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macklin celebrini has autism
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
@theartofmadeline
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RMH
Mike Driver
Fai_Ryy
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Keni
YOU ARE THE REASON
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Cosimo Galluzzi
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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Doug Jones
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@oso-de-cocina
i hate australian people they need a dumb fucking nickname for every single word. can’t even get in a car accident without some australian asshole coming up to you and saying “oh gotcha self in a carblammy there aintcha mate” kill yourself and go to hell
fuck off are you serious?
oh my god
how do you have 2 silly words for a car crash
Goddamit i hate this fucking post. I hate it because obviously if “twelve” followed the same pattern as the other teen numbers it wouldn’t be “twoteen” it would be “seconteen”. Think about it. It’s not “threeteen” it’s “thirteen” as in “third”. It’s not “fiveteen” it’s “fifteen” as in fifth. So with that in mind, you count “first, second, third, fourth, fifth,” and so on, so eleven would be “firsteen” and twelve would be “secondteen” or “seconteen”. “Firsteen, seconteen, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen….” It just drives me absolutely mad everytime i see this post that this obvious pattern was overlooked and i cant hold in my rage anymore.
Taking up Japanese as a side project for myself has reminded me of something.
So like a long time ago I had a professor that I absolutely adored. She happened to be Japanese American. She grew up speaking Japanese at home but never really spent a lot of time in Japan. She mostly spoke with other Japanese Americans and read books.
So one day early in her teaching career there’s an exchange student from Japan who’s having a hard time understanding a concept so she explained it to him in Japanese and then he looked absolutely rattled. Like in shock. Pale.
This is how she learned that the way she speaks Japanese makes her sound like a gang member.
Japanese doesn’t exactly have cuss words in the same way as English does but imagine that the nicest professor you’ve ever had pulls your paper over and says “Okay listen here you little piece of shit I’m gonna fucking explain this to you. Violently.”
This (studying in Chile for a year) is more or less how I realized my two PhD-having, tenured professor expat parents raised me to speak the most disrespectful and swearword-riddled version of Spanish possible (with plenty of ancient slang I didn't know was slang thrown in). It was like:
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
medieval lit is really fun. there will be a footnote that is like “nobody knows what the author meant there and scholars have been debating it for centuries” 
translator’s note: we have no clue bro
translator’s note: we’re sure this was hilarious in 12th century Somerset
translator’s note: again, we’re sure the scribe was the funniest guy in Plantagenet England and was getting all the tavern wenches but we can’t for the life of us figure out what he was talking about
would be fun if language acquisition echoed language evolution a la recapitulation theory. kids going through an indo european phase.
https://xkcd.com/2567/
fuuuuuck there really is an xkcd for everything
Quick put an animal book in front of him and ask him what this guy is
there's an xkcd for that also
Reginald D. Hunter
The last part of that joke is now he's his manager
the existence of "maybe", "perhaps", "perchance", and "mayhaps" suggests there should also be "maychance" and "perbe"
CAN WE MAYCHANCE NOT 😭
Perbe you should have thought about the consequences before posting a linguistic banger
to me, correctly using 5+ commas in a single sentence is like perfectly executing a combo in a fighting game. to me.
if you think a sentence needs 5+ commas it should be two sentences
it’s not about what the sentence needs, i’m afraid, nor is it about economy, clarity, or style. it’s about winning, little-theatre-fairy.
Sam Handwich.
If Pikiwedia says it it must be true.
reblogging this to add that I often think about the old man yaoi mangaka on bluesky who said "the phrase that finally convinced me that the English language is truly beautiful was 'this shit is so ass'"
chinese reaction images are by far more visceral and just downright better than western ones
what is this even supposed to convey
I fully understand that last one
Got a question for all those who studied or know the history of the Japanese language, how come they've never discovered or added the f, v or l sounds? It's not like they're difficult sounds to produce, they are pretty basic so I don't really understand how, especially "la" is so easy to create as a sound.
My knowledge on this from a historical standpoint is pretty limited to a couple of papers on phonological development that I read like. A few years ago so I may be misrepresenting some stuff, but to my understanding:
/f/ and /v/ are both pretty recent developments phonologically for humans in general (in terms of "coming up with speech sounds"), and there's some evidence to suggest that those sounds became as widespread as they are now because of borrowing from specific languages (whether that be from cultural interaction or colonization or some other form of language interaction), rather than something that evolves naturally super commonly; a lot of languages with smaller consonant inventories don't have /f/ or /v/, or those sounds aren't distinguished from other, similar consonants and only appear in specific sound contexts
As for Japanese specifically with those sounds, I think it may be because they have /ɸ/, which is the consonant in ふ (fu), and is a bilabial voiceless fricative (which is the technical term for a sound that is created by a steady stream of air constricted by your lips; aka identical to /f/ in every way except /f/ is between your teeth and your lip rather than between your two lips), and there's just never been a need to include /f/ as a distinguishable/unique sound in their sound inventory. HOWEVER we actually are seeing /f/ and /v/ as unique phonemes in Japanese nowadays via loan words, that's why you'll see ヴ (it represents the /v/ sound) combined with vowel sounds like ヴィ (vi) and ヴァ (va), or フィ (fi), フェ (fe), etc. to represent /f/ sounds in borrowed words
For /l/ it's a little more of a nightmare bc liquid consonants are just a nightmare mystery in general, but /l/ actually is represented in Japanese! It's just that it's a phonemic variation of the Japanese r sound (usually /ɾ/, what you see in ら(ra), り(ri), る(ru), れ(re), ろ(ro)); it's mostly a dialectal thing/a specific sound environment thing. So it's there! It's just that there aren't any examples of it changing the meaning of the word by being there rather than just being /ɾ/
Basically afaik it's mostly just that in language development historically there wasn't any need or motivation to distinguish something like /f/ from /ɸ/ or /l/ from /ɾ/ so they never became distinct phonemes
BUT like I said this is just based on a few things I read a few years ago and my general knowledge from taking linguistics courses; I am not a linguist beyond a bachelors degree and I do not specialize in Japanese phonology so pls don't take my word as like. Irrefutable. I could definitely be wrong
If there are any people who have like, specialized experience in Japanese phonology or just have more knowledge than me who want to correct me or provide their own answer plsplspls do
*rubs together my terrible linguist hands* hahahaha yes!!! sorry to bother you both on this months-old post, but i have some things to add!!
