nothing to see here

Languages, stationery, and whatever else happens to catch my fancy.

[alucardsinep]

estonia banning cruise ships to avoid the spreading of coronavirus (2020, colorized)

[punajuova]

सात, sextán, είκοσι τρία

Thank you for asking and sorry for the late (and long) reply!

सात: What is your favourite way to study your target language(s)?

My favourite ways that are not necessarily the most effective or the best for targeting my weak points:

Reading (mostly books and articles), looking up unfamiliar words, and recording them in my vocabulary database, because I like expanding my vocabulary and find the process therapeutic.

Transcribing (mostly podcasts and news broadcasts), because it forces me to actively listen and exposes weak points that I gloss over and get complacent about in passive listening.

Doing exercises in vocabulary and grammar -- maybe I’m weird, but I find it really enjoyable and therapeutic. This is actually how I got good at English despite growing up in a Mandarin-speaking family!

Listening to music and looking up unfamiliar words in the lyrics, because there’s just something special about really understanding a song you love.

Writing and translating because even though this is the most energy-intensive of all the things I’ve listed here, there’s something very satisfying about looking at something you’ve produced yourself.

You might’ve noticed that these are all activities that don’t require interaction with another person 😅

Sextán: What are your language learning goals for this year?

I wrote a long-ass post about my goals at the beginning of the year, but here’s the TL;DR in descending order of priority:

🇫🇮 Finish my thesis, read 24 books, record 1500 new words

🇪🇪 Read a bit, transcribe ~24 hours of material, record 20 hours of speech, record 1000 new words

🇨🇳 Work on my literacy by reading 108 articles on The Chairman’s Bao and practising on HSK Online

🇸🇪 Record 500 “new” words

🇬🇧 Read 24 books

είκοσι τρία: If you could instantly have native proficiency in three languages of your choice, which languages would you choose?

I feel like there are two categories of languages for which I would choose instant native proficiency:

In the first category are languages that I think would be useful (for myself, that is) to know, but which I don’t really care for enough to prioritise learning in this short life. In this case my choices would be Arabic, French, and German.

In the second category are languages that are dear to me for some reason or other and which I would love to experience the learning process with, but since I am impatient and life is short and unpredictable, I probably wouldn’t say no to a shortcut if it were available. Languages in this category would be Cantonese, Japanese, and Russian.

I should mention that these are languages where I would pretty much have to start from scratch, not languages that I’ve already made decent progress in. If I had to choose between the two categories, I would choose the latter.

Original ask post - feel free to send more questions my way!

[snooze-studies]

Langblr Asks!

One: What is your favorite untranslatable word?

Zwei: Have you ever felt pressured to study a certain language?

Tres: What is your favorite TV Show or Movie filmed in your target language?

四: What is your native language?

Cinq: What was the first language (besides your native) that you studied?

Seis: Have you ever visited or lived in a country that speaks your target language(s)?

सात: What is your favorite way to study your target language(s)?

Osiem: Have you ever decided to quit learning a language for any reason?

Níu: What is your favorite song in your target language?

Десять: What is your favorite language learning app?

十一: Do you usually fall in love with a language or a culture first?

Douz: what languages, if any, were you required to study in school? Did you continue studying them afterward?

Trzynaście: If you could become proficient in all of the languages in one language family, which would it be?

Quattordici: Have you considered pursuing a career in/with your target language(s)?

Vyftien: Have you ever been turned off from a language due to a culture or person?

Sextán: What are your language learning goals for this year?

Seachd-deug: What are your language learning goals for your life?

Arton: Have you ever been inspired to learn a language from a family member or friend that spoke it?

Negentien: Is there any language you would like to learn but are intimidated by?

ยี่สิบ: What initially inspired you to learn your current target language(s)?

Tjueen: Do you plan on moving (short term or permanently) to a country that speaks your target language?

dalawampu't dalawa: What intimidates or frustrates you the most about studying a language?

είκοσι τρία: If you could instantly have native proficiency in three languages of your choice, which languages would you choose?

चौबीस: Have you ever kept a language journal? If so, what did you write in it?

dvacet pět: What do you consider ‘Fluent’?

Iwakāluakūmāono: When you find yourself not up to studying your target language(s), how do you inspire yourself to keep working?

스물 일곱: Which languages, if any, have you not started studying but would like to in the future?

dudek ok: Do you ever wish you were raised with a different native language or in a different country?

Y’all know the drill, reblog and get some questions :) I can guarantee everybody that reblogs will get at least one from me bc I’m nosy!

Additional tip: answering ask lists (for yourself or on tumblr) is a fun way to practice your target language :)

[punajuova]

In today’s episode of Language Detective...

