#i read that the Portuguese used to communicate with the natives with songs

[kaimaciel]

A scene involving baby Lulu.

Afonso looking for the strange little boy that had been spying on him and would run away whenever he came closer. He gets deep into the forest and stops when he sees a vine placed horizontally. He chuckles at it

"oh wow, let me guess, once I stumble on this something will hit me right? Nice try kid." He avoids the vine and takes a few more steps before falling in a hole covered by foliage, luckily the only thing that gets hurt is his ego.

He looks up and there's a little head watching him from above. Alright, maybe the kid is smart enough.

Afonso looks up at the little face peeking from above.

"Olá, amiguinho. You have trapped me, fair and square."

The little boy remains where he is, Afonso can see the tip of a spear on his hand.

Afonso sits down on the hole, his pistol secured and hidden around his waist just in case. He stares at the little boy and smiles.

"So... what now? Are you going to stab me? Take me prisoner? Or wait until my strengh gives out?"

The little head frowns but remains silent and still, brown eyes fixed on Afonso's face.

"While you decide what to do, do you mind if I sing a little?"

Since the little boy remains quiet, Afonso starts singing.

"Ó malhão, malhão, *clap clap clap*

que vida é a tua? *clap clap clap*

Ó malhão, malhão, *clap clap clap*

que vida é a tua? *clap clap clap*

Comer e beber, ó terrim, tim, tim,

passear na rua. *clap clap clap*

Comer e beber, ó terrim, tim, tim,

passear na rua." *clap clap clap*

With the last clap, Afonso realized the little boy had clapped along with him and was now waiting having figured the song's rhythim.

Afonso sang the rest of the song and the little boy clapped along with him, first with a very serious expression on his face and then with anticipation.

As the song ended, he stared at Afonso expectantly. Could it be that he was sad the song was finished?

Afonso never had time to ask because the sounds of his men grew closer and the little boy gasped before disappearing back into the forest. As they pulled Afonso out of the hole, the older tan looked at the trees, wondering if his amiguinho was watching.

[ariel-seagull-wings]

