#learn languages

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I am sorry it’s been like a long while since I’ve been on here. I was kinda going through a tough time emotionally and mentally and you know…ended up spending the majority of my free time in bed watching useless youtube videos. Thankfully I managed to pull myself out of it yesterday and released that NOT doing anything in my free time is only making me feel worse. So I guess I am writing this so that I feel like I have committed to trying harder. I really need to reintegrate languages into my day to day life. Now that I am working a full-time job it’s a bit harder but I’ll find a way. My biggest struggle right now is that I am mixing everything because I moved from Brasil basically straight to Paris so my brain wants to answer in Portuguese every time someone speaks French and on top of that I have 3 other interns on my team right now that speak Spanish and the office language is English. So the terrifying conclusion: all my romance languages are deteriorating and slowly turning into one jumbled mess. HELP!

I’ll update soon with a plan on how I plan to integrate my languages into my everyday life (mostly French, and Spanish and Portuguese).

If you have any tips on how to fit languages into a busy schedule or about Paris let me know! Thanks

z-aliada:

If expression ‘cognitive studies’ means anything to you, this could be your opportunity to participate in a real associative experiment, the results of which will be later used for creation of a scientific research. 

If not, this could be an opportunity to entertain yourself with a couple of weird questions :D 

Anyway, any contribution would be of great - no, enormous - help. So any activity (participation, reblogs, etc.) is very much appreciated. Thank you! 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScbWbeTVRj9jfE8SBeh2wp1oCbm8vFSXqT2LAzk7rs9qYgbcw/viewform?usp=sf_link

languagesandshootingstars:

Kansainvälinen naistenpäivä - International Women’s Day
Hyvää naistenpäivää! - Happy Women’s Day!
Maaliskuun kahdeksas - March 8th
Nainen- woman
Tyttö - girl; daughter
Tytär - daughter
Sisko- sister
Tyttöystävä - girlfriend
Vaimo- wife
Äiti- mother
Täti - aunt
Isoäiti - grandmother
Ystävä, kaveri - friend
Työkaveri - colleague 
Kukka - flower
Kukkakimppu- bouquet
Ruusu- rose
Mimosa - mimosa
Lahja - gift, present
Suklaa - chocolate
Oikeus - right
Koulutus - education
Työ - work
Äänestäminen - voting
Syrjintä- discrimination
Tasa-arvo - equality
Rauha - peace
Juhlia - to celebrate

finnishfun:

Boldog nőnapot! - Happy Women’s Day!

nemzetközi nőnap - International Women’s Day
nő -woman
asszony- married woman
feleség- wife
hölgy- lady
lány- girl; daughter
kislány- little girl
anya- mother
nagymama- grandmother
nagynéni- aunt
március- March
március nyolcadika - 8 March
egyenjogúság- equality, equal rights
egyenjogúsítás, emancipáció - emancipation
választójog, szavazati jog - right to vote
női jogok - women’s rights
virág- flower
(virág)csokor - bouquet
rózsa- rose
tulipán- tulips
hóvirág- snowdrop
jácint- hyacinth
csokoládé, csoki - chocolate
bonbon- box of chocolates
sütemény, süti - cake, cookies
ajándék - present, gift

languageoficeandfire:

image

                                                   (Prichard 2012:17)

So a few years back, I wrote my Master’s thesis while an Erasmus student in England and I thought I would share an abridged version with you. I wrote my thesis about the Northern Vowel Shift, under the title : The Old Scandinavian element and its impact in the actuation and development of the Northern Vowel Shift

  • But first of all, what is the Great Vowel Shift ?

It’s an event described as a chain-shift where the lower vowels, in a push-change movement, forced the higher vowels to raise and the highest ones to diphthongise, as such:

                                        [ɔː] → [oː] → [uː] → [aʊ]

                                        [ɛː] → [eː] → [iː] → [aɪ]

This partly explains the discrepancy between sounds and orthography in English. For instance, <ee> in “meet” now pronounced /iː/ used to be pronounced /eː/and <oo> in “goose” now pronounced /uː/used to be /oː/. This large-scale shake-up took place between the mid-14th and the 18th century.


