Langblr - Blog Posts

recent vocab !

here’s some miscellaneous french vocabulary that i’ve acquired during my french journalling over the past few days! can you tell what i’ve been up to?

l'argile (f) - clay le corail - coral le décolorant - (hair) bleach la démangeaison - itching, itch l'eau de Javel (f) - (cleaning product) bleach le lobe de l'oreille - earlobe la mèche - strand of hair, lock of hair

à la main - by hand déchirant - harrowing

convenir - to suit, to agree with décolorer - to bleach (hair) percer - to pierce rajeunir - to rejuvenate, to feel rejuvenated repousser - to grow back, to repel se teindre les cheveux - to dye one’s hair

♥French Vocabulary : flowers ♥

une fleur = a flower

un fleuriste = a florist

un pétale = a petal

une rose = a rose

un bleuet = a cornflower

un lys = a lily

une marguerite = a daisy

une tulipe = a tulip

une violette = a violet

un tournesol = a sunflower

un oeillet = a carnation

fleurir = to bloom

un jardin = a garden

une graine = a seed

creuser = to dig

arroser = to water

coloré = colourful

(by Francesco Hayez)

Les nationalités

1. American▪︎américain/américaine

2. Argentinian▪︎argentin/argentine

3. Algerian▪︎algérien/algérienne

4. Australian▪︎australien/australienne

5. Austrian▪︎autrichien/autrichienne

6. Belarusian▪︎biélorussien/biélorussienne

7. Belgian▪︎belge/belge

8. Brazilian▪︎brésilien/brésilienne

9. Bulgarian▪︎bulgare/bulgare

10. Canadian▪︎canadien/canadienne

11. Chinese▪︎chinois/chinoise

12. Colombian▪︎colombien/colombienne

13. Canadian▪︎canadien/canadienne

14. Cuban▪︎cubain/cubaine

15. Czech▪︎tchèque/tchèque

16. Dane▪︎danois/danoise

17. Dutch▪︎néerlandais/néerlandaise

18. Egyptian▪︎égyptien/égyptienne

19. English▪︎anglais/anglaise

20. Estonian▪︎estonien/estonienne

21. Finn▪︎finlandais/finlandaise

22. French▪︎français/française

23. German▪︎allemand/allemande

24. Greek▪︎grec/grecque

25. Hungarian▪︎hongrois/hongroise

26. Icelandic▪︎islandais/islandaise

27. Indian▪︎indien/indienne

28. Irish▪︎irlandais/irlandaise

29. Italian▪︎italien/italienne

30. Japanese▪︎japonais/japonaise

31. Korean▪︎coréen/coréenne

32. Latvian▪︎letton/letonne

33. Lithuanian▪︎lituanien/lituanienne

34. Macedonian▪︎macédonien/macédonienne

35. Mexican▪︎mexicain/mexicainne

36. New Zealander▪︎néo-zélandais/néo-zélandaise

37. Norwegian▪︎norvégien/norvégienne

38. Pole▪︎polonais/polonaise

39. Portuguese▪︎portugais/portugaise

40. Romanian▪︎roumain/roumaine

41. Russian▪︎russe/russe

42. Scottish▪︎écossais/écossaise

43. Slovak▪︎slovaque/slovaque

44. Slovene▪︎slovène/slovène

45. Spanish▪︎espagnol/espagnole

46. Swede▪︎suédois/suédoise

47. Swiss▪︎suisse/suisse

48. Turk▪︎turc/turque

49. Ukrainian▪︎ukrainien/ukrainienne

50. Welsh▪︎gallois/galloise

i will do another fifty soon to include the ones i left out. please correct me if i made any mistakes!

Four important verbs!

