[tequeguava]

Introduction 👋

I'm realizing that I never actually made a formal introduction to pin, so now's as good a time as any to finally do it.

I'm Eván (Evan is also fine) and use he/él/ele pronouns exclusively. Please do not use they/them pronouns for me. I grew up in the US, split between Hawaiʻi and Oregon, and am currently living in Ontario, Canada, while completing a B.A. in Spanish (Lang and Lit) and Caribbean Studies. I'm currently in my 4th of 5 years and plan on applying to Master's programs in LATAM or Caribbean Studies after completing my undergrad. My main focus for research is Spanglish usage in Boricua communities on the mainland and, more generally, English-Spanish code-switching.

Obviously I speak Spanish since I'm a Spanish major, and have been learning it since I was around 7 years old, but I don't practice as much as I'd like so I make a lot of mistakes 😅 I've taken 2 years of Portuguese at my university, mainly focusing on PT-PT, but wasn't able to continue this school year because of scheduling problems. Since I'm from Hawaiʻi, I've been trying to study Hawaiian independently when I'm not too busy with school. I'm planning on starting Catalan (at uni) and Ladino/Judeo-Spanish (independent study) in 2024 as well!

The main resource I've been using for studying Hawaiian is the Ka Lei Haʻaheo: Beginning Hawaiian textbook by Alberta Pualani Hopkins.

[salvadorbonaparte]

things my essay contains:

gratuitous fun facts about Beethoven just because I thought it would make a good segue

a mention of the online popularity of the song Vienna

Freudian terminology (boooooo)

verbally beating the shit out of Josef Neckermann and his descendants

things my essay doesn't contain

any actual well argued points

I'm so cooked

I used to be so good at this what happened

[tequeguava]

oof i guess this is a sign for me to work on my essay 😔

[mx-macintosh]

y'all need to relearn the word erratic and stop using schizophrenic/bipolar/psychotic as a replacement

[mx-macintosh]

y'all need to relearn the word particular and stop using ocd as a replacement

[weresoul]

People need to relearn the word "egocentric" and stop using narcissist/narc as a replacement.

[thatpreciousthing]

People need to relearn the word "impulse" and stop using "intrusive thought" as a replacement

[oneirophasia]

People need to relearn the word "callous" and stop using "sociopathic" as a replacement

[do-stars-ever-shine]

I've noticed that SO many people say "ah I speak 10 languages". but then it turns out they just discovered they could say "hello" , "how are you", "fuck you" and decided to call it a day. bruh, even for a1 you need to have a solid foundation. ofc, for a1 it's just the basics, but you've at least got a grasp of the language and the way it works, not the knowledge how to say random phrases. besides, to truly speak a language you have to be familiar enough with it's culture, which takes even more time and effort

[yiddish-shmues]

sometimes I feel like for many tumblr users Yiddish is exclusively a "cool language with fun curses and leftist political songs" instead of a language with a long history and a diverse body of speakers in different countries with various social, political, cultural, religious and economic backgrounds and opinions.

[tequeguava]

Genuine question for L2 Yiddish speakers and learners — considering how wide of a range geographically Yiddish has been historically spoken in, is there a certain dialect that tends to dominate L2 learning resources? Like did one specific country or community's dialect of Yiddish end up being what most people learn if they don't speak Yiddish natively?

I feel like with Judeo-Spanish, Turkish Ladino is the dialect that's kinda taken over most learning resources rather than Balkan Ladino, North African Haketia, etc.

[salvadorbonaparte]

I miss being an active language learning langblr. please tell me some fun facts about your native or target language(s) or share some vocab or reasons to learn the language(s).

[tequeguava]

My original reason for learning my current main target language (Chinuk Wawa) was because because I'm simply a creole language enthusiast and enjoyer, but honestly learning it has been the most fun I've had learning a language in AGES. It started out as a trade language between various Indigenous groups in the US and Canadian West Coast and Europeans, and eventually became creolized during its use on reservations as a lingua franca, especially in Oregon (my home state). It's primarily based in Chinook/the Chinookan language family and Nootka Jargon, but has about 15% each of its vocab come from French and English. Something I find really neat about the words borrowed from French is that it was specifically borrowed from the French spoken by Métis fur traders, so there's a lot of dialectical stuff (like using the word pi for and) that I would never have guessed based on my limited Metro French knowledge.

The grammar has also been really fun to learn. There's no gendered pronouns or (most of the time) articles. You don't conjugate verbs at all and can use time markers if you need to make "tense" particularly clear, but most of the time, it's just implied. There's also tons of compound words with fun literal translations (for example, car -> fire-wagon), which is always fun as well.

[unearthitaly]

I very much agree with these suggestions. Forcing myself to write was the way I could finally start to become an active rather than a passive user of the target language.

[speilrotte]

Learning a language through subtitled youtube videos is so funny because I know the words for weed and hell but not seven

[translatingpostsinfrench]

pourquoi du pain est masculin mais la baguette est féminine....... la baguette est transgenre ?

je vais laisser la communauté parler:

la baguette, icône trans?

oui

non

Voting ended onOct 12, 2025

[superlinguo]

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science, 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

[superlinguo]

Almost a decade later and there’s a fun update to this paper!