  • Why is the Northern Vowel Shift important? 

Because, generally, when dealing with the Great Vowel Shift, it is often assumed that it affected the whole of England. However, the upward movement of vowels was not a unified motion as some British English varieties retain pronunciations that were left unmodified by the Shift and thus retain certain pronunciations similar to those of the period before the Shift intervened. The study of the phonological history of the English language, more often than not, tends to describe the evolution of the vowel set of English by the representation of its southern version.

It matters because this focus on the southern version is probably due to a form of social bias; the most prestigious variety in the United Kingdom in present days is RP (Received Pronunciation) / SBE (Southern British English).

The bulk of the literature published to this day on this matter does not really concern northern England. This fact is quite a shame for there are many differences between the Northern Vowel Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift that seem to indicate that the two phenomena are not likely to be connected and merely share a common vocalic shift.


  • How did the Great Vowel Shift/Southern Vowel Shift happen ?
image

In a nutshell, this Shift took place because of dialect contacts in the south of England. Smith (2007) mentions that early Tudor London offered economic opportunities to the people of the surrounding countryside, attracting large number of people with different dialectal traditions to the same place. 

Smith (2007:130) argues that the socially salient pronunciation of [e̝ː ; o̝ː] inherited from French was used by a category of the population; System I speakers, and System II speakers from outside London, would perceive these raised [e̝ː ; o̝ː] as /i:/ and /uː/. A third group of speakers from System III, would come to London during the 18th century from East Anglia and bring more chaos to the situation. Smith believes that the diphthongisation of the long close vowels comes from System III speakers.

image


  • How did the Northern Vowel Shift happen and how is different ?
image

In my thesis I concluded that the NVS and the SVS were triggered by very different factors; while the SVS took place because of dialect contacts, it would seem that the NVS happened because of instability in Northern English vowels after the introduction of long /ɛː/ in the phonology following Open Vowel Lengthening, which took place between the Old and Middle English period. Open Vowel Lengthening happened as follows: CVCV structures became CVːCafter final vowels like -ewere dropped. 

Examples: 

  • Old English “nama” => Middle English “nām”(“name”) 
  • Old English “faran” => Middle English “fār” (“go”)

However, as you can see, there is a blatant lack of symmetry in the upward movement of Northern English long vowels compared to that of the SVS. Basically, when looking at this graph, the NVS only concerns the front vowels, and not the back ones. I’ll add there is a level of detail missing in the graph depicting the rise of /ɔː/ to /oː/. However, contrary to what occurred in the SVS, the raising of Vowel 5, as Aitkens (2002) calls it, had no impact because once     /ɔː/ rose to /oː/, there was nothing to move upward and force /uː/ to change quality in turn. This is why in Northern English and Scottish dialect, you can hear speakers pronounce the word “house” as /hu:s/ with a long monophthong instead of the usual diphthong /aʊ/.

The reason for that is relatively simple: the absence of /oː/ in the pre-NVS phonology. This vowel had seemingly fronted to /ø:/ in earlier stages, leaving the mid-high back vowel slot open. Thus when /ɔː/ rose, there was nothing to push towards /uː/.

Since the NVS didn’t happen for the same reasons as the SVS, and it looks like the culprit is the fronting of /oː/ to /ø:/ : whence does this fronting come? My hypothesis was that it was under the influence of Nordic languages that /ø:/ arose or was maintained longer in the northern dialects of English than in the southern, which had lost its front rounded vowels by the 11th century (an example of what I called south-eastern distaste for front rounded vowels).