RAUL SEIXAS

@superkingofpriderock​

Raul Santos Seixas (28 June 1945 – 21 August 1989) was a Brazilian rock composer, singer, songwriter and producer. He is sometimes called the "Father of Brazilian Rock" and "Maluco Beleza", the last one roughly translated as "Groovy Nutcase". He was born in Salvador (Bahia), Brazil, and died of pancreatitis in São Paulo. Every year on Seixas' birthday, legions of fans, including thousands of impersonators (many even changing their last name to Seixas as a sign of idolatry), throw a parade in his honor in downtown São Paulo. His body of work consists of 21 albums released along his 26-year career. His musical style is mostly rock and ballad, although he wrote songs in many different styles, including variations of styles typical of his native Northeast Brazil like Forró and Baião, and in fact often used more than one style in the same song, such as in "Let Me Sing, Let Me Sing". His debut album, Raulzito e os Panteras, was produced when he was part of a band of the same name. However, he only gained prominence and critical audience with songs from the album Krig-Há, Bandolo! (1973), such as "Ouro de Tolo" ("Fool's Gold"), "Mosca na Sopa" ("Fly in the Soup"), and "Metamorfose Ambulante" ("Walking Metamorphosis"). Raul Seixas developed a musical style that emphasized the maverick and the mystic. His album Gita (1974), influenced by figures such as Aleister Crowley, expresses his views very directly. Many songs in Gita were co-written with his frequent collaborator, then-fellow mystic and future worldwide bestselling author Paulo Coelho. Raul was interested in philosophy (especially metaphysics and ontology), psychology, history, literature and Latin. In October 2008, nineteen years after his death, Raul Seixas was placed in 19th position in a list of one hundred greatest artists of Brazilian music sponsored by the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone magazine, topping the likes of Milton Nascimento, Maria Bethânia, Heitor Villa-Lobos and others, demonstrating the influence that Seixas' music continues to hold today. Seixas was born at 8 A.M on 28 June 1945 to a middle-class family residing at Avenida Sete de Setembro, Salvador, Bahia. As a child living near the United States consulate, he became fluent in the English language, and was introduced to early rock and roll records of artists such as Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley through his contacts with American diplomats' children around 1956. Elvis's music in particular was influential in young Raul's decision to become a musician. At the age of twelve, Seixas formed his first group, The Panthers, later changing their name to the Portuguese-language Raulzito e os Panteras ("Little Raul and The Panthers"). They appeared on TV Salvador doing covers of Lewis, Little Richard and Elvis, a style of music which was at the time called "cowboy music" in Brazil. They were also the first group in the state of Bahia to play Beatles covers and grow their hair long, as early as 1964.In the mid-1960s, Os Panteras started backing some of Brazil's most famous pop singers of the time, such as Roberto Carlos and Jerry Adriani whenever they went to Salvador. Impressed with their talent, the stars would always advise Raul to move down south and take a chance in the thriving Jovem Guarda scene. Following the promises of fame and fortune, the band moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1967. In the following year they released their first and only album on the Odeon label (later EMI-Odeon), which included a Portuguese language version of the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" among many original numbers. Without any publicity, the record sunk and the band disbanded. Seixas was totally shaken by the failure of the Panthers, and his return to Salvador. He wrote: "I spent all day locked in my room reading philosophy, with only a very feeble light, what ended up spoiling my eyesight [...] I bought a motorcycle and did crazy things in the street."After his former bandmates moved back to Salvador, Seixas made a living as an English teacher before being hired by CBS, still in 1968, as creative director and record producer. In 1971, tired of writing and producing records by bland, commercial artists, he took advantage of a label director's vacations and produced Sociedade da Grã-Ordem Kavernista Apresenta Sessão das Dez, an avant-garde album featuring himself, singer Sergio Sampaio, samba artist Miriam Batucada and Edy Star. The record's mix of Tropicalia, rock and roll and anarchic surrealistic experiments launched Raul Seixas as an icon of Brazilian counterculture.  In the 1970s, Seixas became popular in urban centers such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Music broadcast on TV and radio was satirical, sarcastic with esoteric themes. References to a wide range of historical and fictional personalities are found within his lyrics: The Beatles, Aleister Crowley, Al Capone, Marlon Brando, Jesus, Julius Caesar and Shakespeare, for example. Seixas was subject to censorship during Brazil's period of military dictatorship.  1971 also saw the beginning of a relationship with esoteric author Paulo Coelho, beginning with Krig-Há-Bandolo in 1973. Through Coelho, Seixas was introduced to the work of controversial English mystic Aleister Crowley, which influenced their collaboration. The influence extended not only to music, but also to plans for the creation of the "Alternative Society," which was to be an anarchist community in the state of Minas Gerais based on Crowley's premise: "'Do what thou wilt' shall be the whole of the Law." The project was considered subversive by members of the Brazilian military, which imprisoned all prospective members of the group. Seixas and Coelho are reported to have been tortured during their imprisonment.Seixas got into self-exiling himself in the United States following the detention by government repressive agents, where his American wife of the time was living. (Seixas was legally married two times to Edith Wisner and Gloria Vaquer Seixas). He has three daughters Simone Vannoy, Scarlet Vaquer Seixas and Vivian Seixas. He would later claim that during his exile he had met his childhood heroes John Lennon and Jerry Lee Lewis, although this claim has been disputed. 

Perhaps as a result of his drug addiction and alcoholism, the rate and quality of Seixas' releases slowed through the late-1970s and throughout the 1980s. In later life Seixas suffered from diabetes and pancreatitis. On 21 August 1989 Seixas died of cardiac arrest, the result of acute pancreatitis brought on by his diabetes and not having taken insulin the night before. His final album, A Panela do Diabo, a partnership with fellow Bahian rocker Marcelo Nova (former leader of punk rock band Camisa de Vênus) was released two days before his death.

It is very common to hear people shouting "Toca Raul!" (Play Raul!) in the middle of concerts, regardless of the artist or genre, 

[innovativelanguagelearning]

21 FREE & Cheap  #STUDYATHOME STRATEGIES

Let's Make the Most out of the time we need to Stay At Home!

You might feel stuck at home, but remember, we are all in this together! This list of Tips and Guidelines will inspire you to act on your dream of learning a new language and guide you with direct links to useful Resources! Let’s Start!

1) Read sentences out loud until you master them.

2) Record your voice and compare your pronunciation to native speakers.

3) Create vocabulary stickers and put them on various objects at home.

4) Study with an Online Teacher.

Speak for 3 minutes in your target language within the first week!

A Remote Teacher can give you Personal feedback, assignments, a customized program and corrections via private messenger on our learning platform. Pick your language and learn more!

