(mostly) Non-language Decor/symbol Masterpost

175+ non-Western literature recommendations to diversify your academia, organized by continent + country

I love world literature, and I’ve been frustrated by the lack of representation of it in literature + academia communities on tumblr, so here are some recommendations. I haven’t read all of these myself yet, but the ones I have are excellent and the ones I haven’t come highly recommended from Goodreads and are on my to-read list! 

With the exception of anthologies of older works, all of these books were written before 2000 (some literally thousands of years earlier), since I’m less familiar with super contemporary literature. Also, I only included each writer once, though many of them have multiple amazing books. I’m sure there are plenty of incredible books I’m missing, so please feel free to add on to this list! And countries that aren’t included absolutely have a lot to offer as well–usually, it was just hard to find books available in English translation (which all of the ones below are.)

List below the cut (it’s my first post with a cut so let’s hope I do it right… and also warning that it’s super long)

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(instagram: myfairesttreasure)

It's world poetry day so here are some of my favorite poems:

Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Night Walk by Franz Wright

Crossword by Lloyd Schwartz

The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert

Love Train by Tomás Q. Morín

Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts by Mark Halliday

Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo

in another string of the multiverse, perhaps by Michaella Batten

acknowledgments by Danez Smith

Death Wish by Josh Alex Baker

San Francisco by Richard Brautigan

How to Watch Your Brother Die by Michael Lassell

You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life by Rebecca Hazelton

On Political(ized) Life by Kanika Lawton

All the Dead Boys Look Like Me by Christopher Soto

It Was the Animals by Natalie Diaz

In Time by W.S. Merwin

It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off by Hanif Abdurraqib

Dear Life by Maya C. Popa

I Could Touch It by Ellen Bass

To The Young Who Want To Die by Gwendolyn Brooks

Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds by Ada Limón

vaguely academic things to do to keep yourself entertained

go down a wikipedia research hole by clicking the first term you don’t understand

binge a crashcourse series end to end (personal recs: world history, history of science, big history, philosophy)

find free books on project gutenberg

download some western classics for free

borrow books and audiobooks from the libby app or borrowbox

start a commonplace book

take a khan academy course

browse MIT’s free online course materials

teach yourself to code

go on a google scholar essay dive

try the open access button to avoid some paywalls for academic media, or install unpaywall that does a similar thing

research the history of the place you where you live

tempt the wrath of the duolingo owl and learn a language

search for online streams of the local tv in your target language’s country and use as background noise for immersion points

print and scrapbook favourite poetry and literature quotes

improve your handwriting by doing handwriting exercises

learn philosophy with the philosophize this! podcast. actually just check out all the educational spotify podcasts there are many good ones

start a weekly club with friends to share new and interesting things you’ve learnt that week

clean and reorganise your study space, physical or digital

check out online museums

fave educational youtube channels that I adore: vsauce, crashcourse, smarter every day, kurzgesagt, school of life, tom scott, r. c. waldun, vsauce3, primer, mark rober, veritasium, asapSCIENCE, scishow, TED-ed

hopefully you’ll find something to enjoy! happy learning x

The school system continues to fail neurodiverse students

Neurodivergence in academic settings is highly misunderstood & under discussed. Below is a master list of information on the reality of being a neurodivergent student in an education system built for neurotypicals; as well as resources and tools to aid students with autism, adhd, dyslexia and more in higher education. Please share this post so it can reach, educate and assist and many people as possible.

**this will be continuously updated. if you have any additions please feel free to message me or send me an ask and i’ll add it to the list!

✰ EDUCATE YOURSELF

NEURODIVERSITY: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

VALUING DIFFERENCES: NEURODIVERSITY IN THE CLASSROOM

ADHD EDUCATION CARRD

AUTISM EDUCATION CARRD

MYTHS AND MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT AUTISM

DEALING WITH DYSLEXIA CARRD

TONE INDICATORS CARRD

✰ HELPFUL READS/SELF HELP

NEURODIVERSE SELF-CARE: MANAGING ANXIETY THROUGH CONNECTION

NEURODIVERSITY WELLNESS: LINKS TO SOME GREAT COVID-19 RESOURCES

PREPARING FOR COLLEGE WITH DYSLEXIA

AT UNIVERSITY: THE ART OF SHARING INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR DISABILITY

HACKING YOUR ADHD - where you can learn techniques for helping your adhd brain

SURVIVING COLLEGE WITH ADHD

GOING TO COLLEGE WITH AUTISM

5 TIPS FOR AUTISTIC STUDENTS STARTING UNIVERSITY OR COLLEGE

✰ TOOLS

FOCUS@WILL: an ios & android app designed to increase your focus and attention, Focus@Will uses specially engineered audio in which frequencies similar to the human voice are removed. Why? We are wired to pay attention to them, and they distract us.

