Best language learning tips & masterlists from other bloggers I’ve come across

(these posts are not my own!)

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Masterposts:

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Feel free to reblog and add your own lists / masterlists!

Random Fact #6,370

Native English speakers have trouble remembering the difference between there, they’re, and their.

Native Portuguese speakers have a similar struggle of their own: porque, por que, por quê, and porquê.

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Porque – Because

Por que – ‘Why’ when used in the start of a question (Why weren’t you at school?)

Por quê – ‘Why’ when used at the end of a sentence (e.g. Atrasaram por quê? [Why are you late?])

Porquê – Used as a noun and appears accompanied by a determiner (an article, for example). (e.g. “Queria saber o porquê de sua tristeza para poder ajudá-lo” => "I wanted to know the reason for his sadness so I could help him”)

Actually, that's more the Brazilian standard sorta similar the Spanish orthography practice. In European Portuguese, it's just like this: https://ciberduvidas.iscte-iul.pt/consultorio/perguntas/porque-por-que-e-porque/243#

I don't know how to break this to you, but Brazilians are also native Portuguese speakers.

I'm so so tired of Portuguese people "correcting" Brazilian Portuguese speakers and acting as if it's somehow lesser than European Portuguese.

I'm sorry but do you expect me to not tell them when they're a page dedicated to European Portuguese that the rules are different in the two main varieties. When did I say they're less valid? When did I say they're less important? In fact I literally said that's the Brazilian "standard" as in a different standard of the same language. Portuguese is a pluricentric language, like English, Spanish and French. Just because I said that's more the X standard and Y rules are this, I didn't call one better than the other. I just pointed out the necessary distinction in rules so that the learner of each variety knows rules of both

Random Fact #6,370

Native English speakers have trouble remembering the difference between there, they’re, and their.

Native Portuguese speakers have a similar struggle of their own: porque, por que, por quê, and porquê.

=-=-=

Porque – Because

Por que – ‘Why’ when used in the start of a question (Why weren’t you at school?)

Por quê – ‘Why’ when used at the end of a sentence (e.g. Atrasaram por quê? [Why are you late?])

Porquê – Used as a noun and appears accompanied by a determiner (an article, for example). (e.g. “Queria saber o porquê de sua tristeza para poder ajudá-lo” => "I wanted to know the reason for his sadness so I could help him”)

Actually, that's more the Brazilian standard sorta similar the Spanish orthography practice. In European Portuguese, it's just like this: https://ciberduvidas.iscte-iul.pt/consultorio/perguntas/porque-por-que-e-porque/243#

I just want to disappear into the tardis with a sexy time lord who has crippling anxiety

You're me

The existence of verbs, adverbs, and adjectives implies the existence of jectives. Give us the forbidden parts of speech.

No. Ad- is a preposition based prefix meaning to/at. Jact- is to throw. Adject- is add. Adjective is that which is adds, aka attributes.

here’s a playlist of iconic czech songs no-one asked for, but i made anyway. enjoy my culture!

Reblog if you think we should get a seven season Marauders Netflix show starting with the kids at 11 and going all the way to 17, covering every year at Hogwarts (also featuring Lucius, Narcissa, Bellatrix, Molly, Arthur, Alice, Frank, etc)

I would agree but I don't trust Rowling anymore. In fact, I haven't done that since Cursed Child

the most unrealistic thing about harry potter

is that no teacher ever called him James by accident, or that Ron never was called “Bill-, eh Charl-, no Per-, argh!”

As a younger sister who knows this struggle all too well: THIS IS REAL. Pretty sure 70% of my past teachers still think I’m called what my sister is called in fact.

Imagine Fred being called Percy by McGonagall accidentally and then he gets so offended that he refers to her by “Professor [insert any other name but McGonagall” for the rest of the year, costing Gryffindor a considerable amount of points one at a time.

From then on, she vows to just call them all Mr Weasley.

Until Ginny comes along and she calls her Mr Weasley by accident and Ginny “accidentally’ calls her Sir and it starts again.

It's nice that Mrs Weasley confuses Fred and George but she should do it with other children too. She should call Ginny by her younger sister's name maybe.

Frankenstein enters into a body building competition and finds he has seriously misunderstood the objective

FOR THE LAST TIME, FRANKENSTEIN WAS THE NAME OF THE DOCTOR

…a doctor who built a body.

For what is possibly the first time in the history of pop culture somebody actually really specifically does mean the doctor… and someone tries to correct them.

Also, usage defines meaning. Frankenstein now can mean the monster

Tipping shouldn't exist. Make salaries fair

When you become famous you’re called a legend because your leg ends

What

Your leg. It ends.

I’m not a linguist but I think that’s wrong

Are you saying your leg doesn’t end?