Afrikaans       Arabics       Bulgarian       Cantonese

Chinese       Czech       Danish       Dutch       English       

Filipino       Finnish       French       German       Greek       

Hebrew       Hindi        Hungarian       Indonesian

Italian         Japanese      Korean       Norwegian

Persian       Polish       Portuguese       Romanian

Russian       Spanish     Swahili       Swedish       Thai

Turkish       Urdu       Vietnamese

5) Keep a diary in the language you're learning.

6) Say every action you make in the language you're learning out loud.

7) Write down the vocabulary and phrases you hear on TV.

8) Look up the Word of the Day on your phone.

We all wish new words came up to us instead of actively looking for them. Well, it is possible to get a new word everyday on your phone, by just signing up for a free lifetime account

Pick the language you want HERE to get a notification daily for a new word and example sentences.

9) Sing songs in the language you're learning.

10) Incorporate your language learning into your other hobbies.

11) Listen to podcasts in the target language.

12) Watch Youtube Videos in the language you're learning.

13) Learn both the language and culture from Native speakers on Youtube.

Watch fun and educational videos about the language and culture of your choice and hear it directly from Native speakers. Pick yours!

Afrikaans       Arabic       Bulgarian       Cantonese

Chinese       Czech       Danish       Dutch       English

Filipino       Finnish       French      German       Greek       

Hebrew       Hindi       Hungarian       Indonesian

Italian         Japanese        Korean       Norwegian

Persian         Polish         Portuguese       Romanian

Russian       Spanish      Swahili       Swedish       Thai

Turkish        Urdu       Vietnamese

14) Watch TV Shows on the language you’re learning.

15) Try to communicate with native speakers on social networks.

16) Check out language exchanges online.

17) Chat with Siri in the language you're learning.

18) Speak with other language learners online.

19) Play games in the language you're learning.

20) Watch and read news in the language you're learning.

21) Change the language setting on your phone to the language you're learning.

22) Have books written in the language you're learning at home.

Can’t go shopping or don’t like sitting down and reading paper books? Load your Kindle with Beginner to Advanced AudioBooks HERE.

or Use iBook to Read Audiobooks on your i-phone or i-pad HERE.

Want to finally become fluent in your favorite language?

The Ready, Set, Speak Sale is now on for all languages and for all Basic, Premium and Premium Plus Plans!

You will get 28% percent off all plans and pay as little as $2.88 per Month for complete access to Audio & Video Lessons + Lessons Notes.

Afrikaans       Arabic       Bulgarian       Cantonese

Chinese       Czech       Danish       Dutch        English     

Filipino       Finnish       French       German       Greek       

Hebrew       Hindi         Hungarian       Indonesian

Italian       Japanese       Korean       Norwegian

Persian       Polish        Portuguese       Romanian   

Russian       Spanish       Swahili       Swedish       Thai  

Turkish      Urdu       Vietnamese

[adapembroke]

Reading Tarot Like the Fool

I grew up in a small, conservative Christian community in New England. I went to church school until I was in junior high. Until I was eleven or so, I could count on one hand the people I knew who weren’t members of my family or members of my church. It was a small world, smaller because women weren’t allowed to speak in church or on religious subjects with men or hold jobs outside the home.

It didn’t take very long for me to know that life wasn’t for me, but I had to pretend that it was until I was free to go to college. I lived for freedom, counting down the years and then the months until I could get away and live my own life.

Then I left. And I was utterly lost. If life was a number line starting at 1, I would have been at 0. I had no idea who I was, what I was doing, or where I was going. I was in Fool time. I was off the map.

So, I did the only thing you can do when you don’t know where you are and no one is looking for you: I started exploring. I studied philosophy, psychology, art history, and literature. I eventually got a degree in English only because my advisor absolutely forbid me to stop changing my major. When I ran out of undergrad, I went to a graduate school that didn’t require you to know what you were studying—or even what academic program you were in—until you had to write a thesis. Everyone around me thought I was crazy, but I had an instinct that the way forward for me was to travel light and cover as much ground as possible. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, how do you know where to look to find it? The only solution is to look everywhere.