FINISH: an app that lets you add tasks and divide them into “short term,” “mid term,” or “long term,” as defined by you.

CLAROSPEAK: ClaroSpeak offers the option of visual highlighting in-sync with the spoken words, a great range of colour and font settings to allow for optimum reading and word prediction to help with writing.

C PEN: The C-Pen Reader is a totally portable, pocket-sized device that reads text aloud with an English, Spanish or French human-like digital voice.

Black Feminism & Abolition

if you want to actually engage with intersectional feminism & what abolition really means, this is your homework:

Angela Davis - “Are Prisons Obsolete?”

Ruth Wilson Gilmore - “Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California”

Angela Davis - “Abolition Democracy”

Angela Davis - “Freedom is a Constant Struggle”

“If They Come in the Morning… Voices of Resistance”

Carole Boyce Davies - “Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones”

Safiya Bukhari - “The War Before”

Patrice Douglass - “Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying”

Patrice Douglass & Frank B Wilderson - “The Violence of Presence: Metaphysics in a Blackened World”

“Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?”

Evelyn Hammond - “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality”

Sadiya Hartman - “Seduction and the Ruses of Power”

Sadiya Hartman - “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route”

Audre Lorde - “Sister Outsider”

Audre Lorde - “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

bell hooks - “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”

Michelle S Jacobs - “Black Women’s Invisible Struggle Against Police Violence”

Claudia Rankine - Citizen

Assata Shakur - “Women in Prison: How We Are”

Assata Shakur - “Assata: An Autobiography”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor - “How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective”

Zoe Samudzi & William C Anderson - “As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation”

this is a curated list of texts that i find the most helpful for illustrating why we all should also be abolitionists. the bolded are the ones i’ve found the most helpful thus far. & reminder to buy the books when you can, preferably from independent / leftist / black-owned bookstores… and see what you can find at your local library! keep these works in circulation!

girlcoded

Poems That Haunt Me

“On His Stillborn Son” by Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Two-Headed Calf” by Laura Gilpin

“Power” by Audre Lorde

“In A Soldiers’ Hospital: Pluck” by Eva Dobell

“The Dance of Death” by Charles Baudelaire

“Allowables” by Nikki Giovanni

“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

“Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” by Dylan Thomas

“The Scarecrow” by Khalil Gibran

“The Kitten” by Mary Oliver

Zebra Mildliner Hex Codes

Fluorescent #FEB5D8 | #FFDEB5 | #FFFEAD | #92D4E9 | #ACECE6 Cool & Refined #B5DA9A | #93B0D8 | #BAC7C5 | #BEB1D7 | #EA889E Warm #ABD5DB | #FEA389 | #FFD561 | #E17FD1 | #C1917F Bright #EFB9E0 | #F36B52 | #E0E666 | #64C5B4 | #696CB2 Friendly #FBF485 | #FCB675 | #FEB1B8 | #7AD0E2 | #8E8B87 Neutral #DDA36D | #DBC293 | #FCE9C3 | #D9DBDA | #DAD49A Gentle #FAD0AA | #F2F190 | #A1DCEE | #E2C6DF | #F9C6D4

general language learning resources

dictionaries:

wordreference - has spanish, french, italian, portuguese, catalan, german, swedish, dutch, russian, polish, romanian, czech, greek, turkish, chinese, japanese, korean, & arabic

reverso translation - has arabic, chinese, dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish

bab.la - has spanish, arabic, chinese, czech, danish, dutch, finnish, french, german, greek, hindi, hungarian, indonesian, italian, japanese, korean, norwegian, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, swedish, swahili, thai, turkish, vietnamese, & esperanto

digital dictionaries of south asia - has dictionaries for assamese, baluchi, bengali, divehi, hindi, kashmiri, khowar, lushai, malayalam, marathi, nepali, oriya, pali, panjabi, pashto, persian, prakrit, rajasthani, sanskrit, sindhi, sinhala, tamil, telugu & urdu

