#bcs more often than not Native English speakers will only think about English and won't consider other languages

[chaotictaste]

also if you think about it that (false) explanation only works in English... it has different names in other languages like Pasen (in Dutch) and Wielkanoc (in Polish; lit. tran. Grand/Great Night)

It’s that time of year again. Courtesy of digitalhammurabi.com

Addition about the image, courtesy of Twitter user @lui_log: wrt the background image, which is a stone plaque showing a winged goddess flanked by owls: “Also, we don't know whether this is a depiction of Ishtar, as the piece has been looted, thus has no archaeological context that could point us to whom it shows. Nor does it bear an inscription. The owls could mean that it is Ishtar's sister Ereshkigal, Goddess of the Underworld.”

[thyandrawrites]

more on the topic of "you shouldn't apologize about your english online" because I think it's good to talk about these things

So. I used to do that ALL the time. Especially the rare times I got the confidence to leave comments on AO3, back when I was first browsing the archive and my english wasn't nearly as fluent as it is today. Back then, I was so self-conscious about my english and my ability to properly communicate my thoughts that I often shied away from commenting on people's fics, fearing that I would say something stupid / miss details that were supposed to be obvious because of the language barrier / embarrass myself in front of a native speaker in general. Because I've studied languages all my life and school kinda beats into you that if you make grammar mistakes you're garbage and people won't understand you. But jabs at the education system aside, you know what finally got me to stop apologizing about my english?

this.

that story is 50k long and never once while reading it did it make me think it wasn't written by a native speaker. I don't know if there really weren't any grammar mistakes or if they went over my head because of my own wobbly english, but the point still stands. This reply blew my mind. Like, genuinely. Till then, I lowkey just assumed that bc a work was posted in english on ao3, the author must be a native speaker. When that isn't true all of the time, or even that often. Ao3, like tumblr, is a platform used worldwide by a variety of people. Lots of them are native speakers, but even more only speak english as a second or even third language. Some don't post in english at all.

and just like how I was self-conscious about my english when leaving that comment, that author too must've had a moment in their life when their english wasn't fluent enough to write a whole fucking novel in it. But how amazing it is that we're communicating despite the fact that neither of us speaks english as their first language.

I think that for me this was the moment I first realized I could get to that point, eventually. That even if my english wasn't perfect at the time, it wouldn't always be that way. I could keep practicing it and getting better until a random person online wouldn't be able to tell.

and in time, that proved true. I started out as too self-conscious to comment, and now this is my total wc on ao3:

of course that doesn't mean I don't make mistakes anymore. I still do! and I can get self-conscious about them. But my enthusiasm to keep reading and communicating eventually did more for my learning curve than my self-consciousness ever did. enough so that while at first I was too scared to even write a ten words comment, now I have written the equivalent of three novels in my second language, and my fluency improved a lot as a result

[the-goddess-of-mischief-writing]

what i got from the nationality roulette is that you're not american, but i would've never guessed that from your writing. do you have any tips on how to broaden your english vocabulary if you're not in school anymore?

I will go ahed and say thank you for believing I was native in English, but I want to move on quickly to the most important part of your ask, nonnie. (Just bc this got so long I'm gonna continue beneath the cut)

My tips will be centered about things that have worked for me and that I experience are general things that may help you more than school. For example, amongst all subjects in school, in Sweden there are three, as we call them "primary subjects", you need to pass (at least when you're above grade 5 aka 11 years old) to be moved up a grade and in the end also get your High School diploma to be able to apply to UNI/Collage. These subjects are math, Swedish and English. I started like learning learning English in school when I was 5 and passed each of these English levels with good grades. However, I wouldn't say my biggest development happened thanks to school, but everything I did outside. I was interested and that's where I want come with this.

A good way to start is purely to have interest, in not only broaden your vocabulary within English, but to get better at the language as a whole.