in my opinion, burgeoning-ambitionさん is totally right when he says what we're interested in here is probably the distinction between phonemes in japanese. in phonetics we have a joke: are phonemes even real?? we say this bc once you start looking at the deep, nitty-gritty MATH of phonemes, the boundaries between them can really start to blur in fascinating yet panic-inducing ways (lol). in western linguistics, we represent phonemes with ipa symbols as a shorthand, because it's convenient and legible, but if we forget that the ipa is in fact a shorthand, we also forget that phonemes are not sounds but representations of groups of sounds.
vowels make a good example of this. have you heard how modern standard arabic "only has three vowels"? this is a common vowel inventory chart for arabic:
if you're not careful, it's really easy to look at this chart and say, damn, arabic has only got three phones (sounds) in its vowel inventory. but i think we can all be a little bit less credulous than that. what's really going on here is probably a big venn diagram-type situation whose outermost points end up getting called "phonemes". like this:
!! this is a great big simplification i made in 30 seconds !! i am not an arabic/semitic expert !!
if this is in fact what the vowel inventory looks like in msa, then probably, msa speakers have just as much vowel space as speakers of any other language. it's just that what acoustically counts as /i/ is way more lenient in msa than in many other languages. in broad terms: the acoustic boundaries of any given "phoneme" are (probably) language-specific.
at this point i hear you say: what does this have to do with japanese?? let's return to that!
first of all, i want to share my own observations and experiences. i have observed this: japanese speakers can produce both [r] and [l]. in regular speech, [r] tends to come out as a flap or tap, but if you get into singing and other registers of speech, [l] surfaces more frequently. so, as opさん asks, why is [l] not its own phoneme in japanese?
honestly, i can only speculate as to why, originally, /l/ did not enter the japanese inventory, but since rhotics are cross-linguistically extremely difficult to acquire (in your L1!), liquids as a bigger category might fit that trend. that is to say, /r/ and /l/ are literally just harder to produce, so some languages leave them out of the inventory.
however, what we can take a good guess at is the size/boundaries of japanese /r/. think about a typical "mistake" a japanese speaker might make in english: she might confuse [r] and [l], like not being able to hear or produce the difference between "right" vs. "light". this is not the same as not being able to produce "light" at all! why should someone confuse two phones in their L2 which, under the right circumstances, they can produce in their L1? because the phoneme boundaries are different. [l] exists in japanese; speakers just analyze it as a member of /r/. this is exactly what burgeoning-ambitionさん said!
[f] and [v] are trickier. i will mention another personal observation here: in my experience, japanese speakers do not actually produce ヴ with [v] and do not actually produce ファ, etc. with [f] or even [ɸ]. to my ear, the consonants in these new kana tend to come out much closer to [b] and [h], respectively. so i would hesitate to say [f] or [v] have entered the consonant inventory, even in loanwords, and i would also hesitate to say /ɸ/ has become phonemic in japanese. even if a speaker produces them, they're probably still firmly under the phonemes /b/ and /h/.
cross-linguistically, this is really interesting bc [f] and [v] are among the fricatives that tend to take over from even more difficult fricatives (like the interdentals), which is really stereotypically obvious in lots of dialects of british english for example ("bruv"). but in japanese, we can't even get that far! it might be that phones like [f] and [v] are much more accessible from above than below. in other words, if a language has "harder" sounds like the interdental fricatives, it probably has access to "easier" sounds like the bilabial fricatives. since japanese isn't at the level on the hierarchy where the bilabial fricatives are, it's really difficult to import them via loanwords, and the phones get naturalized. (btw does anyone remember which hierarchy this is?? i've been trying to think of the name of it for like five minutes and can't. message me if you know lol)
uhh anyways what did we learn?? possibly nothing lol, especially since burgeoning-ambitionさん covered a ton of this and the vast majority of it is just (well-informed) speculation. i guess i just thought i'd add some more details! let's all enjoy linguistics forever!!
source: wrote my master's thesis on japanese phonology! message me for actual sources/discussion if you want :)
Are you ever typing something that your phone autocapitalizes and you go back and re-type it just to force uncapitalize it. Like no sorry mcdonalds doesn’t deserve that level of respect from me
A little something for Linguistics Tumblr.
So the Crunchyroll newsroom isn't a "room" so much as a Slack channel. We have news writers all over the US, in Australia, and in Japan. This means we have something akin to 'round-the-clock coverage, but it also means that our schedules respective to each other are skewed. For example, when the East Coast contingent is starting their day, the Japan contingent is shutting down for the evening.
Because of that, we started experimenting with greetings that could apply when Party A was coming in for the morning and Party B was leaving for the night. One person came up with "konbarning": a combination of "good morning" and "konban wa" ("good evening" in Japanese). It stuck.
Over the following months, "konbarning" got shortened to "barning" and other permutations. Now, a year or some later, this is how we announce our arrival:
I love that the English language has so many words for a large collection of things with no obvious organising principle. Hodgepodge. Welter. Myriad. Plethora. Farrago. Jumble. Miscellany.
English:
