student of sedition

b. 1994. artist. current undergrad student major human rights + social justice minor archaeology • welfare recipient • he or any neopronouns

[organsizing]

there is no amount of language learning that is useless. I think it obviously scales up in wonderfulness as you learn more, but even just being at the point where you can recognize what language is being spoken or written is still a more useful thing than not knowing that. it is lovely to say hi to people in their language! any attempt to learn is important. you don't get fluent overnight. and you don't have to get fluent overnight. more knowledge is better than none. it isn't just all or nothing.

[organsizing]

This post has been gaining notes at a somewhat steady rate for a while and I know some people get overwhelmed by posts going viral (which idk if this counts as) but I need you to know: I open up my notes on this blog like a morning paper with coffee.

I read you talking about what you've learned, how to sound out scripts you're new to, how you're identifying the languages of your relatives and feel connected even just that little bit more, because you hear the language and you recognize which one it is! How someone has a friend who tries to learn, "Hi, nice to meet you!" in as many languages as possible. The people who forgot languages but for whom that knowledge isn't vestigial, it wakes up when you come back to it, tending to it like a garden. It's life you're growing, even if it's not a forest! It is Something! There are people who may never know each others languages who still find ways to say hello, and thank you to each other. Bridging the linguistic divides that exist in the world... does not always start as a tight embrace. It begins with reaching out from a distance, knowing there are people out there on the other side of the gap, who you get to say, "hi, how are you?" to!

[nikolaj-mir]

Just found out about βομβαλοβομβάξ… these people were not real

[mintbees]

Trying to find a YouTuber to watch in my target language for immersion learning while not speaking the language well enough to be able to figure out their political views

[tokkibean]

i do not “delete sentences” when they start “hindering the plot” i COPY PASTE THEM into a SEPARATE DOC made just for keeping all my USELESS LINES that i will also NEVER USE so therefore i should JUST DELETE THEM but i DONT because id FEEL BAD if i did

[organsizing]

there is no amount of language learning that is useless. I think it obviously scales up in wonderfulness as you learn more, but even just being at the point where you can recognize what language is being spoken or written is still a more useful thing than not knowing that. it is lovely to say hi to people in their language! any attempt to learn is important. you don't get fluent overnight. and you don't have to get fluent overnight. more knowledge is better than none. it isn't just all or nothing.

[organsizing]

re: tags (I would just reply but ?? for some reason tumblr has restricted replies on my own post ? silly)

I don't know if this is helpful but to learn fingerspelling I made my computer background a font with the alphabet. specifically some version of this:

and just kind of quizzed myself as my computer loaded. Also practicing spelling random words whenever my hands were in my pocket is very helpful.

also I think this is a widely known resource but just in case, the website lifeprint.com is a goldmine. it just has the whole curriculum on there from an ASL teacher who has ASL as his primary language. that site and signsavvy are really helpful for getting some training wheels in ASL. once I figured out how to ask people what the sign is for [fingerspelled word] or how to ask the meaning of [sign they just used] it became a lot easier to pick up more as we conversed.

not to make it seem like I am remotely fluent or anything! but I do have enough building blocks to be able to learn while conversing, which has been huge!

anyway I wish you a wonderful learning journey 🙂

[skatinginfinitelywithyourmom]

how to get up in the morning tutorial

[skatinginfinitelywithyourmom]

how to get up in the morning walkthrough

[skatinginfinitelywithyourmom]

how to get up in the morning tips and tricks

[queerspacepunk]

not to be all "these two words will change your life" or whatever, but I promise you, programming in "good catch!" as your response to people correcting you/pointing out errors or whatever removes so much friction from interactions, and comes with a delightful happy meal toy of "not hating yourself so much for making mistakes"

[valyrfia]

so I’ve become endeared with the idea of a “personal curriculum” over the past week or so as a way to keep learning so I’ll throw this question out to the lovely people of tumblr: if you have to recommend to someone ONE book as a comprehensive introduction to your degree field of study assuming they only have a school-leaving level of attainment in the subject, what would it be?

[coyoteweird]

tip for for making your personal curriculum: you can find a plethora of real course syllabi for pretty much any topic or focus you can think of via google! pages of results of real syllabi from great colleges & universities freely available!

instead of using ai or similar to make your curriculum for this fall, look into actual courses created by professionals and academics that are free and accessible to the public!

[macgyvermedical]

Took me until about halfway through college before I realized “study” means “play with the material in a variety of ways until you understand it” and not just “read the assigned chapters and do the homework” and I think that probably should have been discussed at some point prior to that.

[organsizing]

there is a class I'm in where I only handed in one out of 5 assignments, and we have basically a month left. I just had a meeting with the professor about the workload and how I could accessibly still complete the course. I submitted one of the assignments orally right there, and we developed new deadlines for me. I'm going to do two more of the assignments orally now, and hand in another one in a narrative format rather than an essay format.

I can still do this!

amazing how much gets done when you get over the sad sack moping phase of being behind.

[organsizing]

I don't post a lot on here these days but maybe I ought to! I think I mostly just feel like ✨️Studyblr✨️ has aesthetics that are Not For Me. Like not in a taste way. I love the aesthetics of Studyblr™️

However: I am going to school with a laptop from 2015 which won't update any software. It also visibly looks like it's from 2015. And I take notes in v scribbly ways on actual paper and sometimes the whole thing is in red pen and it's not legible to anyone but me. I just write down what I don't already know. (Depending on the class there may not be much to that.) I'm disabled and taking like 2 classes rn. I'm on welfare because my student loans defaulted when I was homeless at 19 and 20 and my phone contract went out and I didn't want to be alive. I pay tuition and go to school with mutual aid, abuse reparations, and fumes. Sheer force of will and cultivation of a good social ecosystem of activists I organize with.