The Holy, Bellowing Fool

Look up the word “fool,” and you’ll see that the origin of the word is the Latin word for “bellows” or “empty bag.” To be a fool is to be empty. The dictionary says “empty headed.” It’s tempting to go from empty headed to ignorant or stupid, but an empty bag has room to be filled. The poet Keats called this “negative capability.” Being in a place of negative capability means that there is room in your head for new ideas. You don’t approach everything you see with a firm set of assumptions. You know you don’t know everything. You’re teachable. The Buddhists call this ”beginners mind.”

The Fool is a beginner. He doesn’t know anything but what he sees. He is like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The child might not be the only one in the crowd who sees that the emperor is naked, but he is the only one whose head isn’t so full of manners that he can’t tell the truth.

Being a fool isn’t always about speaking your mind and hoping for the best. In Medieval Europe, the king’s fool had an essential role in court. His job was ostensibly to make the king laugh, but his real job was to say the things no one else in court could say. In an age when the king could lop off your head for no reason at all, being a fool was a careful dance of wisdom and cunning. A fool needed the wisdom to see the truth under the facade of court and the cunning to speak the truth in a way the king could hear. This is a more mature face of the fool, closer to the idea of the holy fool, the saint in ancient times who went around town doing crazy things to snap people out of their super-serious assumptions about what it means to be holy.

Another face of the holy fool is the trickster. The trickster wears many faces all around the world. In ancient Greece, he was Hermes and Prometheus. In Norse mythology, he’s Loki and Odin. For some Native Americans, he’s Raven or Coyote. In Hinduism, his name is Krishna. Like his name suggests—and the trickster is, for some reason, always male, according to Lewis Hyde—his role in society is to play tricks. “Pushing, goading, jabbing the kings and heroes whenever they turn away from the inner world of truth,” Rachel Pollack says.

She points out that he is carrying a wand. In the major arcana, the Magician, Chariot driver, and the World dancer are the only other archetypes who carry wands. While the Magician and Chariot driver carry theirs “self-consciously, with a powerful grip,” the fool and World dancer “hold their wands so casually we hardly notice them.” The fool is even using his wand to carry his bag. While the other wands in the major arcana are white, the fool’s wand is black. Black is the color of “all things being possible, infinite energy of life before consciousness has constructed any boundaries.” The Fool does not know his own power. This means he can’t use it consciously, but it also means his power cannot destroy him.

Ultimately, though, the Fool is a light-hearted card. If you are working with the Fool, Michelle Tea says that “the Fool wants you to be spontaneous…If it is bathed in optimism and takes you into unknown territory, the Fool wants you doing it.”

The Polyglot Fool

Tarot is a language of the soul. There are many other languages of the soul. Just like spoken languages, there are ideas that overlap, and there are ideas that are found in one language and not in others. If you want to know about longing and nostalgia, ask someone who speaks Portuguese about saudade. English is one of the world’s most preeminent languages for swearing, and there are branches of philosophy that are nearly impossible to understand without a basic working knowledge of how to construct a German verb.

When you know lots of things and you bring what you know into your practice of reading Tarot, it increases your literacy. The cards are literally able to say more things to you.

For example, Tarot has a sun card, and astrology also works with the sun. The sun is an important part of Wicca and the Norse, Egyptian, and Greek religions. This morning, I was reading a theory from an anthropologist’s doctoral thesis from a hundred years ago that Arthur is a memory of a Celtic sun god and the tales of the round table are all that are left of his lore. The Anasazi and the Romans planned their cities around the path of the sun, and Japan was once known as the Empire of the Sun. Florida and California are obsessed with the fact that it’s sunny there, and there are places in the north called the Land of the Midnight Sun. The place I live right now is defined by sun season and no-sun season. There is a song by They Might Be Giants about the sun and a Beatles song and a children’s song about “Mr. Sun” that is currently stuck in my head and driving me crazy. Those of you who are more scientifically minded than me can probably find a lot of meaning in the finer details of the sun’s nuclear reactions or whatever it is that makes the sun burn.

I’m sure that if we put our heads together, we could come up with dozens of other references. Any of those references could inform your readings as long as you—and the person you’re reading for—find meaning in it. You could draw the sun card and have it mean that the person is going to move to a place with a strong association with the sun. It could mean that they need to work on developing their ego. It could refer to one of the solar holidays. If your client venerates a sun god, that card could point to a message from them.

You might be feeling a bit dizzy right now wondering how you know which reference to choose, but that’s a good thing. It means that you have possibilities. Knowing which one to choose is a matter of trusting your intuition, which we’ll deal with later.

