAnluain: An irish grammar book, very comprehensive but it is written entirely in irish

Gramadach na Gaeilge: AN CAIGHDEÁN OIFIGIÚIL: The official grammar standard for Irish published by the Irish government, again written exclusively in irish.

Daltaí na Gaeilge: Some good lessons on irish grammer, proverbs, and other parts of language, also has info on classes in America, Canada, and other countries

Goodreads list of top rated irish language novels

TG4Player which has irish language tv and movies

You can also search youtube for irish language short films, and youtubers, youtubers would be a good way to pick up on everyday/conversational irish if you arent able to speak to people in real life, seeing as it wont be as formal as most online resources or films. You can also look for other media like tumblr, or tiktok, personally I love Úna-Minh on tiktok (she translated Among Us and got it officially implemented, and iirc she's written a biography in irish, and has even more irish resources than I could ever list, go check her out!! She also has a youtube, instagram and twitch account if you prefer those. She's definetly been an significant help to my turas as Gaeilge.

Easons and books.ie have good irish and irish language books, as well as being irish brands you can support (including dracula in irish for 10 euro + shipping???) Along with kennys.ie and litríocht

Also, writing irish is a great way to force yourself to learn, be it journalling, fiction, or just notes in irish. Talk to people online in irish too, social media posts, chatting in chatrooms, discords, reddit, etc., anythign to practice. That's the key to any language, consistent practice.

This is just a starter, feel free to add resources in rbs if you have any you feel are worth seeing!

Go raibh míle maith agat as léamh!!1

ALSO WATCH AIFRIC ITS FUCKING AMAZING YOU CAN FIND IT FREE ONLINE

[duine-aiteach]

Charlie Byrne’s also have an Irish language section of their website but if you can visit their shop in Galway City I really would. It’s my favourite bookshop (alongside Gay’s The Word). It’s a bit labyrinthine and highlights loads of Irish writers etc. They also sell secondhand books on the shelves outside the shop.

Dubray Books also have a big focus on Irish writers and interest. They’re also generally cheaper than Easons.

[stop-that-llama]

Now You're Talking on youtube for beginners (Ulster irish but refers to other dialects too).

Wordle - As Gaeilge

Litreach (a listening game)

The Teanglann mobile app does Focal an Lae that's fun for building vocab

Siopa Leabhar - the Book Shop

[pompadourpink]

Encore VS toujours

Bonjour, can you please help me understand the differences between using toujours and encore? Merci mille fois d'avance 💕

*

Encore:

is an adverb of time and can be used as:

‘still’ (Il respirait encore quand je suis arrivée - He was still breathing when I got here)

‘again’ (Vous vous êtes encore réveillés - You woke up again)

‘but also’, often after the conjunction Mais (but) (Nous sommes non seulement les premiers à finir mais encore les seuls à réussir)

‘even more’, after the adverb Plus (more) (Je suis encore plus grande que toi - I’m even taller than you) as a graded quantifier

‘but then’, at the beginning of a clause (Tu pourras choisir ta chambre, encore faut-il que tu arrives à l’heure - You’ll be allowed to pick your room, but then you have to be on time)

‘at least’ (Si encore il acceptait d’être raisonnable! - If at least he would agree to be reasonable)

‘again?!’ (Comment ça ? Elle sera en retard ? Encore ?! - What are you saying ? She’ll be late ? Again ?!)

‘nonetheless/still’ (De toutes les bêtises que tu as fait cette année, celle-ci est encore la pire - Out of all the stupid things you did this year this one is still the worst)

‘rather’ (Elle déteste tellement les épinards qu’elle préfère encore manger des choux de Bruxelles à tous les repas - She hates spinach so much she’d rather eat Brussels sprouts for every meal)

Toujours:

is an adverb of time and can be used as:

‘always’ (Il est toujours en retard - He’s always late)

‘usually’ (C’est toujours moi qui prends - I’m always being blamed)

‘still’ (Elle est toujours aussi drôle - She’s still so funny)

‘without exception’, in a negative sentence (On ne peut pas toujours gagner - We can’t always win)

‘anyway’ (Essaie toujours, qui sait - Try anyway, who knows)

‘anyhow’ (C’est toujours ça - Anyhow, we at least have that)

Hope this helps! x 

[linguistness]

Learning Czech

Here are some tumblr posts i collected for learning Czech:

Resources:

Online Resources for learning Čeština (Czech)

Czech Resources

Masterlist by @multilingualpotato

Some vocab lists & grammar:

Czech month names

Czech prepositions of place

Czech nouns, their genders and declensions

Czech culture:

Children's books (look in the comments & tags)

Czech Christmas traditions

Czech Christmas carols

Czech Easter traditions

Some Czech langblrs:

@czechnotebook

@multilingualpotato

@ffaari

@mediocrelanguagelearner

[lingwistyka-balto-slawistyka]

Ok I'm going to redo that linguistics poll that I accidentally only made last a day

Choose a major field of linguistics

Phonetics + Phonology (the study of language sounds)

Morphology + Syntax ("grammar")

Semantics (the study of meaning)

Generative Grammar (complex sentence analysis as per Chomsky)

Historical + Comparative (language evolution, related languages etc)

Theoretical + Applied (philosophy of language, meta linguistics)

Neurolinguistics (the brain processes of language)

Lexicology + Lexicography (word formation + dictionary writing)

Computational (language algorithms)

Developmental + Didactics (language acquisition)

Voting ended onFeb 13, 2023

[learningcherryblossoms]

Going into computational but I love historical

[yinlotus]

there are so many interesting things to learn and pursue. i have no understanding of how anyone can simply choose 1 or 2 majors and make a career from them. i get bored of solo subjects far too easily for that. i want to learn everything. i want to do everything.

[learningcherryblossoms]

its how i ended up triple majoring and minored lol

[inhkeart]

hello friends if u could fill out this lil form about fanfiction and language learning i would be very grateful <3 i'm writing a paper on it so pls reblog/share the link with other people !

[clowergen]

tbh i still can’t understand why anyone would not want to learn other languages. like you can open a book full of once alien-like symbols, and actually know what it’s saying. it’s gotta be one of the best feelings in the world

[aro-langblr-deactivated20240924]

y’all,,, I just,, really fuckin love languages

[renthony]

If the HBO Max shitshow teaches us anything at all, it should be that when it comes to streaming media, media piracy is media preservation.

Physical media is harder to erase. Download your favorite animated shows today. Burn that shit to DVD and share it with your friends. If the corporations won't produce physical media, it's up to us to do it ourselves.

Streaming exclusives are the enemy of media preservation and archiving. Nothing should be lost just because corporations don't respect the art they own. When piracy is the only option, it becomes vital to pirate, lest things get lost forever.

There are instances of lost media being found again because someone home-taped it. The torrent you seed, the episodes you download, could one day be the only reason your favorite streaming show wasn't lost forever.

Art is being destroyed. Workers are being exploited and abused. And at the end of it all, what's there to show for it? Nothing, because HBO Max is setting the precedent that you can just delete whatever you want, whenever you want, and not even tell the artists.

Animation workers aren't being respected as artists OR as workers, and shit like this is a perfect example.

[cosmictulips]

If you want to read the supreme courts ruling about roe vs. wade here you go

You can read it HERE

but yea just know they're coming for same sex marriage, being LGBT as a crime and uh, protection such as birth control, etc etc etc.

if you don't think this is going to affect you, you're not paying ANY attention.

[prettyasapic]

Every person need to be taught disability history

Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.

Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.” (A decision which still has not been reversed)

Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.

Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors and parents left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.

Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.

Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”

Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.

Teach about us.

[sweaterstitches]

friendly linguistics reminder that learning a language and not then like. using it frequently and teaching your kids (if you have them) that language and the culture that comes along with it, you aren’t actually doing much of anything to ‘save’ a dying language or dialect. there’s a reason linguists seek out native speakers, especially monolingual ones, and not someone who learned it secondary to their primary language.

it’s the same principle as primary & secondary sources in historical research. a secondary source is never going to be a primary source. it’s useful, yes; but if, say, a colonial power went through and destroyed all of a culture’s artifacts, a sketch one of them made of an object is never going to be the same as the now destroyed original.

dying languages aren’t dying because people don’t care, they’re dying because current or historical forces have decided they needed to be destroyed.

languages aren’t just their words, they’re their speakers. they’re the culture it was born out of. they’re the physical places their words sought to describe.