Venir de: Just (action) Je viens de manger - I just ate

Se mettre à: To start (action) Je me mets à manger - I'm starting to eat

Être en train de: To being in a process of (action) Je suis en train de manger - I am eating

Aller: To be about to start (action) Je vais manger - I'm going to eat

So, I’m an Anki user and I’m completely aware of how intimidating Anki can be upon first glance. Here are some Anki add-ons that can help make the experience a better one. Feel free to suggest your favorites as well!

Pokemanki: For each basic deck you have, this add-on gives you a Pokémon egg, and it grows stronger as you review. I am a huge Pokémon fan, so this is a necessary add-on in my opinion.

Migaku Vacation: This add-on lets you take sick days and vacations from your Anki reviews, to not make the process so overwhelming if you miss a day.

Anki IPA: Haven’t personally used this one yet, but as a linguist it’ll be super helpful for French. It transcribes your cards into IPA instantly! Only a handful of languages are supported, so check it out. 

Pull from Duolingo: This will take words you’ve learned so far in your Duolingo course and make them into cards! Definitely great for those beginning stages of a language when you aren’t sure how to make your Anki deck.

Puppy Reinforcement: Nice puppies tell you you’re doing a good job :)

Anki Simulator: This one lets you simulate your progress. I like looking at shiny graphs, so if you do too then this is for you.

Migaku Spanish: This add-on features audio recordings, color coding for grammatical gender, and a dictionary. It’s also available for French and Portuguese and - I think - German, if I’m not mistaken.

Beeline: It adds gradients to text to make it easier to read. Helpful for long blocks of text!

Beautify Anki: Are you tired of the boring grey background of Anki? This is one of your options. It’s an attempt to make the interface a lot more friendly-looking.

Randomize Fonts: I literally had ZERO idea why you would use this one for fun, but one of the reviews pointed out it’s good for identifying words in different contexts, and if you are learning a language that uses a script that isn’t what your native language is written in, this could definitely be cool!

Anki Accountability 2: Allows you to generate a report to send to someone about your consistency with your reviews. Could be useful among a competitive group of friends, or for language teachers who would like to implement use of Anki in the classroom!

Japanese starter pack

SO you’ve finally said okay, I want to learn Japanese. If you’ve never learned a language before then it can seem daunting but it’s a very rewarding experience! I’m gonna lay out what helped me start and stuff that I think would’ve been helpful for me even early on! But I still recommend doing your own research and trying lots of different methods bc language learning especially by yourself is a very personal experience! This is also meant for absolute beginners just looking to get started so I will try to keep it simple. 

First I just want to say I think your first goal should be “I want to be able to read and write kana fluently” because even just that will open so many doors and send you well on your way, but most importantly because: romaji will not be there for you. At all. And to be able to learn to read efficiently you need to read! Just like when you first learned the alphabet you must try to read everything, try to read tweets, posts, articles from NHK news easy, candy packaging, anything! You don’t have to understand what you’re reading at all, you just have to be able to read it right. And learn this with all the sources I will list in the post don’t try to learn it completely in isolation. Some tofugu kana resources to get you started/supplement other resources: Hiragana guide, Katakana guide, kana charts

Getting started immediately with apps There’s lots of language apps to pick and try out but I think the 2 best options right away are Duolingo and Lingodeer. Duolingo has improved its japanese course so much since I first did it in 2017, finally more lessons so you can use it beyond the beginner stage, separate lessons for katakana finally, and it uses more kanji to really give you a headstart on that front! Its still kind of inefficient in isolation but its so good for getting you started. If you’re fine with spending some subscription money then Lingodeer, a recently paywalled app specially made for asian languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean is worth giving a try! Here’s a video review of it by Miku Real Japanese

Textbooks The most famous textbook used in classrooms is Genki! A good book, its concise, streamlined, and efficient! but it’s not really designed for you to study by yourself. Its designed for the classroom and doesn’t really include a lot of content to help you become fluent in reading kana and some kanji. This can make starting feel more daunting and overwhelming for some so a lot self learners myself included recommend starting with Japanese from Zero! Specially designed for self learners and does a slow and thorough approach with an incorporated workbook section! There’s lots more options to explore tho and cough cough pdf versions to check out before you have to settle with a purchase

