simonetingz

[deep-sea-anemone]

Rewatched Link Click in preparation for the 2nd season...Damn, I nearly forgot how good it was.

[master-gatherer]

hello!! feel free not to post this or anything, I just noticed your comment about polish/welsh/gaelic not having romanized versions and since I love this topic, I just thought you might like to know that technically theyre already romanized!!

the alphabets used by english, polish, welsh, and gaelic are all different versions of the roman alphabet (hence why it's called romanized!), but you can tell it's the same alphabet set because of how many letters they all have in common! I think a word that might be more relevant here is "orthography", which is basically how each language writes out it's language but it's super important bc it defines how the sounds map to the letters themselves.

whats happening for welsh and gaelic is that their orthography is just really different than english's, so for an English speaker, a lot of the letters and sounds don't seem to match up at all! meanwhile polish does have a lot in common with a few changes to the 26 letters but then they have a lot of additional letters and digraphs. it can actually quite hard to rewrite languages to have a more English orthography so that English speakers can see more easily what the language might sound like because English orthography is so complex and inconsistent (threw/through, sew/new, etc) but it's a really fascinating topic!!

(a bit of a sidebar here, but it's actually really cool to look into how different languages that don't use the roman alphabet try to come up with romanizations of their own languages! Chinese for instance has multiple systems for romanization, pinyin being one of the more popular ones, and then there a lot of inconsistencies with their orthography and english's!)

anyway sorry for dumping all this in your inbox! I just find linguistics stuff really interesting, and i wish a lot of it were more common knowledge!

Don't feel bad at all! This is all really fascinating.

See, I didn't realize there was a different thing from romanization that explains how the sounds work, hence why I conflated that with orthography. I have never heard that term before, but it explains why some romanizations confuse me or have changed (I'm thinking how tsar went to czar in English, even though I'm sure the original spelling in Russian/Cyrillic has stayed the same).

Thank you for the new info, it'll help me if I get down a rabbit hole for more research into this kind of stuff. Linguistics is fascinating to me but I have trouble getting my mind around it so a formal class seems intimidating 😅

[zhuhongs]

As I'm writing this marks my 5th full day in Taiwan. Its been good, its also been a lot. But yk, any big life change will come with these sort of feelings. Before I came here a lot of people said (rather ignorantly) I was basically asian anyways, so I'll fit right in. They had a very narrow idea of what asia was like and thought, oh you tick some of the stereotype boxes, you’ll fit in and stay there forever. I always knew that wasn't true, and people were saying it in bad faith. I’m indian, I like a lot of things about Asian culture and I know more than the average westerner but I was born and raised in the West. Now matter what, I will always be a Westerner, ya know. 

This is incredibly apparent to me as I have been living with 3 Japanese people. Now 4 since one just moved in. I find it incredibly funny, I was originally going to go to Japan back in 2020 and now I’m here in Taiwan getting the Japanese roommate experience. And I must say, it sure is something. I must preface, my roommates are incredibly nice. But that’s the thing, they’re too nice. They’re nice, polite, unobtrusive, and considerate to a fault. It makes me feel very uneasy. Like I can’t even make a sound. They’re so pleasant, have such inoffensive likes and interests that it feels so hard to be different even in the smallest things. For example, we clean a lot. Like they sweep up the hair on the floor around once or twice a day. And I shed farrrr more hair than they do and t’s just, i don’t know, strange. Or like they refuse to keep their belongings out, even if it’s neat. Like we always bring our toiletries and and out of the bathroom and leave nothing there. Even the floor mat gets put away after a shower. That blows my fucking mind. Like!?!?!? Why can’t I keep my shampoo inside the bathroom where its easy to access, why can’t the bathroom mat just, always be down. What’s the need to constantly put away and take things out. I don’t think this is reflective of Japan as a whole but moreso of these girls but, oh my god. It’s great that they are so clean. But as a very forgetful person, it makes me feel Veryyyyy on edge. But I have a feeling that sooner or later it will become less of an issue. It’s not a big deal, but yea. I’m just really not used to living in the same room as others. Also it doesn’t help that I can’t communicate effectively bc of the language barrier. We both try so hard but it just, doesn’t work out. It’s no ones fault though. It just is what it is. If we all shared an apartment with separate rooms, that’d be ideal. I could very easily do that. But this… it’s gonna a very interesting 3 months. My cousin offered for me to live with her if it gets too much, and i think I will take her up on it when my 3 month lease is up. Bc i’m NOT losing that money.

But tbh, i am also very different from my cousin. There are aspects of asian culture that I’ve always lived by that she will never like. But I feel like she’s more accepting than my roommates are. We coexist better. It feels no matter what, i will never fully mesh with anyone else. My existence has always been caught between two different paths of thoughts and people rarely consider a third path. But that’s okay, I’ve long accepted this about myself and made peace with it. It’s honestly funny how my cousin is different, but with my roommates our differences are a bit suffocating. Nevertheless I’ll never get tired of how mad my cousin gets when her bf and i talk to each other in chinese. It’s HILARIOUS. She’s like “BOTH OF YALL ARE NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS.. OH MY GOD” we enjoy to piss her off, it’s a love language. But for now I want to stay in the dorms. The next semester I’ll probably stay with her. Plus, my friends are coming back to Taiwan in january so i’ll have more than enough people to speak to in Chinese.

Honestly, this is living arrangement is the only challenging thing about living in Taiwan right now. Classes are a bit tough right now but I will easily catch up once my books come in. Taking public transport is getting easier by the day, and my chinese will no doubt improve but even at its current state, I can easily get around. I can order food, talk to cashiers, and even have a simple conversation with strangers. I’m overall doing great!! I’m just too introverted to be around people so often. Like the US is very different. The US is built off of solitary time. People commute all alone, live in separate rooms, it’s very easy to be alone and take up space. Well at least for me. Many cannot do that. But here, I’m always around others -- on the bus, on the train, at shops, at the dorms, on my walk to class, at the bus stop. Everywhere, I’m so lonely sometimes yet I am also surrounded. There are so many random times I want to cry but I kinda can’t. I always feel like others are staring at me but also averting their gaze. It’s a very unique sort of struggle. Of course, I choose this and I will never regret the decision, but there is a special sort of loneliness that comes with studying abroad, especially so far from home. 

I tried to explain it to my roommates but my Japanese isn’t good enough. But their foreignness is different than mine. Sure, more people speak english here, and my chinese is better than theirs. But there are so many Japanese people here too. On the street people don’t stare at them. They pass for Taiwanese on a first glance, the culture isn’t all that different from theirs: they can buy food that they’re used to, They can call their friends and family at almost any time bc there’s barely any time difference, if something happened, it’d be easy to go home or have someone visit, they’re used to this sort of city. But for me, its completely different. Which I chose, I understand I chose it, but I still need some time to get used to it. It’s a big change. I didn’t understand how big of a change it’d be. I don’t think anyone can fully understand until they are there. It’s an experience for sure.

But I think all of this is forcing myself to become much louder about the way I am. I used to hate the way western culture was So loud about individualism. I thought, isn’t it good to be considerate of others.. Why must it always be about what I want. But now I’m like… yea there’s a level of consideration i can give but I refuse to live my whole life trying to be palatable to others and take up as little space as possible. I will find my own way that’s a fusion of every culture I’ve encountered. There are no arbitrary societal rules I want to follow, only my own judgement. I follow my rules and I need to be louder about that.

I think a lot of people, regardless of ethnicity want to be like that and cannot bring themselves to do it. Like comparing the nightlife of taiwan with the daytime, I can tell there are so many repressed people out here looking for escape. This is true everywhere, but I just realized it here in Taipei. These next few months will be about me learning how to do that and be okay with it. I’m excited to see what kind of person I’ll be at the end of these 6 months. It’s day 5 and I feel like I’ve reached so many realizations about the world outside of my bubble of existence and it’s lovely. I can only imagine what the future will bring.

[meichenxi]

I just had my first Korean lesson on italki!!

Intelligent Thoughts On The Language As A Whole After One Hour Of Exposure: 

- aspiration my beloathed. it really is karma when the aspirated and unaspirated /t/ being allophones in English in the beginning of a word and that being a better cue to whether something is ‘voiced’ or not than actual voicing which helped me so much with learning Chinese (because Chinese operates on a very similar system as English where aspiration is actually more important, hence why wade-giles etc had everything spelt <ch> and <ch’> or <p> and <p’> rather than just <p> and <b> like pinyin) comes back and bites me in the arse whilst learning Korean. but LUCKILY for all parties concerned (me), I spent a summer teaching myself how to unaspirate my /ptk/ series for Hindi and distinguishing them by voice alone, which is not something natural to me as a native English speaker, so I am actually already fairly good at the aspirated/non aspirated distinction. I just need to actually remember to use it. learn languages it’ll be fun they said

- on a similar note. THE FAMOUS KOREAN GLOTTALISED STOPS!!!! guys come on!! the famous - ok maybe it’s just me / other linguists who know that one, but Korean basically has (and forgive me this is all remembered knowledge, I haven’t done any research myself since deciding to learn it) three series of stops. 1) unvoiced and unaspirated, 2) ‘tense’ or ‘fortis’ or ‘hard’ or ‘glottalised’ stops, which yeah as the name suggests nobody has any idea what to do with, they’re the subject of many many angry phoneticians’/phonologists’ drunk midnight duels, and 3) aspirated stops. the last are easy, we do them naturally in English all the time; the first are unideal but I should be ok bc of my time with the TERRIFYING MONSTROSITY that is the Hindi stop series; the second ones....well. well well well. the way the teacher did them in the lesson really was glottalised. (record scratch - quick phonetics lesson - we usually use something called the ‘pulmonic’ system i.e. the lungs to push air up through the voice box and create consonants, but you can also use the ingressive system i.e. breathing in [try it with [b] and [p]] and the epiglottal system which is where you use the glottis to create a little bubble of air way smaller than you’d get with the lungs and under way higher pressure, and when you release it it sounds very spitty and extra and cool. na’vi uses this.) glottalised X = epiglottal but either way it’s cool and I don’t know much about it so maybe expect some posts later? 

