Seek knowledge, find wisdom

My name is Mack. Student and violinist. Fascinated with every language in the world. 🇱🇺

[romanceyourdemons]

my scholarly physique and delicate constitution are not well-suited to questing, but they keep me around because i’m very good at saying ominous and unsettling things at significant moments

[theancientwayoflife]

~ The Moon Represented as a Woman on Horseback.

Date: shortly after 1464

Medium: Watercolor and ink

[zoryanavesna]

Brutally Honest Rules for Language Learners

If you can`t make your own examples to a grammar rule, you don`t know this grammar rule.

Learning words without context is almost useless. You may repeat something like “road” or “deeply” millions of times and still forgetting them in the most important situations. Memorize phrases instead. e. g. “I crossed the road” and “to be deeply ashamed”.

Prioritize. There are almost 500 000 words in the English language and even more in some non-European languages. If you decide to learn 5 words a day, you`ll need a shitload of time to cover at least the third of the whole vocabulary. So, know precisely what words are the most frequent and the most important for you personally.

No, you won`t learn a language by listening to songs ONLY.

If your level of knowledge is Intermediate or higher, you don`t need the fucking subtitles. Well, in the beginning, you will have a terrible headache and doubts about the whole thing, but every video will be making you a little better. You`ll slowly get used to the accents and intonation. It`ll stop to sound like the endless phrase without any pauses. Just give yourself some time.

Translation from the native language to the target language is useless (if you`re not going to become an interpreter). Write the short texts in your target language instead.

Forget about boring topics from the textbooks. Argue with somebody in the comment section under your fav YouTube videos. Try to persuade me that the Earth is flat (I know it`s insane, but you`ll remember it much better than writing the essay “The current problems of ecology”). Rewrite your own posts. Write down 15 phrases do describe Donald Trump. I mean… Everything is better than a standard way of learning that doesn`t express your inner self.

Check the pronunciation of ALL the words. ALL the time. Your intuition is a great tool. However, it doesn`t cure all the irregular cases. Just look at English words “daughter” and “laughter”, “head” and “heat”, “though” and “thought”. They look almost similar but they sound in ABSOLUTELY different ways. There`s a possibility that your target language also has a lot of such cases. Just spend few seconds on looking at the transcriptions. It doesn`t hurt, I promise.

[regging]

a jstor article is like a beautiful wild horse and a control+f search is like using a sugar cube and a calming voice to tame it

[polylingual]

Thinking about making goals out of some of these for this year!

[girlofdogs]

mary oliver was right: i am here!!! i am alive on this fresh earth!!! i am standing in my kitchen waiting for my tea to boil and that alone is proof of my existence!!!!

[linguisten]

“The most important relationship between language and culture that gets to the heart of what is lost when you lose a language is that most of the culture is in the language and is expressed in the language. Take it away from the culture, and you take away its greetings, its curses, its praises, its laws, its literature, its songs, its riddles, its proverbs, its cures, its wisdom, its prayers. The culture could not be expressed and handed on in any other way. What would be left?”

— What Do You Lose When You Lose Your Language? (via languagessi)

[worm]

why did we stop building castles. i feel like humanity might live to regret that

[langsworldmemes01]

[ainaraoftime-deactivated2025020]

one of my favourite linguistic phenomena/in-jokes is spanish potato chips being “ham-flavored, probably”

[ainaraoftime-deactivated2025020]

y’see because spain and portugal are so close, labels in stuff like food, shampoo, etc often come in portuguese as well as spanish

this brand of chips, Lay’s, displays the flavor in spanish and portuguese, resulting in ham-flavored chips looking like this:

with “jamón” being spanish and “presunto” being portuguese

however, “presunto” is also a spanish adjective, meaning “presumed” (or suspected)

so you have this in-joke going where spanish chips taste like ham, presumably

[fluffmugger]

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

You’ve heard of “I can’t believe it’s not butter!” now get ready for “It’s questionable whether or not this is ham”

[marlynnofmany]

This is (A) hilarious, and (B) perfect for adapting to a science fiction setting. 

Sneaking onboard an alien ship?  Send in Stabby the Roomba first.

[goodplan-ipromise]

[eliottdemauries]

me: *wants nothing more than to befriend my mutuals*

also me: shy

[transliterations]

“Language transcends us and yet we speak.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (via philosophybits)

[crazyaboutlanguages]

[imjustmeat]

Oh, to be young, unleashed in a Barnes & Nobles with a fifty dollar gift card, buying whichever books had a dragon drawn on the cover.

[austinkleon]

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse & Remix

[medievalpoc]

Link to Article

Link to British Library Flickr

Link to Album View (shown above)

Selected Links by Subject:

musical instruments | fashion & costumes | ships | dancing |decorative papers | curator selection | highlights | portraits | space and science fiction | children’s book illustrations | technology | flora |advertisements | decorative illustrations | castles | heraldry | diagrams| comic art | illustrated letters & typography | wildlife

[austinkleon]

From Open Culture:

We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.

(via maudnewton​)

[lierdumoa]

Okay but to clarify, the British Library did not put 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain. The British Library digitized 1,000,000 public domain images.

These images were already public domain. Copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author. Once copyright expires, the creative work automatically becomes public domain, free to remix and reuse.

The British Library did not grant us the right to use these images. It made images we already had the right to use more easily accessible.