In a nutshell, what I argued is that northern varieties of English may have started losing their front rounded vowels, like down south, but contact with Old Norse speakers ranging as far back as the late 8th century in Northern England may have played a role in re-introducing a decaying phoneme in northern dialects of English. Furthermore, Scandinavians tended to remain in their own little closed communities, exchanging little with the outside world for a few decades after the end of the Danelaw. Their contact with neighbouring population must have played a role in the upholding of /ø:/. 


Basically,tl;dr, English underwent massive phonetic change because of the Great Vowel Shift. However, it would me more accurate to refer to it as the Southern Vowel since its effects did not affect northern regions of England, which had experienced its own shift; the Northern Vowel Shift. It arose because of phonetic evolution between Old and Middle English. A back vowel was absent from Old Northern English, rendering a SVS chain-shift-like motion impossible in northern dialects. This back vowel may have fronted because of Old Norse influence in the region, which lasted longer in the north of England than in the south.

If you want to read my dissertation, here is a link to it

finnishfun:

languageturtle:

I just stumbled upon a site called Cooljugator - it provides conjugated forms of verbs in over 40 languages. Here’s an example of what looks like:

I think it might be quite useful!

Oh, this is pretty good, does adjectives and nouns in Finnish as well as verbs!

image

In your Chinese studies you’ve probably learned: 红色、橙色、黄色、绿色、蓝色、紫色、灰色、白色、黑色、咖啡色、粉红色

But there are so many beautiful colors out there! Let’s learn some more. These are color terms I’ve come across outside Chinese class.

In general you can indicate a light shade with 浅 and a dark shade with 深. I have also seen 墨 for dark and 淡 for light, but when I Googled various color terms, there were more results for 浅 and 深 than 淡 and 墨.

I spent way too much time messing with HTML to color the text to match (except for the shades of white).

  • 褐色 hèsè - brown
  • 橘黄色 júhuángsè - orange
  • 奶油色 nǎiyóusè - cream
  • 金黄色 jīnhuángsè - gold color
  • 朱红色 zhūhóngsè - vermilion
  • 米色 mǐsè - beige
  • 棕色 zōngsè - brown
  • 青色 qīngsè - cyan / blue-green
  • 灰白 huībái - light gray / ash-colored
  • 蔚蓝 wèilán - azure / sky blue
  • 纯白 chúnbái - pure white
  • 雪白 xuěbái - snow white
  • 洁白 jiébái - spotlessly white / pure white
  • 漆黑 qīhēi - pitch-black
  • 铜色 tóngsè - copper
  • 乌黑 wūhēi - jet-black / dark
  • 靛色 diànsè - indigo (color)
  • 金色 jīnsè - golden / gold (color)
  • 银色 yínsè - silver (color)

Here are some single characters I’ve seen as well. Some of these are commonly used in names, like 彤 and 丹.

  • 彤 tóng - red
  • 丹 dān - red / pellet / powder / cinnabar
  • 缇 tí - orange-red silk / orange-red colored
  • 赤 chì - red / scarlet / bare / naked
  • 碧 bì - green jade / bluish green / blue / jade
  • 翠 cuì - bluish-green / green jade
  • 皓 hào - bright / luminous / white (esp. bright white teeth of youth or white hair of old age)
  • 颢 hào - bright / white
  • 玄 xuán - black / mysterious

彤, 丹, and 缇 are all described as a red-orange color. I’m not really sure of the difference, so I just made them all the same shade. I’m also unclear on exact distinction between 褐色 and 棕色. Image search results certainly suggest that they are used differently. Not sure how 咖啡色 fits in either.

I stumbled across this giant Wikipedia table with many beautiful colors that you can check out to learn more!

Rare and Common Chinese Syllables

Recently I was doing a little light research on the rarest syllables in Chinese.* I discovered that I didn’t know any characters for some of the rare syllables I found, so I started wondering what syllables are the most common and the rarest in my vocabulary. I decided to undertake the unnecessary task of chronicling how many characters I know for each possible Chinese syllable.**

There are apparently 400+ possible Chinese syllables, and I only have so much time, so I’m sure I missed a character that I know here or there. However, the top 5 most common syllables (which I’m showing below) had a substantial lead over #6, so I’m fairly confident they are my true top 5. And for all the syllables presented below, I checked MDBG to confirm I wasn’t forgetting any characters.