- I don’t think the guy released how hard I was quietly fangirling about a set of consonants 

- oh LOOK batchim they’re unreleased sometimes!! how exciting!! I love a good unreleased consonant. the pressure is killing me. and ANOTHER famous thing!!!!!!! all of the twenty gazillion consonants that all get pronounced as [t] in final position!!!!!!!! if you don’t know this one (very reasonable) this is exciting because it means that when combined with postpositions you get some really really interesting backformations - basically people know that something ends in a [t] but they don’t know whether that is an underlying [t] or [s] or what! and then sometimes a loanword that then ends in a [t] in English gets hyper corrected to an [s]. or....something. again, this is knowledge four years hence. anyway it’s very cool. 

- we really did just ‘learn hangul’ in one hour huh. wow. I mean my brain hurts and I need to consolidate but. what a change from chinese. 

- Korean appears to have preserved elements of Middle Chinese phonology / non-Mandarin dialects in its loanwords!!!! which I mean makes perfect sense. but there’s loads and loads of [m] going on where you’d expect *mumble mumble maybe w* and that’s more like Cantonese which obviously preserves different features and....yeah I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff about to be thrown into a precipice but as the protagonist, it will only make me stronger

- already seeing lots of Chinese loanwords. that’s cool. that’s very cool. I can get behind that. shame about the tragic loss of the palatalised-retroflex distinction (q/j/x vs ch/zh/sh) but I guess some sacrifices had to be made

- korean. had tone???? and I THINK I read somewhere waaaaay back in first year of my degree that maybe there are dialects in which it is either being reintroduced (naturally, I hasten to add, because that makes it sound deliberate) or it hasn't fully left - YES I JUST CHECKED and the first thing that comes up is ‘tonogenesis in contemporary Seoul Korean’ BROOOOOOO do you understand why that is so exciting?? we essentially have 0 opportunities to study the process of tonogenesis in Real Life, and endless opportunities to see the loss of tone / the drastic consequences after it is lost, and that could potentially be vital in helping map and better understand the histories of languages in the sino-tibetan language family and others....

- next lesson! we are learning subject markers! and getting started! with verbs!!!!! you know I could literally die for verb final languages. I don’t know why. but I just think they are the sexiest thing on the planet

Conclusion: 

- Korean seems cool?

- bring it on.

[pumpkinpaix]

anonymous:

I just discovered your mdzs pronunciation stuff and it's super helpful!!! Especially to an english speaker, it's so helpful to hear everything pronounced slowly! Would you ever consider doing more but on Chinese basics? Like tones, or differences between similar sounds? (But please don't feel obligated! Just a suggestion bc I find your pronunciation super helpful :) 

hhhhh the file was too big for tumblr :’) even after I exported it at medium instead of standard quality, so i made a soundcloud after all aha.... it’s downloadable, even!

anyways! chinese school with cyan? :D transcript with helpful links under the cut.

previous chinese pronunciation posts with pinyin if you want to go back review them armed with new knowledge to practice: mdzs names 1, mdzs names 2

rough transcript (brackets indicate things i didn’t say but wanted to add as a note, or laughs lol):

hello everyone! okay, so I’m going to make an attempt to do some basic pinyin, I guess, a basic pinyin post? so the goal is by the end you should be able to hopefully! look at basic pinyin or any pinyin word and get a general sense of how it might sound. this is not comprehensive, and you shouldn’t take it as such,  but i hope you might be able to get a good foundation out of it? I don’t know, just for sort of, a basic general overview.

I’ll use some MDZS words or names or whatever to I guess keep it fun as examples? But the rules should be generally applicable across the board. This is geared towards native English speakers because that’s what I am. I am not a linguist, just a layperson, so I’m going to be explaining like a layperson.

So, this is pinyin with cyan! chinese school with cyan. horrible, I thought i escaped this [laugh] oh, all those horrible saturdays. [all sounds will be read with first tone unless otherwise indicated]

okay, so, I’m going to do the basic vowels first. there are five so it’s: a o e i u ü

so I’ll do that a — oh wait, no there’s six, oh gosh! okay. bad start! so there are SIX basic vowels: a o e i u ü

so i’ll do that one more time: a o e i u ü

so there’s actually a seventh vowel sound, but we can get to that in a minute. it’s not included in the orthography.

so ü is usually the hardest for native english speakers since it doesn’t exist in english, but a friend of mine recently explained it really well. so if you say “ee” just like, “ee” like in creek or something like that, then shape your lips as if you’re saying “oo”.  so if you speak french or german, it might be easier for you, those are just the two languages I’m familiar with. the ü is the same as the ü in german, like in die Tür, in french it’s just like you know, la lune, mur, etc.

basically say “ee” then move your lips until it looks like you’re saying “oo” — eeeeeüüüü or you can do the opposite, you can say “oo” then move your tongue as if it’s saying “ee” so: ooooüüüüüü. ü. and that’s basically it.

so now i’m going to do the initial consonants. that’s all the vowels. but the initial consonants, the consonants, or the consonant sounds that can start words, there are… well there’s not that many, but I’ll go through them really quick. there is an order, and every consonant is associated, every initial consonant is associated with a natural vowel sound and they come in groups. the order that i learned them in is this:

b p m f • d t n l g k h • j q x • z c s zh ch sh r

[repeated slower]

b(o) p(o) m(o) f(o) • d(e) t(e) n(e) l(e) g(e) k(e) h(e) • j(i) q(i) x(i) • z(i) c(i) s(i) zh(i) ch(i) sh(i) r(i)

I think the official one [the official order, i mean] might have the z c s and the zh ch sh r switched, but it doesn’t really matter they’re both in the same group. so you’ll notice that there are only four naturally associated vowels: o e i and ï [not sure if this is technically the right way to write it, but it’s convenient for illustrative purposes here].

so ï is the one that’s with the z c s, zh ch sh r group. I also think this is a pretty hard vowel to pronounce for english speakers, but i don’t really have a handy way of explaining it. i’ll try though!

so for things like the z c s sounds: say “sss” like you would in english. “ssss” then change your lips to the way you say “ee” and then vocalize without moving your tongue. so you can also produce this sound without changing your lip shape, but doing so will kind of force it, or make it easier to find I think. so ssssssi. sssssi. so that was me doing the whole process with saying ssss and then moving my lips and then vocalizing. but i can also do it with my lips rounded. “si”. that’s me with lips rounded, but having the lips wide like that helps i think

[or you can just vocalize “zzzzz” like in “buzz” or “jazz”. that zzzzzz sound gives you the vowel you want. that probably would’ve been an easier way to explain it haha.]

for the zh ch sh r sounds, to get that, you can say “juh” like how you would say j, a j sound in english, so it’s “juh” but dont’ say the “uh” just stick to the “j”. so that’s the zh sound. “zhii” just like hold it. then ch sh r. I don’t know, I think that’s pretty intuitive once you get those.

in terms of the consonants that i think that are difficult, they are d, j q x and z maybe? so i’ll go over them.

so d taps the palate in english, “duh”, “duh”. the d sound, it taps further back on the little bump [on the roof of your mouth] there, but it taps on the teeth in chinese. I think it’s a non-aspirated t sound? so say “tuh” but then instead of having that breath, just take that out. “de”. it’s a non-aspirated t, it taps in the same spot. so that’s the d, the “de” sound.

j q x, it’s the same sort of things, if you stretch your lips, I think i helps to move it into the right space. so instead of “juh” it’s “ji”. “ji”. “ji ji ji ji”. “qi”, “xi”. the q has the “ch” sound, but instead of sitting so far in the front, it sits a little further back [in the mouth]. instead of “ch” which is the ch, it’s “qi”, which is moving further back. and same with “xi”. instead of “sh” it’s “x”. i don’t know if that helps [laugh]. but instead of “sh” it’s “x”. so “xi”.

again, instead of “ch” it’s “q” and instead of “sh” it’s “x” [laugh]

[I forgot to talk about z oops. it’s basically a combination of d and z in english: “dz”. like the end of “hands”. that “dz” sound.]

okay, so, you can start a word with any of the vowels, any of them can be initials, but some of them will change orthography when they’re at the start of a word. so i think it’s pretty intuitive, but a o e all stay the same. but the “i” sound, the i, turns into a y, the “u”, the u, turns into a w, and the “ü”, the ü turns into yu. so “yu”.

okay, so that’s all the initials! that’s it! that’s not too bad.

okay, so now I’m going to start doing the finals, like the ends of words. you can end any word with any of the vowels, but I’m going to include them anyways because it’s in the table. i just copied this table from wikipedia because it’s i think pretty intuitive and clearly stated. they show both how the sound would be written as a full word and how it would be spelled when it was attached to an initial. so basically what i just talked about regarding changing orthography when you start a word with vowels, things like that.

[link to table in wikipedia]

okay starting with the first row, I’m pretty sure this is ï. the i sound that i said was difficult:

[row 1]

so I’m going to do that again. I’m going to do each one twice and then we’re going to move onto the second row.

