#i just need to learn the english word for conjugation

[physalian]

How to Make Your Writing Less Stiff 8 | "to-be" and auxiliary verbs

Part 7

Part 6

Part 1

As I go through editing my latest manuscript, I'm faced with the dilemma of when to drop a to-be verb, but also when to keep it and how the differences between the two in any given situation can make just a little... a little *garnish* of a difference.

To-be verbs:

Am, is, are, was, were; a subset of auxiliary verbs

Auxiliary verbs:

To do, to be, to have (simplified)

Auxiliary verbs tend to indicate tense, but we use them more often as crutch verbs, filler verbs, because you can just conjugate the verb itself to the proper tense without the need of the auxiliary verb.

The advice generally goes to remove these, as they count as filler words when followed up by a second verb. Versus the TBV or AXV and an adjective.

He does look / He looks She is cooking / She cooks They were standing / They stood I am fishing / I fish She does cry / She cries We have slept / We slept

vs

He is afraid / He fears She was sorry / She regrets They were happy / They cheered I was confused / I hesitated

The verb+adjective combo can't so easily drop the verb without changing either the tone, the flow, or the actions of the characters, because one is an act of doing, and one is a state of being (for the most part, 'fear' is one of those exceptions in English).

You would have to rearrange the sentence, e.g. "I was confused by this" to "This confused me," to elimiate the TBV. Which, most of the time, does help the narrator feel less passive in the story, but, again, we're here for flavor text, not an MLA formatting guide.

So, sometimes the inclusion of the TBV or AXV adds subtext to the action itself.

"He does look" has slightly more urgency and weight than simply "he looks" because the AXV emphasizes that this is an action the actor might not have taken otherwise, for better or for worse.

In the silence, she stands there huffing, voice wrecked from crying as he heads for the open door. “Don’t you walk away from me.” He turns, face impassive. “There’s nothing left to be said.” vs He does turn, face impassive. “There’s nothing left to be said.”

The latter indicates that this might be hesitation or regret on his part, as opposed to a decisive, quick action, or that this is an action that she, the narrator, didn't expect him to take.

It also helps convey the tone of voice (or at least the general direction of the level of emotion in a voice). This absolutely varies on a case-by-case basis and the context of the action and should not be abused.

One of the juicier verbs for subtext here is "try"

He tries to coach her through how to do it properly. vs He does try to coach her through how to do it properly.

The former is direct and simple. He is attempting (he attempts) to help but through the act of "trying" and not "doing" there's an indication that she isn't getting it.

The latter is a little more hopeless, where he and she both know that whatever she's attempting to learn, she won't succeed, but he's doing it anyway. Maybe because he cares or he feels bad, or, that he wasn't going to help her, but something changed his mind.

Deciding when to use these helps convey the inner thoughts of non-narrating characters without head-hopping, and also shows the biases of the narrator.

Hope this helps!

[mishkakagehishka]

But that's my bother with duolingo, also, there's no point in learning a language there if you're a clean slate beginner, or if you're not using it alongside another way of learning.

Bc how are you just gonna tell me second person singular conjugation and leave it at that. A chart would be nice😓

[waggledoogledoggle]

SOMEONE GIMME MULTI-LINGUAL JED AND OCTAVIUS PLEASE

I NEED IT.

JED AT THE VERY LEAST KNOWS SPANISH AND ENGLISH IF NOT ALSO MANDARIN BECAUSE OF THE RAILROAD. LIKE, Y’ALL, HE CANONICALLY ON SOME LEVEL ACTUALLY KNOWS SPANISH

“No comprendo, amigo!” HE SHOUTS THAT AT THE AUGUSTUS BUST. IS THE ACCENT SHIT? YES. BUT IM CHALKING THAT UP TO ACTORS CHOICE CAUSE GUESS WHAT. HE CONJUGATED IT FUCKIN CORRECTLY.

GIMME JED SPEAKING IN ENGLISH COMPLETELY NORMAL BUT THEN HIS BRAIN DECIDES TO FORGET THE WORD IN ENGLISH SO HE JUST STOPS FOR A MOMENT AND STARES AT NOTHING, SO HE JUST SAYS IT IN SPANISH AND OCTAVIUS JUST STARES AT HIM LIKE ‘…tf?’ BUT THEN THEY GO TO CARRY ON THE CONVERSATION AND LIKE HALF A BEAT LATER JED JUST SHOUTS THE WORD IN ENGLISH CAUSE HE REMEMBERS IT NOW. LIKE:

“I mean, I ain’t ever seen such a mess! Hell we even had to get a new… uh…”

“…”

“…”

“Jedediah?”

“…mesa…”

“…mesa?”

“I… can’t remember it in English right now… but I’m sure it’ll come back to me… uhm, anyways, yeah we had to get a new one of those, which sucks cause it was the only good one in that tavern! I ain’t ever seen such a brawl, I mean- TABLE!”

“Jupiter- Jedediah what the fu-”

“That’s the word! Table! Alright, we’re good now, as I was sayin-”

AND OCTAVIUS? DUDE IS A FUCKIN ROMAN GENERAL, SO NOT ONLY DOES HE KNOW LATIN, BUT HE IS ALSO LIKELY FLUENT IN GREEK. SO ENGLISH IS HIS FUCKIN THIRD LANGUAGE

SO YOUR TELLING ME, THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ONE SINGLE MOMENT IN BOTH CANON CONTENT AND NON-CANON CONTENT WHERE OCTAVIUS FORGETS THE WORD IN ENGLISH SO HE COMES UP WITH SOME BATSHIT CRAZY SOUNDING DESCRIPTION OR MAKES A SOUND EFFECT AND JED JUST HAS TO TRY TO FUCKIN GUESS WHAT HE MEANS.

“Hey Octy, did ya see where lil’ Ted went?”

“Yeah he went on the- the um- the horse tornado.”

“…what?”

“You know, the horse tornado.”

“…do you mean the ‘Carousel’?”

“That’s the word! Yes, the Carousel, yes.”

OR

“He went on the… Jed how you say *makes helicopter noises*”

“…oh! Helicopter.”

“Yes! That.”

AND I WANT IT TO GET TO THE POINT WHERE JED STARTS GETTING IT FIRST TRY NO HESITATION WHILE EVERYONE ELSE IS LIKE “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK DID I JUST WITNESS, HOW DID YOU GET ‘PEN’ FROM HIM SAYING ‘BLEEDING INK STICK’”

And even better. I want Jed learning Latin for Octavius once he finds out English is his third language. Because if Octavius learned his first language, then he’ll be damned if he doesn’t do the same for Octavius.

I BEG OF THEE, PLEASE

(Edit: yes I know that Jedediah Strong Smith irl knew some/the basics of Latin lmao, what I meant by 'learn Latin' was work to become fluent in it like how Octavius is fluent in English, my bad for not explaining more clearly lol)

[cripplecharacters]

I have a character who is nonverbal, intellectually disabled, and uses an AAC device. I'm wondering how I would write down her inner thoughts and monologue? Would she think in full English sentences, in AAC symbols, or something else?

Hi asker,

I will start off by letting you know that there is no single definitive answer for this, but I still have thoughts and ideas.

So, as for the question of would she think in AAC symbols or English sentences, that really depends on your character. It could be either.

Some nonverbal people, but not all, don't think in words at all, but more in images or associations, so this could be the case of your character and might even be part of why they are nonverbal and need AAC. (Some people who aren't nonverbal also don't think in words either, but your character is, so that's what I'll focus on here!)

Your character could also think in words. They might think entirely in words, or partly. They might think in what you would think of as more 'standard' English sentences, or maybe more simplified sentences.

For example, it's common for people with ID to use simpler syntax and/or less abstract language. But language abilities are a wide range, and this can extend to AAC usage. Some people might use more complex sentences, while some might might only be able to use two words in a sentence. Some people might get the hang of pronouns, and some might not. Some people might get the hang of conjugating verbs, some might not. Some people speak more slowly or with more pauses. You have a lot of leeway in how to conceptualize your character's thoughts.

I want to add one thing: a lot of ways that people with ID people can speak are used to make fun of people. Slower speech, simple sentences, not conjugating some words, stuff like that. If you include this, you have to take care to make sure that the message you’re sending by including them is “some people just talk like this” and not “isn’t it so funny/weird/gross/weird that some people talk this way? Let’s make fun of it/focus on how weird and different (derogatory) it is”.

However, the limitations of a written medium is that at the end of the day you will in fact have to use words to write what is going on in her brain, even if she doesn't think in words.

So I would say: focus on figuring out how your character manages language, since there’s many different ways they can, and then once you decide that it might be easier to figure out exactly how to write them. Mod sasza has even more points below!

Hope this helps,

mod sparrow

Hi, I'd consider how your character learned language. If her first exposure was a symbol-based AAC device, there's a higher chance she'd think in AAC symbols than if she first communicated via sign language or anything else that's not a symbol-based AAC device.

I'm fully verbal and actually mostly think in associations and other non-language ways like pictures (though when I'm imagining things like an actual conversation, I do use language). That's why for me and a lot of other people with ID (verbal or not) it can take longer to think of what to say; you need to translate your thoughts to language first.

With your character having much more severe language disability than me, I'd guess that she either used very simple sentence construction or that you'd have to describe her thoughts in a less direct manner (associations or visuals), which will be more time-consuming to write and more cryptic to readers (which makes it realistic, communication with people with significant language problems takes longer, if mind reading was real it would apply to it too).

You should definitely consider the things mentioned by Sparrow; whether she understands pronouns, conjugation, can she differentiate similar words correctly (e.g., love/like, handsome/pretty), etc.

Depending on her level of ID, she might think "I'm hungry" as anything between "Damn, I wish I was eating a burger right now" (complete English sentence) through "Yes food" (in which "yes" means positive rather than agreeing with someone) or "Images of her home kitchen flashed through her head" (simply associating kitchen with the feeling of hunger), to "Two symbols from her board; one meaning 'me' with the second showing an empty plate, went through her mind over and over". There is a big difference between a person with mild ID who might be unable to speak because they can't coordinate their mouth to make actual words but don't struggle with grammar at all, and a person with a profound ID whose entire AAC board is "yes" and "no" (or not even that, but I wanted an example to show what could be someone's existing-but-very-limited language ability).

Obviously some of these are more clunky, some are less so. But the way a lot of nonverbal ID people communicate isn't perfectly clear and direct, and there is a lot of variety in the manner that it shows.

I also wrote this post about speech in intellectual disability that you might find useful. I hope this helps !

mod Sasza

[copperbadge]

[ID: A screengrab of my Duolingo end-of-year congratulation banner, which informs me I am a World Champion in the top 1% of learners. It also, ominously, shows Duo the owl, curled up to resemble a planet, colliding with another smaller planet in a starry night sky. Which is certainly a choice to show to the app's power users.]

I don't think "Top 1%" is entirely earned on my account; I suspect that tier's easier to get into when you're a paid user like I am. Plus, while I tested into the beginner level, I did study Spanish for a decade and Latin for three years, so I had a leg up.

Still, I'm willing to show it off. And it is true that I'm becoming more capable of reading written Italian, and I'm starting to be able to follow spoken Italian. I can at least discern words even if I can't always translate them on the fly, and I can tell when I'm watching an Italian speaker subtitled in English where the English translation is inelegant or not strictly accurate.

It's actually a great way to improve, I think -- I watch all the pregame and postgame interviews for AS Roma, which are mainly conducted in Italian (at a variety of skill levels based on the player) but subbed in English. I was charmed to be able to follow the other day when Mourinho -- who is fluent but not a native speaker -- had a little conversational aside with one of the journalists. He was talking about how "a coach isn't supposed to be in heaven or hell" but he wasn't sure of the word for hell (and you a devout Catholic, Mou!) so he said "nè in paradiso, nè in, ah...inferno se dice, no?" I actually understood without consciously translating that he was saying "not heaven, not, uh...'inferno' is how you say it, no?" to which the journalist replied yes. It's been cool to learn a language where for once I wasn't just being whipped through conjugations and declensions endlessly, where I'm getting to watch actual humans speak the language in non-didactic ways.

Gonna be a while before I understand Edo Bove, though. I don't know if he's got a thick Roman accent or if that's just how he talks but boy doesn't seem to say the endings of any given word. I guess you don't need to when you're that good at footie, though.

[astralarya]

Sign Language is Useful for Everyone

ASL is an amazing language, and everyone should learn it (or another sign language). So much utility, even for hearing people! Talk in loud environments. Talk across rooms. Talk without being disruptive. It’s just great fun and a wonderful way to converse.

Linguistically, it is a fascinating language, with “conjugations” having the ability to use spatial information to modify meaning—a trait unique to sign languages.

There is a lot of great free content online. Here is my recommended learning path for those who are interested:

Learn the alphabet/fingerspelling. There are a plethora of free lessons on this topic, so pick what clicks best for your brain. Not only should you practice fingerspelling, it is important to practice receptive fingerspelling, ie. reading and understanding other people fingerspelling. I myself still struggle with receptive fingerspelling despite having practiced a lot, so don’t sweat it if you struggle! Once you know the letters move onto step 2, but keep coming back to work on receptive fingerspelling. Receptive fingerspelling practice (shout out @serinemolecule for getting me into these): * Dr. Bill Vicar's Receptive Fingerspelling Practice * Handspeak Receptive Fingerspelling Practice

Learn the basic signs. If videos work well for your brain, see this playlist of educational videos for hearing people created by interpreters. If you are not video-brained, feel free to move on to the second half of this step. The goal is to (eventually) learn all the signs for words in Basic English, linguistically important words for communication. Reference this list of words and at your leisure choose words and search the web for “asl [word]”. Lifeprint and Handspeak are both excellent dictionaries and you can teach yourself all the important signs you need to know this way. You really only need to know the signs for "how" "sign" + fingerspelling, and "what" "meaning" + mimic sign + read fingerspelling to move onto step 3. These are the bootstraps with which to pull yourself up.

Start learning by doing. Go to a ASL meetup in your area. It is intimidating at first, but the deaf community is extremely welcoming of those who are willing to come and learn. If there are no meetups in your area (or you want even more practice), here are some online communities: * American Sign Language Discord * Sign Language Forum You also can begin consuming some of the best quality content in the space: ASL education taught in sign. * ASL University Lessons * American Sign Language (ASL) "The ASL University Playlist"

I think the general strategy of 1) alphabet 2) basic words / bootstrap phrases 3) conversation, is a great way to learn any language. Push yourself to get to conversation as quickly as possible—avoid chasing perfection at earlier stages. Conversation is what will make the basics stick.

[dedalvs]

can you make a translator for firish i want to use it in my rps i have with friends

I've actually gotten this question a couple times, which is great! But this type of thing just isn't possible with a conlang. It has nothing to do with the quality of the conlang or the level of completion (i.e. the amount of vocabulary, how much of the grammar has been recorded, etc.), and I'll tell you specifically why.

First, you may have seen "translators" for various languages online like LingoJam. LingoJam not only has translators for a bunch of different languages, but allows you to make your own translators. The way these work, though, is you write down a word in one language and write its translation into another—something like:

English > Spanish

I > yo

am > soy

to > a

the > el

store > tienda

going > yendo

That is, you put in one to one correspondences, and that's what it has to work with. Once you're done, if you ask for a translation, it looks up the words and sees what's available and it spits back what it has, in order. If we had this very minimal English to Spanish dictionary (which is 100% accurate, by the way! That is, all of these English words can be translated as all of these Spanish words), you could ask LingoJam to translate the following into Spanish...

I am going to the store.

...and you would get...

Yo soy yendo a el tienda.

Now, if you speak Spanish, you'll see all the places this went wrong. (Short version: You don't always need subjects pronouns in Spanish; you use a different helping verb for "to be x'ing" in Spanish; you rarely actually use this "to be x'ing" construction in Spanish; the present tense is sufficient; though el means "the", it's the wrong gender for tienda—analogous to saying "an store" as opposed to "a store" in English.) And you can actually avoid this in LingoJam by adding phrases on top of single words:

English > Spanish

the store > la tienda

I am going > voy

But you can imagine how much work that would be...

The reason why things like LingoJam are so popular, though, is because imagine if you knew nothing about Spanish. Typing in "I am going to the store" and having it instantly spit out "Yo soy yendo a el tienda" is pretty darn satisfying! If you don't know it's wrong but you're happy with it, what's the problem?

Now, a language like Spanish is huge, so it's easier to get accurate Spanish translations online than it is to get accurate Korean translations online—and it's easier to get accurate Korean translations online than accurate Tigrinya translations online, etc. The reason for that takes us to Google Translate.

I think most people know that with LingoJam, you get what you pay for. Google Translate, on the other hand, is much more sophisticated, and much more accurate. It's not 100%, but it's pretty darn good—for widely spoken languages. This is why.

Way back when, Syfy facilitated a chat between me and the folks at Google Translate because they wanted to see if Google and I could work together to create a translator for a couple of my Defiance languages at TED in 2013. After all, we had a full two weeks. We could bang something like that out in two weeks, right? (lol no)

I learned then how Google Translate works. Google Translate doesn't actually know anything about the specific grammar of a language—maybe a couple language specific tweaks, but it's not as if you can go under the hood and find a full grammar of Spanish that tells you when to use the subjunctive, what all the conjugations are, etc. Instead, what Google Translate has is a database (i.e. Google, along with Google Books, Google Scholar, etc.) with tons of, presumably, fluent documents written in the various target languages offered on Google Translate. They also have faithful translations of those documents—not all, but a percentage. Google Translate uses that information to predict what a given sentence in one language will turn into in another.

In order to do this successfully, Google Translate needs BILLIONS of documents to troll. And it has that. It has BILLIONS of articles written in Spanish and translated to English. That's why the English to Spanish translation is as good as it is.

Now, having said that, anyone who's bilingual in English and Spanish knows that Google Translate isn't perfect. Sometimes it's pretty good, but sometimes it produces a lot of clunky, unnatural, or even incorrect translations. This is because there isn't a human back there calling the shots.

But that's its best translator. Now imagine translating between English and Samoan (one of the other languages it offers). There are EXPONENTIALLY more online articles in Spanish than Samoan. Consequently, the translations you get between English and Samoan on Google Translate are absolutely no guarantee.

And bear in mind, there's a kind of minimum threshold they work with before adding a language to Google Translate. If Samoan is on there and not Fijian, it's because there's that much more Samoan online than Fijian.

Now let's go back to conlangs. What Google Translate wants is BILLIONS of articles written online in the target language. Forget how complete the grammar of a conlang is, whether you can find that description online, or how many thousands of words the conlang has. How many fluent articles are there written in that conlang that are online? How many can one person to? How about a team of people? And how many conlangs have that?

This is why Google Translate has Esperanto and nothing else. Esperanto has been around for 136 years, and in that time there have been a good number of people who have learned to speak it fluently, and have written things (poems, articles, books) that are now online. It is as much as Spanish? Certainly not, but it is enough to hit Google Translate's minimum threshold, and so it's available.

Assuming you have a conlang with a full grammar and a good amount of vocab, if it were popular, it might have enough available material for Google Translate to work with 125 years from now. But at the moment, it's not possible. That says nothing about the language: It's about how Google Translate works.

And bear in mind, Google Translate is, at the moment, our best non-human translator.

If predictive-AI gets good enough that it can learn the grammar of a language, then it may be possible to produce a translator for a new conlang. That, though, is not the goal of Google Translate. Maybe ChatGPT and things like it will get there one day, but even that isn't a dedicated language learning AI. We need an AI that doesn't work with billions of fluent articles, but works with two books: a complete grammar and a dictionary. If an AI can one day work with those two tiny (by comparison) resources and actually produce translations that are as good as or better than Google Translate, then we'll be at a "translation-on-demand" place that will be good enough to feed a new conlang to. At that point, it will simply be a matter of producing a grammar and lexicon of sufficient size for the AI to do its thing.

So, no, right now we can't do a Ts'íts'àsh translator. :( We can go over things like the sound system and basic grammar and you can create your own words to work with it... A lot more work, but hey, we don't have to churn our own butter or milk our own cows anymore! We've got time!

[haesunflower]

Help now you need to write something about being their English tutor holymoly I’m not going to be able to get this out of my head…

I’m so soft for Jiwoong now I need him

this sent my mind spiraling, so here's a quick lil something

₊˚⊹♡.....pov you're zb1's english teacher.....₊˚⊹♡

good students: hanbin, gunwook, gyuvin

gyuvin is already pretty advanced, but he insists that the more he knows the better

gyuvin consistently turns in THE BEST assignments and does THE BEST in terms of pronunciation/verbal tests

you can tell he studies vocabulary a lot, because he'd mix difficult words in to his everyday speech

hanbin and gunwook study hard too, and i think gunwook is more motivated with competition

like he cant get left behind if gyuvin is doing so well already!!!

i see gunwook and hanbin buying dictionaries, thesauruses, and just general easy english books they can practice reading with

gunwook 100% understands more than he lets on

and hanbin is the exact opposite where people think he's doing much better than he actually is

there for vibes: jiwoong & hao

i think hao shows up for reassurance, (although he says he isn't that good) he can speak english and understand it pretty well but he likes testing himself if he knows everything

i can see him speaking english the whole class duration just to really practice and get compliments on how well he's going

you do compliment hao a lot!

jiwoong doesn't really need the basic english lessons anymore but has to go so it doesn't look suspicious as to why he's suddenly so good

(headcanon bc you're dating him already)

(sigh) read this so it makes sense

but he lovingly stares at you as you talk, literal heart eyes

thinks it's funny that no one knows that you two are together

wants to learn but is easily distracted: taerae & yujin

these two try their best

it's not their fault matthew and ricky are annoying!!

is pranked the most, i see taerae falling for ricky and matthew's bullshit when they teach him stuff like "shitface means handsome in english"

yujin watches all his hyungs and is confused 90% of the time

so he stays quiet and nods, accepting some things as fact without even questioning it

why are you even here?: matthew & ricky

literally shows up on random days just because they're bored

ricky likes to ask dumb questions or just literally stirs the pot

ricky: how do you say "gyuvin is an airhead" in english?

and you're like...well you just said it

and then ricky goes 😏 "exactly lol"

meanwhile matthew asks extremely difficult questions that's not relevant to the current subject matter, just to brag that he's a native speaker lol

matthew, raising his hand: how do you conjugate a verb?

and you're like matthew we're talking about nouns

kinda gets on your nerves for being #1 distractors for taerae and yujin bc they think everything is funny

but in all seriousness, outside class they've very helpful and encouraging, i see them helping out other members with their homework!

[rigelmejo]

Why learning mandarin is not that hard, if you were considering studying it but scared (this post is partly joking, in that any language could be easier for you to learn than another, and it depends on the individual, so you may not find these aspects as easy or vice versa you might think another language's aspects i found hard were easier for you. Also, if you've studied or tried to study japanese then in particular these aspects compared are going to be more familiar)

1. You're scared to learn hanzi. There's 4000 you say. They look hard! Well some happy news: hanzi are made up of 214 radicals put together (like letters) to make 1 sound-meaning piece (so like how c a r are put together to mean CAR). The sound meaning piece is hanzi. Each hanzi usually has 1 pronunciation (compared to english which often pronounces syllables multiple ways). Each hanzi is like 1 syllable or word-part. Many hanzi are 1 radical that's related to it's pronunciation, and 1 radical roughly related to it's meaning. (With some exceptions, like with any language). Examples: 人 认 任 仁 仞 all have the person radical 人 "ren" (which looks like a diagonal line with a straight line down, when it's put on the side of hanzi), all of these hanzi are "ren" like the radical, with different meanings (which the other radical hints at). So 人 means person, since it's just the person radical. 认 means to know someone, and the meaning radical on the left is the smushed radical 言 that means speech. As you get used to seeing hanzi, you'll notice that you can often guess the rough pronunciation (at least enough to see 吧 ba and then later see 把 疤 靶 and guess that if you type "ba" you can look them up, since they all share 巴). You'll often be able to start guessing new words based on the meaning radical, and hanzi you already know. There's some hanzi which are just one radical, like 人 person, 女 woman. Many of these are like the 214 radicals, and the radicals are the main thing you'll need to memorize. I know 216 feels like a lot. But once you practice identifying those 214 radicals, new hanzi become much easier to remember because you can recognize how to make them and what information they might contain about meaning and pronunctiation. If you learn ��� shou is hand and it looks like 扌when it is a radical, then you can start figuring out 把 and 拉 may have something to do with hands or using them. Many verbs that people do, have the hand or foot radical. Here's a list of the radicals:

Most words are 2 hanzi put together (similar to english driveway, airport, steering wheel, cross walk, coffee cup, inter-nation-al, extra-terrest-rial) with the sound-meaning hanzi contributing to build a new word. There's some 1 hanzi words, like person 人. There's some 4 hanzi words and phrases. You'll learn hanzi and over time, that will result in learning or being able to guess MANY MORE WORDS beyond just the number of hanzi you've learned. If you learn 清 qing means clear, you'll see new words like 清晰(qingxi distinct, clear) 清楚 (qingchu be clear about/understand), 清除 (to clear away, eliminate), 清新 (pure and fresh, original), 清洁 (qingjie clean). If you guess "something to do literally or metaphorically with "clear" then you may figure out the words with 清 in a show or novel, if you know the other hanzi then you'll then learn to guess even more words.

Once you learn a few hanzi, it opens up the understanding of many words. Then as you learn more, the words you can guess expands a lot. You can rely on radicals in hanzi to help you guess what pinyin to type to look a hanzi up, and what general area a hanzi might relate to in its meaning (like the water radical 氵in 海 冰 池 indicating these hanzi may be related to water).

2. The grammar! Is it hard? Now this will depend on what you prefer. Mandarin has no conjugation. I hate conjugation. This means when you learn a word? You can recognize the word in all contexts. You don't need to learn several versions of "to run" in mandarin, it will always be pao 跑. There might be similar words, like in english dash/sprint/run etc. But you're not memorizing run/ran/running. You learn 跑, and you'll recognize it in the past, present, future, and with whoever is saying it. In contrast to say japanese where 分かります (わかります) 分かりました 分かった 分かるない 分かるなかった 分かりませんでした are all "understand" in different verb conjugations and levels of politeness. 明白 (understand mingbai) is the same whether its I understand 我明白, i understood 我明白了, 我会明白 (i will understand that... although id use liaojie or zhidao probably). In chinese you may use another word for tense, like english says "i will go/i have gone" and 会，要，了， 过 show up in those sentences. And there is 的 得 地 which have grammar functions. But there's no conjugation. The sentence order is also generally subject verb object, if you're an english speaker then the overall word order will be familiar and make it less of a hurdle to get used to other grammar differences. For me, the biggest hurdle (with japanese) was and still is the word order in sentences, and it's taken me years of practice to get familiar enough to interpret sentences i hear as i hear them. For me, french's biggest hurdle was conjugation (and still is if i have to write). So in those regards, mandarin can be quite approachable.

3. Tones! What can I say. There's a lot of good youtube videos that explain the 4 tones and neutral tone, tone sandhi (tone changes), and how tone pairs may be easier to study with. It is definitely new if you don't already know a tonal language. But it is also something you can practice listening to, and get better at hearing. It is something you can get used to recognizing in months, it may not take you years. There are hurdles with speaking, but people who learn english have to learn where to put the emphasis in pronuncing multi syllable words (along with learners of french and german and spanish). Practice, shadowing, and working on where you struggle, are part of it just like any language. I've found these pages very helpful: dong-chinese has a Pronunciation guide under Learn Pinyin, and if you go through it and do the practice tests it can help a lot with listening skills:

And this site Accent Lab has tone pair drills. I really like this exercise, as tone pair recognition helps a lot with recognizing words:

[sayitaliano]

i need help to learn italian in 2 years do you have suggestions

i have italian friends im bothering but yk

sono è un idiota :/

Ciao! Okay first of all I cannot guarantee you can make it in two years: it depends on the level you want to reach, and how much you'll be able to study&practice/find time to schedule some Italian in your daily (or at least weekly) time. This said, for sure you can become a beginner if not even an intermediate... it depends on what level you are now as well. It also depends on what you need to do in two years: I mean, if you for example want to come here on vacation, it's perfectly fine to be a beginner and talk English as well when necessary.

Now, you can find all the resources I have in the various masterposts on @sayitalianohome: there's grammar, vocabularies, audio/reading/apps resources and especially suggestions on how you may want to try to study on the daily.

I can already suggest you to go slow and don't rush things: I understand you "only have two years" and you already want to speak Italian fluently but rushing won't take you there, ever. It will just make you more confused. Learn easy vocabularies (animals, colors, forniture, food... things you see on the daily + how they change in gender/number) and verbs conjugation first, starting with the auxiliary ones: eg. from your last line, "sono" or "è" un idiota? Who is an idiot? You (io sono) or one of your friends (lui/lei è)? Try to start translating easy sentences (as this one) word by word: subject, verb, and eventually direct complement. Longer more complex ones can wait for when you'll know more vocabs and own the basic grammar of this pretty complicated language.

Best of lucks, here I am if you need further help/infos!

[slayingfiction]

Creating Your Fictional Language AKA Conlang

Hi Everyone!

As I am working currently on a conlang for my WIP, I thought I might post about the steps for anyone else thinking of going above and beyond in their world building to create an entirely new language.

First: if you don’t want to create your own language but need one for your WIP, there are many online generators that will do it for you. My favourite is vulgarlang.com and it comes with a free demo version.

Before we begin:

IPA: learn all about the International Phonetic Alphabet. This is when you will be deciding which sounds will be present in your language.

Study existing languages to get an idea of all the ways you can design your alphabet and language. This will give you an idea for grammar, punctuation, sentence structure etc.

Getting Started:

Name your language.

Make your alphabet. This can mean creating your own drawings for sound, or using an alphabet that already exists. You can make an alphabet, each symbol representing a particular sound (up to about 50 usually) , a syllabary which represents a syllable (up to about 100) or pictographs (hundreds needed).

Create words by putting your sounds together. Try combining words to make new but similar words. For example, any is an indeterminate word, and where is for a place, anywhere being a compound word being a place that does not have a pre-determined location.

Order your sentences. English has an order of subject-verb-object (the dog ran after the ball), while in Japanese they use subject-object-verb. Once you choose an order for where your words fit into your sentence, be sure to always follow the pattern as to not be confusing later on.

Make grammar rules. These are the rules that dictate your language, and if you are following the steps, you will have already started. Does your language have plurals? How many ways can your verbs be conjugated? Is your punctuation the same as in English?

Start creating your dictionary, and be sure to always write it down and keep notes, or you won’t remember.

Practice. Practice. Practice. Create new documents using your language, writing journals entries, translating books or try speaking it out loud. Get to know your language.

For languages similar to English, here are the word classes to help you start choosing which words you need translated: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, determiners/articles, interjections and suffixes. Please note, not all languages have these classes, and your language may not require them either.

Things to remember:

Making a symbol equal to English letters and writing English words with your new alphabet is a cypher, not a new language.

The shape of your creature’s mouth will determine the sounds they can make. That being said, if you make a language too hard to pronounce or remember, no one will be able to learn it. You probably want your new language to be useable.

Homophones are words that sound or are written the same, but have different meanings. This happens all the time, just be careful when using similar words, people will confuse them often. This could mean your character learning the language can make people laugh with silly comical mistakes, or insult an entire race.

Your conlang will, and should, have words that don’t translate to English, and that’s ok. A fantasy world will likely have many different words that we are not accustomed to for things like weapons, or food or instruments we don’t have.

Implementing the language into your WIP is an art. You want the language to come naturally to native speakers, but using too many words too quickly will draw attention away from your words, and your reader will start to skip them. Try putting in a dictionary at the start of the book for reference, and slowly growing your readers knowledge without overwhelming them. No one wants to try to remember a new language while also getting to know your characters, environment and plot.

Keep in mind, all languages have slang and idioms. There may even be several dialects of the language, similar to English. Don’t forget, you also need a new name for their currency. These are all things you need to consider when creating your language.

You need about 800 to have conversational basics and over 8000 words to be a native speaker of a language. No matter where you end up, you need to start somewhere.

Hopefully this is helpful to someone! If something I wrote is wrong, please let me know so I can change it :) Any questions, comments or concerns, message me or leave them below!

Happy Writing

[catchyhuh]

Well part 6 made it obvious that besides French and Japanese Lupin can talk at least in English, Italian, Russian, Spanish, German, Turkish, Korean and Dutch (gosh, he's good, I'm jelly).

What languages do the others know? I have some headcanons about Goe, but I'm curious about your ones!

well, the short of it, for all of em really, is: “do i need to learn this language to continue living for the next month? yes? ok let’s learn some conjugation.” so it’s less about which specific languages and just HOW many they know so much as how do they go about the process of learning/how do they USE the language once they’ve learned it so. IT’S A LOT

and uh also they all tend to default to japanese but you probably knew that LET’S GET INTO THE LOT

jigen:

jigen knows the least out of all of them, mostly because he. does not talk to many people. he’s an unintentional perfectionist about it in just that one sense; if he’s communicating, he wants to be SURE he’s understood, no room for misunderstanding

of course, that doesn’t mean he’s a slouch. i’m sure he can still speak, listen to, read AND write at least ten more languages than you and i can, minimum. BUT STILL, he just doesn’t want any room for misinterpretation, none whatsoever. so usually, he lets someone else do the talking, or he attempts to get by with whatever he and the other party can understand. it’s kind of funny because his stubbornness with this means a lot of times the gang will purposefully leave him to flounder, because THAT’S WHAT HE GETS FOR NOT WANTING TO REMEMBER SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS “no ice in my drink please”

because of this, he’s most proficient in READING in other languages. there’s no need for input on his end, and he can get a hang of sentence structure AND the words themselves, so there’s no embarrassment later. so particular about these things

fujiko:

the only one who can speak a language better than she can understand it being spoken to her. like jigen, she mostly learns by just reading it, (sometimes by rereading a book she already knows, so she already has an easy guide to go off of) so trying to decipher someone TALK talking at a conversational speed is. a different beast

uses the whole multilingual thing as more of a novelty than a necessity. like it’s a party trick to her. like she's a translation dictionary in the flesh! ask her how to say purple in danish! wanna know the word for cookie in malay? if you want to know how to say “penis” in 30 languages, fujiko will frown and go “c’mon. grow up." ...but she'll still answer since it’s actually still just ‘penis’ in like five different languages anyway,

this is mostly because she weaponizes the “you don’t think i can understand x language, but yes, i can, and i can hear you calling me stupid while i’m standing right fucking next to you. you will regret this in time”

goemon:

absorbs foreign languages the fastest, which is hilarious because he’s always the most stubborn about wanting to just speak his first language. i mean it’s goemon, you probably saw this coming! 

has since softened on the concept, not because of a “loosening of his personal principles,” but rather, he saw how damn DIFFICULT it made things for the average person he interacts with for two seconds of his life. it was initially easy to hold onto it, until he saw the poor waitress grin apologetically and say she was so sorry she didn’t understand. then he softened. a BIT. if you know even a smidge of japanese he’s expecting it from you. 

wore a t-shirt that said COOL GUY in big, obnoxiously american letters once for a disguise. burnt it when the operation was over. lupin has five pictures of it. goemon allows the records to exist because he is, objectively, a COOL GUY

zenigata:

the funny thing is you’d ask him about it and he’d get kind of sheepish. like, yeah, he knows (he pauses to count on his fingers for a second) 23 languages but he’s not REALLY good at most of them it’s just like a thing for WORK it’s not like he’s REALLY got them down--

again, it’s the fault of that freakish hypercompetence that comes up for rule of funny. if he’s just getting off the plane and he realizes he’s left his gloves at home and is desperately trying to find a pair, no, he can’t get through in the slightest. but if it’s LUPIN involved, oh buddy if there is an ELEMENT of DANGER AND/OR LUPIN, he just breaks out entire sentences with almost perfect pronunciation and everything, to the point the other people in the room wonder if he was faking his issues earlier. and the answer is no, he wasn’t, he just didn’t have the proper motivation. NOW he does, and NOW he can speak fucking perfect indonesian, just because!

also kind of sort of treats it as a party trick the way lupin and fujiko do if he’s in a good enough mood (but you actually do get hints of that in the show, like that one little part 3 bit!) so that’s fun

[wromwood]

My own context under the read more:

My mother raised me with the vague warning that I needed to learn Spanish by the time that she was ninety, had no teeth, and would refuse to speak English anymore. This is despite the fact that she never actually taught me Spanish whatsoever.

Apparently, she just assumed that speaking Spanish out loud sometimes would be enough for someone to pick up an entire language. She did not expect that not only does this (understandably) NOT WORK if it's your only strategy, but also that I can't learn languages well without seeing the words spelled out and learning the intricacies of its phonetics/alphabet with visual support.

This is why my French is so much stronger than my Spanish. Despite hearing Spanish a lot all throughout my life, I actually had French classes in school. I learned what the words look like, what their letters sound like, how the verbs are conjugated, all that jazz. Sure, my brain still turns to soup in a French conversation, but I can parse out enough words to get by and reach for studied responses in a pinch.

Before I started taking Duolingo, spoken Spanish sounded like a reassuring and familiar mess of sounds. They're sounds I'd heard a lot before, and I knew a bunch of them, and some of them strung together formed phrases that I knew well... but what were those words? What letters formed those sounds? Well, that's anyone's guess.

[copperbadge]

Questi sono i miei "carti di studio" Italiano -- non il mio "biglietto stufare" come pensavo primo. Sono diviso in parti per tipo -- vocabolario o grammatica. Non mi avevo studiare grammatica a scuolo, così devo lo studio ora.

Biglietto stufare. LOL. James Bond, Biglietto Stufare. È un universo alternativo di capocuoci.

These are my Italian "study cards" -- not my "ticket to stew" as I thought before. They're divided in parts by type -- vocabulary or grammar. I didn't have to study grammar in school so now I have to study it.

Stew ticket. LOL. James Bond, Licensed to Stew. It's an alternate universe of chefs.

(I tried to type biglietto studiare which is an inelegant way to say "flash card", but I mistyped Studiare, to study, as Stufare, to stew.)

Duolingo has done well for me in terms of learning the basics and figuring out how sentences go together, but I've reached a point where every module is just review/practice. I don't feel like I understand the grammar as systematically as I could, especially since I never had a proper class in English grammar in school, so I'm augmenting. Also I need to start studying vocabulary where I see the word and don't have an immediate list of words it could be, like in the Duo app, so flashcards are a good option there too.

[ID: A photograph of a carabiner clip with several plastic "binder clips" strung on it; each binder clip has a deck of flashcards in it of varying thicknesses, representing nouns in English and Italian, grammatical oddities and idioms, regular verbs, and tense conjugations. I'm still figuring out how to fit all billion tense conjugations onto the cards I've made for the irregular verbs.]

[beforeiread-studies]

First Korean lesson on Italki - done!

It went well. It was just 30 minutes and we spent 10 of them talking in English about my goals and then moved on to "free talk", that is, she asked me questions (like what's your 직업, describe your family) and I tried to talk as much as possible.

I was afraid I would not understand what she said but the teacher spoke very little and when I didn't understand, she wrote the word and explained it. So I felt very comfortable. If you are on the fence on trying a lesson, just do it!

I'll now try to book a couple of other lessons. I might also try another tutor, who knows.

I just wish I had sent her an introductory message beforehand because while we were speaking I forgot half the things I wanted to tell her. Like, I didn't even tell her that I specifically want speaking lessons. She had to pull that out of my confused ramblings lol.

It went well but I'm also humbled. I really suck at conjugating verbs and should have learned all numbers (I only know how to say 1 2 3 7 9 and now 4, I guess). I realized that I need a more solid grammar base, which is why after the lesson I ditched my to-do list and ran to the bookstore. I think having a teacher to impress not disappoint (?) will give me the motivation to complete the exercises (also the price point).

[baby--charchar]

Rhea & Deafness

Rhea is a Deaf character, and I've always tried to do justice by her in regards to both her clinical deafness, and more importantly, her cultural Deafness. This post expounds on some important historical, societal, legal, and medical information in regards to the Deaf community, and I wanted to expand on some of the topics here specific to Rhea.

So Rhea is Deaf?

Yes! She has some residual hearing, but it's only about 15%-30% of what a typical person hears. She can recognize Vaggie's voice if she's sitting right beside her, and she finds a lot of comfort in hearing Vaggie talk and sing to her. She does not hear with enough clarity in order to decipher language, so she does not understand what's being said. She also misses most ambient sounds from her environment, like say, people walking behind her or shouting across the room.

Why is there such a big communication gap between her and everyone else at the hotel. Why doesn't she just use lip reading/writing notes/etc.?

There's a lot of components to this, but by far the most important is: Her native language is American Sign Language, not English. Lip reading requires extensive familiarity with English, which she did not get at her Deaf school; lip reading is also a mediocre communication system in general, as even the best lipreaders can only recognize about 30% of what's being said, and end up filling in the gaps through context clues. To be blunt, Rhea just sucks at it, but it's no skin off her bones.

Writing things down leads to a similar issue- English is not her first language. English literacy rates among the Deaf community are often lower than hearing individuals, but this is not due to lack of intelligence or even education. To read, you have to KNOW ENGLISH (including the grammar, syntax, conjugation, word order, etc. that's wildly different from that of ASL); then you must use the complex SOUND SYSTEMS of the English language to decode and decipher. It's not impossible, but it has its limits. Rhea's literacy is okay, and originally she had communication cards at the hotel. But they were simple words like "eat," "pool," and "Vaggie," and were useless during her meltdowns when she needed so much more help communicating. Everyone in her life is learning ASL (yes, even her grumpy case manager Lute), and while it's a slow process, it's already proven more meaningful for everybody.

She went to a Deaf school?

Yes, it was a residential school in a shitty little beach tourist town. As a school it was okay; just a little old and outdated. She was never the most social, but she had community there. She was on the swim and dance teams. She's won a few state medals in swimming. If Vaggie could find a way to smuggle those into hell for Rhea, that'd be great.

So she has a hearing aid?

Yes, a hearing aid! Not a cochlear implant. The implants are way more invasive, controversial, and often unnecessary if a person has residual hearing.

Hearing aids simply sit on top of the ear and act as a microphone to amplify sound. She never had them on earth as her birth family was...pretty neglectful about her altogether. Maybe if she had them growing up, she'd be better at English and lip reading/writing would benefit her more. But that's not even close to being the worst thing they've done, so let's just move on.

She LOVES her hearing aids. She loves the experience of bolder & brighter noise at the hotel. She's always loved music, but her hearing aids add a whole new level of vibrancy to it.

It's important to note that hearing aids do not "cure" deafness, and that's neither Rhea's nor Vaggie's intention with them. Making things louder doesn't affect the pitch, tone, or intonation discrepancies that can make understanding speech hard for Deaf people. Rhea is just a stimmy girl who's enjoying the world around her some more.

But Rhea's not JUST Deaf, right?

Correct! And honestly I think this the most important thing to remember about her.

She is Deaf, as well as autistic, as well as an age regressor, and she struggles from mental illness. Deafness affects everything she does, but it's not what's causing her a lot of the struggles she goes through.

Her struggles, as well as her negative traits such as aggression, immaturity, instability, self injury, tantruming, dissociation, and meltdowns ARE NOT TIED TO HER DEAFNESS. She should never ever be seen as representation for the Deaf community, she is just one person, one FICTIONAL person.