Apolyghostjourney - A Polyghost Journey

I fucking love language and linguistics, I love the social aspects of it, the storytelling, the music, the sounds, the comparisons, the loanwords, the differences, the history, the changes, the communication, things that transcend that, non-verbal languages, the dialects, unconventional ways of communication, the mixes of languages, the pigins and creoles, the bilingual or multilingual speakers, codeswitching-

I love it all. I love how humans express themselves. How sometimes translation isn't needed because everyone understands anyway. How it can catch you offguard, how words aren't possible to translate-

How silences are often louder than words.

A while ago I talked to my polyglot friend, who's currently learning Czech, and he asked me for some easy reading materials. As I have offspring and thus my home is overflowing with kids books, it was pretty easy to find something suitable for, say, A1-A2 learners.

Since I've seen a lot of Czech learners on this site, I realized I could share with more people!

So, here's the link to my Google drive folder:

Hope it helps!

(if anyone needs help translating something, feel free to DM me)

What they don’t tell you about speaking multiple languages is that your brain does not in fact have a box labeled Spanish and another one labeled German. Instead it has a box labeled “Not English” and sometimes when you’re talking or writing in one of the languages you speak it will just start pulling random words from that box.

strangely common misconception that words have basically the same meanings in every langauge and that translation is just a matter of identifying which exact word in the target language corresponds to the word in the original language

love saying "ich krieg die krise" for i'm losing it / i'm freaking out / etc because it translates directly to "I'm getting the crisis". you know the one. THE crisis. the one and only baby. ye ol reliable

People might wonder why I love etymology so much and the reason is simple — our everyday language is full of poetry. The English word "clue"? It comes from a Middle English word for "a ball of yarn", "clewe", which is a reference to the myth about Theseus and the Labyrinth. The Czech word "potkat" — "to meet"? The "tkat" part actually comes from "tkát" — to weave. To meet someone is literally to get interwoven with someone in Czech. How am I supposed to not love this?

Source

My French text book says « mais ce serait trop simple si c’était systématique, n’est-ce pas?! » and I think that’s the French language’s motto