[row 1 repeated, each sound twice]

okay, now the second row:

[row 2]

so we’re going to do the same thing again, twice each:

[row 2 repeated, each sound twice]

okay, and the third row:

[row 3]

and again, twice each:

[row 3 repeated, each sound twice]

and then the final row:

[row 4]

and then one more time, twice each:

[row 4 repeated, each sound twice]

okay so that’s it, that’s all the finals I think.

so I think -(i)un/yun is probably one of the harder sounds, the -un with the y at the beginning, the -iun? “yun”, with the umlaut. I don’t really know how to explain how to pronounce that one, but you know it’s the… yun [laugh]

okay so a note on u vs ü. when a word begins with j q x or y, and it’s followed by a u, it’s automatically be pronounced as ü even though it will not be marked. so here are some examples.

names like Ā’Yuàn: yuàn. it’s a ü sound automatically, and it’s not marked in the orthography. or Yú Zǐyuān. yú zǐ yuān. same thing. and then with something like in hánguāng-jūn, jūn, the j the “ji” combined with the -un becomes “jun” like the “yun” sound. or Jīn Zixuān. Xuān. Xuān. it’s the ü sound.

so an example of the same final spellings but with different initials. like the yuàn in ā’yuàn — you can see it automatically changes to an ü pronunciation, but spelled the same way the -uan ending, but you have a different starting consonant that’s not one of the exceptions, so “le” — so in luànzàng gǎng. luàn. it’s “u”. luàn. and then for like yú, yú zǐyuān, yú, instead of the ü, in jīn rúlán, rú, rú, it’s the “u” sound, and they’re marked the same way.

okay! yeah that’s pretty much it. that’s like all the basic sounds in chinese, I’m pretty sure. [laugh] it’s not actually that hard. i mean, it’s obviously hard, but there’s not as many sounds as you expect, or it’s less complex than you might think.

so obviously now we have to deal with tones. i know this is the one that everybody finds really scary, but i actually i know it’s easy for me to say because i’m a native speaker, but i actually think they’re very intuitive and easy to hear, as tones go. it’s gonna be fine. anyways, we’re gonna get through it.

here is how i remember tones: I do it with a cadence. and i literally sometimes have to go through this cadence on words when i’m not sure how to identify what tone they are. this is how i learned it, my grandmother taught me this, you know, i mean, it’s very standard, but:

ā á ǎ à

or hummed it’s: ¯ ´ ˇ `

and then I’ll do it again:

ā á ǎ à

¯ ´ ˇ `

so yeah, i really do sing it sometimes when i’m trying to figure out or remember what tone mark goes on something, I go dūh dúh dǔh dùh [laugh] over and over again until i figure it out.

and yeah, that’s it! they’re pretty intuitive, they follow the path of the tone, or the shape of the tone markers. so you can see the ā is flat, the á goes up, the ǎ goes down and then up, ǎ, and then à, the fourth one, just goes down.

so whenever you’re writing a tone mark on a word, they always go on the last vowel UNLESS there’s an a or e present. those always take precedence. I’ll spell out a couple of examples in the text.

[EXAMPLES: hào not haò and méi not meí, but jiù]

[laugh]

so i will go over, um… okay, i think my dad’s having a meeting downstairs, so maybe you’ll hear him in the background, but okay, the last thing i will go over a couple of sandhi rules, just a few! this isn’t all of them, i think there might be five? but i’m just going to do the three that are most relevant or the most commonly seen I think, or the ones that I think about that will trip you up most likely, i think, when you’re pronouncing things.

so the one that everybody knows, or the one that everybody teaches first, i think is the two third tones in a row will cause the first third tone to turn into a second tone. so for example, in Yílíng Lǎozǔ. “Láozǔ”. the two characters by themselves are lǎo and zǔ, but because they’re right next to each other, it becomes láo, second tone, “láozǔ”. [NOTE: the pinyin will still be spelled as lǎozǔ. you will just automatically read it aloud as láozǔ] so instead of “lǎo zǔ”, it’s “láozǔ”.

and then, the second thing that a third tone does is that a third tone that is followed by anything that is not a third tone drops to a thing that is called a low tone, I know i said there are only four, but this is… here’s an example. [there is also the soft tone, which is kind of the absence of tone, but I’m not going to talk about it here haha] in liǎnfāng-zūn, jin guangyao’s title.

liǎnfāng-zūn, you can kinda hear it doesn’t really rise again at the liǎn, liǎn, liǎn, by itself it goes down up, like a valley, but when it’s followed by the rest of the title, liǎnfāng-zūn, it just kinda sits at the bottom and then jumps back up. liǎnfāng-zūn, liǎnfāng-zūn, it just kind of sits at the bottom as opposed to coming back up, so it’s still. it still follows the same curve, it just doesn’t quite come back up i think

i actually had to look that one up, because I was like. oh is that real? i hadn’t noticed it.

but the third tone on its own is just the third tone, so for example, in xuē yáng’s courtesy name, xuē chéngměi, měi, you can hear it there, it comes back up—oh birds!

so xuē chéngměi, měi. dǔh. [laugh]

[LOL I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT THE THIRD SANDHI RULE I WAS GONNA TALK ABOUT. you can read about it in the link to sandhi rules i’m going to post at the end of the post.]

so yeah, that’s pretty much it actually! hooray! I’m sure, I mean, chinese is a whole language, so it’s complicated, this won’t really get you to a point where you can read pinyin entirely, but i think those are like the basic rules that i use when i’m reading pinyin, but of course, i’ve been reading pinyin for a really long time, that was the primary way i engaged with chinese text for many many years because i was illiterate! i’m still pretty illiterate, but that’s okay. i’m getting better! but yeah, so like i said, this isn’t comprehensive. if it was horribly confusing, if there was stuff in it that just didn’t make any sense, you can ask me questions! I will try to answer them. my brother’s coming home today, and i’ve been using his desk to record because his room has been empty, so i’ll have to figure out something else. but for now, um, yeah!

okay, bye. :)

/end transcript

okay!! so here are the promised links:

tone sandhi rules

very useful interactive table where you can click on sounds to hear them read aloud! (linked to me by @nerd-bastard​ thank you so much!)

obviously the wikipedia page is very good, though it’s a little dense

@tonyglowheart​ sent me a thread of someone reading out mxtx names on twitter here! the reader has a different accent than i do (they say they sound like they’re from the northern mainland. i would guess my accent is probably closer to something near shanghai? since I learned pronunciation from my grandmother, and then of course tempered by my american upbringing)

I would probably recommend going back to the other pronunciation posts I made to see a variation of sounds written out with different tones? i feel like that would be helpful!

anyways WOO thanks for your patience, it’s been a minute. brain’s doing kinda oomf these days, but we’re gonna make it :’) state of the world is. something.

normally i would just link my ko-fi here, but this time, i’m going to say check out my donations tag or do your own research into someplace more in need to put your money instead. :)

[kaepopsicle]

ncts majors in uni.

this is all my personal opinion. tehe シ enjoy! (some of them might have majors & minors :))

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𝐽𝐼𝑆𝑈𝑁𝐺 . 𝑆𝑂𝐶𝐼𝑂𝐿𝑂𝐺𝑌 // 𝐷𝐴𝑁𝐶𝐸

I feel like since he has a big heart he would like learning about others

The dance one is kind of a given, he does it as a minor but more for the fun of it

I can see him being someone that works with social services

Even though he’s shy he’s good at understanding others

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𝐶𝐻𝐸𝑁𝐿𝐸 . 𝑆𝑃𝑂𝑅𝑇𝑆 𝐵𝑅𝑂𝐴𝐷𝐶𝐴𝑆𝑇𝐼𝑁𝐺

He is such a good speaker I can see him being a sports broadcaster

At basketball games specifically

He has a strong voice which he can use for things like that

He also loves sports (especially basketball) and I think he would do a good job at it

if he was the sports broadcaster I might actually watch sports

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𝑌𝐴𝑁𝐺𝑌𝐴𝑁𝐺 . 𝐿𝐴𝑊

This boy has such a big mouth and just knows what to say at the right times

But he also seems like the type of person to have a strong sense of justice

He seems like an intelligent person who knows what’s right and wrong (good morales)

Him also being charming and convincing he could do a good job at getting people to believe what he’s saying

Him being a lawyer is just a hot concept

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𝐽𝐴𝐸𝑀𝐼𝑁 . 𝑃𝑅𝐸 𝑀𝐸𝐷 (ℎ𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑙𝑦 𝑖 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑠𝑒𝑒 ℎ𝑖𝑚 𝑏𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑎 𝑝ℎ𝑜𝑡𝑜𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑝ℎ𝑦 𝑚𝑎𝑗𝑜𝑟 𝑡𝑜𝑜)

He has said before if he wasn’t an idol he would be an doctor

And just big hearted nana would be such a good doctor

He probably would be a pediatrician, he’s so good with kids

He’s also quite intelligent as well so I know he would be good in med school

Just imagine him as a doctor y’all lab coat in all, I would never eat an apple

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𝐻𝐴𝐸𝐶𝐻𝐴𝑁 . 𝐶𝑅𝐼𝑀𝐼𝑁𝐴𝐿 𝐽𝑈𝑆𝑇𝐼𝐶𝐸 (𝑖 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑠𝑒𝑒 ℎ𝑖𝑚 𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑜 𝑑𝑜 𝑗𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑎𝑚//𝑏𝑟𝑜𝑎𝑑𝑐𝑎𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔)

