THANK YOU

How finns from around Finland say “I”. The formal form is “minä” and default informal form is “mä”

I love the way learning a language can make you feel like a kid again

I went for a walk with my grandma and pointed at all the flowers, always saying the Hungarian word or, if I didn't know it, asking my grandmother "Mi ez?" or "Hogy mondják… magyarul?", then she answered me and I wrote it down on my vocabulary list

It's like rediscovering the world

You look at everything, find out everything you know and everything you don't know. You repeat the word with a smile, then you see the same flower, you try to remember the word, and if you do, you're as happy as a child

So simple but so sweet

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)

You know what I think is really cool about language (English in this case)? It’s the way you can express “I don’t know” without opening your mouth. All you have to do is hum a low note, a high note, then another lower note. The same goes for yes and no. Does anyone know what this is called?

Broo learning a more obscure language is so hard because there is both so little and so much to work off of. Like I’m trying to figure out where to start with Tibetan, I can barely find any resources due to so much Chinese imperialism within Tibet making Tibetan as a language rare as hell, and each time I think I start to figure out the bare bone basics, I find something that opens more questions than answers. Like what the fuck is a post-postscript? Or a postscript for that matter? And are they different from the standard Tibetan alphabet? WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT ALPHABETS?! WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS, ENGLISH?!

If you could instantly be granted fluency in 5 languages—not taking away your existing language proficiency in any way, solely a gain—what 5 would you choose?

Learning a new language really does make you aware of how many fucking words there are. Waaaaaay too many things in this world that need their own special little word. Grow up.

me: why are you destroying earth!!!

aliens: because theres people who think that english is the only language they need to speak

me: thats fair i understand

affirmatives and filler words/sounds are my favorite thing in any language. i love that every language has various noises to make between words & thoughts and in pauses etc. i think they're also called "hesitation forms" (?)

growing up autistic i've always been very prone to language mirroring and i pick up hesitation forms so quickly i often explain upfront that it's not on purpose and i'm not mocking or purposefully mimicking someone in a conversation.

i also pick up affirmatives unintentionally and nearly immediately. in a lot of languages, people have a way of gently saying "yes, yes, yes, yes," repeatedly while receiving a list of instructions. in english this often is along the lines of "yes, mhm, okay, yep. got it. okay."

i took a kendo class in which everyone but me spoke Japanese as a first language and i was expected to answer instructions in Japanese and i began so formal but quickly fell into extremely casual, repeated affirmatives. i have very little experience with Japanese, so note this is only what i picked up in one particular place with this particular group, but it was fast nodding and repeated "ah. mm."

when i lived in norway and learned the language on the fly by immersion, i got completely stuck doing the affirmative H, which sounds like a gasp. i couldn't stop doing it for months after i moved home, and some of my friends near Oslo also used it as a hesitation form, so it was a double whammy.

no point to this, i just love languages and sounds.

It's not ignorance but poetry

the weirdest thing about learning a language is not knowing a specific word.

not sure what a puddle is called but i can say little ocean in the road !