What is it like being portuguese, you ask? There's a folklore band playing in the middle of the supermarket's cheese section to promote chorizos
I wish this were a joke

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almost home
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trying on a metaphor

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祝日 / Permanent Vacation
we're not kids anymore.
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dirt enthusiast

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@study-the-thing
What is it like being portuguese, you ask? There's a folklore band playing in the middle of the supermarket's cheese section to promote chorizos
I wish this were a joke
Alright Langblrs,
How did you learn your second language?
Does anyone have any advice for wanting to pick up a new language? I only speak English and I would really like to learn Spanish. I know it's going to be a lot of work but I really want to be competent in at least two languages. It would especially help if there was advice for being self taught as I dont have the resources to take classes ($$).
You've received some good advice, especially about learning the sound each letter and letter combination represents.
Mine is: start somewhere, anywhere.
Languages are vast. There is no 'order' to learn them, no specific way. One person might say "only read later", but you can read right away if you want. Same goes for most any advice. Whichever way you take initially, you can grow, your mind gradually creating a space for Spanish as you repeat the info and language exposure and experience the same thing in different contexts.
Just try out different things and let yourself have fun as much as study seriously. Believe that you will figure this language thing out eventually. It can be tempting to give up when self-studying, but the only way to learn is to continue, although it's okay to take breaks too. Good luck!
Finnish lessons were hard today. I can read, and kind of understand. I can work out the missing words, conjugated correctly. But when I'm asked a question all words vanish, my mind is blank, no words appear. When I need to improvise, I'm tongue-tied, a white snowy void of silence and white noise. After two years of lessons I feel I should be doing better than this.
I'm consoling myself with Google Translate, using the voice input to say words with 'ä' in them and watching with incredulity as the 'ä's appear or change to 'a's as I slightly move my mouth shape - I still can't actually hear the difference, but apparently Google can - so I suppose at least I can make the right postures and hope for the best.
Things come gently and with time. You've got this. :)
Religion in everyday language
[Isso vai acontecer] no dia de São Nunca (à tarde)! – [That’s gonna happen] on the day of Saint Never (in the afternoon)!
The Brazilian way of saying “It’s never gonna happen”.
https://www.rtp.pt/play/p319/e306283/quinta-essencia
This is a link to podcasts in European Portuguese, which are interviews with experts on a part of a subject like science, history etc.
Hey, does anyone know of textbooks and dictionaries through which to learn British Sign Language?
most days I wish I was cat
Multitasking
Novas palavras (09.12.19)
Idosos (adj) —> elderly
A/o idosa (noun) —> senior
A dispersão —> dispersion/lack of concentration
A viela —> alley/narrow street
Atingir —> to get (compreender), to hit, to affect (afetar), to reach
Atingir a perfeição —> to reach perfection
O disparo —> firing (detonação)
O alvo —> target, objectives target (motive)
Virar alvo de crítica —> to become the target of criticism.
A Periculosidade —> danger
Nocivo (adj.) —> harmful, destructive
A truculência —> barbarity.
Rastro de mortes —> a trail of dead.
Perambular (V.) —> to roam (Brazil)
O Pancadão —> pancada violenta
A molecada —> (inf. 🇧🇷) kids
Entalar (transitive) —> to get stuck
Writing systems in the world
A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication. There are about 4,000 languages that make use of an established writing system.
All writing systems require:
at least one set of defined base elements or symbols, individually termed signs and collectively called a script;
at least one set of rules and conventions (orthography) understood and shared by a community, which assigns meaning to the base elements (graphemes), their ordering and relations to one another;
at least one language (generally spoken) whose constructions are represented and can be recalled by the interpretation of these elements and rules;
some physical means of distinctly representing the symbols by application to a permanent or semi-permanent medium, so they may be interpreted (usually visually, but tactile systems have also been devised).
Generally, threre are three major types of writing systems: alphabets, syllabaries, and logographies. There are a number of subdivisions of each type, and there are different classifications of writing systems in different sources.
Alphabets use a standard set of letters representing the consonants and vowels of a spoken language. The correspondence is almost never one-to-one. Usually several different letters represent one phoneme and/or several phonemes are represented by the same letter. Alternately, a sequence of two or more letters can represent a single phoneme. Abjads differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, and in abugidas or alphasyllabaries each character represents a consonant-vowel pairing.
Syllabaries consist of symbols that represent syllables (which are considered to be a basic building block of the words).
Logographies use characters corresponding to words, morphemes or other semantic units.
Alphabets typically use a set of less than 100 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have several hundred, and logographies can have thousands of symbols.
Segmental systems
A segmental script has graphemes which represent the phonemes (basic unit of sound) of a language.
Alphabets
Alphabets, or phonemic alphabets, are sets of letters that represent consonants and vowels. The word “alphabet” is derived from alpha and beta, the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet.
Alphabets currently in use include Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian (Mkhedruli), Greek, Korean (hangŭl), Latin/Roman, N’Ko, and Tifinagh.
Abjads
The first type of alphabet that was developed was the abjad. An abjad is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant. Abjads differ from other alphabets in that they have characters only for consonantal sounds, although vocalization is used in specific contexts, such as in religious books and children’s books. The term “abjad” takes its name from the old order of the Arabic alphabet’s consonants ‘alif, bā’, jīm, and dāl.
Arabic, Hebrew and Thaana are the only abjads currently in use, but Samaritan and Syriac are used to a limited extent.
Abugidas
An abugida is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one. The graphic similarity of most abugidas comes from the fact that they are derived from abjads, and the consonants make up the symbols with the inherent vowel and the new vowel symbols are markings added on to the base symbol. The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Ge'ez script used in some contexts.
Abugidas that are currently in use include Bengali, Burmese/Myanmar, Cree (Nêhiyaw), Dehong Dai (Tai Le), Devanāgarī, Fraser, Ge’ez (Ethiopic), Gujarāti, Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Inuktitut, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Naskapi (Innu Aimun), Ojibwe (Anishinaabe), Odia, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, and Tibetan.
The ones used to a limited extent are Balinese, Batak, Bilang-bilang, Blackfoot (Siksika), Buhid, Carrier (Dulkw’ahke), Chakma, Cham, Dhurwa, Ditema, Gondi, Grantha, Hanifi, Hanuno’o, Hmong, Javanese, Jenticha, Kaithi, Kerinci, Khoiki, Kirat Rai, Kulitan, Lampung, Lanna, Lepcha (Róng-Ríng), Limbu/Kirati, Lontara, Lota Ende, Manipuri (Meetei Mayek), Mon, Mwangwego, New Tai Lue, Ranjana, Rejang, Sasak, Satera Jontal, Saurashtra, Shan, Sharda, Siddham, Sorang Sompeng, Soyombo, Sundanese, Syloti Nagri, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tikamuli, Tolong Siki, Tigalari, and Varang Kshiti.
Syllabic systems
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words.
Syllabaries currently in use include Cherokee (Tsalagi), Hiragana (Japanese), Katakana (Japanese), and Yi (Nosu).
Logographic systems
The symbols used in logographic systems often represent both sound and meaning. These scripts can also be called semanto-phonetic, logophonetic, morphoprhonemic, or logosyllabic.
They may include the following types of symbol:
Pictograms and logograms
Pictograms or pictographs resemble the things they represent. Logograms are symbols that represent parts of words or whole words.
Ideograms
Ideograms or ideographs are symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas.
Compound characters
Compound characters include a semantic element, which represents or hints at their meaning, and a phonetic element, which shows or hints at their pronunciation.
The semanto-phonetic writing systems currently in use are Chinese (Zhōngwén) and Japanese (Nihongo), while Naxi is used mainly for decorative, ceremonial or religious purposes.
Directionality
Scripts are also graphically characterized by the direction in which they are written. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written either left to right or right to left.
The early alphabet could be written in multiple directions: horizontally (side to side), or vertically (up or down). Prior to standardization, alphabetical writing was done both left-to-right and right-to-left.
The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, came to be written right-to-left. Scripts that incorporate Chinese characters have traditionally been written vertically (top-to-bottom), from the right to the left of the page, but nowadays are frequently written left-to-right, top-to-bottom, due to Western influence.
Does anyone have any resources for learning European Portuguese (and specifically European) I want to get some resources for a friend but don’t know where to start
Ayup, here: https://study-the-thing.tumblr.com/post/188753039917/got-a-bunch-of-stuff-here-on-my-blog-check-the
Good luck!
Rui Veloso | Máquina Zero
11.17.2019 we are very busy!!
study-the-thing reblogou a tua publicação:Learning other languages via english, especially…
Yeah I wish they had a European Portuguese course because it would make so much sense to learn other European languages…
It’s not even the course, I understand why they’d use BR-PT for that - there’s simply more speakers.
Idk which is easier to learn for foreign speakers - I imagine that it depends on your first language - but generally people seem to think BR-PT is easier.
It’s just frustrating that when I was using Portuguese as a base language anytime Duo asked me to translate something from the language I was learning into Portuguese, it would mark my answer as incorrect not because I didn’t understand the language I was learning, but because Duo didn’t consider my phrasing in Portuguese correct.
Oh whoops, I didn't mean to imply I think they should not have a BR-PT course. It's important that they teach it. I think it would be ideal to have two Portuguese courses. I understand that they won't do that, but I think it's a shame.
Yes I think first language is key. For monolingual English speakers, I think BR is typically easier. For me at least, it feels easier. Some of the grammar translates more directly and requires less thought to wrap my head around.
That sounds really frustrating, it slows everything down. You know your own language!
Zero to Hero Audio Visual is a free website with videos with transcripts, a dictionary, a reader with pop-up dictionary (you can copy paste text or enter urls), and a page for further learning resources. You can filter things by level and topic. This link takes you to the Portuguese section but there are a bunch of languages! And anyone can get involved to add to the website.
Learning other languages via english, especially on apps like duolingo can be kind of weird because of things like english using you for both plural and singular and not having genders and thinks like this.
Duo in particular is odd because it provides a translation but no explanation, so you sort of have to figure out by yourself what things are actually doing in a sentence. So obviously if you see “You eat apples” spelled completely different twice you can figure out that one is plural and one is singular, but not which is which at first glance.
Yeah I wish they had a European Portuguese course because it would make so much sense to learn other European languages through EUPT. BR lacks the tu/você distinction and its grammar can be closer to English. Also I found that Portuguese-Languages other than English courses are even less tolerant of EUPT.