For some reason I just see him being a criminal justice major

Works as a detective, he is good at figuring things out I feel like

His voice is also so nice to listen to and he seems to know what he’s talking about

He has a big heart for understanding others so he would do a good job at seeing all the sides to an investigation

Also just imagine him in a long brown trench coat and just ughhhh

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𝐽𝐸𝑁𝑂 . 𝐸𝑋𝐸𝑅𝐶𝐼𝑆𝐸 𝑆𝐶𝐼𝐸𝑁𝐶𝐸 // 𝑆𝑃𝑂𝑅𝑇𝑆 𝐸𝐷𝑈𝐶𝐴𝑇𝐼𝑂𝑁

Since jeno is such an athletic person it’s not a surprise he would be good at exercise science

Him being a physical education teacher or a trainer just fits

He’s so patient and motivational that it would be easy for him to help others

Even though he’s on the shyer side he seems like someone who would be good at leading

GYM TEACHER!JENO OR WEIGHT TRAINER!JENO

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𝑅𝐸𝑁𝐽𝑈𝑁 . 𝐴𝑅𝑇 𝐻𝐼𝑆𝑇𝑂𝑅𝑌

He just has that vibe to him

He doesn’t just like something for being something he loves the meaning behind it

Being an art history major he would yes, do art but also be able to learn and tell stories about it

He just seems like an artistic and poetic person, he just would fit being some sort of art history professor or something

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𝐻𝐸𝑁𝐷𝐸𝑅𝑌 . 𝐶𝑈𝐿𝑇𝑈𝑅𝐴𝐿 𝑆𝑇𝑈𝐷𝐼𝐸𝑆 // 𝐸𝐷𝑈𝐶𝐴𝑇𝐼𝑂𝑁

I know he loves learning other languages and of other cultures (he has said it before but I can’t remember where)

So him being a cultural studies major just fits, him traveling meeting new people and learning about them

I also think since he loves teaching Ten mandarin he is patient and gentle

He would make a great teacher too! Since he just all around seems like a warm hearted, lovely individual

If he taught a class no one would ever skip it

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𝑋𝐼𝐴𝑂𝐽𝑈𝑁 . 𝑉𝐸𝑇𝐸𝑅𝑁𝐴𝑅𝑌 𝑀𝐸𝐷𝐼𝐶𝐼𝑁𝐸 // 𝑊𝑅𝐼𝑇𝐼𝑁𝐺

Okay so we all know how Xiao is with Bella and the cats, so it’s not a surprise he would want to do something evolving animals

Being a veterinarian fits, he can also sing while taking care of the animals

He just has that kind of heart you know?

Finds them beautiful and special and he is also good at comforting people if they lose a pet

But also since he has such a talent for writing I can see him minoring in writing, songwriting, poetry, etc.

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𝑀𝐴𝑅𝐾 . 𝐶𝑂𝑀𝑀𝑈𝑁𝐼𝐶𝐴𝑇𝐼𝑂𝑁𝑆 // 𝐸𝑁𝐺𝐿𝐼𝑆𝐻 𝐿𝐼𝑇𝐸𝑅𝐴𝑇𝑈𝑅𝐸

So for mark I had a little trouble thinking about what he would want to do, he has a lot of strengths

But one of his strengths is talking, he’s not the best at technology but him describing stuff seems to be powerful

So a communications // English literature major seems pretty fitting

He could be a communications director and brand leader for some big company

He also is a natural born leader (I blame the leo in him) so he would be good at leading people

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𝐿𝑈𝐶𝐴𝑆 . 𝐸𝑁𝐺𝐼𝑁𝐸𝐸𝑅𝐼𝑁𝐺 // 𝑁𝑈𝑅𝑆𝐼𝑁𝐺

I feel like Lucas is honestly a really sweet guy who would love to take care of others so a nurse fits him

And he also just seems like someone who’s intelligent and kindness is underestimated

And honestly him being the type of person to pick an easy major 😂 so he would pick engineering and actually like it

I’m not sure what kind of career he would do, but I just know he would be good at whatever he chooses

He’s a quick learner :) why do I want to see him as a nurse so bad

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𝐽𝑈𝑁𝐺𝑊𝑂𝑂 . 𝑁𝑈𝑅𝑆𝐼𝑁𝐺 𝑃𝐴𝑅𝑇 𝑇𝑊𝑂. 𝐹𝑂𝑂𝐷 𝑆𝐶𝐼𝐸𝑁𝐶𝐸

I can see him being some sort of nutritional nurse

He loves food and eating it but he’s also a big softie

So why not combine both of his passions and make a career out of it

He can test different foods and make sure they are healthy enough for others

And make diet plans for patients in the hospital for Dr. Na

imagine him, Jaemin & Lucas working in the same hospital omfg

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𝑊𝐼𝑁𝑊𝐼𝑁 . 𝐶𝐻𝐼𝑁𝐸𝑆𝐸 𝐻𝐼𝑆𝑇𝑂𝑅𝑌 // 𝑇𝑅𝐴𝐷𝐼𝑇𝐼𝑂𝑁𝐴𝐿 𝐷𝐴𝑁𝐶𝐸

Winwin just seems like the type of person to be an professional dancer

But in traditional Chinese dance

Since that’s what he is trained in

He has that raw, beautiful talent to him that he would be a good person to have shows and show off those talents

But studying in chinese history could be a back up in case he wants to settle down

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𝐽𝐴𝐸𝐻𝑌𝑈𝑁 . 𝐸𝐿𝐸𝑀𝐸𝑁𝑇𝐴𝑅𝑌 𝐸𝐷𝑈𝐶𝐴𝑇𝐼𝑂𝑁

Okay so Jae being the strong and warm person he is and how much he loves kids he would make an amazing elementary school teacher

He has a way with kids and making them listen to him

He would make it fun and beneficial

All of the kids would be in awe about him they just couldn’t help but pay attention

All of the female (and maybe some male) teachers have crushes on him

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𝑇𝐸𝑁 . 𝐴𝑅𝑇 // 𝐸𝑁𝐺𝐿𝐼𝑆𝐻

Okie so this one is a given

He is a jack of all trades

There is nothing he isn’t good at, so personally he could do whatever he wanted

But since art is a strong passion I can see him being a professional artist, maybe owning an art museum

But also I see him minoring in English since he does love the language and speaking it, he could move to an western country and speak or teach it

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𝐷𝑂𝑌𝑂𝑈𝑁𝐺 . 𝑅𝐴𝐷𝐼𝑂 𝐵𝑅𝑂𝐴𝐷𝐶𝐴𝑆𝑇𝐼𝑁𝐺 // 𝐾𝑂𝑅𝐸𝐴𝑁 𝐿𝐼𝑇𝐸𝑅𝐴𝑇𝑈𝑅𝐸

Okay so three words; Doyoung radio show

He would have his own show and talk every morning

He would talk about pretty much anything, his life being an idol, his friends, family

Deep stuff dumb shit

Anything, and the korean literature could also just be a back up, he would do good in both

Vroom vroom talk show is quaking

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𝑌𝑈𝑇𝐴 . 𝑊𝑂𝑀𝐸𝑁𝑆 𝐺𝐸𝑁𝐷𝐸𝑅 𝑆𝑇𝑈𝐷𝐼𝐸𝑆 // 𝐽𝐴𝑃𝐴𝑁𝐸𝑆𝐸 𝐿𝐼𝑇𝐸𝑅𝐴𝑇𝑈𝑅𝐸

So we all know Yuta is a feminist (WE FUCKING STAN) so him being an women’s gender studies major just makes sense

He would want to learn anything he can about women and even be a women counselor or someone who helps women going through stress

Also Japanese literature just bc you know he is Japanese and I think he would do a good job at that too

But imagining him being someone who helps women in tough situations and just being an all around MAN makes me cry

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𝐾𝑈𝑁 . 𝐶𝑈𝐿𝐼𝑁𝐴𝑅𝑌 // 𝑃𝐼𝐴𝑁𝑂

I think you guys saw this one coming

He has such a passion and talent for cooking he might even own his own restaurant!!

He is a good leader so being a head chef and telling people how to cook things and also being able to make things he wants to just sounds like a good plan for him

And piano minor simply for the fact he loves playing for fun

He would travel around the world making food for famous people and just wowwww

Gordon Ramsey is quaking

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𝑇𝐴𝐸𝑌𝑂𝑁𝐺 . 𝑃𝑆𝑌𝐶𝐻𝑂𝐿𝑂𝐺𝑌

Honestly Taeyong being a psychology major isn’t surprising

He has been through so much in his life that his heart just feels like he should help others

Him being such a gentle sweet person it wouldn’t be hard to make others feel comfortable around him

His presence all around is calming, he would do a good job just listening to people and maybe helping them

HE IS JUST SUCH A SWEET PERSON IM SOFT

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𝐽𝑂𝐻𝑁𝑁𝑌 . 𝐵𝑈𝑆𝐼𝑁𝐸𝑆𝑆 // 𝑃𝐻𝑂𝑇𝑂𝐺𝑅𝐴𝑃𝐻𝑌

Hear me out, Johnny opening a coffee shop in Chicago

He would take pictures of the city and use it as interior design and he would make his own bouquets and have lots of plants around the coffee shop

It would be a very hip shop where a lot of college students goes

He would be very popular and everyone would know him

People would probably just go to his coffee shop to see him and taste his coffeee

I mean who wouldn’t want to go to Johnnys coffee shop ??? (Omg he should call it Johns Joe) hahaha I’m sorry I’m laughing at myself)

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𝑇𝐴𝐸𝐼𝐿 . 𝑀𝑈𝑆𝐼𝐶 𝑆𝑇𝑈𝐷𝐼𝐸𝑆

Again this is a given

Taeil just screams music teacher

Choir teacher, travels the country having his class and choirs sing in competitions

He is such a calm soul he would be good at it

And his voice is ANGELIC so it would be such an honor to be taught by him

He also just seems like he knows what he is talking about when it comes to music

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[yue-muffin]

@mejomonster I’m sorry I wrote an ESSAY AHH. The thought of squishing it in the messages was horrifying haha.