While trawling through the 39183298214 learner Finnish corpus texts written by native Polish speakers, I came across an interesting sentence about the Polish flag. The writer had mentioned that the red in it symbolises veri, the blood of the people, which is a little morbid but makes sense. They then went on to say that the white of the flag represents arpa, a... lottery ticket??

Not wanting to believe that gambling is so deeply embedded in the Polish national identity, I set out to discover the truth:

Sure enough, it seems that the writer had meant to say something completely different, but had simply chosen the wrong synonym from a dictionary that didn’t provide context alongside its definitions.

So the next thing I did was to look up what arpa was in Polish:

And, since I don’t actually know Polish, I went on to find out what the English translation(s) of los would reveal:

...ah. Now it all makes sense.

(Side note: I should mention -- and I only found this out in conjunction with my little investigation -- that there ARE expressions in which arpa CAN refer to fate, e.g. kohtalon arpa, ei ole osaa eikä arpaa. But that’s mostly in idiomatic figurative language, and by no means an everyday use of the word.)

In other news, today is apparently also the day I learn that kismet can be something other than a Fazer chocolate bar. 🍫

[punajuova]

Kinda wish I knew Polish because I’ve been going through all the C-level texts in this corpus of learner Finnish for my thesis and for some reason the VAST majority of them were written by native Polish speakers?

So many interestingly worded expressions and I wish I knew the reasoning behind their choices...

[punajuova]

Last week I learnt a new Chinese expression: 余音绕梁，三日不绝 (yú yīn rào liáng, sān rì bù jué), which refers to something along the lines of music lingering around for some time. An earworm, perhaps.

I learnt it from, of all places, a corpus of learner Finnish. 🤷🏻‍♀️

[punajuova]

Time to get serious after literal years of procrastination 😬

If having fun stickers to put in my planner doesn’t motivate me to finally get my shit together and finish my thesis, I don’t know what will...

[punajuova]

Yay! And now that I finally got that stupid badge out of the way, I can move on to other things...

[punajuova]

So, I really like names. Not enough to write an entire thesis on them, but enough to waste hours of my life reading forum threads about the “unique” names people like to give their kids. So when my partner sent me a link to the following article, I of course had to read:

While scrolling through the list, one particular name caught my attention:

...I wonder if the parents were Tolkien fans.

[punajuova]

🇫🇮 Language diary: TIL in Finnish // 20.1.2020

TIL that the singular and plural forms of hippa can mean different things.

n. sg. hippa, hipan, hippaa = tag (the game).

n. pl. hipat, hippojen ~ hippain, hippoja = a party.

I learned this while revising vocab from the second Harry Potter book:

He olivat juuri aloittaneet lupaavalta vaikuttavat hipat, kun matami Pomfrey rynnisti paikalle ja huusi jo tullessaan: “Poika tarvitse lepoa!”

[punajuova]

I’ve had my eye on a subscription at The Chairman’s Bao for quite a few weeks and I’m so glad I held out until now because they’re currently having a 30% off sale and I managed to snag a subscription for much cheaper than usual. No longer do I have to content myself with just the free articles, yay!

Starting off with HSK 3 articles, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find them easier than expected. I guess I still have a fair amount of passive vocab lurking in my memory? For now, I will resist the temptation to go up a level or two, and instead focus on learning to read more fluently, without having to pause here and there to dredge up the pronunciation of some half-forgotten word.

Writing down sentences with unfamiliar words has been quite therapeutic!

[punajuova]

🇫🇮 A glimpse into my Finnish vocab system 🇫🇮

During my very successful attempt at avoiding thesis work over Christmas break, I managed to transfer all the Finnish vocab I’d recorded years ago from the first Harry Potter book over from Evernote to Notion. Turns out there were over 500 of them! Here’s a little before-and-after of my old and new systems, along with some observations I’ve made so far.

The previous system (Evernote):

Vocab entries are kept in separate notes within different notebooks

Each note contains entries from one chapter or an entire book

(+) Notes are stable and load quickly

(+) Entries can be viewed chapter by chapter

(+) Order of the entries follows progression of the text/stories

(-) Static and disconnected with limited organisational possibilities

(-) No way to quickly tally total entries by source, category, etc.

(-) Hard to keep track of entries, often leading to repeats

(-) No way to easily consolidate all problematic/unsolved entries

(-) Broken copy-and paste function meant a lot of typing by hand

The current system (Notion):

There are no notes or notebooks, only one big table

Everything is organised and filterable by tags

(+) Dynamic and interconnected with flexible organisation

(+) Entries are filterable by alphabet, word class, source, etc.

(+) Automatic tallying of total entries by source, category, etc.

(+) Easy to quickly check entire database for duplicates

(+) Problematic/unsolved entries can easily be consolidated

(+) Copy-and-paste function doesn’t mess up formatting!!!