I am a student because I want to be. Because it is a place where everyone in my classes talks about homelessness and welfare and childhood poverty and abuse and SA and transness and disability as some theoretical thing that lives on the streets outside of the classroom, outside of sight. Because when I raise my hand and tell people I live in this space, people have started listening to me in ways that I haven't experienced before outside of like. Protest speeches. And also once when I was doing standup comedy. But I also am finding more of this sense of being heard in other aspects of my life because of the labour of activism I've been doing. organizing the anarchist bookfair and other stuff. I also intend to start @welfarehistoryproject as a more formal thing eventually but I keep kicking cans of project ideas down the road.

anyway. I don't know what to do with this blog. I made it in my early 20s IIRC and don't know what I intended from it other than to be in this space of romanticizing learning.

I don't believe that academia is the only way to learn. I don't have respect for it as an institution. I don't have respect for institutions broadly to be frank though. school has been my enemy, my abuser, my rival, and now it is just an interface to me, a series of keys that lets me behind paywalls.

also sometimes I get free t-shirt. wack how much free shit you get as a student but I guess it's not that free considering tuition is a punch in the gut but still !

idk where I'm going with this but here's what I Might post here in future in terms of the more original content type stuff (the stuff that's already on this blog is reflective of what I will be reblogging still)

I tell you about the schoolwork I am doing and my progress for accountability purposes

I share quotes from my readings and stuff

generally I may talk about school topics but unsure what precisely.

maybe some study set up posts

possibly talking about writing?

I am constantly learning a little bit of a lot of languages (mainly Greek and French and ASL right now) so I may talk about that stuff but less likely.

I may also talk about organizing (the activism type). I'm not going to tell you about groups I'm in or whatever but I can talk about resources and pass along advice and frameworks that have helped me.

I also am polyamorous and I have BPD (borderline) and there is a lot I have learned from both of those things being part of my experience. I feel like it would be received weird if I posted about either of those things here, but I would talk about it if people wanted that.

I'm also happy to talk about navigating welfare systems and how to do that. I think there's lots of blogs that teach you about resumes and shit, so I'm happy to help with the underclass equivalent

?? feel free to request I talk about anything

I intend to make a biographic pinned post eventually that is concise and edited but here is some stream of consciousness.

Also I blog normally from @vagaybond

[organsizing]

there is no amount of language learning that is useless. I think it obviously scales up in wonderfulness as you learn more, but even just being at the point where you can recognize what language is being spoken or written is still a more useful thing than not knowing that. it is lovely to say hi to people in their language! any attempt to learn is important. you don't get fluent overnight. and you don't have to get fluent overnight. more knowledge is better than none. it isn't just all or nothing.

[ociewriter]

300 words a day is actually fine. listen to me. 150 words a day is still writing. 1200 words one day and then zero for the next week is also fine. there are no rules. please don't let writing become a tedious task just because you don't think you're doing the daily word count right.

[cedar-west-deactivated20230408]

If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...

Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?

Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?

Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?

Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?

Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?

[mishkatelwarriorgoddess]

Thank you so much for this!

[etudieryvivere]

Cantonese Resources

This will be a list in progress, just whatever I find. Feel free (please help) to recommend any resources that you know of.

Websites:

cantonese.sheik.co.uk

This has characters, vocabulary, pronunciation help, essays, a bunch of different stuff, Beginner to Intermediate. CantoDict is apart of this (add /dictionary/ to the url)

cantoneseclass101.com/cantonese-resources/

Some stuff for grammar, reading and writing, pronunciation, etc. The actual course is Beginner to Advanced, but the free stuff is just beginner. They also have a free Word of the Day email newsletter thingy.

cantonese.ca

Vocab lists!

livelingua.com/courses/cantonese

Audio lessons along with a textbook. It seems free (and claims so). It's only a basic course, and comes with a dictionary as well, although it's hard to see the characters well. They also have tons of other languages (including ones like Igbo and Finnish, so check it out).

cantonese-alliance.github.io/courses.html

Okay this one is super cool. In the proficiency levels tab, they have some curriculums for different levels (with tons of resources). There's also 'Cantonese through films' which has a long list of movies organized by decades. Even more materials, historical, linguistic, and the like. Overall, super interesting.

savecantonese.org/education

Textbooks and resources (most of which are mentioned).

These are just the first few things I've found, but there's alot, so I', making a spreadsheet with everything else on it too. Hope this helps!

[balloons-and-shadows]

Masterlist Langblr challenges

Following from my previous posts, if you do feel like working on your languages, but don't know where to start; here are some langblr challenge you might like!

Language Blog Challenge: 20 weeks of challenges | by @lily-learns-finnish

Langblr Reactivation challenge | by @prepolyglot

14 Day langblr challenge | by @lass-uns-studieren

Langblr News challenge | by @tealingual

90-day vocab challenge | by @jibunstudies

100 Happy Days Langblr Challenge | by @nordic-language-love

Mini speaking challenge | by @nordic-language-love

16 words challenge | by @neblina-a-blin

30 day langblr challenge | @moltre-s

Brick-by-brick language learning challenge | @linguistness

Langblr word of the day challenge | @nordic-language-love

P.S. Please let me know if you know some more fun langblr challenges!