Ok ok. First, I genuinely LOVE open discussion about translating. :3 If it was a more stable career, I would have gladly thrown myself at it in a heartbeat. You bring up some excellent points that I’ve lovingly stewed over with no one to talk to about for years haha.

In my early translation days I also preferred more direct translations even if they ended up stilted, but nowadays I prefer looser translations that prioritize the original intent over the original wording. Part of it is, that direct translations help you learn more. If every translation omits the original chengyu for an English equivalent, you’ll never end up learning that chengyu and its cultural context. So I get where you’re coming from! It took me a long time to get over that stage myself...

Ok, now my Translator Brain will step up lol.

Backing up a bit, the first step, assuming no language limitations, translation is…you’re basically the god of your own little world, haha. Before you translate a single word, you have to decide your intended audience. This is also where you decide whether you’re making a translation or a localization. People get all up in arms about localizations, and I have strong (negative) feelings towards some. But localizations have their place, they get new fans into a work, bc they’re geared perfectly for the average, casual player/reader/watcher. Pokemon (the game) is actually a really good example of this. The names of the Pokemon are brilliantly clever in each respective language bc they went for localization instead of literal translations. 

Early translations of the Tale of Genji, while…problematic and heavy on the orientalism, had their place at the time bc it made people interested in the work and Japanese culture, whereas they wouldn’t have cared nearly as much probably if the translation was not approachable. Nowadays, we have much more accurate translations of Genji :) with delicious footnotes :). This is why I don’t understand why people get SO up in arms about translation poaching. Imagine if there was only (1) one version of Genji?? Or any other classical work?? If someone wants to use their valuable time to make a translation on something that already has one, that’s entirely their perogative.

When not going for a hard localization, the choice then falls on: what do I translate more literally, what do I NEED to convert to fully “English” wording to make sense.

Oooh yeah, and stilted characters/narratives! That’s a great point. You also have to recognize when some characters or situations just…do sound stiff in the original, and you should keep that stiffness in English. I think this is a skill that comes with fluency with the language (ex: Lan Wangji from MDZS, I THINK he’s supposed to just be succinct and reticent, but depending on how you translate him, he seems rude or bad with words. Unfortunately, English is a language that does NOT deal in word economy, so you pretty much have to make him say a lot in English or else people will get the wrong idea…like I did.)

In the novel I translate, one character is this exact scenario and idk know how to word him in English sometimes. He speaks informally (inappropriately so sometimes), but it’s a little stilted bc he’s not had much exposure to the outside world, and speaks like he’s regurgitating what he’s been taught by his parental figure. It’s really difficult to get that across in English without making him sound too much one way or the other lol.

I could talk for DAYS about good and bad Japanese localizations/translations. :D I have never played Kingdom Hearts but totally understand- there are SO many games/movies where I was sad at the stuff lost in translation, but some of them are so good at maintaining the overall context and feel, and that’s just a trade-off that has to be made. I do get sad when a localization isn’t as good, or outright changes a character’s story arc tho. >:|

It’s also definitely a choice whether to keep much of the original terms (Shimei/shidi etc). I tend to prefer them to stay in too, but minimally if that makes sense? Sometimes I see translations where they keep a lot of them in, which is great for me but my inner translator cringes at how hard it would be to keep up for someone who doesn’t know the language.

(Asura to Vanquishers is 100% unacceptable I Do Not Care About Excuses lol. Also, yao/yaoguai, and yokai I feel are ones that should stay untranslated 100% of the time. You run into so many grey areas and issues if you try to translate these terms into English bc there’s simply no equivalent (or...you will translate 1 thing as “spirit” and later encounter a totally separate word that can also be translated as “spirit” and be left unable to explain the difference without a footnote) and the English terms are too loaded with their own cultural context…

Ooh yeah I…”love” those phrases that NEED to be worded differently in English. Some are easy, some are ??? HOW do I- and GAH I hate filler words lol. You really need to learn when they’re used by exposure lol bc all explanations/definitions I’ve found do not really explain when to use things like 就 lol yeah, emphasis but how do I convert to english?? Japanese has a lot of little particles like that (not as many as Chinese tho) and occasionally I’m all ?? OK, so DID this change the meaning of the sentence or nah…Part of dealing with those, to me, is learning to tell when you can just drop them like a hot potato and convey the feeling in the overall sentence instead haha.

AHH Sha Po Lang…that translation sounds like it speaks to my heart and also very difficult to craft. The Most Difficult VN I Have Seen, Ever is one where the original writing is so…good but also ridiculous? Like, the reason this VN is so annoying to translate and read (native speakers had to get the dictionary out lol), is bc it uses many obscure terms, its word economy is off the charts. But the narrative isn’t that dense just for the lolz. It’s bc the MC is a scholar? Or, like, a well educated and thoughtful student who feels very deeply about the world and things happening, so he just…waxes poetic. GAH when the narrative Fits the characters and their world so well, my heart just gets happy.

[fresh-bag-of-ham]

a ramble about pinyin/english speakers trying to pronounce chinese words that no one asked for! hopefully this helps one person?

so Pinyin is the official phonetic romanization system for Mandarin Chinese in Mainland China. It was designed by Chinese linguists to improve literacy rates in China, so it's designed first and foremost for native speakers and not to be immediately legible to English speakers/other Roman alphabet users, unfortunately for us! (The next most popular romanization system, Wade-Giles, was designed by two Brits, but it's... not better lol. It gets used more in Taiwan, especially for names. Mao Zedong is PY, Mao Tse-tung is WG.)

The first thing you do when you're taking a beginner Chinese course is you drill consonants (technically called "initials") in groups according to how they're formed and the sets of vowels/endings (technically called "finals") that they pair with.

The most immediately annoying thing is the final "i" -- it never makes the same damn vowel sound! Ok that's not quite true, but with some initials, "i" works as a filler/neutral final and different groups of initials have different neutral vowels. These groups are:

1) zhi/chi/shi/ri -- The retroflex consonants! The group that makes the least English-like "i" sound. Pull your tongue back in your mouth and say "jury" without the y, "church" without the last ch, "shirt" without the t, and... "r" is like an English r that's approaching the french-j [ʒ] sound that you wish the pinyin "zh" represented instead. We would drill "zhi chi shi ri" over and over in class bc you say them all with the exact same mouth shape!

Zhi as in zhiji (soulmate), shi as in shijie (Senior Sister) and jing shi (The Silent Room). Chī means "to eat", also Chifeng-zun is Scarlet Peak Master. Rì means day, or sun! "Sunshot Campaign" is "Shè Rì Zhī Zhēng", all retroflex initials! Cool!

2) zi/si/ci -- The English short "i" sound. You've heard it a million times: gongzihhhhhh!!!  Gōngzǐ aka young lord, same zi as in tùzi (rabbit), and si as in everyone's fave Lan Sizhui (pronounced like sih-jway) and everyone's least fave Jiang Cheng telling Wei Wuxian to go die: "nǐ qù sǐ ba!" Don't think there's a ci I can easily point out, but fun fact the pinyin "c" is pronounced kind of like a hard "ts" sound! Tsangse Sanren not Kangse Sanren!

3) Everything else with "i" -- the long "ee" sound you've been dreaming of! This is “i” as an actual final and not plonked in as a filler. Wangji, Yanli, Xichen, Qishan, Yiling, WuJi, ni (you), didi (younger brother), bu bi (when Lan Zhan is being self-denying and says "no need"), di yi (first), qi (energy), and on and on and on. You’ve probably been pronouncing all these right all along, congrats!

The only consolation is that these combos will always make the same sound. When you hear a “ch”+ee” sound, that’s always qi and never chi.

[sootbird]

Hi sootbird :) I was wondering how you study Japanese, like, what materials or books do you use, do you attend a class or are a disciplined self-study person? I've tried several methods and apps and such and so far, nothing really turned into a routine for me...

Hello!! To answer your question about my own personal Japanese study, I took five years of Japanese classes at my university and have a bachelor’s degree in it. Right now, I’m self-studying, because I’m still not where I want to be in terms of fluency. It takes a fair bit of discipline, but I think it’s fun and I’m a big nerd so I like to study it every day. ;;

I’m so excited you’re interested in learning Japanese!! It’s such a neat language. I’m not entirely sure how to advise self-study straight from the beginning, but I can try! I’m sure there are lots of resources online for learning Japanese (it’s a fairly popular language to learn these days), but I also have a slew of books that I can recommend to you. Some are books that I used at school in my classes, and others are books that I acquired on my own over the years. The textbooks tend to be more expensive bc they have a lot of material, but I do think they’d be useful for beginning self-study, because you do need some sort of foundation before you can branch out on your own. I do think that having materials made me feel like I was properly studying it and I think has encouraged me to keep up with my self-study!

Textbooks:

Nakama books

These are the textbooks I used in my beginning classes. Nakama 1 was for first year, and Nakama 2 was for the second year. I think they’re pretty good books, and you can rent them for a semester on Amazon it looks like.

