Bon, je commençais à regarder mon CPF pour faire des cours d’allemand🇩🇪, et un ami américain m’a prêté son compte « Rosetta Stone » illimité pour iOS ou macOS.
C'est une espèce de Babbel ou Duolingo qui n’a pas l'air trop mal fait. Je vais tester.
Dafuq with calling Yang Guo (杨过) "Penance". I don't care if that is what his name means whatever but you dont have to translate Chinese names like that. I can't take this translation of Jin Yong's book seriously omg 💀
Like, there's this character in Mysterious Lotus Casebook called "Duo Bing", can you imagine if you call him "Always Sick"?? Chinese names don't have to be direct translations omg
Long and fiery winter night it is ! User:Dragons_Bot is importing frequency lists in 500 more #languages from Unilex into #Lingualibre. Dragons Bot script is running tonight, editing Lili persistently. We then will have common words list for 1001 languages, ready for you to record. At step 3 of the Recording Studio, click "local list", then search List:{your_iso}/Unilex and you are good to go ! If your community's languages aren't there you can let me know below. 🎉 https://lingualibre.org/wiki/Special:RecordWizard
Updated this article with an extra para on the #Malaysian school system & realise how confusing it is. I speak 4 languages only because I had the luck of growing up in certain areas & studying in schools where Malay, English and Chinese are used often. These days, it's not unusual to find graduates who can only speak ONE language. In #Malaysia, this can be limiting, especially if you cannot speak Bahasa Malaysia, the national language.
Being from where I am in the world, my words for ingredients are in Malay, Teochew, Hokkien, Tamil (there’s no order to which food items are in which language. They simply.. are. Some fish we use the Malay names, some fish we use the other names. Same with veggies)
And now that I am in N America I am re-learning some words in Cantonese
I thought I couldn’t get ‘kang kung’ here but learned it’s actually called ‘ong choy’
I am the only one in my family who speaks Mandarin. My parents and I speak Hokkien. My siblings are complete 🍌
How I came to know two Chinese languages is through an accident of geography - I spent my growing up years in Penang and Johor. Penang's main Chinese language is Hokkien and Johor it is Mandarin.
I am not sure why my siblings didn't pick up Cantonese as they grew up in Selangor 🤔
A habit I am starting is to write a short sentence, like a diary entry, in Chinese every day. My writing is horrendous but this is one of the ways I am trying to remember the characters.
Something I love telling people is that the Mandarin euphemism for ‘being horny’ is ‘I ate your tofu / I want to eat your tofu / they ate my tofu’. I feel like we should popularize that in pop culture. Like, you hear that in TV shows (mainly Taiwanese but also sometimes mainland Chinese)
Many British adults regret not concentrating in their French or German lessons at school. Most believe that languages should again become compulsory in school.
Many feel ashamed that they cannot speak another language and would welcome the opportunity to learn.
Only 21% of UK adults said they can have a conversation in a modern language that's not their mother tongue, according to a YouGov poll commissioned by the British Academy.
Lumi = snow
Hanki = full cover of snow, at least half a meter
Nietos = large & wide ,naturally piled snow
Kinos = smaller, localized piles of snow. If articifial, always this
Nuoska = malleable snow, you can make snowballs out of this
Tykky/tökkö = wind-packed snow
Hankikanto = melted and refrozen cover of snow which you can walk on
Räntä = sleet
Pyry = heavy snowfall in wind
Tuisku = ice crystals snowfall strong wind
Myräkkä = snowstorm
@jessie is a lover of #languages and helps run #CommonVoice, @mozilla 's open #voice#data set, which now supports over 100 languages. She also teaches #WebDev and loves #hiking. She's awesome you should follow her 🇬🇧
That's all for now, please do share your own lists so we can create deeper connections, and a tightly-connected community here
I'm reminded here of @maryrobinette's short story - "Red Rockets" - "She built something better than fireworks. She built community."
A question for bilingual/polyglot people: Do you post both in English and in your other, native languages? How do you decide which one? I see my English posts get more reach, probaly because some people have filtered out other languages.
I find it easiest to post in the language whatever I feel like writing in. I don't give it much thought. How about you?
I gave myself a very low bar of learning 100 characters this year. I am currently using the free app Tofu Learn to learn my characters and I have learned 20 characters in 20 days. The app has lots of decks that you can download to use, and I am using one where they teach you the radicals, then give you a story why the radicals combined makes said word. This proved to be very effective for me as the story behind the word makes it easier for to remember it.
Every week I do my #Taiwanese language homework, panic about how ‘I don’t know these words’, then realize that all the words I don’t know are the Taigi words that originated from Japanese
Also, I have to zoom in to see how to write some traditional characters, coz I’m getting old (and I actually only know how to write simplified)
Ngisenhlangweni yobulimiziningi eUFS eBloemfontein kuleli viki, kodwa kunokuningi okungumbhuqo nehlazo la. // I am at a conference on #multilingualism at UFS in Bloemfontein this week, but there is much that is ironic and disgraceful here. #languages#academia#IsiZulu
Interesting discussion between #Chinese educated Chinese and #English educated Chinese aka "bananas" 🍌.
I belong to the latter group and have always felt like an inferior Chinese in Selangor (my state) because I couldn't speak fluent #Cantonese and so-so #Mandarin. The only place I really felt like I belonged was in Penang where people spoke my dialect & I am one of the dwindling numbers that speak it.
Part of the reason why I’m learning Cantonese more seriously this year is that when I hear instructions for tai chi or Buddhism in English, it makes me very uncomfortable. Like, it’s just the wrong language and I don’t feel connected to it. Same as with someone saying romantic things to me in Mandarin (Mandarin is the language of teachers and taxi drivers yelling at me. No intimacy allowed in it)
Learned from this #Radiolab episode that Wubi is a huge technological and linguistic achievement, extremely efficient. I wondered why I never learned it and only know pinyin. Turns out if you force people to type in pinyin it makes them rely on Mandarin.
I find pinyin inefficient and as someone who speaks southern Chinese languages before Mandarin, it can be hard to spell correctly all the time. Also it makes me forget how to write characters