kai-skai

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this is my favourite video rn btw

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The english language is not as sophisticated as finnish when it comes to who is doing what with verbs. "To eat" and "to feed" are obviously different in english, but "to drink" has no equivalent better than "to water". In finnish, one verb can usually be adjusted to mean simply "to do something", "to have something done to oneself", "to have someone else make one do something", and they even stack. Teetätyttää means "to make someone get someone else manufacture something (for you)".

Some forms of some verbs are so limited in use that they have come to practically only mean one thing, such as puhalluttaa - "to make someone blow air (from their mouth)" pretty much exclusively means "to do a breathalyzer test on someone". And so, finns who are learning how to speak a new language may sometimes find themselves at a loss of how to express the exact thing they want to say. It feels like trying to play the piano while wearing boxing gloves.

And so, a perfectly polite finn who has been pulled over by a cop in an english-speaking country could very possibly answer to "have you been drinking?" with "no, and if you don't believe me you can blow me."

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@lizardywizard relevant to you(r interests)?

Kobold is finally finished! This wearable sculpture will be available this Friday at 2pm PST. originally sculpted in @monsterclayusa , cast in urethane and hand painted. Features glow in the dark flexible whiskers made from @cosclayusa , springy ears and flappy parts! Eyes are see through visor. More info will be available once the s a l e goes live!

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reading a book from 1962 proclaiming the tiny percentage of "true" homosexuals should be left alone as a disabled minority but that the real problem is the growing epidemic of socially contagion'ed young people who only feel gay because of societal stress, mental problems and the derogation of women and that homosexual extremists ought to accept the reasonable compromise of not being actively persecuted in exchange for the institution of a conversation therapy-first approach plus laws that protect vulnerable impressionable children from being infected by a trend that will lead to psychological and physical damage

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So I had a hysterectomy today (hooray!) and I brought along my stuffed orca, Shamu, as a comfort object. And everyone i interacted with during my pre-op was like "Oh! Who's this?" so I was telling them all about him, how he's been with me since I was 9 and gone on every single vacation and road trip, and they were telling me about their own stuffed buddies (one lady said she still has hers after 40 years!) and all of this while I was signing consent forms and providing a list of the things I'd brought with me, you know, small talk.

So then a nurse comes over and goes "Okay, I've got some stickers I'll put on your things so we know they're yours" and I'm like "OK cool" so she puts a sticker on my coat and stickers on my bags of clothes and then she turns to Shamu and I'm like "oh I guess he gets a sticker too"

But no. She pulls out a hospital bracelet that's an exact copy of mine and slaps it on his tail, like so:

And i was delighted by this, so I took a picture to send to my friends, who were equally delighted, and were cracking me up with their reactions (like so:)

Anyway, they take me back and put me under, and when I awake groggily a few hours later it takes me a minute to get my bearings, so I don't notice Shamu at first. But then I realize he's tucked up next to me in the gurney, so I grab him, and my hand touches gauze.

And I'm like "huh?" so I look at him and I realize

They gave my fucking orca a hysterectomy

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Reblog if you also think Toph shouldn’t have been a cop.

I want to see how “unpopular” this opinion really is outside cop-worshipping Reddit.

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this is a cool post about a fascinating thing but I gotta nitpick OPs German

gehen zum Arzt, sein beim Arzt, kommen vom Arzt

the verb should go at the end when you're using the infinitive! zum Arzt gehen, beim Arzt sein, vom Arzt kommen

whether the Kino is more of a building or an activity.

wh-? Kino is definitely a building. The activity is Filme anschauen. There is no activity you can do with Kino, you can only go there. … is that even a thing in English? Going to an activity? "I'm going to bike-riding"? …. I can't even think of examples in German tbh. "Ich gehe zum Fußballspiel" I guess the football game is an activity? But that's dative anyway. ….. what was the activity example? I need to know now.

if a German cat sits on a table, the table is in dative—die Katze springt auf dem Tisch

uhhh die Katze springt auf den Tisch: the cat jumps onto the table die Katze sitzt auf dem Tisch: the cat is sitting on the table die Katze springt auf dem Tisch: this is just grammatically incorrect

I was told not a month ago that motion = accusative, no motion = dative

yeah that seems incomplete I'd say that accusative means specifically motion towards. You're throwing an accusation at someone. (Can't think of any counter-examples, at least.)

furthermoar, why vom and not aus dem?

hmmm what's not making sense about the explanation of physically exiting something? I suppose there are some edge cases, like parking lots maybe - do you drive aus dem Parkplatz or vom Parkplatz? But both feel correct there. (Maybe "vom" a bit more than "aus dem", but a parking lot exit is an "Ausfahrt", so. Correct enough.)

