ALTMy latest cartoon for @GuardianBooks.
This is what will happen when I die if I am good.
feminism 🤝 othering 🤝 philosophical bullshit
running out of ideas in a last minute english lit essay
This has the same energy as a writer desperately trying to make their insanely cool but devastatingly off the wall plot point work with the rest of the story
this is a friendly reminder that language proficiency levels aren't 100% accurate and appliable to everyone. you can be able to talk about evolution and use the subjunctive mood but have no idea how to describe your daily activities. you can not know many synonims but be adept at explaining stuff. you can be able to name every single thing at the supermarket but unable to form a sentence with reported speech. you can not remember jobs names but know slang and dialects. you can read the classics but barely speak or write.
language learning is multifaceted and it's completely normal to develop certain skills before others. sometimes it's because some are easier for a particular person. sometimes it's because some are more useful in one's context. the point is, whatever set of skills you have, it's great. keep going.
I can pretty much read in Spanish at an intermediate level and listen to a lot of music so a lot of the vocab I use or understand is literary or more flowery. Meanwhile I can’t speak a word of it and have the most basic knowledge gaps.
Look, I knew five languages by age 19 and now I am learning like 3 more. I work as a language instructor and a consultant. If I can give language learners only one advice, this is it.
STOP LEARNING WORDS ON THEIR OWN.
You're doing yourself a disservice by learning lists of "30 words you must know!" "100 most common words!" like it literally means nothing if you cannot use those words in an appropriate context with proper grammar. So what you actually need to do is learn those words via example sentences.
!! even when I don’t know a word in English, I usually look up examples so I know how to use it (especially with technical words that I learn/use at uni)
dropbox containing linguistics textbooks
contains 34 textbooks including etymology, language acquisition, morphology, phonetics/phonology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, & translation studies
dropbox containing language textbooks
contains 86 language textbooks including ASL, Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew (Modern & Ancient), Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh
dropbox containing books about language learning
includes fluent forever by gabriel wyner, how to learn any language by barry farber, polyglot by kató lomb
if there’s a problem with any of the textbooks or if you want to request materials for a specific language feel free to message me!
Took me until about halfway through college before I realized “study” means “play with the material in a variety of ways until you understand it” and not just “read the assigned chapters and do the homework” and I think that probably should have been discussed at some point prior to that.
I’ve never really revised in the traditional sense (only when doing homework) and thought it was so weird that I did my best work when I just explained/taught the material to someone else/discussed it/made analogies that worked for my brain
It’s been a while — I honestly don’t remember if I’ve posted on here before lol but I’ve been lurking on langblr/writeblr/studyblr for a couple of years and now I’m here !!
× they/he
× native 🇬🇧 (🏴)
× a2 🇪🇸 learning 🇧🇻
× obnoxious english student who likes writing essays for some reason
× i like both fiction and nonfiction. i also like the vibe of poetry but i have yet to understand one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
× will post stuff directly and indirectly related to languages/studying/writing and stuff that has nothing to do with it <2
Queer Multilingualism Linguistics Survey
Hi! My name is Gabe, and I am an undergraduate Linguistics student. You may have seen me put out a linguistics survey previously; this was for a graduate course, and I am still organizing that data and working on that paper. However, I have another research paper in a different linguistics course on Globalization of queer identities, and how language may affect the way queer identities are viewed and talked about. I am running another survey to collect data for this paper as well.
If you are queer and bilingual/multilingual, please consider taking this survey! How long it will take depends on the depth of your answers, but I would say 15-20 minutes is maybe a good estimate.
The survey can be found here, and I ask that you please reblog so it can reach more people! The survey will close on Friday, April 14th, at some point, so that I can begin organizing my data.
Thank you!