Genki books

I haven’t used these textbooks, but I have friends who did use them in their Japanese classes, and I’ve heard good things about them. I recommend checking the reviews and seeing which book series (Nakama or Genki) you wanna go with. Of course, if you feel like splurging, you can always get both and cross-reference them.

Other books: These are other books that I use to supplement my study. AKA you don’t need them right away.

A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar -- Makino/Tsutsui

A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar -- Makino/Tsutsui

The Handbook of Japanese Verbs -- Kamiya

A Dictionary of Japanese Particles -- Kawashima

All About Particles -- Chino

The Handbook of Japanese Adjectives and Adverbs -- Kamiya

Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication -- Kamiya

The first step you wanna take before anything else is learning how to read and write the Japanese syllabaries. Japanese doesn’t use an alphabet like English does. Instead of the written characters representing individual sounds, they represent syllables. Let me illustrate this with an example: the Japanese word for “heart” is こころ. As you can see, there are three characters there. When written in Roman letters, it is spelled “kokoro.” Six letters in our alphabet, but only three Japanese characters. The syllables in that word are “ko,” “ko,” and “ro.” You can see how the writing system is syllable-based.

Japanese has two syllabaries. The first is called hiragana. The second is called katakana. The syllables represented by these two systems are exactly the same, but the syllabaries are used differently. Hiragana tends to be used more, and katakana tends to be used for loan words (words from other languages that have been integrated into Japanese). I’ll use “kokoro” as an example again.

Here is “kokoro” in hiragana: こころ

Here is “kokoro” in katakana: ココロ

The use of hiragana versus katakana is something you’ll get used to with experience, but it’s important to know BOTH syllabaries. I didn’t learn katakana well enough at the beginning and it haunts me to this day. Don’t rely too heavily on romaji (the writing of Japanese words in Roman letters) because the Japanese don’t use it. Only use it as a pronunciation tool at the beginning. I do use romaji on a romaji-to-Japanese keyboard I have on my phone, but that’s really just a matter of convenience and for quicker typing.

Learn both of the syllabaries and practice writing the letters as you go. I recommend using a fun pen! After that, the textbooks can tell you what to do next. (The textbooks do tell you how to learn hiragana and katakana as well at the start, if you need more guidance than the internet gives you.)

Here are some other important resources that will be a big help to you:

Dictionary app: A Japanese dictionary is gonna be really important and I find that it’s handy to have one on your phone. I don’t know about Android, but the App Store has a few of them. I use one that’s just called “Japanese Dictionary” and it’s got a red icon.

Online dictionary: If you can’t get your hands on a dictionary app or if you’re on the computer, you can use this great online Japanese dictionary called Jisho. I use it frequently when I’m on my computer.

Flashcard app: Flashcards are gonna be your best friend. I recommend getting a good flashcard app. The one I use is Anki, and I have it on my phone and on my computer. You can download it for free on your computer and I think it’s free for Android. I have an iPhone and I had to pay 25 bucks for the app but I’ve heard that there’s a free version on the App Store too? It might just have ads, but I’m not sure. Anyway, Anki is great because it will make note of the flashcards you’re having trouble with and give them to you with more frequency. There are also a lot of decks that people have uploaded to the Anki website, so you can find all sorts of community-made Japanese decks that you can import (I think you have to import a deck on the desktop version, but then you can sync it up to your phone). 

And finally, some things to keep in mind before starting Japanese. 

Japanese is generally agreed upon to be a pretty difficult language to learn (for English speakers at least). As a native English speaker, I would agree that it is kinda hard. The general sentence structure of English is subject-verb-object. In Japanese, that structure is subject-object-verb. Since the verb is at the end of the sentence, it can be tricky to switch your brain around to the order.

A lot of people will also tell you that kanji is a nightmare. Kanji are the third element of the Japanese writing system, and are characters borrowed from Chinese. In fact, Japanese did not have a written form until the 5th century, and all of it came from Chinese. Kanji characters however, have mostly retained their resemblance to Chinese characters. They more closely resemble traditional Chinese characters, and visually look like a step between traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters.

Anyway, they may look quite complicated and there are a lot of them. But you will learn to love them, and they’re so fun to write. This is a kanji-positive zone so if you ever get stressed about kanji come chat with me and I will reassure you.

Here is a book I am currently using to effectively memorize kanji, and I highly recommend it. It’s beginner-friendly.

So, you may get stressed out by Japanese and maybe by all the information I just gave you, but don’t worry!! It’s a very fun language to learn and anyone can learn it if they put their mind to it! I believe in you! Come back and ask me if you have any questions.

Thank you for the ask and I hope this helps!!

[flyingcookierambles]

study plans?

recently i feel like my friend going to japanese college has motivated me to try to start studying japanese again. plus some spontaneous chinese here and there, more vocab/pronunciation/tone focused rather than grammar right now.

ended up a kinda long ramble lol, ill cut it up into two pieces.

i literally do daily: 1 duolingo so the owl doesnt hunt me down like the weak prey i am (any language)

i try to do once a day: 1 or 2 anki decks for vocab. for japanese i use many: JLPT N4, Genki 1 & 2 Including Genki Supplementary Vocab,  Core 2k/6K Optimized Japanese Vocabulary, 2500 Most-Used kanji. For Chinese I use the HSK level 1/2/3 word list. these are seperate, just a pain to type lol. i dont use wanikani actually lol. the renaming of radicals annoyed/confused me, who was forced to learn the names of the very proper strokes in high school chinese lol. plus having no assessment test and having to start over from the very beginning and then getting the simplest kanji wrong because i remember the radical by its shape or a stroke by its proper chinese name and not a silly american name (no i did not learn this character is actually wearing a hat or a pot lid. thats weird.), i just got kinda annoyed and went back to simple anki flashcards lol.

3-4 times a week: going over 2-4 grammar concept from genki 2 so far. partly because when i was studying with my 2 friends over the summer we were doing a cramming thing for our friend to to get up to standards of the college they were transferring to, now attending. as a result, we uhh. kinda skipped over basically all vocab. only did the grammar, and sometimes not even all the grammar. we skipped over really simple stuff (ie the volitionary form which is just slapping a ~ou/おう at the end of things) and the stuff that was just -te form + some extra words. so i’m finally properly going over that stuff in full, alone. plus im rewriting/digitizing my notes in onenote bc pencil and pen kinda smear/fade over time so this will just be better if i want to go to my notes for reference in the future. the ease of searching by control+f is also nice compared to flipping thru pages in confusion. i also feel like my learning style is def repetitive related, so going over things a second time works for me. (for japanese im using using genki 2/the genki 2 track on bunpro.jp. (this website is incredible and for the most part free. even if you want the premium sub version, the cheapest sub plan is $2 a month! while i dont have it, i did do the free trial when i first signed up and it was ok and you can totally do the free version and get all the barebones japanese grammar explanations from like 4 different textbooks) when/if i ever finish genki 2, ill just check out the minna no nihongo track on bunpro, more to see if there’s any grammar that gets covered in that one that genki doesnt have. if they’re just the same but a different order or something, ill just move on to the tobira track since its the intro to real intermediate japanese grammar.) i might check out the free textbook irodori, more out of curiosity than seriousness honestly. iroiro uses a different fluency grading system than the common JLPT N5-1 levels, iroiro uses the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment, or CERFL. Since im focusing on the JLPT N level standards and these are totally different curriculums and stuff, im not sure how helpful irodori will be to me at this point but ill look at it because its a free textbook. when i try to relearn chinese again ill dig out my integrated chinese textbooks (goodreads), only intermediate since i seem to have lost my beginner editions somewhere in my house between moving from college dorm to house every summer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . i might check out the all set learning site, it seems to both HSK and CERFL. ill probably review the HSK 1-2 stuff real quick since thats basically what i learned in high school/college and i kinda forget a lot since its been like 6 years now. then ill maybe hopefully finally get to HSK 3. ill try to watch videos from yoyochinese on youtube too. she explains things really clearly and helpfully to native english speakers in a way that my previous teachers havent been able to. ill stick to the youtube tho since ive heard that the actual courses from her website are very expensive for online self study tho, and purchasing a regular textbook would be cheaper lol. 

once a week: try to use words from anki decks + whatever grammar i learned in practice sentences/make up sentences yourself. this is a bit hard bc since im self studying if my sentences end up wrong/sounding awkward to a native speaker i am not really sure how to check lol. i’m on polyglot.city (a mastodon instance focused on language learning/blogging) and i post there sometimes and people have helped me/rated my sentences every now and then but recently its been very slow. (japanese, altho i hope that i regain enough of my mandarin skills to do this again sometime)

every 2 weeks: after accumulating grammar for a bit, i try to read a grade/language level appropriate short story in the language. (hint: the level of a toddler probably lol.) for japanese i started using satori reader, altho other short story apps exist. for chinese there’s du chinese and tcb/the chairman’s bao. honestly i use du chinese just because im too lazy to make an account for tcb, altho i may finally make an account and use it one day. one day..... (japanese and chinese)

for japanese i just want to get to tobira right now and then long term is simply reaching what is probably jlpt n3, the typical not quite fluent but still ok enough to conduct business or ask a native speaker for help in a convenience store. kinda eh, a good middle intermediate level. from that point, i should be ok enough to try to read a YA novel. no not a light novel (might try it tho) but like a regular novel for middle schoolers. or maybe doremon? ill see where it goes from there. i hope to at least be able to understand some of the things an average person would like a weather forecast on the nhk or a short newspaper article. maybe ill take the actual jlpt test someday.....not sure how to sign up/where to find it in my city tho....

for chinese, i just want to know more vocab and improve my tones/pronunciation right now. 