Youtube  There are so many good youtube channels both old and new to help you at every step! If you need to hear someone explain things for you bc you want to practice listening/pronunciation, you just like lectures, written explanations didn’t help then youtube is a great asset! Japanese Ammo has lessons starting with absolute beginners, if you want to try your hand at doing lessons with no english at all, then Sambonjuku’s basics can help. Japanesepod101′s youtube is also a great place for beginners! This is just a tiny sample of the many youtube channels dedicated to teaching you japanese so if none of these clicked with you then there’s many more channels to try! All linked channels also have videos on kana! 

In summary simply getting started is the first step and when you conquer kana then that’s already big progress! These are the basic tools that helped me simply start so I hope at least one of them can be helpful, and if not then there must be some tool or resource out there that will work for you! And quick note: a book I’m reading right now that I also want to recommend as supplemental reading is Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner. Its really good advice on how to approach and start language learning and I agree with everything I’ve read so far, and its just a really encouraging book! I also recommend checking out Tofugu.com which has a lot of great reviews, articles, advice, and resource roundups for you to explore. also shoutout to my fav langblr on here @ohitoyoshi just because. and if anyone reading want to share what helped them get stared then feel free to add on!

Cats and kittens,

Here's a link to a Google doc file I created. You'll find:

Entire classic books written or translated to French (divided by country/continent + by genre in the French section)

The first chapter FR/EN of very famous novels

Quizzes (made by yours truly)

Have fun!

Language learning recommendation

Let me tell you about I website I just found. It's called mamalisa.com and it has lullabies and children's songs in every language. Here are just some of the languages;

Arabic

Ukrainian

Korean

Welsh

Swedish

Romanian

Spanish

Danish

Next to the lyrics of the song, it also has;

the English translation

if it is part of a game, the explanation of the game and its instructions

any relevant context/history

whether the same song exists in another language

the mp3 download

relevant youtube clip

sheet music

You can sort the songs by language, continent, country or type of song!

do u have any advice for ppl who want to study linguistics and languages but couldnt afford to study it at school?? thanks if you answer this, have a great day

yeah! you can easily download textbooks online and study from them AND I do have a dropbox full of linguistics textbooks!

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qm7x5dz8fu4bdlp/AADshTfRGZG5JZALkDV6wFlwa?dl=0 

it includes phonetics/phonology, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, morphology, and etymology. 

I also have another dropbox folder full of language textbooks:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tdm26h60ccl9pe1/AABg0B3mOGaWLG9Kfyuvut6wa?dl=0

As of November 6: Includes 83 textbooks including Arabic, ASL, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Welsh :)

French fairy tales

Princess Rosette, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy : FR / EN

The fair with golden hair, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy : FR / EN

The friendly frog, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy : FR / EN

Aurore and Aimée, Jeanne de Beaumont : FR / EN

Beauty and the beast, Jeanne de Beaumont : FR / EN

Bluebeard, Charles Perrault : FR / EN

Cinderella, Charles Perrault : FR / EN

Donkey skin, Charles Perrault : FR / EN 

Little red riding hood, Charles Perrault : FR / EN

Little thumb, Charles Perrault : FR / EN

Puss in boots, Charles Perrault : FR / EN

Sleeping beauty, Charles Perrault : FR / EN

The fairy, Charles Perrault : FR / EN

Blondine, Sophie Ségur : FR / EN

Ourson, Sophie Ségur : FR / EN

Sophie’s misfortunes, Sophie Ségur : FR / EN

The little grey mouse, Sophie Ségur : FR / EN

(You can download the Wikisource PDFs legally for free at the top of the page as they are part of the public domain)

What to do during lockdown

(and work on your French):

