Do other languages do this thing when a word will have two definitions which are complete opposites, or is that a curse reserved for us alone.

Cozy Mandarin Vocab List!

inspired by @malteseboy and this post

keep in mind that most of those nouns can be used as verbs too and that i put different (cuter and more cuddly) words for verbs  🌺☕️📚

i get a lot of asks about the etymology and evolution of the word ‘dyke’! here is a history essay by JR Roberts, published in sinister wisdom no. 9, 1979, that posits a few theories and provides some explanations. note that this does contain some offensive historical language and slurs. it is about six pages long, so i’m going to place it under the cut!

Keep reading

neato: a 13th-century number notation system created by european monks

Enjoy Chinese president Xi Jinping’s official cartoon series, as a continuing effort to promote a softer image of the country of big boss. Make sure you laugh!

yeah man i’m just going through some stuff right now you know

Yeah sex is cool and all but have you ever started learning a language and then heard that language from strangers/tv/etc and understood bits and pieces of it, reminding you of how much progress you've made in the language??

Compliments 

Me anxious and confused as why someone’s being nice to me

Stolen from Russian Memes United

2+ Months of Language Learning Prompts!

Sometimes it can be tricky to know what to learn if you are teaching yourself a language. Here are some ideas for what you can focus on learning each day for the first two months of learning a new language! I formatted it so there is the general topic for the day and then in parentheses are some ideas to get you started but you can definitely learn a lot more than what I’ve written down! These are just to help generate some ideas!

This definitely would move pretty quickly if you covered all this material in 2 months so you could definitely spend more time on each topic if you need! This would require quite a bit of time each day in order to learn it all. This could totally work for a 4 or 6-month challenge where you spend 2 or 3 days on each of the topics I listed if you don’t have enough time to cover each topic in just one day!

Some language learning prompts for those of us with way too much free time right now

On the topic of English people being shitheads towards Welsh people - This fucking dude today on AITA

Yeah pretty sure we're all hoping for a divorce on this one lol

how did this fucker say it's "not as bad as it sounds" and then somehow end up being even worse than it sounds by the fourth sentence

Further updates, I couldn't resist looking this one up.

Character development.

WIIYAW - HER BODY (IN ANISHINAABEMOWIN)

Note: Most body part words in Anishinaabemowin are “inalienable.” This means you have to say HER head, MY head, YOUR head. You can’t simply say “a head” without specifying who it belongs to. This is what the o- or od- on most of the words refers to. 

Thanks but Finnish is literally my native language you dumb owl

*look at train station menu*

'What's kääryleet?' I ask

'It's hard to explain.'

*Google it*

Still no idea.

Maps of the world from a 1988 Soviet Union Children’s book called мир и человек). You can get the full book available for free here

I have thoughts about the whole feminist anti-interrupting thing. Like I agree, men do talk over people and it is disrespectful, but I also think there are cultures, specifically Jews, where talking over each other is actually a sign of being engaged in the conversation. It’s something I really struggle with in the south, because up in New York, even non-Jews participated in this cooperative conversation style, but down here, whenever I do it by accident, the whole convo stops and it gets called out and it’s a whole thing. Idk idk I feel like there’s different types of interruptive like there’s constructive interrupting where you add on to whatever is being said - helpful interrupting, and then there’s like interrupting where you just start saying something unrelated because you were done listening. I have ADHD so I’ve def done the latter too by accident, but I’m talking about being more accepting of the former.

I think a lot of the social mores leftists enforce around communication tend to be very white. Like Jews are not the only group of people that have distinct communication styles. Like the enforcement of turn-based communication, not raising your voice (not just in anger but also in humor or excitement), etc. it’s always interesting that the most pushback I get about how I communicate come from white people (mostly women actually, white men just give me patronizing looks because they don’t feel like they can call me out in same way). Like I’ve been teaching these workshops, and a few of them have been primarily black people, and I’ve noticed black people will also engage in cooperative interrupting (and I love it!). This isn’t a developed thought and I welcome feedback. Idk I think there should be space in leftist organizing for more diverse communication styles.

Here’s a source:

As a linguist: overlapping talk is not the same thing as an interruption!

An interruption is specifically intended to stop another person from speaking so you can take over. Other reasons that talk might overlap:

The norms around these kinds of overlaps vary -- by context (we all use more audible backchannel on the phone; an interview is not a sermon is not a casual chat), by culture, and yes, by gender, which is why it’s a feminist issue. But gender doesn’t exist in a vaccuum! Some reasons overlaps might be mis-interpreted as interruptions when they’re not intended to be:

Norms around conversation tend to be super white/Western/male/NT; even among linguists, the way we talk about analyzing talk usually presupposes discrete turns, with one person who “has the floor” and everyone else listening. It even gets coded into our technology -- I thing the account’s gone private, but someone recently tweeted, “For the sake of my wife’s family, Zoom needs to incorporate an ‘ashkenazi jewish’ checkbox” because the platform is programmed to try to identify a “main speaker” and auto-mute everyone else. Most of the progress on this front in linguistics has been pushed by Black women and Jewish women, or else we’d probably still be acting like Robert’s Rules represent the natural expression of human instincts.

And it’s very White Feminism to recognize how conversations styles have disparate impacts across gender lines without also recognizing other axes along which conversation styles vary, once that empower us as well as oppress us. Just because I feel interrupted doesn’t mean I am interrupted, and it definitely doesn’t mean I have the right to scream “EVERYBODY SHUT UP!!” until I’m the only one talking.

I don’t ... have a great way to end this? Just that it’s good to recognize competing needs in communication, and have some humility and intentionality about whose needs gets prioritized and how.

Here is a free Sherlock Holmes - The Speckled Band by Arthur Conan Doyle (Пестрая Лента - Артур конан Дойль), Russian graded reading book aimed at elementary level. You can find the PDF [here]. It’s pretty short but it comes with vocabulary lists, and questions on the text to assess your comprehension. 

There’s also a free audio playlist reading this out, so it’s a great way to get some listening practice in also. You can find the Youtube playlist [here].