In my sense, to broaden your vocabulary you can't purely focus on, for example, to write or read all the time. Of course, this helps to a certain extent because you expose yourself to more literature where you have the opportunity to learn new things/words. But my tip would still be to be open about discovering and learning from all aspects of the language.

If you watch movies, do it without the subtitles and if you still want/need them, put them on English. If you're like me and watch Youtube and all that stuff, find people you like that's native in English and follow them. When you read, don't only do that on Tumblr or other "creative and leisure" platforms. The language, no matter which, will have a different tone compared to those of books, news-articles etc. I know this is so basic and essentially boring, but I've noticed how big of difference it makes.

Despite English is wide-spread in Sweden and used on multiple occasions, news-outlets doesn't present in English, nor are articles written in English all that often. You can hear people speak in English to their friends or family despite Swedish is their mother-tongue, but all of this is usually done in a fun way, like phrases or citations of someone. What I'm trying to say, nonnie, is that you need to actively expose yourself to media that's in English and the simplest way of doing that is through your media consumption. Bc, you won't forget your native language, it surrounds you in your every-day life.

And to throw in a last tip that is a much more direct way of broadening your vocabulary, a dictionary/Thesaurus, I can't stress how much this can help.

I don't know if you're a writer or not nonnie, but I'm not afraid to admit that I ALWAYS have a dictionary and/or Thesaurus tab open on my computer. Hence, the biggest difference between a native English speaker and myself (despite viewing myself as fluent), is that when they get tired or runs out of inspiration, their writing will still be more fleshed out than mine. They don't revert to the same kind of sentence structure, word choices or phrasing and all that jazz as I may. To have that dictionary to be able to just see different words when you think you've used a certain one a few too many times indirectly makes you learn/remember more words.

Think about how many times you may have needed to search for a word you know how it should sound in English but then isn't the correct translation from your native language and what you want to portray/reflect. Every word you inspect and turn down in search of the correct one is a word more you've seen and have the potential of remembering.

Sorry this turned into a bible nonnie, my thoughts just kinda ran away whilst writing😅

[screwtheprinceimtakingthehorse]

It does help a lot, thank you! ❤ luckily I do have experience in writing (both in creative writing as well as characterisation of ocs and pacing thanks to rpging) and I know my way around fandoms and the basics of fanfiction well enough, even if only as a reader. I do hope that I won't have any language related problems bc I am a native german speaker like yourself :D the only thing I am worried about is about not properly managing to write the personality of an already existing character

Well, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about your English! If you hadn’t said, I would have had no way of knowing. Some interference is to be expected, but that’s what editing is for :’D

As for characterisation and personality, there’s really only practice and intuition. Here’s a few things I find myself thinking about a lot:

study their speech patterns as well as word choice — if you nail the dialogue, you’ve won half the battle; and sentence melody and register is a huge part of that

to that end, try and imagine hearing anything you write for them said in their voice (I sometimes get my wires crossed and hear Daud’s dialogue in assassins in his German voice, which is... a trip and a half) — it may all sound ‘wrong’ in the beginning, but keep at it (see also: throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks)

as for introspection and self-image, you may have more or less info at your disposal, depending on the medium; and even a character’s own thoughts and opinions of themselves may not be the most reliable — in fanfic, you often end up blending a character’s view of themselves with your opinion of them as well as what other characters think of them

if you’re writing from their point of view, you’re gonna get to know them better than you may think you can, and fast — writing fanfic is an endless cycle of ‘what would ___ do?’; it’s the same in that as with ocs as you’re building them up. The longer you work on a character, the faster iteration becomes. The only difference is that canon has given you a template to work from (and then shred, cackling with glee, then set the pile on fire).

all of that said: you don’t have to know canon like the back of your hand to write a character well; what you need to know is what pushes their buttons, good or bad.

writing an existing character, warts and all, can feel restrictive because chances are you cannot simply decide that they’ll do X. You’re gonna have to coax them, prod them, persuade them. Coming up with good reasons for why they should do what you want them to is the way freedom lies, I promise. (see also: help, Daud discovered character development and now he wants things)

Basically, stick all your empathy and imagination into a blender and fling it at them. You’ll be grand.

