Heyo, my name is audrea. Im from America but im actually Argentinean and Portuguese. I like to cook, study new words, and write. Most of my language learning will focus on food vocab and descriptive writing. Im learning a bunch of languages, the most serious being Spanish, Portuguese, ASL, and japanese. Please treat me kindly, thanks for your time ♡
Yo, mi nombre es Audrea. Soy Argentinean y portugués, pero de América. me gusta cocinar nuevas cocinas, aprender nuevas palabras y escribir. Aprendo español, portugués, japonés y asl. Gracias por tu tiempo ♡
Polygloss has you describe an image in your target language so another player can guess it. It encourages creative answers. The game works for people of all levels — you can describe simple pictures or try your hand at wordplay.
It has plenty of options and will let you add any language you’d like — tho it’ll probably be more difficult to find people to play with.
Assortment of random Japanese words I‘ve learned since arriving here without studying
足元(あしもと)- at one’s feet, underfoot (heard over a tannoy announcement at the station warning passengers to take care when boarding the train)
参る(まいる)- to come, to go (humble) (they never say “電車がきます” when the train’s arriving; it’s always “電車が参ります”)
まもなく - soon (humble) (again, they never say “もうすぐ” on the train; it’s always まもなく. To the point where I actually forget もうすぐ and end up saying まもなく to my teacher and she laughs at me)
最高の(さいこうの)- the best (from My Hero Academia, because they say “the best hero” literally all the time, and at first I was like “you want to be a psycho hero? What??”)
残念(ざんねん)- unfortunate, too bad (randomly heard on the radio and recalled I’d looked it up recently, and then heard it again a couple of times in anime)
さすが - as expected of (hear it in My Hero Academia aaaaall the time)
揚げ鶏(あげどり)- Japanese-style fried chicken (I asked the cashier how to pronounce it when I ordered it)
本線(ほんせん)- mainline (I hear this literally every time I use the local trains because it’s the name of the line, but I only just figured out what it means)
鼻水(はなみず)- snot (lit. nose water) (hear this all the time when kids want a tissue. They just come up to me and say “先生。鼻水” and I’m like ok gross just go get a tissue you don’t have to ask me)
おっぱい - boobs (heard in class as I got groped by a five-year-old girl, double-checked the meaning on the way home)
甲虫(かぶとむし)- rhinoceros beetle (they’re on one of the videos we put on for the kids when they’re coming into the class and they all just say “kabutomushi” whenever it comes up on screen)
かぶと - a particular style of traditional Japanese helmet worn by ancient warriors (it’s in one of the pictures I had to use this term where I ask the kids “what can you see?” and every single class someone would point to it saying “kabuto”)
I was actually really confused the first time they said it because Kabuto is the name of a Pokemon (and not one I’d really expect them to know because it’s from the original 150 and hasn’t really featured in more recent generations) but it looks like this:
So I was like. Wtf there’s no Kabuto here, wtf are you on about?
hi - I’ve had trouble finding a satisfactory answer online for this: why is it that some adjectives precede the noun theyre describing? for example, “un buen profesor” or “la nueva maestra”. i love your blog and it’s helped me so much! thank you!!
Someone else asked a similar question that I have saved in my drafts I've been working on. I'll give you a short version before I go back to my drafts
Most adjectives go after the noun [el gato negro "the black cat", la luna llena "full moon" etc]
When regular adjectives go before the noun it reads as very exclamative and flashy, as if that adjective were in bold or italics. Full on extra emphasis [as in: El maravilloso mago de Oz "the wonderful wizard of Oz" which reads as "the wondrous" or "the marvelous" rather than simply "great" or "wonderful" in a traditional sense]
Some nouns change meaning depending on adjective placement; nuevo/a, and bueno/a are like that
More below...
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Another basic example: es una historia larga "it's a long story" vs. es una larga historia "it's a SUPER long story"
In the case of nuevo/a if it comes after the noun it means "brand-new" like "never been used before"
If it comes before the noun it tends to mean "newest" or "latest"
As an example:
la nueva maestra = the new teacher [f] / the teacher [f] who was just hired
la maestra nueva = the new teacher / the rookie teacher
If I saw la nueva maestra I would tend to think "just hired", if I see la maestra nueva I get the sense she's a teacher who doesn't really know how to teach but that might just be me
Other adjectives like this are mismo/a where la misma cosa is "the same thing" vs. la cosa misma "the thing itself"
A really common one is triste like if you see triste in front it means "dreadful", if you see it behind it's just "sad"
And there's antiguo/a, bueno / buen, buena, grande / gran, viejo/a, mismo/a, nuevo/a, mal / malo/a, triste, etc.
