was reminded of that youtube channel that records footage of that bridge that scalps trucks today. one of the fascinating developments that's happened since i last heard about it is that, in one of their many attempts to stop the trucks from being can-opened, they installed a traffic light that detects when a vehicle that's over the allowed height is coming and turns red so the driver can stop and hopefully notice the signage all around that's screaming "YOUR VEHICLE IS OVERHEIGHT TURN AROUND" and avoid an accident. However as a result sometimes drivers see the light turning yellow and IMMEDIATELY start flooring it to avoid having to stop, ensuring that the roof of their truck just gets fucking annihilated instantly. Really beautiful stuff you should check it out
Two tiktok clips posted together by tiktok account shooshimango
clip 1 of a tiktok: food is dipped into a white sauce, with a brief view of a man eating it. "delicious with tee-zay-tee-zai-kai" is narrated by a masculine narrator. onscreen, a caption of "delicious with taztziki" is shown.
clip 2: three men in wigs (toupés?) look disgusted at the camera. one of them is wearing a cross; they are dressed as stereotypes of their own greek culture. after a pause, the one in the center repeats "tee-zay-tee-zai-kai, eh?". A second later, all three begin manically screaming over each other in greek: "There*! Wanker! what are you saying, my babe**? it's dza-dzee-kee! dza-dzee-kee you*** idiot! what are you saying?". two of the men walk off screen in contempt at the end.
*you can say "there" in Greek in a way that is a deep insult. it requires a hand gesture.
**μωρέ μου can only really be used at a peer/older person, is masculine, and is derogatory, but does technically derive from my baby. generally used to imply you've had enough of someone's bullshit.
*** ρε and βρε kind of mean "you" and are disrespectful. you might use them with your mate in a friendly way but here it's an insult.
Something that is not mentioned in the description above, is that the Greek man on the right says “He have stroke” before they all start yelling in Greek. Which I find absolutely hilarious
once again needing to remind some people that mispronouncing foreign words isn't just about not knowing how to say it; if your language doesn't have that sound, in many cases you can't hear it properly. You won't be able to hear yourself say it wrong because you probably can't distinguish between the sounds a native speaker can. It will sound right to you and you will be wrong.
Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others don't. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.
So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying "It's Not That Hard?" Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and can't even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!
"I might have butchered that, please let me know" is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.
This is one of the reasons that, historically, many people would take on or be granted new names if they stayed any length of time in another culture; it's very common for the names from one language to simply not map to the sounds of another!
this just in apparently; accents are just affectations and every ESL person who has ever struggled to understand or pronounce a word is a lazy white person
(I first need to say that it is folly to overexamine a slogan, and the slogan as it stands is never intended to be examined; it is a tool for provocation and a rally to do better, and can never be “incorrect.” I am not criticising the intention of the slogan.)
When Black Americans have addressed the genuinely shameful failures of white Americans to pronounce Black names, it is, firstly, absolutely necessary. This has been done in the past with the slogan, “white people can pronounce Tchaikovsky and Schwarzenegger.”
This is intended to highlight the entirely correct point that white Americans have made more efforts to address names that are considered “foreign” and “difficult” but are associated with “white” cultures, than to address Black names. The slogan is provocative, useful, and highlights the hypocrisy of white Americans. It is a challenge to do better. Because Americans often perceive z’s and v’s to be “foreign” and “difficult” it is an especially pointed dig.
However. Let us briefly lump together Americans, all English-speaking Americans of various backgrounds dialects, into one American lump and stand back.
Respectfully: you HAVE to be American to believe that Americans have learned to pronounce “Tchaikovsky” and “Schwarzenegger” correctly.
Although Americans firmly and confidently believe that they can take on “Schwarzenegger,” German speakers… don’t. That’s just not how you say those sounds. One particular letter gets mangled.
It isn’t even an accent problem; you can say it correctly with a strong American accent. The American reinvention of “Schwarzenegger” represents a failure to understand how German sounds work, which is fine - hey, they’re “difficult” and “foreign” - but it is paired with total unearned confidence on the part of ALL Americans of ALL dialects that “of course we know how to say it. It’s a celebrity who was on the TV, he’s a governor, that’s how everyone says it.”