anyway I realize German often doesn't make sense (don't get me started on grammatical genders), but this feels like an unfairly harsh criticism

good thing i didn’t know about the DLAB, the U.S. military foreign language aptitude test, till now. had i acquired that information at a plausible age, i might very well have ended up working for mfucking Defense because this is the greatest test in the world. look at it!

first of all this is gold. it’s hands down the funnest kind of question i’ve ever seen. are there prep books. does it have a name i can use to scour the internet for puzzles

but what’s amazing is that it’s authentically fucked up. janky, if you will. like, i think i can see what choices are the best of those provided, but they do not feel like great, lucid, this-is-so-obvious-now-that-i’ve-thought-it-through, rock solid answers. they feel more like, okay i’m def lost in the rain forest but yeah me and my machete are gonna head in this direction. this, uh, can you call four instances and two tentatives a corpus? this dataset is a goddamn mess. i love it. i said “authentically” because tbh that’s pretty much the flavor of the feeling i have wading chest deep into one of the trickier thickets in a real existing foreign language, albeit one with fewer actual cryptids

—

we’re dealing with wo/wohin/woher prepositions in German and it’s an overt swamp; there’s a desultory table but they obviously got demoralized and punted. drilling a lot of examples—gehen zum Arzt, sein beim Arzt, kommen vom Arzt—may be better than trying to decide rationally, in the middle of a sentence, whether the Kino is more of a building or an activity.

the feeling i get wondering why they chose a skull, specifically, for farkila in this DLAB sample question is very akin to the feeling i get about … look

if a German cat sits on a table, the table is in dative—die Katze springt auf dem Tisch—because the cat is immobile, so it’s answering a where question

if the cat jumps onto the table—auf den Tisch—it’s in accusative, because it’s answering a where-to question

but if the cat jumps off the table, that’s a where-from question, and requires dative. vom [= von dem] Tisch. this is true even though there’s motion involved, and I was told not a month ago that motion = accusative, no motion = dative, using wo and wohin examples. now that woher is here the entire fucking heuristic is broken and i feel gaslighted. how can it be that jumping onto X is accusative but jumping off X is dative?

well, they say, it’s von. von always takes dative.

ok great, two rules in conflict, i’m supposed to just know which one wins, this is like what if order of operations in arithmetic but worse

furthermoar, why vom and not aus dem? onto = auf. on = auf. off (of) = von. feels messy. also, the cat is literally still in midair, so why isn’t this like coming out of the supermarket (physically exiting it) vs coming (to some not immediately proximate place) from the supermarket? well, it’s just different, they say. it would be aus if the cat was jumping out of a container like a cardboard box. but this is a flat surface so it’s von. hope this helps

o yes thank u that helps. i am definitely going to vom

it’s not that much palpably better than farkilam jankov? it makes a kind of unsatisfactory spot sense, if you wrestle assiduously through each example and get to ask annoying questions, but like. The System Is Bad

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So a Hawara von mir frequentiert gewisse Saunas und hat mir sehr eindrücklich erzählt wie underwhelming dem Kurz sein Eumel is, und wenn ich dein rpf fanart seh muss ich jetzt immer daran denken.

(Besagter Hawara hatte keinen persönlichen Kontakt zum Kurz sein' Kurzen)

bin ein seriöser politischer journalist

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You discover that you have control over a certain thing, as determined by spinning this wheel. We're talking full-on magical girl/superhero/supervillain/your label of choice control.

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benefits of having a job: WOOO MONEY 🔥🙏🥇💥💥💰

bad parts of having job:

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this will be the year I finally convince everyone to abandon New Year's resolutions in favour of Yule Boasting, the clearly superior tradition

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the author's barely disguised longing for a kinder world

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Tortuga is the pirates' port in Pirates of the Caribbean, famously quite lawless

its rude to reblog things from people you arent mutuals with fyi. :/

💀 my brother in christopher

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Okay, I really hate to do this - all over again - but! Although I recently got a little software job to scrape together some sort of living and as a springboard into something better, my feelings went from Lmao to Mao pretty quickly once my landlord informed me that, since I'll now be letting from him instead of subletting from a departing roommate, he's demanding a €350 deposit by the end of December.

I'm only getting paid by the middle/end of January, and for now I'm completely hosed, nobody to borrow from, and it's no use trying to delay either; he's a hardass and he could make my life miserable. Do y'all think I could raise that with your assistance? It's literally the last motherfucking hurdle at the last fucking minute... 😬😬😬

Please consider helping, and please boost this if you don't mind. I swear I'll pay it forward once I have real fucking money of my own. I wouldn't have survived this long exile without your kindness!

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Some other handy quotes