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In the case of bueno/a which is honestly more confusing, this is the way I was taught:
un buen amigo = "a good friend" = he was good as a friend
un amigo bueno = "a kind friend" = he was a good person who was also my friend
Similarly there's malo
un mal amigo = "a bad friend" = a friend who is not a good friend
un amigo malo = "a bad friend" = a friend who is a bad person
But there are certain expressions or set "collocations" [a set word phrase] that use them a certain way like un buen augurio "a good omen" vs. un mal augurio "a bad omen / an ill omen"
@argentinosaurus made some very good points in the tags! And please let me know if I am misunderstanding what's being said.
"Adjectives that precede the nouns they're modifying usually indicate a certain emotional response. compare: un hombre pobre vs un pobre hombre. [un hombre pobre "a man who has no money / a poor man" vs. un pobre hombre "an unfortunate man / a poor man"]
there's emotion there"
The rest talks about more grammatical matters which I don't know how many people know the linguistic terms so I'm hesitant to totally include it in full without a constant explanation on my part
But essentially they're saying that in a phrase like tomo el café frío "I drink cold coffee", the adjective frío is directly modifying café as a "premodifier" would in English - describing what the noun is, a quality of the "coffee"... your basic adjective function
The second - tomo frío el café - uses the adjective in a way that in translation is what we would call "an object complement" or "objective complement". This basically means that you're using an adjective to describe a noun in terms of a change or a modification of its original state... basically it reads as "I drink coffee cold"... meaning "I drink coffee when it has become cold"
In essence: "cold coffee" describes what it is, "coffee cold" describes what it has now become
[and important note this isn't an adverb like we aren't saying a person drinks their coffee "coldly" which makes it sound like the person is doing it without emotion... the "cold" still complements/modifies the "coffee"]
...But for our general purposes in Spanish, they're right in saying that un pobre hombre elicits a more emotional response. And in something like la Antigua Grecia "Ancient Greece", it makes sense in terms of it's not antiguo/a meaning "former", it refers to a Greece that has now become "Ancient" to us
That's how I'm understanding it, and that might help people understand it more completely in the linguistic sense
I noticed in Japanese that people will say いい匂いする when they smell something good, and I wondered why it wasn't いい匂いしてる, since you're currently smelling it, so it should be in present continuous form.
But then I realised. English does the same thing. We don't say "I'm smelling something good", we say "I smell something good". I tried to think of other verbs that behave in the same way, and I came up with: see, taste, feel, hear (note: all 5 main senses), think, understand, know, sympathise, get along (with someone), like.
Besides the sense-based verbs, the other verbs all indicate stability. The verb is being done and it will stay that way unless otherwise disturbed.
e.g. "I think jellyfish are cool (and I will most likely still think this in 5 years)".
They also imply at least a small amount of time in the past spent in this state.
e.g. "I understand how an internal combustion engine works (and I have understood this for at least a few hours already)"
But the sense verbs seem like an exception. They don't necessarily indicate a stable state."I smell dog shit" doesn't imply that you'll continue to smell dog shit for any amount of time - you probably just walked past it and on your next whiff you might not smell it at all.
A bit of googling led me to this really cool paper which explains that these sense based verbs are stative verbs and therefore they are used to declare something about your own state (and also can't usually be used in the progressive aspect, although there are exceptions which is what the paper is about). This makes me think that all of the verbs I mentioned above are exactly the same, and that it's not the tense or aspect that implies the continuous state of jellyfish love, it's just a coincidence that all of those verbs generally tend to be long lasting states.
it’s so bizarre when animated American films are set in a certain location and then only certain characters have the accents of that place. It makes no damn sense!! like
To be fair, almost everyone in Ratatouille does have a French accent. The real question is why Linguini and also all the rats sound intensely American
If it was just the rats I’d say it’s because the movie can be interpreted to mean that the rats understand but don’t necessarily speak human languages so the rat dialog isn’t literally taking place the way we see it but that doesn’t explain why Linguini has a rat accent