[flamagenitus]

I'm terribly sorry, Kess, but you appear to have activated my trap card.

I honestly don't think it's googleable info! The project involved making small utility programs for gathering info about a big graph. The teacher knew what he was doing when he assigned it to us, and there's no easy way to just... look up the answer. The only way to do it properly is to actually know how to use python and to understand graph theory, and combine the two yourself to fulfill the assignment.

However. The people on this course are all biologists. Nobody knew programming before, like, 4 months ago, and there haven't really been enough classes teaching people python since then. Nobody knows how to program in python this year, and they kinda didn't know how to program in python last year. It's a problem inherent to the way the degree is taught, I think (and I do have many thoughts on the matter). When I took this module last year, I straight-up just didn't do the project bc I had no idea how to go about it. I'm actually pretty shocked I was able to get my programs working how I wanted them to this year! And I'm fairly sure the teacher will look at them and tear them to pieces bc they give the right results sometimes but don't actually work, like he has on non-evaluated work earlier in the semester lmao. So even though I'm "helping", it's kind of the blind leading the blind.

The actual reason my classmate is using ChatGPT, I'm pretty sure, is bc everyone in my class but me is using it routinely for assignments and practical classes. The teachers know this is happening, they just don't have a coherent policy about it yet other than, like, don't use it in exam settings pls. They want to incorporate its use into the curriculum, but they don't know how to yet. We had a teacher last year tell us to use ChatGPT to generate code (syntacticly perfect, logically terrible) then adapt it so that it worked, to show us the limitations of language model-generated code. It is a workable way of programming, but it requires that you know enough about programming the be able to fix the errors, and so it doesn't actually address the problems my class has: none of us know what the hell we're doing.

I'm not sure how my classmates are actually faring using ChatGPT, because while they are all smart people who have been given exactly the same information as me, and probably put in a lot more work and thought to the problem than me, there's no reasonable way to be like "hey person I don't really know, can I look at your work for the assignment? No no I'm not stealing it, promise, i just want to see if your methods actually work. What do u mean that's insulting". I myself am not using ChatGPT bc I am addicted to doing things the hard way, which involves reading loads and loads of very dry program documentation pages and spending hours banging my head against walls bc I didn't understand the difference between a matrix and a data frame. I'm the kind of freak who likes breaking things into their constituent parts and then rebuilding them, probably wrong, to figure out how they work, even if it takes a billion hours. Sometimes this works, but often it's just me repeatedly throwing myself against the walls of my own ignorance, desperately wishing there was an easier way to accomplish what I want. It sucks, but I won't learn how to use ChatGPT bc I simply don't trust it to do what I want to do, and also because I would rather do things myself because knowing that I did it is infinitely more satisfying. Like I said, I am addicted to doing things the hard way. (My classmates are biologists. I am a biochemist. There is a difference and the difference is that nobody has ever made them try to read an NMR spectrum.)(there's probably a reason I'm retaking my year c:)

Also: all the documentation available is in English and I am the only native English-speaker in the class. At least ChatGPT also exists in French and doesn't speak like a technical manual or a genie providing you with exactly the information you need and not a spare morsel more.

Anyway, I don't blame her for asking for help. We all need help, and since none of us are getting it from teachers we may as well band into little coalitions to share our confusions. I'm just used to working with my friend from last year, who only uses ChatGPT when she's desperate. Adding a new person who uses ChatGPT as a matter of course just made the gears in my brain grind bc I was trying to shift gears too fast! Hence the original post, basically. Also, I was at my grandma's house and my mum was treating me like a teenager, and I was generally kind of irritated bc family at Christmas

Trying to help one of my classmates with a programming project we all have due in 2 days and it's hard bc she keeps asking ChatGPT for code. Like. Girl. The language model isn't capable of logic and it cannot write a coherent python script for you