[seoftheart]

100 things i love about johnny

“his english name means “god is gracious” and it’s derived from hebrew words יוֹ (yo) which is the hebrew god and חָנַן (chanan) which means “to be gracious” and i mean,, true

his korean name is written as 英浩 in hanja characters and they can mean  “flower, petal, brave, hero” and  “great, numerous, vast” - also true

his lisp

his bad puns and pickup lines

how he donated his voice by recording audio guides to aid artists with development disabilities

how much he loves haechan and taeil :((

how much he loves nct in general

his love for yoona

how he never fails to include both female and male fans when he’s talking so nobody gets excluded

his silky hair

the way he furrows his eyebrows and one side of his upper lip goes up when he says something sassy or tries sounding smart

the little, cute wrinkles that appear on the sides of his mouth when he’s smiling

how hard he works on his chinese and tries to communicate with chinese members in their native language grfsregkajeg

the way he discreetly comforted yeri on enana when she was sick

how he noticed that on the vlive commentary function it said “say something nice” and found it really nice

how he’s really humble about the things he does and his qualities, oh my god !!

he thought his selfies weren’t good and asked for advice and didn’t believe jaehyun and doyoung when they told him his selfies are really good indeed, he was so surprised when they told him!!

his wannabe raps LMAO that rap he wrote in high school still haunts me

he stayed in sm for so long, ever since 2008, but he didn’t give up and made it to debut with nct! he had to watch his friends from exo debut before him while he was left behind but that didn’t discourage him one bit ;((

how he always finds a way to play on enana during the commercial break, and it’s usually playing with the cameras, which is really cute

his smile when he’s talking with the fans

how he always does that dance where he swings his arms left to right constantly while doing the same with hips, in sync with the arm swing and embarrasses others but does it anyway

he always thinks of nct’s international fans!! he always adds a sentence of two in english so everybody understands what’s going on

he has a lot of trouble learning japanese but he still tries so hard ;((

his “boku wa johnny desu”

he’s really shy when someone compliments him, but never fails to compliment others

he has such a nice relationship with enana staff members and always helps them and encourages them

“to everyone out there, i just want to say that whoever’s listening to this is absolutely beautiful, and there’s nothing you need to change about your appearance, you’re already as perfect and unique as you are.  don’t let anyone tell you differently. if you ever feel like you’re not worth anything, seek help or change your environment, don’t let the bullies get to you. life is long, life is beautiful. don’t stop right here because of these mean people. live for yourself, live happily, and show them you’re stronger than them.”

saying “bless you” when people sneeze a lot of people overlook, but he finds it meaningful

he always encourages either the nct members or complete strangers when they’re speaking english even though they make mistakes and makes them feel confident about their language skills

that one time he started randomly meowing on enana and made jaehyun laugh

ok but on a serious note tho. johnny likes to,,,meow around. idk if it grew into a (weird) habit of his but he just,,,meows. he meows around jaehyun, he meows around mark, he probably meows around everyone in nct. can i pls get this limited-edition cat too

his super broccoli and super corn t-shirts

his singing voice ;–;

how he never hesitates to do aegyo but regrets it straight afterward so he lowers his head and covers his face with his hands

he said he loves running through the rain when it’s raining and it’s so unusual but cute!

lmao he’s such a hopeless romantic tho, i bet he got that running-in-the-rain idea from a romance film or smth

“to do and regret, rather than not to do and regret”

his hobby is photography and he takes really nice photos which he posts on nct’s instagram!!

his signature is really pretty!! it’s one of the most beautiful signatures i’ve seen an idol have tbh

he plays the piano really well and he used to play it together with jaehyun in their room when they were roommates

during the time he shared the room with jaehyun, jaehyun used to always light up scented candles and it sometimes bothered johnny but he never said anything about it so jaehyun wouldn’t feel bad

also,, he sleeps naked?? but like,, he’s so open with it. he’s like oh? clothes? i don’t wear clothes when i sleep lol and taeil is ????? so  c o n f u s e d  but johnny is just there, with a big grin on his face lmao

he’s a bit clumsy but it makes him adorable ;-;

his laugh!! it goes from a simple giggle to a high pitched laughter and it’s so recognisable and funny to hear, but it never makes you tired of hearing it

the dimples that appear on his face when he’s smiling, #help

he always gives other members the chance to speak in english if they want to or if they’re confident but never forces them if they don’t want to

how he’s so passionate about photography and he uses his camera more to capture the nature and his members than to take pictures of himself

also. that one photo of a smiley face written on a foggy car window (probably?) that he took is so, so, so important.

seriously, i love the style of photography he is going for!!

how he always participates when nct does volunteer work, like how he went to that school and made meals for children or how he went to a p.e. class and taught the kids how to dance

the way he laughs!! he always laughs in little fits, like, it goes hahaha hahahaha hahaha and it’s a d o r a b l e

how he’s secretly a meme king and loves sharing memes with nct members on their gc but they never reply to him and it’s so sad but so cute fsdjkghs

the way he looks at cameras like they’re the most precious things in the world

he never fails to hype a nct member up!!

how much he loves his family. he doesn’t talk about them a lot but when he does you can see it in his eyes how much he misses his parents. also when he cried when they sent him a video message for his birthday during his smrookies days!!

also when he was so surprised and teared up when his mum sent an audio message to enana back in 2018

“love starts with a smile” - johnny, 170327

he always sees beauty in some things that would usually get overlooked or wouldn’t be seen as beautiful and pretty and he never fails to express how he finds them nice!!

his relationship with mark. it’s not only that they’re english speakers so they’re close, you can see just how much johnny cares for mark. mark is like johnny’s little brother

he has a tendency to say things in a tone someone could find sarcastic but he really means it. he uses these phrases that have grown to be seen as sarcastic only to convey his true feelings and i find it so unique and beautiful (like when he said “it’s beautiful, mark” in the first relay vlive when mark, jaemin, winwin and kun were making standees for the sprouts - one would think he’s saying it just so that he wouldn’t hurt mark’s feelings but if you listen closely enough, you can hear the sincerity in his voice)

how he uses “your one and only” when writing to the fans

also the message on a photocard for the regular-irregular album where he wrote “from your one and only to my one and only” i literally blushed okay.

seriously though, the messages he writes on photocards are so thoughtful and cute, for example on the regulate pc he wrote: “simon says... smile!” and like,, i might have cried.

his face with no makeup on!!!

his thighs that are both muscular and soft, you can’t really tell if he’s really fit or a bit chubby and it makes my heart go whoosh whoosh bc!! my bias!!! is chubby!!!!! and i love it!! !!!!

seriously though, the songs he recommends and/or plays on enana

he says he’s a really clumsy person or it’s just his height so he always bumps into things and i find it adorable even though it must hurt him but how can you not love these small things about this giant man shjsjs

how he sleeps with so many plushies and gives them names and always changes the one he’s hugging at night om g

“pandas. OmG PANDAS” - johnny in ikea

have i already said this but he’s so empathic and compassionate and conscientious and always tries to make people around him feel comfortable with his jokes and warm smiles

he’s also so patient and laid-back and doesn’t get angry so easily, like, someone would probably get angry with yuta were it his phone number that was exposed (even by accident) but johnny was just liek,,,yah it’s okay and forgave yuta and sgjdjsh he’s just so nice :(

how he thinks make-up shouldn’t be limited to girls only and doesn’t believe in gender roles!!

in addition to that, he even appeared in an episode of netflix’s bill nye saves the world that touches on the topic of sexuality & identity and it’s such a big thing for an idol, especially a rookie idol to talk about how kpop is changing the traditional ideas of what gender norms are in such a conservative country??

“just be yourself. i feel like that’s a big point” - johnny in bill nye saves the world

*serious, with a smile on his face* “do you have a boyfriend?” *serious* *can’t contain the cringe and laughter* *turns away in an adorable way*

johnny’s fashion evaluation much?? it’s just him giving weird names to nct’s outfits and pretending to be an expert by giving them star ratings but it’s all just random and it’s so funny shjsh

while we’re at being funny! god of humour!! right there!!!! johnny suh invented humour ok i don’t make the rules

like,, his humour is not the normal kind, i saw many people actually say he’s not funny but LMAO joke’s on you, his humour is the galaxy brain type of humour, it’s like,, a bit dry but it’s so funny if you’re on the same page as him

when he went to ikea with jaehyun to buy a lamp but they only ended up looking at plushies and johnny immediately made friends with two snake plushies, fred and jason. “fred, what are you doing here??” “jason, jason! no, he’s my friend, jason. jason, he’s my friend.” - johnny in ikea, after saving jaehyun from jason’s bite. like that’s so random but it’s working because i’ve melted

him wearing hoodies and putting them over his head while taking photos of his members is so precious and soft!!

the way his pinky kind of drifts away from the rest of his fingers when he’s waving or covering his mouth or doing anything with his hand really

his plump lips and the way they curl upwards a bit and it makes them look so  c u t e  but they’re also a bit sexy???

he has these scars on his face (a lot of them on his chin) that are almost invisible because of the makeup but i think they’re from pimples, perhaps? but they’re so beautiful and precious and i love them when he smiles and they get a different shape and it’s art?? on someone’s face?????