If you listen to Arnold saying HIS OWN NAME, which he does, you can tell that AMERICANS ARE NOT EVEN SAYING HIS NAME LIKE HE DOES. Even British people land a better attempt. It is a function of American cultural hegemony that Americans do not notice this. It is an inherently American view of the world to believe that a consistent, confident mispronunciation of someone’s name is a respectful, educated and correct handling.
(Tchaikovsky is interesting because it’s an Anglicisation of a French version of the spelling of Чайковский, which was possibly settled on because it was the easier way to get English speakers to perceive it. American English tried a different version in his own lifetime, as you can see below, but which would have led to Americans putting a “cow” in it.)
Again, it doesn’t cancel the slogan, the slogan is good-quality - but it shows how this is invisible to those who have not learned otherwise.
Outside of America, all Americans are perceived as American together, and Yanks join the ranks of English speakers. English speakers are famed around the world for having the same “bash and mangle it into something that sounds similar, and insist that it’s correct, because you don’t hear the difference” approach.
It will help in learning other languages to try. It will help a lot to take the loss with grace and accept correction!
Although the OP sort of accidentally implies that you “can’t” hear certain nuanced sounds - it is entirely possible to distinguish and perceive most nuanced sounds even in extremely nuanced languages, with intention and attention and training, especially with the guidance of a native speaker. Even if you can’t get it perfect it is still possible to improve and worthy to try!
IMO of the most fascinating ways for an English native speaker, especially an American one, to understand this is to watch how Mr Yang teaches Chinese students how to use American handling. “Soften up on the K sound” “throw in a little SpongeBob to it” you will suddenly hear things you probably weren’t ready to hear.
English Class #learnenglish #chinese
Here is a British person making a respectful attempt at Schwarzenegger, followed by Schwarzenegger saying it himself. One person has a British accent, and Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent is considered distinctive to German speakers, but ideally, once you try to notice it, even if you are American, you should be able to hear what Americans are doing wrong.
One correction on that last point @elodieunderglass: Terry Wogan is Irish, not British, and although it's soft here, his accent is unquestionably Irish (although he did get British Citizenship in '05, he said all through his life his identity is Limerick, the city of his birth).
Honestly, the fact that Terry Wogan has an Irish accent adds another layer onto this, but I am very tired and my brain isn't firing on all cylinders so I'm really hopeful there'll be someone better qualified than me with the necessary bandwidth who is willing to go into it
There you go then! Thanks! I don’t know the presenter at all so I must regret that I didn’t know that, and grabbed it quite quickly trying to find a piece of Arnold saying his own name - allow me to demonstrate a graceful reception of correction!
Where the presenter tackles Arnold’s first syllable (“shvarts,” he does one brisk syllable, not the American “shwaaarz”. but you can also notice him tackling the “r” at the end as an “ah” sound, which is the way a lot of British people sidle up to it. But it’s also fairly close to how Arnold does it. The result is a more lifted and graceful sound and the vowels are lifted, not flat. So the presenter is either doing how RP presenters approach it, or is trying to follow Arnold. which is probably why it sounds like a handsome attempt, despite them both approaching it in a way that is probably odd-sounding to German German-speakers. At any rate: Americans get the ‘w’ wrong and add an extra syllable; the presenter here dodges both. Apologies for describing this badly, I’m not at all a linguist.)
jud duplenticy writes some fantastic lines in his account of the murder like "The darkness of that story was the bedrock of this place" or "Testing tolerances, tapping deep poisoned wells, hardening, binding with complicity" or "Because in the part of my soul that cannot lie to Christ, or myself, or you…" but he did also write "Young, dumb, and full of Christ" which doesn't necessarily undermine his skill as a storyteller or anything but what an insane thing that is to say to benoit at this point in the story
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”
Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.
i am banned from eating my herring inside. they make me eat it on the smoking area by the loading dock, under the theory that it already smells bad there. but it was raining today which was preventing my breakfast, so i was feeling sad and hungry and then i realized that there was a large cardboard box in the dumpster from a previous delivery. like a fridge sized box. so i fished it out of the dumpster, then tipped it on its side and had a nice little cardboard cave to watch the rain and eat my fish in. which was a great experience. very soothing. very zen. at least until the security guard from the day before stepped outside to smoke. then i tried hiding from him by crawling deeper in the box, which unfortunately did not work. instead he saw a sort of damp sniveling pale hairless creature eating fish in a box, and delivered the verbal killshot of "good morning, mr. smeagol." which is how my day was ruined before 8 am.
