One of my recent favourite linguistic phenomena are words for geological aspects that are only used about nature in the region where the language is spoken.
Like in Swedish “fjäll” refers to mountains above the tree line, exclusively in the Nordic countries. It’s not that that’s the name of our mountain range, it’s just what we call mountains here. I can’t say that I’m going to the Italian “fjällen” because they do not exist. I’d have to say “berg” which is a more general word for mountain (which can also be used for Nordic mountains of course, although “fjällen” is way more common and also gives a very different picture in my opinion). Another example would be “älv” (big river) and, interestingly according to the dictionary of the Swedish Academy, a similar but not exactly equivalent feature, “flod”, has the usage note “mainly describing a feature abroad”. Personally I had never thought of this and to me there could be a “flod” in Sweden but not an “älv” abroad.
What fascinates me about this is that these are in no way features unique to here. Like how you’d think a “fjord” has a specific name because it’s so common in Norway and so uncommon elsewhere. Both “fjäll” and “älvar” are extremely common everywhere so why are they only used for our “fjäll” and “älvar”?
Anyway if anyone knows if this phenomenon has a name, if it has been studied and, most importantly, if you can think of any of these in your own language I’d love to hear about it!
Here’s a vocab list (based on this post) you can fill in with your own target language(s). There’s also an empty vocab list at the end in case you find additional words i missed in my lists. I’ll upload more lists with the rest of the vocab words from the post above soon too!
-> here’s a link to a Google Drive folder with the pdf file if you prefer that format
Feel free to post & share your filled-in lists for other language learners!
Hello everyone! As you may know I've created this challenge to help revive the langblr community. It's a three week challenge designed to get you back into learning languages and (hopefully) give you ideas on how to study and share your knowledge of them. It is completely optional to do, but try to reblog other people's posts if you aren't participating.
The challenge is designed to be done daily, however if you miss a day, you can go back and do it later or continue from where you left off. I do encourage you to do your best to keep up with the challenge though. Tag your posts with #langblr reactivation challenge so that others can find your posts.
If you have any questions, please send me an ask or a message and I'll do my best to answer it.
I'll put the prompts under a read more so this post isn't ridiculously long. Good luck to everyone participating! Remember the best way to promote the langblr revival is by reblogging other people's work.
Week 1
Day 1: Create an introduction post about yourself. What's your name? What languages are you studying? What languages do you hope to study? What do you hope you'll get out of this challenge? Add whatever else you’d like to your introduction post!
Day 2: Write a list of goals you have for your target languages. Make both long term and short term goals. An overall goal could be to have the ability to talk with native speakers with ease and a smaller goal would be to finally learn that difficult grammar point that's been plaguing you for ages. How will you achieve them?
Day 3: Create a list or a Mindmap of vocabulary topics. Start with a broad topic and narrow down to more specific topics. An example could be bedroom - furniture - closet - clothes or travelling - languages - study words - school supplies. Keep a hold of this because you'll use it later to create vocab to study. Some broad topics to start with: house, school, work, travelling, friends and family, nature, city. Feel free to use these or think of your own. Share your mindmap so others can get some ideas if they need it. Here are some mind map creation tools (x) (x) (x).
Day 4: Create a vocab list for one of the topics you created yesterday, if you want to make more, feel free to make as many as you like! Share your list and reblog other people's lists. And most importantly, make sure you study these words!
Day 5: Find a video in your target language and watch it as many times as you need to in order to understand it. Make a post about the video. What was it about? Did you like the video? Was it difficult to understand? Make sure you link the video. Try to write your answers in your target language, but if you can’t that’s okay!
Day 6: Look up 3 idioms in your target language and explain what they mean and how you use them in a sentence (with an example!).
Day 7: Send asks to other langblrs (bonus points if it's in a shared target language!) asking them about whatever (for example, ask how their day was, ask questions about their target languages, or share some of your thoughts with them). If you receive one, answer it! You can ask more than one person and it can be on or off anon.
Week 2
Day 1: Over the next week, create a playlist/playlists of songs in your target language(s), they can either have a specific mood or genre or they can be a collection of songs you've discovered. When you feel like you're done with your playlist, share it so others can find some new songs. If you already have a playlist, you can add songs to it and update it.
Day 2: Write an explanation on a grammar rule in your target language (such as verb tenses, exceptions, word order, etc). Include sentences to show how and when it is used.
Day 3: Either make a vocab list or find a vocab list you like and make sentences using those words. You can make them as long or as short as you like. This is a good way to contextualise vocab words and learn them in context. Share your sentences and highlight the vocab word.
Day 4: Record yourself reading an article, short story, or passage (basically anything written in your target language). Listen to it and see if you can point out any areas you can improve with your speaking and any areas that you're doing well. You can post your recording if you wish.
Day 5: Post at least 2 songs that you like in your target language. Make sure you add a link to them so people can go listen to them.
Day 6: Share a study tip you have. This can range from how you organize your notes to playlists that help you study to apps you use to review. Just something that you find makes studying easier (and more fun).
Day 7: Share with everyone some langblrs you enjoy seeing on your dash, try to put at least 5 people (and make sure you @ them!).
Week 3
Day 1: Remember that playlist you made/are making? Take a song you really like and make a vocab list of words you don't understand, learned from the song, or recognize but don't quite remember. Post so others can see and link the song. If you have extra time and/or want a bit more of a challenge, translate the song as well, either into English or another language.
Day 2: Write about a festival or holiday that is celebrated in a country that speaks your target language. This can be either something you’ve celebrated yourself, have wanted to participate in, or have never heard of before. You can write this in any language you’d like.
Day 3: Make another vocab list from the list you made at the beginning of the challenge. If you are learning two or more languages, make the vocab list in 3 languages (meaning for example: French, German, and English or Japanese, Arabic, and Ukrainian).
Day 4: Find a recipe written in your target language and translate it into your native language (or another language of your choice) or find a recipe in your native language and translate it into your target language. Bonus points if you actually make it (share pictures if you do)!
Day 5: Create a collection of resources you use to study/learn your target language. Add links to them if possible so others can also use them.
Day 6: Create a post explaining a grammar rule that you had/are having difficulties learning. If you’re currently having difficulties, do your best to explain and ask others to help you understand it better. Include example sentences in your explanation.
Day 7: How do you feel at the end of this challenge? Did you meet any goals while doing this? Do you feel more confident in your language abilities? Where do you think you'll go from here? Answer these questions either in your native language or your target language.
Hopefully you guys enjoy/enjoyed this challenge. After you've completed the challenge, I encourage you to continue your studies in your target languages and support others in theirs.
something that’s interesting to me about japanese is that, while strictly speaking it lacks conjugation for person, it can end up conveying person indirectly though fairly explicitly through many of the grammatical structures related to politeness or quasi-politeness
take for example the verb hoshii*, which means “want to.” in japanese it’s incorrect to make assertions about someone else’s state of mind (it’s unclear to me whether it’s grammatically incorrect or just very rude), so in declarative sentences hoshii tends to mean “I want”
to express what someone else wants, you can use the construction “hoshigaru,” which means something more like “seems to want”
so because of a rule which seems to be basically related to politeness, we end up with this pair of verbs which comes very close to expressing grammatical person
*yeah technically it’s an adjective they’re the same thing nbd
There’s a fun book, Ellipsis and Reference Tracking in Japanese by Shigeko Nariyama. It starts out with a seemingly quite narrow question: in Japanese you can omit a subject or object of a word if it is clear from context, and if you compare sentences in English versus Japanese, typically arguments that would be pronouns in English are omitted from the Japanese, so without the pronouns, how do speakers know e.g. if a given sentence means “I want” or “you want”. But once she starts listing the features used for this kind of disambiguation, the book basically turns into a description of all of Japanese grammar.
The “epistemic morphemes” section is about the thing you noted above, but there are also a bunch other things that are marked in Japanese but not in English, like the “direction” of a verb (する versus してくれる), or politeness in the sense of keigo.
I thought reading this was kindof mind-expanding, because it also gives some perspective on why European languages are constructed the way they are. Not only person, but also gender: why do we distinguish he and she? Presumably because we need some way to know who the arguments refer to in a sentence like “He gave the book to her”, and the sex of the participants in a situation is basically random with 50-50 probability, so if you mandatorily mark gender that has a good chance of disambiguating them. Japanese keigo marks the superior-inferior status of the participants, which is similarly random. You can see that there’s a kind of equilibrium, where each language has some set of features that are mandatory to mark, but then speakers can take advantage of that to leave other information implicit and disambiguated from context.
Japanese listening practice for beginners - Youtube videos
“キッズボンボン for Children” channel
All of the videos on this list have Japanese subtitles. It is mostly in ひらがな and the words are separated. This and the fact that these videos are aimed for children, makes them great for beginners.
PEACH BOY - MOMOTARO (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
KINTARO (Japanese) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
USHIWAKAMARU (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
SHINING PRINCESS (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
THE TONGUELESS SPARROW (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
THE DANCING KETTLE (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
THE STORY OF THE MONKEY AND THE CRAB (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
CLACK CLACK MOUNTAIN (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
OLD MAN WITH THE LUMP (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
OLD MAN FLOWER (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
THE YOUNG MONK IKKYU (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
THE GRATEFUL CRANE (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
THE SNOW WOMAN (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
THE ROLLING RICE BALL (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy
INCH BOY (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
THE CHILD GODS (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
THE STORY OF THE ZODIAC (JAPANESE) Japanese classical stories | fairy tale
All of these videos have an English version on this channel. Search for them or click on this playlist. You can use both versions to study what’s being said.