resources for learning words in context:

reverso context  - has arabic, chinese (in beta), dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish (in beta)

linguee - has german, spanish, portuguese, french, italian, russian, japanese, chinese, polish, dutch, swedish, danish, finnish, greek, czech, romanian, hungarian, slovak, bulgarian, slovene, lithuanian, latvian, maltese, & estonian

for learning different writing systems

omniglot - an encyclopedia with literally any language you could think of including ancient languages

scripts - an app for learning other writing systems with a limited amount for free (you can do 5 minutes a day for free) - has the ASL alphabet, Russian cyrillic, devanagari, Japanese kana, Chinese hanzi, & Korean hangul

Wikipedia is also helpful for learning different writing systems honestly!

pronunciation

forvo - a pronunciation dictionary with MANY languages (literally an underrated resource i use it all the time)

a really helpful video by luca lampariello with tips on how to get better pronunciation in any language

ipachart.com - an interactive chart with almost every sound!! literally such an amazing resource for learning the IPA (however does not include tones)

another interactive IPA chart (this one does have tones) 

language tutoring

italki - there’s many websites for language tutoring but i think italki has the most languages (i have a referral link & if you use it we can both get $10 toward tutoring lol) - they say they support 130 languages!

there’s also preply and verbling which are also good but there aren’t as many options for languages - preply has 27 and verbling has 43

(obviously these are not free but if you have the money i think tutoring is a great way to learn a language!)

getting corrections/input from native speakers

hellotalk - an app for language exchanges with native speakers & they also have functions where you can put up a piece of writing and ask for corrections - honestly this app is great

tandem - language exchange app but unlike hellotalk you can choose multiple languages (although i think hellotalk is a little bit better)

LangCorrect - supports 170 languages!

HiNative - supports 113 languages!

Lang-8 - supports 90 languages!

verb conjugation

verbix - supports a ton of languages

Reverso conjugation - only has english, french, spanish, german, italian, portuguese, hebrew russian, arabic, & japanese

apps

duolingo - obviously everybody knows about duolingo but i’m still going to put it here - i will say i think duolingo is a lot more useful for languages that use the latin alphabet than languages with another writing system however they do have a lot of languages and add more all the time - currently they have 19 languages but you can see what languages they’re going to add on the incubator

memrise - great for vocab! personally i prefer the app to the desktop website

drops - you can only do 5 minutes a day for free but i still recommend it because it’s fun and has 42 languages! 

LingoDeer - specifically geared towards asian languages - includes korean, japanese, chinese & vietnamese (as well as spanish, french, german, portuguese and russian), however only a limited amount is available for free

busuu - has arabic, chinese, french, german, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, spanish, russian, spanish, & turkish, 

Mondly - has 33 languages including spanish, french, german, italian, russian, japanese, korean, chinese, turkish, arabic, persian, hebrew, portuguese (both brazilian & european), catalan, latin, dutch, swedish, norwegian, danish, finnish, latvian, lithuanian, greek, romanian, afrikaans, croatian, polish, bulgarian, czech, slovak, hungarian, ukrainian, vietnamese, hindi, bengali, urdu, indonesian, tagalog & thai

misc

a video by the polyglot Lýdia Machová about how different polyglots learn languages - this video is great especially if you don’t know where to start in terms of self study

LangFocus - a youtube channel of this guy who talks about different languages which is always a good place to start to understand how a specific language works also his videos are fun

Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb - this book is great and available online completely for free! 

Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner (on pdfdrive) - another great book about language learning

Anki - a flashcard app (free on desktop for any system & free on android mobile - not free on ios mobile) that specifically uses spaced repetition to help you learn vocabulary, it’s got a slightly ugly design but it’s beloved by many language learners & is honestly so helpful

YouTube - literally utilize youtube it is so good.

Easy Languages - a youtube channel with several languages (basically they go around asking people on the street stuff so the language in the videos is really natural) & they also have breakaway channels for german, french, spanish, polish, italian, greek, turkish, russian, catalan & english

there’s also the LanguagePod101 youtube channels (e.g. FrenchPod101, JapanesePod101, HebrewPod101) which are super great for listening practice & language lessons as well as learning writing systems!