*Rare in this case meaning how many characters exist for a syllable, not how often a syllable is used in the language. The latter would be an interesting but very different question. Also, I’m not taking into account tones here, and I am only considering simplified characters.

**I don’t have a perfect definition for what characters I “know.” I basically tried to include only characters I’m fairly confident I can write. There are definitely more characters out there that I recognize, but I didn’t want to include any that I believe I can’t read correctly out of context. I was a little more liberal for the rare category though.

Most Common

1)ji:几、给、极、寄、及、记、级、集、机、季、计、基、鸡、即、吉、击、纪、积、继、济、急、技、际、挤、激、辑、既、绩、肌、疾、己、忌、迹、寂、棘、圾、讥(37)

2)yi:一、以、亿、亦、翼、已、遗、易、义、艺、仪、异、依、议、益、医、意、译、奕、伊、疫、忆、宜、衣、移、逸、毅、怡、谊、疑、姨、椅、裔、邑、抑(35)

3)yu:鱼、与、玉、愈、于、语、预、余、雨、宇、予、域、遇、育、豫、钰、寓、昱、煜、喻、欲、狱、羽、裕、郁、虞、娱、妤、瑜、誉、浴、吁、愚、俞(34)

4)shi:是、十、试、使、诗、拾、时、市、师、室、适、式、实、事、视、石、势、史、识、世、狮、食、士、释、始、施、氏、示、失、湿、饰、逝、嗜(33)

5)qi:七、骑、器、起、期、其、企、气、奇、齐、启、弃、琦、淇、柒、棋、旗、绮、妻、契、麒、琪、汽、岂、歧、祺、戚、欺、祈、乞、泣、凄(32)

I was not surprised to see yi, ji, qi, and shi make the top 5. That lion-poet-rock verse exists for a reason, and I feel like yi, ji, and qi are just everywhere. Yu was a bit of a surprise, but it makes sense since I like to research Chinese names, and a lot of the characters I listed for yu are used in names.

Rarest

For the sake of brevity, I’m only showing 25 syllables max for each category. There were simply too many for me to list them all.

First are syllables for which I only know 2 characters:

  1. ang:昂、肮
  2. cang:藏、苍
  3. ceng:曾、层
  4. gen:跟、根
  5. geng:更、庚
  6. gun:滚、棍
  7. hei:黑、嘿
  8. ken:肯、恳
  9. kuan:款、宽
  10. niang:娘、酿
  11. pen:喷、盆
  12. qun:群、裙
  13. re:热、惹
  14. reng:仍、扔
  15. rou:肉、柔
  16. ruan:阮、软
  17. ruo:若、弱
  18. sai:赛、塞
  19. shua:刷、耍
  20. sun:孙、损
  21. te:特、忑
  22. wai:外、歪
  23. zhua:抓、爪
  24. zhui:追、坠
  25. zun:尊、遵

Next are syllables for which I only know 1 character:

  1. ca:擦
  2. cen:岑
  3. dei:得
  4. diu:丢
  5. fo:佛
  6. fou:否
  7. gei:给
  8. luan:乱
  9. lve:略
  10. nen:嫩
  11. neng:能
  12. nin:您
  13. nuan:暖
  14. nv:女
  15. nve:虐
  16. qia:恰
  17. ri:日
  18. run:润
  19. sen:森
  20. shei:谁
  21. shuan:拴
  22. tuan:团
  23. weng:翁
  24. zen:怎
  25. zhuai:拽

What I find really interesting is how some of the syllables above are ones I encounter all the time while others are ones I only even heard relatively recently. For instance, I was a bit surprised that I only know one character each for luan and nv. I guess since 乱 and 女 are very commonplace, I feel like those syllables are everywhere, and it never occurred to me that I only know one luan and one nv character. But I remember furrowing my brow when I first learned 拴 and 虐. They feel unnatural to say honestly! I have to think about it for a sec.

Lastly, here are syllables for which I didn’t know any characters.

  1. chua
  2. chuai
  3. chuo
  4. cou
  5. cuan
  6. den
  7. dia
  8. ei
  9. kei
  10. keng
  11. nou
  12. pou
  13. seng
  14. zei
  15. zuan

Some of these definitely elicited a “what? This is a legit Chinese syllable?” reaction from me. When I think about it more carefully, it makes sense that some, like chuo, exist. After all, I encounter zhuo and shuo all the time. But since I’ve never heard chuo, I guess it surprises me! Zei and dia strike me as the most unusual. Were you surprised by any of the syllables on this list?

If you’re interested in learning about the rarest syllables in general (not for me specifically), here’s some of the stuff I read:

The Rarest Mandarin Syllables

Unusual Mandarin syllables

flickerofkorean:

I am trying to start a daily Korean diary but since I’m just a beginner I had no idea what and how to write. After a bit of research these are some expressions I collected:

오늘은 특별한 날이다.

Today is a special day.

오늘은 평범한 날이다.

Today is an ordinary day.

아침 여섯시 반에 일어났다.

I got up at half past six in the morning.

세수를 했다.

I washed my face.

그리고 비가 내린다.

And it was raining.

흐렸다.

It was cloudy.

맑았다.

It was clear.

눈이 왔다.

It snowed.

비가 왔다.

It rained./It was rainy.

오후 두시 오십칠분 점심식사를 먹었다.

I had lunch at 2:57 p.m.

그 음식은 맛있었다.

That food was delicious.

나는 한국어를 공부했다.

I studied Korean.

학교에 다녔다.

I went to school.

놀이공원에 갔다.

I went to amusement park.

그 후에 피곤해서 집에서 잠을 잤다.

After that, I slept at home because I was tired.


Please tell me if you spot any mistakes or if you have other useful sentences you come up with.

myhangeul:

I have uploaded my small collection of Korean children’s books in PDF form. Since I am just learning Korean I summarized a few of them based on the pictures, so please excuse some of the titles! 

There are 4 types of PDF’s in each folder, full color editions of the book with pictures (title.pdf) or just the text of the book (titletext.pdf). There are also black and white editions for those who want to print them off to write on them for translating. I’ve also included a zip file for those who want all 4 files. 

Categorized based on difficulty** : 

Beginner

Intermediate

Advanced(ish)

  • Pelé - (It’s a short biography)


Hope that these books will encourage and help those who are starting to learn Korean! 화이팅!!!!!



**…in the realm of children’s books but I could totally be wrong!

안녕!

Korean learners, I hit the point where I learn Korean with Talk To Me In Korean and I’m halfway through the second level and I keep reviewing the first level, scared of forgetting it and… I find it useless to learn more if I can’t practice grammar so.. Do you have any idea how to practice what I’ve already learnt? Any workbooks? Websites? I think about TTMIK workbooks, they’d be perfect, but I need to save money first. 

I’d be happy for any answers~ 

nerdinaomi:Vocab Lists Basics A Big List of French Adjectives Adverbs in French - Part 1 Bas

nerdinaomi:

Vocab Lists

Basics

School and Academics

Weather and Seasons

Nature, Animals, and the Environment

Emotions/Feelings

Food

Activities and Actions

Travel and Politics

Miscellaneous

Grammar

Resources

Websites and Apps

TV and YouTube

Listening and Music

Reading

Miscellaneous

Blogs

@lucylangblr

@sciogli-lingua

@my-french-resources

@french-stuff

@learningallthelanguages

@naomisfrench

@french-vocab


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