Begin Each Reading Foolishly

When you begin a reading, be the Fool. Explore everything. Make as many connections as you can. If a card reminds you of someone from your favorite TV show, write it down in your journal. Find yourself assigning cards to all the characters in Harry Potter? Fantastic! (And I want to see!) Collect as many connections with each card as you can.

Resources:

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack

Trickster Makes this World, Lewis Hyde

Modern Tarot, Michelle Tea

This post was originally published on Aquarius Moon Journal on 21 December 2019.

[crtranslate]

Half a year of translation and other matters, July 2020

Just as about everyone else on this planet, our team has been impacted by Covid-19 in some ways. Fortunately for us and those who appreciate our translations though, our actual ability to work on this project together online has been pretty much unchanged! We have done more than work hard, though - we have been playing hard too. 

As our hopes of meeting up in person this year dwindled, the community spirit actually lifted and we have come together in creative and previously untried ways. Our community has grown from a volunteer work project into a place where we play rpgs, read our translations to each other in our native languages aloud, have movie nights in various languages, read our favorite stories to each other, draw together and much, much more. That being said, we did translate a whole bunch of episodes for you all. Without further ado, we present the work of the past seven months:

Critical Role:

CHINESE (SIMPLIFIED & TRADITIONAL): C1E4 - C1E5 - C2E5

CZECH: C2E1 - C2E2

DUTCH: C2E7 - C2E8 - C2E9 - C2E10 - C2E11 - C1E0 - C2E12 - C2E13

FINNISH: C2E3

FRENCH: C1E11 - C2E11 - C2E12

GERMAN: Mighty Nein Intro - C1E2 - C2E15 - C2E16

HEBREW: Mighty Nein Intro - C2E1

ITALIAN: C2E8 - C2E9

POLISH: C2E7 - C2E8 - C2E9 - C21E0

PORTUGUESE (BRAZIL): Mighty Nein Intro - C2E8 

RUSSIAN: Mighty Nein Intro - C2E12 - C2E13 - C2E14 - C1E1 - C2E15 - C2E16 -  Liam’s Quest

SPANISH:  Mighty Nein Intro - C2E11

Handbooker Helper:

CZECH: What is Handbooker Helper? - Ability Scores - Ranger (Quick Build) - Death Saving Throws - Barbarian (Quick Build) - Ability Checks, Proficiencies & Saving Throws - Cleric (Quick Build) - Fighter (Quick Build) - Armor 101

DUTCH: Condition Effects - Dragonborn (Quick Build) - Skills - Multiclassing - Gnome (Quick Build) - Feats - Half-Elf (Quick Build) - Backgrounds - Half-Orc (Quick Build) - Dwarf (Quick Build)

JAPANESE: Dice 101 - Rogue (Quick Build) -  Ability Checks, Proficiencies & Saving Throws

POLISH: Druid (Quick Build) - Combat Actions - Bard (Quick Build) - Spellcasting Basics - Advantage & Disadvantage - Sorcerer (Quick Build) - Leveling Up

SWEDISH:  Skills

UnDeadwood:

FRENCH: UnDeadwood Part I

RUSSIAN: UnDeadwood Part I - UnDeadwood Part II - UnDeadwood Part III - UnDeadwood Part IV

One Shots:

GERMAN: The Song of the Lorelei

RUSSIAN: Critical Role and the Club of Misfits

Between the Sheets:

GERMAN: Matthew Mercer

RUSSIAN: Travis Willingham - Laura Bailey

Narrative Telephone:

DUTCH: Pumat's Stroll

GERMAN: Pumat's Stroll

RUSSIAN: Pumat's Stroll

Mini Primetime:

RUSSIAN: Limited Color Palette with Sam - Dirt and Grime with Liam - Painting Grayscale with Babs Tarr - Painting Fades with Marisha Ray

Join the Team

Are you a Multilingual Critter, who likes to type, likes a little brain-teaser and have a few hours to spare? You can join the team by translating a slot in your favourite language.

For more information, read our How to Help Page, send us an Ask via Tumblr, or a tweet at @CR_Translate.

Also, be sure to join our Discord and meet the rest of the wonderful Critical Role Translate team, and help make Critical Role global!