(-) Entries can no longer be viewed chapter by chapter

(-) Order of entries no longer follows progression of texts/stories

(-) Not sure how much the system can handle without lagging

My main concerns about my new system have to do with its sustainability: Notion is much younger (and therefore less established) than Evernote, I will have to pay to get past its storage limit after my school email address expires, and I’m not sure how many more rows I can add to the table before it starts to lag significantly. But overall I do think the new system’s improvements are significant enough for me to want to stick with it for now.

[punajuova]

📚 My multilingual reading list 📚

For the past couple of years I’ve been tracking my reading in various paper bullet journals but they never really worked out because 1) my terrible attention span meant I rarely reached for paper books, leaving me with little to record and 2) I could never be bothered to update things on time.

Recently I gave both audiobooks and digital reading lists a try and so far things have been working out pretty well:

🎧 In December I managed to listen to some 15 books, more than twice the number I’d read in the previous 11 months.

🗒 I find this digital list much more versatile and pleasant to use, and the threshold to update it lower.

Here’s how I have things set up:

Status: My categories are TBR (to be read), Reading, Finished, and DNF (did not finish).

Type: I have 💬 for audiobook and 📖 for paperback.

Language: I currently have books in 🇬🇧 English, 🇫🇮 Finnish, and 🇪🇪Estonian -- hoping to add more languages in future!

Name: The title of the book in the language I read it in.

Author: In addition to the original author(s) (in grey), I also like to include the translator(s) (in yellow) and audiobook narrator(s) (in orange) if applicable.

Start date: A lot of the older entries are blank because like I said, I’m terrible at updating things 😅

End date: I have my entire reading list automatically sorted by end date in ascending order.

I really like this system so far because as a visual person I find the emoji and different colours both engaging and aesthetically pleasing. It’s also really easy to keep things organised with tags, automatically count the books in each category, and show filtered entries within a certain time frame. Here’s another picture to further illustrate things:

I use Notion (referral link / non-referral link) to maintain this reading list. The premium version with unlimited storage is currently free if you sign up with a school email address. The referral link will give new users $10 credit and also grant me $5 credit. Your name and email will show up under the “Earn Credit” tab of the person who referred you so please take that into account!

[punajuova]

💫 My 2020 language goals 💫

It’s that time of the year again! But first, a personal disclaimer...

For the past few years, I have struggled a lot with productivity and progress. The official reason is depression; unofficially, I suspect that laziness is also at play. I list these goals with the expectation to fall short in some of them, but with the hope that I will put honest effort into making at least some progress.

So, here are my 2020 language goals in descending order of priority, as well as the methods and resources I plan to use in my attempt to achieve them.

🇫🇮 Finnish 🇫🇮

Finish my goddamn thesis and graduate 😒

This is top priority because it’s already dragged on foreverrr and I am SO done with school.

Read 24 books in Finnish

Audiobooks will play a huge part here -- I have a monthly Storytel subscription that has turned out to be a real game changer in getting me to consume more literature. Great way to liven up dead time!

Record 1500 new words

This includes reviewing my old annotated vocab (of which there is a lot) by migrating them from Evernote to Notion (*referral link; see details at end of post before clicking), so the goal isn’t really as lofty as it may seem.

🇪🇪 Estonian 🇪🇪

Read the first ~250 pages of Eesti keele käsiraamat

I have the paper version (which I prefer to the online version) and will be reading it casually: I’ll highlight and maybe record unfamiliar words but won’t otherwise be taking notes.

Transcribe spoken Estonian (48 x 25-min sessions)

This works out to about 4 x 25-min sessions per month. I use the demo version of f5transkript (keep meaning to get a private/commercial license but it’s a lot of money for a student 😭) to transcribe and Audacity to split my audio into 5-min segments. My go-to things to transcribe are podcasts like Keelesaade or Ma elan siin, but I hope to branch out to more challenging stuff (faster speech, more informal language, etc) this year.

Record 20 hours of speech

This is honestly the most intimidating of all my goals because I haaaaaate listening to my own pronunciation. I will probably start with reading book excerpts aloud before moving on to prompts from the excellent #SpeakingIn20 challenge.

Record 1000 new words

This includes reviewing my old annotated vocab (smaller than my Finnish collection, but still a significant number) by migrating them from Evernote to Notion.

🇨🇳 (Mandarin) Chinese 🇨🇳

Achieve HSK3-level literacy (overall goal)

More specifically, I want to be able to comfortably read HSK3-level texts without stumbling over words and constantly reaching for the dictionary. To do this, I will have to refresh my Chinese character memory and expand my vocabulary by quite a bit.

Read 108 news articles

This works out to about 9 articles per month (less than 3 per week) and I will be using the graded articles on The Chairman’s Bao. My plan is to just write down sentences with unfamiliar characters and their 汉语拼音 in a notebook. No definitions or explanations, just some simple handwriting practice.

Do exercises and practice tests (108 x 10-min sessions)

This works out to about 9 x 10-min sessions per month (less than 3 per week). I will be using HSK Online (got the lifetime paid version -- god knows I’ve spent more money on stupider things), which offers exercises in listening, reading, writing, and vocab training in addition to practice tests.

Do Duolingo lessons (min. 1 per day)

The bar is set very low because this is mainly to maintain my streak for those damn achievement badges 😑

🇸🇪 Swedish 🇸🇪

Transfer 500 words from Evernote to Notion

I plan to start this later in the year, and only if I manage to fulfill my school-related responsibilities. Swedish is unfortunately not a priority at the moment and whatever little practice I manage to squeeze in will be mostly passive. I do have some old annotated articles that haven’t been reviewed in a long time so I will review them by transferring vocab over to my new system in Notion.

🌟 I wish everyone an excellent new year! 🌟

* Details regarding Notion referral link: the premium version (main difference is unlimited storage) is currently free if you sign up with a school email address. The referral link above will give new users $10 credit and also grant me $5 credit. Your name and email will be visible to me under my “Earn Credit” tab. If you are uncomfortable with that, please sign up with a normal link.

[punajuova]

What better way to spend a sleepless night than by whipping up a new vocab management system for your target languages?

I’ve been playing around with Notion (referral link; see details below) for the past few days and I honestly like it SO much more than the static and disconnected system I’ve had up till now in Evernote. With Notion I can easily organise and filter entries around within a single table, and it’s just so much more... dynamic and functional?? Plus I really like the idea of having everything in one neat database instead of 128587235 separate notes.

I currently have my personal dictionary (sõnaraamat) set up for Estonian but I’m definitely going to do this for my other target languages too! Everything is automatically arranged in alphabetical order and the columns I have right now are:

Letter of the alphabet (täht)

Word class (sõnaliik)

The vocab entry itself, usually a single word (sõna)

The meaning or definition of the entry (tähendus)

A sentence the entry appears in for context (lause)

The source of that sentence (allikas)

I have the name of the source highlighted in blue.

I have the creator of the source highlighted in grey.

I plan to organise sources by categories (books, articles, etc).

This is just the beginning of my potential new system, a product of my insomnia brain that I will hopefully continue to work on. I’m excited to see what else I can do with these new tools!

For the record, the premium version of Notion is currently free if you have a school email address (the free-for-everyone version has a storage limit that’s still pretty generous). The referral link above will give new users $10 credit to squirrel away for future use (and in the interest of full disclosure, I get $5 credit too).

[punajuova]

Recent target language books #2 🇬🇧🇫🇮

As part of the A Book in Target Language Challenge, here’s a list of books I’ve recently finished and begun. Each book will have its language (for consistency, 🇬🇧 will be used for all English-language books) and format (📖 for paperback or ebook, 💬 for audiobook) indicated beside it.

Books I recently finished:

🇬🇧💬 Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

A quick and easy listen, although it might’ve been better enjoyed in paper format (the narrator kept referring to some mysterious PDF that I never got hold of). I kinda feel like this is one of those books riding the konmari/hygge/[insert recent trend here] wave? Overall, some interesting info but nothing terribly in-depth or groundbreaking.

🇫🇮💬 Hanna by Minna Canth

I realised that I’d actually read this book years ago back in my high school or early university days! The subject matter is depressing but still relevant today at its core. This book was published in 1886 so the language has some old-fashioned elements (e.g. etehinen instead of eteinen), but it should be understandable enough for advanced learners. No slang or colloquialisms. You can find the entire text online at Project Gutenberg.

🇫🇮💬 Tunne lukkosi by Kimmo Takanen

Will definitely be re-reading in paper format, which is much more conducive for note-taking. I really liked this book because a lot of it just felt extremely relevant to what I’ve been dealing with. Like many non-fiction popular science books, the language is pretty standard and easy to follow, with fairly uncomplicated sentences.

🇫🇮💬 Eliitti by Maija Kauhanen

I think I might’ve enjoyed this more if I’d read it as a paperback? The audiobook often left me disoriented because the narratives kept jumping back and forth in time, and tbh I found the reader a bit.. flat and monotonous. Intermediate learners unfamiliar with the spoken language might find this book challenging because the dialogue is pretty colloquial and there is a LOT of it

🇬🇧💬 Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

I know next to nothing about Norse mythology so this book served as a nice and sufficiently entertaining introduction. Not sure how it might be received by someone more well-versed in this area. It was a fun and quick listen, the language was simple but engaging, and the author did a good job narrating it.

[punajuova]

Super old screenshot but duolingo changed up their streak animation?! Tbh I liked the old one more... They also removed the 50 gem reward after completing each skill level AND the random treasure chests after the first lesson of the day! Not that gems were ever good for much but MEH