he speaks so confidently in korean even though it’s not his native language! one would think it is by the way he never stutters or has a loss for words but it’s just because of his never-ending friendliness and confidence that’s a part of his personality

remember the rolling paper event during the 127 1st anniversary party? all of johnny’s messages were the longest ones and were so heartfelt and sincere. he really poured his entire heart while writing those and that only shows just how much he loves his members

his role inside the group may seem unimportant but he’s one of the few people holding the group together. there is taeyong as the leader, but johnny is like a leader from the shadows who puts everyone before himself first - and it is not easy to do

he cares for the foreign members so, so much. out of all the nct members, he’s been in sm the longest and as a foreigner he understands and knows what it’s like to suddenly be in a completely new country surrounded by nothing but strangers. he kept on conversing with ten, both in english and in korean, so ten would feel more comfortable and he’s the main reason ten’s korean has gotten so much better. also, he takes so much patience with the chinese members who have language barriers with both him and the rest of nct and never fails to correct them when they say something wrong or when they can’t think of a word/phrase to say. when they were touring seoul, he was always next to lucas and closely listening to how lucas speaks so that he can help him learn better!!

johnny knows how to flirt and seduce but what he doesn’t know is how to act afterwards so the embarrassment that comes after he says something cringy is just the most adorable think ever (take “do you have a boyfriend?” ig video for an example). he’s just so awkward and he can’t compliment someone without blushing ;(

also oh boy, johnny is just so bad at lying like fksjshksh he can’t keep a secret to save a life. were we, nctzens, not so dumb, we’d get so many spoilers he accidentally gave lmao

while we’re at this, he also can’t have a nice phone because he literally doesn’t care about it, hE THREW IT IN THE FLOOR in that one video, isn’t that enough as it IS

also,,,,,,he put a metal fidget spinner on its screen and somehow expected it not to break?????? just how lovable this idiot is.

he’s so,,,,awkward and cute around girls,,,like,,,,,,,help me. him confessing to yoona (kind of?) is the cutest thing ever and it just fills my heart with love and i!! wanna protect!!!!!

the thing i always look at when i watch enana are his ears because he always fiddles with them and touches the earring(s) and it’s cuuuute

but lmAO somehow the earring(s) always fall out when he does touch them and it’s somehow so,,endearing because he’s so cute jfc

he once said he tries using “thank you” and "i love you” a lot because those words are so powerful and he seems to always want to bring smile to other people’s faces..

also!! his parents call him prince as a nickname and,,well. i might be crying because that’s  s o f t

do you know that johnny always tries to wear colourful clothes on rainy days so that he breaks the monotony and the nostalgia of rain?? fdkjhsrgahkdsg

“you can overcome everything with laughter”

also,, have you noticed how he always makes a double peace sign when he’s embarrassed? cute.

[cinneira-blog]

I rate how languages sound.

Okay, so I was asked to do this rate X thing. I’m gonna rate how I personally perceive how different languages sound.

ACHTUNG! IT’S DAMN BIASED AND RUDE!

Languages that I’ve never heard are not mentioned. Standard varieties are implied unless stated otherwise.

IE.

Germanic.

English. Is everywhere, so whining won’t help much, I guess. Certain British accents are cool (e.g. RP and London). SAE is a potato. Scottish English sounds affected. Irish English I dunno, is it even English? Quantum computers might be able to decipher it.

Dutch. Throat disease.

Icelandic. Shit tier.

Faroese. 10/10, it has “ch” sounds, “ll” —> “tl” and other nerdgasm-inducing things.

Danish. Acquired taste.

Swedish. 9.5/10. Very cute.

Norwegian. 8/10, sounds manlier and a bit rougher than Swedish.

German. Sounds gay when spoken, decent when sung.

Celtic.

Welsh. Mongolian of Europe.

Irish. Russian backwards, seems to have been robbed of sibilants. Poor souls.

Breton. Sounds 100% like French, but actually is not. Weird.

Romance.

Spanish. LA is shit, EU is better, but not really. Although the variety where they pronounce “ll” as a “j”-sound is cool.

French. Throat disease.

Italian. Overrated, but still very cool. They speak too fast tho.

Catalan. Better than both Spanish and French.

Occitan. Second only to Italian.

Portuguese. BR is shit, EU is a bit better. Madredeus are 10/10.

Romanian. Blanda-upped something, 4/10, I guess. Hard to tell.

Slavic.

Russian. Very cool when sung. Spoken, it’s hard to tell since I’m a native, but let’s say shit. Girls nowadays sound too capricious and guys whiny and gay.

Ukrainian. Jokes aside, quite cute. 6.5/10.

Belarusian. Jokes aside… Wait, it’s not even cute.

Polish. Gone overboard with sibilants. Like, seriously. Also flat.

BCS. Tones, really? (Can’t remember if it was actual tones or pitch accent, doesn’t matter tho). Doesn’t suit a Slavic language at all, makes it a bit too sing-song-ish.

Bulgarian. Surprisingly decent, although would be better if they had more palatalised consonants (it would be Russian at that point tho).

Czech. Too soft, can’t compute.

Baltic.

Weird Slavic.

Hellenic.

Greek. Utter shit when spoken, a tongue of gods when sung. Seriously, what the heck? Go listen to Eleftheria Arvanitaki/Natassa Boufiliou or even Disney’s “Colors of the wind” in Greek first, and then to a random Greek League of Legends streamer.

Armenian.

Worse Greek with uvulars and a lot of affricates. When a Slavic speaker complains about unpronounceable consonant clusters, you know something’s gone very wrong.

Indo-Iranian.

A no for me. If you think that was too wide of a brush, wait until I get to American or Australian languages.

URALIC.

Hungarian. Cute, cute, cute. 9.6/10. My mother is fluent in it, and I still can’t forgive her for not teaching it to me when I was a larva.

Finnish. A cheap imitation of Quenya. I’m [not] sorry.

Erzya, Moksha, Komi, and other Uralic tongues of Russia. Sound like Hungarian (or Finnish) spoken with a thick Russian accent. Not fun.

SEMITIC.

Arabic. I’m not really versed in dialects of Arabic, so I can’t say which ones it were, the ones I heard. Most likely, Levantine or Egyptian. Sounds like choking. Worse when sung.

Hebrew. Better than Arabic when sung, indistinctly shitty when spoken.

Berber (Tamasheq). Pretty cool, go listen to Tinariwen.

DRAVIDIAN.

A no. Can’t stand retroflexes (yes, they regularly give me existential pain when I speak Russian or hear Swedish, I know, but still).

CAUCASIAN (NW, NE, S).

These are actual alien tongues. Almost everything about them save nominal morphology (even with that said, they are mostly ERG-ABS) is butt-clenchingly hard (I mean, the real, mean, savage kind of hard. All the usual language learner boogeymen like Chinese or Arabic are jokes compared to THIS. Almost perfect analysability, go figure). Alan Bomhard thinks NWC had intercourse with IE when IE was young. Supposedly, one of the reasons why IE is so troubled with irregularity.

Kabardian. Can vary between completely alien-sounding to absolutely, stunningly beautiful. Go lurk on youtube for some videos.

Chechen. Danish of Caucasus, but devoid of potatoes. Incredibly soft-sounding and melodic.

Georgian. Surprisingly, shitty-sounding.

TURKIC.

Turkish. Shit tier.

Uzbek. Even worse.

Kazakh. Very decent. I hear a Russian accent every time though.

MONGOLIC.

Khalkha Mongolian. Welsh of Asia.

Other Mongolian varieties. Sounds just as funny as Ukrainian to a Russian speaker. Jokes aside, far softer than Khalkha. Not like it’s a good thing tho.

TUNGUSIC.

Manchu. I don’t think it’s possible to find a recording of it spoken, but from what I’ve read about its phonology it seems VERY DAMN INTERESTING. Why would you die out tho.

SINO-TIBETAN.

Mandarin. Absolute shit tier.

Cantonese. Cantopop one love. (Hong Kong makes much better mainstream pop-music than both Japan and Korea). Even though supposedly all the lyrics are written in Standard Mandarin and then sung with Cantonese readings. Spoken, sounds a bit angry.

Tibetan. Weird, soft, palatal. The cadence is nothing like any variety of Sinitic. Old Tibetan must have been hilarious, just as Old Chinese (btw, google “fengshengbang Old Chinese reconstruction” or smth like that, you will be very amused).

KOREANIC.

Korean. Uhm. In K-pop sounds like shit regardless. Alternative stuff, though, is pretty cool. When spoken, makes think of relationships gone wrong, arguments in drama and stuff. 6/10. Nell’s lead singer is 11/10 tho.

JAPONIC.

Japanese. 9/10 when sung (they tend to fuck the prosody to accommodate for Western rhythms), 10/10 when spoken by females, 2/10 when spoken by males. The worst thing you can hear in your life is Japanese spoken with English accent. The second worst is Japanese spoken with Russian accent.

TAI-KADAI.

Shit.

AUSTRO-ASIATIC.

Shit.

AUSTRONESIAN.

Shit, with the exception of…

Tahitian and Maori. These are very well designed conlangs. I would like to shake hands with the creator, he seems to have great understanding of phonetic aesthetics. Easy to pronounce for a change.

AMERICAN LANGUAGES.

I mean, I’ve heard some recordings and stuff, but can’t remember the names of the languages. These are something I know very little about, maybe some day I’ll dig into that potpourri.

NIGER-CONGO

Too much prenasalisation from what I’ve heard. Like, really.

KHOISAN

Clicks lol. On a serious note, some of them are very cool, it’s just the clicks, they sound like impure audio or smth, I can’t help.

So, basically my top 5 would be (in alphabetic order):

Faroese

Greek

Hungarian

Japanese

Kabardian

Not even that much of IE-bias, wow. Next time I’m gonna do the same thing but with writing systems/alphabets/orthographies.