[odissea]

hello my dear euro mutuals :-) i'm bringing this petition to your attention since i think it's something that will (probably) affect our futures. It's the Unconditional Basic Income petition, whose aim is to "establish the introduction of unconditional basic incomes throughout the EU which ensure every person’s material existence and opportunity to participate in society as part of its economic policy". For this petition to go through the EU commission it needs to be signed by 1 million people and it needs to reach the minimum threshold in at least 7 countries. As of now, only Slovenia reached the minimum threshold, with Germany, Italy and Spain very close to reaching it too. The petition needs to reach its goal before the 22nd of June so we really don't have much time.

European Citizens' Initiative

Give your support !

[pandirpus]

I usually don't rly care if ppl reblog things but it would be appreciated especially if some Americans shared it - you guys have more European/non-American followers than you think you have I promise!

Doesn't have to be on tumblr - can be a copy/paste to twitter or whatever else places you can think of.

(no pressure and no guilt-tripping/judging OBVIOUSLY)

[zhooniyaa-waagosh]

Any Japanese language learning program that doesn’t have writing and stroke order aspects for hiragana, katakana, AND kanji has automatically failed in my eyes. You cannot expect students to be able to learn a whole new writing system by just looking at it, especially when kanji is nearly entirely based on memorization.

Writing, especially repetitive writing, is a universal part of learning a language for a reason.

[jpn-langblr]

I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I was first learning how to write my alphabet at age 6, my workbooks certainly had small arrows indicating which way to write A, G, Æ and all the rest of them.

So why would you ever leave stroke order out of a much more complicated writing system? It’s just easier to learn if you get presented with it up front!

[russenoire]

nah, it’s easier to learn…whenever you choose to pick it up. learning to write kanji after having become visually familiar with them was far less overwhelming for me.

but you probably should learn at some point, out of respect for the language and all. i will never understand the folks who happily proclaim that learning to write japanese by hand is useless.

[chouhatsumimi]

Having just attempted to learn to handwrite all the Joyo kanji, I feel pretty confident when I say that being able to handwrite them is not required to be able to recognize them and use the language. I also felt like know the words they were used in helped me recognize them when they were presented along with their general meaning, that is to say that I agree with the point directly above that being visually familiar with them before learning to write them (and we’re talking N2 and N1 kanji here) at least gave me a baseline for what I was dealing with. The good thing is, even though I had never handwritten most of them before, once you learn the general stroke order, it’s pretty easy to figure out what it’s going to be when you have to mimic a new kanji that you’re looking at. I do think it’s important to know basic stroke order, especially because it will really help you look up new words that you encounter offline/when you can’t copy and paste.

[nyahongo]

These are excellent points! When I first started studying Japanese, I was terrified of learning kanji and I didn’t think that writing them would be helpful for my studies (even though I learned to handwrite hiragana and katakana). However, as I returned to WaniKani, I slowly became less afraid of kanji and changed my mind about whether I wanted to learn to handwrite them or not.

So here’s my list of reasons why I’m learning to handwrite kanji:

Motivation - As I learn each new kanji, I look up its meaning and stroke order and try writing it during my review sessions (like in my Genki workbook). This process and each kanji I get to learn to write is so motivating, especially because all of my handwriting up until now has been in kana only. I want to move away from writing words I know the kanj for in hiragana. When I know a kanji, I want to be able to write it (e.g. writing 日本 instead of にほん).

Fun - I’m learning Japanese because it’s fun, and I love studying it! I don’t want it to become a chore. When I learned how to write the kanji 人 and wrote it for the first time (in the word 日本人, which I wrote as にほん人 at first until I learned how to write 日本), I was so excited - I immediately thought to myself, “Oh my gosh, it’s a kanji character and I CAN write it! I know what this kanji means and what it looks like - I don’t have to be scared of kanji anymore!”

Utility - I agree with @russenoire and @chouhatsumimi here about being able to use stroke order to look up new words. I also think that learning stroke order can help you pick out the radicals in a given kanji, and that in turn can help you figure out the pronunciation or meaning of that kanji and potentially connect it to other kanji you’ve learned. For example, I learned the kanji 火, and also learned that this kanji is also a radical meaning “fire.” Then, I learned the word 火山 meaning “volcano” (or literally, “fire mountain”). Granted, this word is comprised of simple kanji, but the radicals - which just so happen to also be kanji in and of themselves - 火 (fire) and 山 (mountain) are useful in remembering what the word 火山 means. The pronunciation of this word isn’t necessarily intuitive because it uses rendaku (I initially thought it was pronounced かさん which is incorrect) and rendaku isn’t really related to the physical appearance of the kanji, but the vowel sounds in its pronunciation.