Eight years after this original study Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow have a sequel.

The original paper showed that blind and sighted people who speak the same language have similar gestures to represent events. These gestures can’t have been acquired through visual learning, so this was evidence that gesture and speech must be all bound up together in the brain. But there was still a question about how deeply they’re tied together. Perhaps this was something that adults settled into as they got older.

In this new paper, Özçalışkan and team looked at the speech and gesture of blind and sighted Turkish children between the ages of five and ten years old. They used the same methods and targeted the same kind of action verbs and gestures. It’s worth checking out the paper for the frolicking doll dioramas they set up as part of the experiment.

Even the youngest children showed the same kind of gesture patterns as adult Turkish speakers. This means that these kinds of patterns are part of language learning and not something that gets added on top later in life. That is further evidence for the original argument that speech and gesture are a package deal.

It’s so great to see this team continuing to refine and support the original findings.

From the “research highlights” section of the paper:

Gestures, when produced with speech (i.e., co-speech gesture), follow language-specific patterns in event representation in both blind and sighted children.

Gestures, when produced without speech (i.e., silent gesture), do not follow the language-specific patterns in event representation in both blind and sighted children.

Language-specific patterns in speech and co-speech gestures are observable at the same time in blind and sighted children.

The cross-linguistic similarities in silent gestures begin slightly later in blind children than in sighted children.

Citation

Özçalışkan, Şeyda, Ché Lucero, and Susan Goldin‐Meadow. (2024). Is vision necessary for the timely acquisition of language‐specific patterns in co‐speech gesture and their lack in silent gesture?. Developmental Science, 27(5), e13507. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13507

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[adonischildsupportcase]

[storyweavingspider]

The number of whites that treat AAVE like simlish instead of an actual dialect with specific rules, etc. is maddening actually

[omgshiftercat]

Recommending You're Wrong About's episode on "Ebonics" for all non-Black people. I learned a lot.

[omtai]

love downloading a pdf to never read. just in case. like lol. you’re coming home with me

[what-even-is-thiss]

Here’s how to tell if a language is easy to learn

None of them are easy

They’re all stupid and terrible and will kick you in the nuts

That being said

Languages similar to ones you already speak

Languages you have a lot of motivation to learn

Languages that have a lot of resources and media to watch and/or listen to and/or read

So, if you’re reading this with relative ease (aka you speak English fluently) probably French or Spanish

Do whatever you want though idk

Don’t just choose a language based on how easy it is

Unless that’s what it takes to keep you motivated idk

Go learn Frisian or something

[what-even-is-thiss]

Frisian is an endangered language and it sounds just fine. Hitting you very very hard with a very large fish.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Respect minority languages or die by my comically large fish

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[what-even-is-thiss]

Why does like every language do things with their R sounds that nobody else understands

[ruhua-langblr]

Duolingo Sucks, Now What?: A Guide

Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) due to AI and people are more willing to make the jump here are just some alternative apps and what languages they have:

"I just want an identical experience to DL"

Busuu (Languages: Spanish, Japanese, French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Korean)

"I want a good audio-based app"

Language Transfer (Languages: French, Swahili, Italian, Greek, German, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, English for Spanish Speakers)

"I want a good audio-based app and money's no object"

Pimsleur (Literally so many languages)

Glossika (Also a lot of languages, but minority languages are free)

*anecdote: I borrowed my brother's Japanese Pimsleur CD as a kid and I still remember how to say the weather is nice over a decade later. You can find the CDs at libraries and "other" places I'm sure.

"I have a pretty neat library card"

Mango (Languages: So many and the endangered/Indigenous courses are free even if you don't have a library that has a partnership with Mango)

Transparent Language: (Languages: THE MOST! Also the one that has the widest variety of African languages! Perhaps the most diverse in ESL and learning a foreign language not in English)

"I want SRS flashcards and have an android"

AnkiDroid: (Theoretically all languages, pre-made decks can be found easily)

"I want SRS flashcards and I have an iphone"

AnkiApp: It's almost as good as AnkiDroid and free compared to the official Anki app for iphone

"I don't mind ads and just want to learn Korean"

lingory

"I want an app made for Mandarin that's BETTER than DL and has multiple languages to learn Mandarin in"

ChineseSkill (You can use their older version of the course for free)

"I don't like any of these apps you mentioned already, give me one more"

Bunpo: (Languages: Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Korean, and Mandarin)

[delicateartisantrash]

me shoving more information i think is super useful and interesting onto my main blog sorrryyyyyy not sorryyyyyy--

[romanceyourdemons]

people needdddd to wear headphones in public because while on an otherwise very lovely walk in the park today i saw a guy sitting under a tree watching a porn parody of the star wars prequels

[romanceyourdemons]

if nothing else trying to tune out the sounds of anakin and padme going to town as i contemplate the babbling brook gave me a brief but vivid window into what it’s like to be obi wan kenobi