Work on your pronunciation

Read some classics

Read some fanfiction

Listen to podcasts

Listen to TED Talks

Listen to music

Listen to the radio

Watch french movies (detailed, by period and type)

Watch dubbed/subtitled movies: The Simpson, Cesar and Cleopatra, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Red Shoes, La Vérité

Watch cartoons

Watch youtubers

Watch let’s plays: 1 2 3 4 5

Work on some MOOCs

Learn about black holes, Pompei, giant animals, gladiators, the Dreyfus affair, Charles Manson, ants, Leonardo da Vinci, Rome, smelly cheeses, Mozart, the Bermuda triangle, meditation…

Follow french subreddits

Search our social media

Visit the Louvre online

Check my practice tag

And make sure your priorities are in order!

Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books  that I try to update regularly 

Hey! Just happened upon this post and thought the list is really worth expanding as I’ve studied some DH myself!

Check out Around DH in 80 Days where there’s a list of 80 DH projects from around the world that were picked to be featured. You can also find their GoogleDocs spreadsheet for the full list of suggested projects. Their efforts to highlight global DH projects are ongoing, and they’ve created this new website as well!

Would also love to share one of my favorite digital projects called Diarna, a geomuseum documenting and mapping sites of Jewish heritage from all over SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) and Central Asia!

And for those interested in learning about or studying different Arabic dialects, I want to share MADAR corpus which is a database collecting Arabic sentences as spoken from 25 Arab cities. This website details how to use it.

Cheers!

Digital Humanities is a really cool field.

It’s main goals is discovering how to use digital infrastructure and tools to do humanities research (linguistics, history, literature) and how to engage the general public in academic discourse of these topics.

From a historian's perspective this is very exciting as many people think history is boring or worse just names and dates. These tools and visualizations of history bring people to the forefront of history conversations and engage directly.

Not to mention these are very fun to play with. Video games for academic nerds.

Digital Humanities really encourages research and digital projects. It may be slowly becoming a passion of mine.

Here are some of my favorite examples:

Allow me to introduce with the Digital Humanities Forum at Miami University Oxford, Ohio. https://libguides.lib.miamioh.edu/c.php?g=1100099&p=8022726

Other universities host past digital humanities projects on their scholarly commons too:

Berkeley: https://digitalhumanities.berkeley.edu/projects

https://orbis.stanford.edu/ Orbis is the interactive trade map of the Roman empire and is a very detailed digital humanities project. It's one of my personal favorites cause you can "Take walking tour to Constantinople"

Or perhaps you'd like to walk the silk road? http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/index.html.en

Image reading is very interesting too, this tool from google is what I I normal think of https://cloud.google.com/vision. The "Try the API feature" allows you to upload and analyze images to find descriptor terms. (Yes I hate google and AI, but I'm sorta okay with metadata for museum object files being made a bit AI, it's painstaking work and there are too many words and way of describing a freaking spoon.)

http://www.onodo.org/ Onodo allows network mapping and is a cool easy to use program. Check out the Gallery to find public published projects on the Mughals Emperors to Star wars.

Geospatial labs create digital products linked to maps and are also a form of digital humanities and is very applicable for the origins of an artifact and conceptualizing location. http://www.arcgis.com/ is a geospatial platform designed to make Story Maps. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/b2c6b618e7b24cebb4039ac59dc52f19

Makerspaces and 3-D modeling are also considered to be digital humanities as there is a digital component. So check out the Makerspace at your local library!

Omeka is a digital platform that can create very basic virtual exhibits and is a pain to work with (the backend is annoying as all get out, too many metadata slots) but kinda cool.

Virtual museum exhibits are also digital humanities!!! (I could easily make a series of posts about that) This runs the gambit from slides shows to video game like exhibits to videos of tours and click through tours. It's kinda a you name it it's a valid exhibit model.