SNOW WHITE (JAPANESE) fairytale | Folktales | bedtime stories
THE LITTLE MATCH SELLER | Folktales | bedtime stories
HE MERMAID PRINCESS | Folktales | bedtime stories
LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD | Folktales | bedtime stories
THE THREE LITTLE PIGS (JAPANESE) | Folktales | bedtime stories
THE ADVENTURE OF TOM SAWYER (JAPANESE) | Folktales | bedtime
THE WIZARD OF OZ (JAPANESE) | Folktales | bedtime stories
THE UGLY DUCKLING (JAPANESE) | Folktales | bedtime stories
ALICE IN WONDERLAND (JAPANESE) | Folktales | bedtime stories
All of these videos have an English version on this channel. Search for them or click on this playlist. You can use both versions to study what’s being said.
Duolingo is slowly rolling out a new Japanese course (see this tweet for a comparison–the one on the left with the kana skills is the old course, and the one on the right without kana skills is the new one). So far this and one reddit post are all I’ve seen for the new course, but I’m really curious about the new course, so if anyone has the new one I would love to see screenshots or a written list for the skills of the tree! I wanna know how different it is. Help a bird out!
In case anyone comes here also looking for info on the new Japanese course, someone in the comment section of this thread offers a look. Overall, seems to be:
More skills (130->175ish), but fewer lessons within them
Way more grammar notes
A more gradual introduction to kanji (none in the first checkpoint, barely in the second)
General tree restructuring
I hope they haven’t nerfed kanji content too much, but overall I’m excited to see where it goes!
Duolingo is slowly rolling out a new Japanese course (see this tweet for a comparison--the one on the left with the kana skills is the old course, and the one on the right without kana skills is the new one). So far this and one reddit post are all I’ve seen for the new course, but I’m really curious about the new course, so if anyone has the new one I would love to see screenshots or a written list for the skills of the tree! I wanna know how different it is. Help a bird out!
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.
The post/challenge for those who want to find a language partner.
We have a lot of ways to say “like” in swedish, and it’s a really bad habit that i do not endorse… However, using these will make you sound more like a native. To show them in the most natural context as possible, I’ve resorted to screenshots of messages between my partner and I! (..and a random tweet for the last one)
1. TYP
This is the most common one. Can also mean “type” (as in a type of coffee, tea etc.) or “guy/person” (han är en rolig typ - he is a funny guy, hon är en konstig typ - she is a weird person). Is also used as “kinda”.
Translation: “I wrote like German car or something”
Translation: “And tiredness and so on but i kinda don’t feel it”
2. LIKSOM/LIXOM/LXM
Liksom is the one that is the most similar to the english “like”. Liksom is made up of two morphemes, “lik” and “som” – “lik” means “similar” (in another context it would mean corpse) and “som” means “as” or “like”. So the word liksom literally means “as well as, similar to”. But it is only used like that in formal texts. (ex. Bananer, liksom blåbar, är bär – Bananas, as well as blueberries, are berries). It can also be spelled “lixom” or “lxm” when using it as “like”.
Translation: “And like you can empathize without feeling bad”
3. ASSÅ/ALLTSÅ
Asså comes from alltså, but it gained another meaning and pronunciation and now they’re pronounced differently depending on which meaning you want. Alltså means “thus” and you can use alltså to mean asså, but you can’t really use asså to mean alltså. Some people shorten asså even further to “aso”. It is a very special word and is best understood through context, but can indeed be used as like.
Translation: “like why should i pay 50 crowns a day to go to school” (this was right when i had lost my free public transport card that i get from school)
Translation: “When do you think we should have “blockus”party? The day before i have my birthday or on monday?” “That is, the monday my birthday is on.” (Here you can see that “asså” is also used to clarify what you meant from a previous message)
I can’t find a message where either of use have used alltså in the formal sense, so heres a sentence from an essay I wrote some time ago:
“Han lever alltså i en identitetsanarki” - He thus lives in an anarchy of identity
4. BA/BARA
Means like in the sense of “he was like…”. It is casually pronounced as ba, but if often also pronounced as bara which is the original form. “Bara” means “just” or “only”. So when we say “han ba(ra)…” it means “he just…”
“mom and I are watching @/filipdikmen96 on yt and she was like “Sine that Filip is handsome after all(,) does he have a girlfriend?””
And that’s it, I think! If you’re Swedish and feel like I’ve forgotten something, feel free to reblog and add your own! Hope this helps (:
PS. If you need more context, twitter will save you! just put these in a twitter search and observe. For “ba(ra)” and “typ” I would suggest also putting some other random swedish word too, like “är”, so you immediately get Swedish tweets.
Hi! I’m interested to know which books from your country are common to read in school where you’re from. Do you have books that most people will have read after finishing school? What are the classics everyone just knows about? (So like even if you haven’t read it you have a pretty good idea what it’s about) Please reblog/comment/send an ask and tell me where you’re from and what books are in your country’s education canon. I’m mostly interested in people writing in your native language/from your country but if you want to add some foreign books that’s cool too!
anyone have any discords where people practice swedish? multi-lang discords are acceptable so long as the swedish channel is actually like, active, haha.