Japanese is an incredibly fun and rewarding language (if you’ve ever wanted to learn it for ANY reason, most importantly including the “silly” reasons) but the fearmongering and capitalist intervention involved in the language learning process have given it a reputation as an “impossible task” for English speakers, leading to confusion and dkn learners and weird pessimist attitudes about the whole thing. In this thread I will explain how to effectively learn and retain Japanese. This is a tried, tested and true method; probably 99% of all people who try to learn Japanese give up, but everyone I’ve met who has tried and stuck with this has been at or above N3-N4 after 6 months or less including me
You can teach yourself Japanese for free if you have a little free time every day and a computer
1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.
2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).
This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!
3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible
4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do
5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.
Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too
For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn
For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.
You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.
For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.
Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).
Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.
Remember to consult yomitan and cure dolly where needed, that’s what it’s there for. As you can see I am quite normal about the Japanese language, so if you have any other questions or need help with anything else feel free to shoot me an ask and I will get back to you promptly. Japanese is not your enemy and it is not impossible. It is your friend
every few months i try to figure out how to build a website so that if tumblr ever gets nuked i dont lose all my writing and every few months i have to remind myself that i am a fish trying to climb a tree
*scrabbles frantically for links* Joe Hills Says You Can Code!
it's a set of four lessons on creating, publishing, and managing your own website, primarily aimed at internet artists who want websites for pretty much the reason you do
it also assumes no prior coding experience (I mean no experience - step 4 of lesson 1 is 'find the text file you just made')
“A debt to the fae must always be paid,” the old man said. His eyes glistened with tears as he looked to the full moon overhead. “And the cost is always severe.”
There were murmurs from the others around the fire. Men and women who gathered to hear the wise man speak knew the reality of what he said intimately.
“I owe all my gold,” one man said.
“Then you must remove the gold from your vaults and strip every filigree from your home,” the wise one said.
“I owe my blood,” one woman said.
“Then your blood must be spilled within a fairy ring,” the wise one said.
“My debt is to be paid in flesh,” another attendee cried.
“Then your flesh you must divest—“
“Bullshit. Propaganda!” a woman called from the tree line. She pointed a finger at each person in turn. “You’re buying into it by even entertaining the idea of paying them back.”
“I have lived many years,” the wise old man said, “and every debt I attempted to evade came back many time worse.”
“Sounds like you weren’t fast enough,” the woman said, stepping out into the light. The sweat on her forehead glimmered in the moonlight like morning dew. She jerked a thumb towards her chest. “Me? I’m fast as fuck. I’ve been outrunning my debts for years.”
The wise one gaped. “That’s not— you can’t—“ he turned to his audience. “She is speaking lies.”
His audience hesitated.
“I would personally like to avoid being divested of my flesh,” one attendee offered hesitantly.
There were murmurs of agreement.
“Then stretch up, bud,” the woman said over the wise one’s protests. “We’re running tonight.”
The wise one stared as his audience fled into the night. “Y-you’ll all die!”
“Not me,” the woman howled from deep within the woods. “I’m fast as fuck, boiiiiiii!”
I wanted something short and fun to warm up with today, and so you all get to experience by first attempt at doing some proper post-processing - oh, and using mic distance for a fun effect at the end there.
@caffeinewitchcraft - thanks for giving me permission to record your stories! Hopefully this will be the first of many!
I am crying both from honor and laughter. Thank you so much! You have an amazing voice
I also took a look at their website and they have some awesome flash fiction on it, including a Sci-fi piece in the "humans are space orcs" category but in the softest, most human way. It's here (X) !
The moth circling your ceiling fan @liminalumi - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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