I do know that Miami University of Oxford, Ohio has a virtual museum of the Archeology collection on campus, but I don't have a link. Sorry. The collection is made up of 3-D scans of artifacts and is really cutting-edge. I swear I've seen it and been on the website.

https://dsl.richmond.edu/ Is a really cool set of interactive history stats with maps, and primary resources discussing tough social issues like land acquisition and redlining. Even the history of party lines in the US House of Representatives.

https://voyant-tools.org/ Last but not least Voyant is great for analyzing literature. Or my thesis, just to see what the drinking word actual is. It will pick out most common words, make word clouds etc. So if your slide show on a author out of copyright need pizazz you can upload the NOT copyrighted work for some word clouds. Or see the depth of vocabulary used or check that your resume can be read by an API. Cause that's what this tool is an API. THIS IS NOT an AI generation detector it only counts words

Now most of these projects and tools are for English and are US directed, but I'd love to hear about how the rest of the world is doing Digital Humanities. I'd love to hear about your favorite projects and tools! So maybe add a few to this post?

What they can see:

What they can’t see:

me watching Narcos and making a little mental note whenever I can identify a new swear word or expression

I had to speak French once (like, it was a test, it actually had to be French, not whatever works) and I had to really resist the temptation of saying “hombre” (spanish for man) instead of “homme” (french for man) because my brain somehow decided that “hombre” sounded, like, more beautiful? more natural? more suitable? idk. I wasn’t even learning Spanish back then yet.

Also, during the same test I think I almost said (or even actually said, I don’t remember) a really tired “Yeah…” instead of what should’ve been a really tired “Ouais…” (same thing but in French). Since English is also a foreign language to me, this is yet another example of what OP’s describing.

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.

Trying to study amid self-conflicts and doubts. I'm so depressed and worried about my future.

Analyzing past papers to get a sense of what to expect in the entrance exam amid the tensions throughout the nation.

Fruits and English grammar

Enough with my depressing thoughts. I decided to make myself a five-ingredient sandwich, and now I'm going to study English. (Maybe studying will distract me from all the pessimistic thoughts and loneliness.)

I'm getting very stressed these days because my high school finals results will be declared soon. I know I didn't do well, so I just hope I pass and achieve the required percentage to get into universities. My first entrance exam didn't go well either. I plan to post everything I do — for example, if I finish one or two topics, I'll post about it. Maybe this will satisfy my brain and give it enough dopamine so that I don't procrastinate. Tommorow, I plan to complete Set Theory, Statistics, Sequences and Series, Permutations and Combinations, and maybe Linear Equations as well if I have some time left.

I've made a decent study plan for my upcoming exams, though I'll admit I'm very scared. Also, I've finally decided to add dried snapdragon (flowers) to my commonplace notebook. We'll be moving out in a month, and I'll have to leave this beautiful garden behind as well. I've spent more than twelve years here, so I'm drying some flowers from the garden and placing them at random pages in my notebook.

Time left for the exam: 2 days

I have three days left before my entrance exam. I didn’t study much today, but I’ll try my best to complete at least one English book.

06.09.2019 ||

This days it's so hard to me now, I'm nervous and unprepared for this exam, it's like everything I do is not enough to pass this year, I don't want to go to class anymore and I want to study more at home. I'm not separating more time to play my violin, although practiced today and it was wonderful. I'm trying survive this week.

Ps.: This place is a coffee inside the college. I like to study there when I want to go out.

•

Esses dias tem sido difíceis pra mim, eu estou nervosa e me sentindo despreparada pro vestibular, é como se tudo que eu tivesse feito não fosse o suficiente para passar esse ano. Eu não estou querendo mais ir às aulas e quero estudar em casa. Eu não estou separando tempo para tocar violino também, apesar de eu ter praticado hoje e ter sido maravilhoso. É, eu estou tentando sobreviver.

Ps.: Esse lugar é um café que fica dentro do cursinho ( na faculdade ) eu estudo lá quando quero espairecer.

335 minutes = 5 hours, 35 minutes.