I mean. at some point it does. yes. 

then what’s the problem

Because leg isn't Latin for leg, nor is end Latin for end. The word legend comes from Latin

It baffles and infuriates me that Hogwarts students don’t take Latin or Greek. Accio? Literally “I summon.” Lumos? Fucking “light.” Expelliarmus? Expel weapon!! Ooooh I wonder what Levicorpus does– you Dumb Ass Bastard. You ILLITERATE. It’s called Levicorpus, it lifts someone’s body, it LEVIES your goddamn CORPUS-

Hermione ghost wrote this

Counterpoint: Hogwarts actively discourages students from taking Latin or Greek because if they knew either one every single magic twelve year old would be trying to mash up twenty words and make their own Ultimate Spell instead of using the Good Standardized Spells Known Not To Explode Magic Schools 

I have a feeling that last point is aimed at the ravenclaws…

Snape still went around and learnt it. Sneaky bastard

2.1.9 - Uvular plosives [q, ɢ] (and their variations)

Present near-universally in: Eskimo-Aleut, Mayan, Quechua, Aymara, Toba, Mocovi, Salishan, Tsimshianic, many Na-Dene languages, Afro-Asiatic languages (some dialects of modern Arabic, Somali), some Khoisan languages, many Turkic languages, near-universal in all Caucasian families, Mongolic, Tungusic, Yukaghir and Hmong-Mien. Adopted as a sound by influence of neighbouring languages by: wolof, kurdish, ossetian, persian, pashto, urdu, balochi, sindhi. Also present in some formosan aboriginal languages and it was a phoneme of proto-austronesian.

Technically Urdu as spoken in India has it as opposed to Urdu spoken in Pakistan.

3.1 - Vowel Harmony

Very characteristic of Turkic, mongolic, uralic, korean, tungusic and nilo-saharan. Also present in telegu, several niger-congo languages (swahili, lingala, sesotho, tswana, igbo) and some californian language families.

Bengali and some Portuguese dialects have some type of vowel harmony

5.1.4 - Clusivity

Clusivity refers to the marking or existence of different pronouns for the 1st person non-singular forms that inlcude or exclude the speaker(s) with whom one is talking to. Clusivity is not exclusively associated to a particular family of languages although it’s generally absent from european languages. It is common the Austronesian languages.

Southern Hindi has Clusivity. So does Punjabi even though it's not standard.

Alienable vs. inalienable possession

Languages that make morphologically or lexically a two way distinction between nouns that are inherently possessed (inalienable possession - including body parts, kinship terms, etc.) and nouns that are “freely” possessed like any object (pen, table, house…). It’s present in many languages, but it’s not universal in any single language family. For example there may be different case suffixes according to the possession class, or different prepositions (like Maori, Tahitian, Rapa Nui, Hawaiian, etc) equivalent to English “of”, or a different possessive suffixes. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inalienable_possession

IA languages do that with the have construction being different

Retroflex sibilants and apico-alveolar sibilants (both either fricatives and affricates)

These similar sounds occur in: Retroflex sibilants occur in Slavic languages (Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Mandarin, Indo-Arian and Dravidian languages, Pashto, South Vietnamese, Javanese and Mapundungun. Apicals occur in north Iberian dialects, Greece, Finland, Icelandic, Shona. Malagasy and Fijian have retroflex affricates, but they’re non-sibilants. 

Hindustani and most other modern IA languages don't have retroflex sibilants. Sanskrit had it. Hindi doesn't actively distinguish between them and they're usually palato-alveolar

LANGUAGES WRITTEN IN MORE THAN ONE WRITING SYSTEM

Ojibwe & Cree: Canadian aboriginal syllabics and latin alphabet Hausa, Kanuri, Tajik, Malay, Central and Southern Kurdish, Brahui: arabic and latin scripts Serbian/Bosnian, Karelian, Skolt Sami, Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbekh: both cyrillic and latin alphabets Afar and Oromo: latin, geez or arabic Tulu: kannada, tulu or devnagri scripts Punjabi: gurmukhi or kurmanji (arabic) Santali: ol chiki alphabet or bengali or devnagri Lao (in Thailand): lao or thai scripts Zhuang: zhuang script or latin Tagalog (and others in the Phillipines): baybayin and latin Mongolian and Tungusic langs.: cyrillic (in Mongolia) or mongolian traditional script (in China; also different variations for Tungusic) Japanese: hiragana, katakana, kanji and romaji Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Buginese, Batak, Minangkabau, Renjang: latin alphabet + respective alphabet for each Indonesian language

Add Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu)

Videos to watch when you have lost motivation to learn languages

site that you can type in the definition of a word and get the word

site for when you can only remember part of a word/its definition 

site that gives you words that rhyme with a word

site that gives you synonyms and antonyms

THAT FIRST SITE IS EVERY WRITER’S DREAM DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I’VE TRIED WRITING SOMETHING AND THOUGHT GOD DAMN IS THERE A SPECIFIC WORD FOR WHAT I’M USING TWO SENTENCES TO DESCRIBE AND JUST GETTING A BUNCH OF SHIT GOOGLE RESULTS

-Sherry