[notchainedtotrauma]

“when Biden WROTE the loophole in Roe v. Wade which allowed for it to be overturned…”

“when Biden WROTE the loophole in Roe v. Wade…

“when Biden WROTE the loophole…”

“when Biden WROTE…”

[notchainedtotrauma]

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6127592-biden94letter.html

This is a letter by Joe Biden about his legislative involvement in trying to overturn Roe v. Wade. Also a reminder that Biden’s Catholic.

[therealsmokingleather]

This is why now.

[nathanielthecurious]

a lot of you hate historians and archaeologists, and i think that’s a problem

look, i fully recognize that there are reasons to be skeptical of history and archaeology. i am very on board with criticizing academia as an oppressive institution, and the way that researchers take their bigotry and bias with them to their work. i also recognize that academia does a pretty bad job of communicating what it does to the public, and that’s a part of why people’s hostility to it is able to flourish.

but i am disturbed by the pervasive narrative in online leftist spaces that people who research the human past are ignorant and bigoted, and i think we need to do more to combat that narrative.

historians being homophobic has become a whole meme, and it feels like people are just using historians as a homophobia scapegoat, when in reality the humanities are overwhelmingly left-leaning. people also keep blaming historians for erasing the homoeroticism of fictional literary characters, which is just… not what historians do. homophobic biases and erasures in the interpretation of history over the past few hundred years are a very real thing that’s important to learn about, but scholars have radically shifted away from that approach in recent generations, and these memes are not helping people outside the field to understand history and reception. instead, a lot of people are coming away with the impression that…

(source… really? nobody?)

this thread gets bonus points for the comments claiming that modern historians argue about whether achilles was a top or a bottom using homophobic stereotypes, which i can only guess is a misunderstanding of the erastes/eromenos model (a relationship schema in classical greece; i think people have debated whether achilles and patroclus represent an early version of it). also a commenter claims that the movie troy invented the idea of achilles and patroclus being cousins when no, they were also cousins in lots of ancient sources.

there’s this post about roman dodecahedra (link includes explanation of why the original post is misleading).

there’s this thread about how some thin gold spirals from ancient denmark look exactly like materials used in gold embroidery to this day but archaeologists are stupid and don’t know that because they dont talk to embroiderers enough. in fact, the article says they were most likely used for decorating clothing, whether as a fringe, braided into hair, or embroidered. so the archaeologists in the article basically agree with the post, theyre just less certain about it, because an artifact looking similar to a modern device doesn’t necessarily mean they have identical uses.

this thread has a lot of people interpreting academic nuance as erasure. the museum label literally says that this kind of statue typically depicts a married couple, giving you the factual evidence so you can interpret it. it would be false to say “these two women are married” because there was no gay marriage in ancient egypt. (interpreting nuance as erasure or ignorance is a running theme here, and it points to a disconnect, a public ignorance of how history is studied, that we can very much remedy)

lots of other conspiracy theory-ish stuff about ancient egypt is common in social justice communities, which egyptologists on this site have done a good job of debunking

oh, and this kind of thing has been going around. the problem with it is that there are loads of marginalized academics who research things related to their own lives, and lived experience and rigorous research are different forms of expertise that are both valuable.

so why does this matter?

none of these are isolated incidents. for everything i’ve linked here, there are examples i havent linked. anti-intellectualism, especially against the humanities, is rampant lately across the political spectrum, and it’s very dangerous. it’s not the same as wanting to see and understand evidence for yourself, it’s not the same as criticizing institutions of academic research. it’s the assumption that scholars are out to get you and the perception that there is no knowledge to be gained from thorough study. that mindset is closely connected to the denial of (political, scientific, and yes historical) facts that we’ve been seeing all around us in recent years.

on a personal note, so many marginalized scholars are trying to survive the dumpster fire of academia because we care that much about making sure the stories that are too often unheard don’t get left out of history… and when that’s the entire focus of my life right now, it’s disheartening to see how many of my political allies are just going to assume the worst about the entire field

[classicslesbianopinions]

[image description: a text post that reads, “nobody hates gay people more than historians.” it’s tagged with “gay,” “ancient history,” “achilles and patroclus,” “historians,” “ancient greece,” “history.” end image description]

[mapsontheweb]

The Plebiscite Areas after World War 1.

Full article >>