[dwindledglow]

001. MEET ISLA

FULL NAME: isla renee monroe. PREFERRED NAME: isla. NICKNAME/S: is. DATE OF BIRTH: may 15th, 1993. GENDER & PRONOUNS: cis female & she/her. ORIENTATION: hetero. RELIGION: agnostic. RELATIONSHIP STATUS: engaged to kendrick parker. OCCUPATION: sports agent, ceo of monroe corporation and actress. RESIDENCE: montauk, east hampton.

002. CHECK ISLA’S BACKGROUND

HOMETOWN: quebec, canada. NATIONALITY: canadian and american. ETHNIC BACKGROUND: hungarian and canadian. LINGUISTICS: french and english which are her native languages, spanish, german, portuguese and italian in a fluent level and she can lead a conversation in japanese. EDUCATION: she attended university of birmingham where she got her BSc in physiotherapy and, later, she attended queen mary university of london where she got her MSc in sports and exercise medicine. CRIMINAL RECORD: despite some mishaps along the way and almost being charged for public lewdness and, later, having allegedly assaulted a paparazzo — which was settled in a deal, isla has a clean record. BIRTH ORDER: first. FATHER: lawrence jude monroe, born on may 19th, 1966 in toronto, canada, passed away on august 11th, 2006 in los angeles, california. lawrence was a high-profile hockey player and the founder of monroe corporation. MOTHER: audrey gabrielle kelly, née jones, born on october 29th, 1968 in montecito, california, residing in los angeles, california and working as a communication and media teacher at the university of southern california though she used to be a successful sports reporter. SISTER/S: elizabeth sophia kelly, born on june 8th, 2002 in malibu, california, residing in los angeles, california where she also studies. she’s one of two children audrey had in a second marriage, making her isla’s half-sister. BROTHER/S: anthony dean kelly, born on april 7th, 2000 in malibu, california, residing in los angeles, california where he also studies. he’s the first born of audrey’s second marriage and, thus, isla’s half-brother. SIGNIFICANT OTHER: kendrick parker. CHILDREN: bella nicole parker, born on june 9th, 2018 in montauk, new york. zoe eliza parker, born on june 9th, 2018 in montauk, new york. kyd lawrence parker, born on january 14th, 2020 in montauk, new york. OTHER RELEVANT FAMILY: none. EX/ES: joseph taylor. PETS: gliss and qana, two french bulldogs and brooklyn, an english bulldog.

003. GET UP CLOSE & PERSONAL

HEIGHT: 5′5″ or 168 cm. WEIGHT: between 117 lbs or 53 kg and 125 lbs or 57 kg. BODY BUILD: isla has a naturally willowy and curvy frame, something in between a hourglass shape and the classic supermodel-rectangle one — leaning more towards the first. she's not overly slim but she has the average weight for her height, and she has curves in the right places. her body isn't the most defined but she has a toned frame and she has more lean muscle than fat. isla has a big bust — 32C —, a flat stomach and long legs. EYE COLOR: she has cerulean blue eyes but, on occasion and depending on the light, they might look a grey-ish blue. EYESIGHT: whereas isla doesn't have any kind of issue like miopia or astigmatism, she has severe eye fatigue. she can get away without wearing anything but for activities that demand a lot of focus, such as reading, and when it comes to spending time in front of a laptop, as well as reading or watching television at night or in places where the light isn't the best, she needs glasses to stop her vision from going blurry. HAIR COLOR & STYLE: naturally, her hair is more of a caramel brown shade but, currently, it’s more of a chocolate brown shade. appearance and the way she portrays herself is very important for isla due to her career both as a sports agent / ceo of a world renown company and as an actress. naturally, her hair is straight and when the girl is in a rush, she opts for keeping it that way, using few products and a straightener to sleek it back. when she has the time, she prefers to spend some time making loose, beach waves or a few loose ringlets so there's some volume to her hair. if she's home or off-duty, she'll not waste much time on it and will often try to get her hair out of the way by throwing it on a ponytail or some kind of messy bun. if she has events, she likes to mix it up and often leaves the more elaborate hair styles to a trusty stylist. DOMINANT HAND: right. NOTABLE PHYSICAL TRAITS: her electric blue eyes paired with her angular facial features and plump lips are, perhaps, the most notable characteristic when it regards isla. there's almost a vintage quality to her features, something outstanding and that distinguishes her from other girls — and most people, in general — out there. likewise, her willowy figure is one of her most obvious, notable appearance features. SCARS AND MARKS: she has a few scars here and there, courtesy of her clumsy moments, but it’s nothing major or particularly noticeable. other than that, she has a few notable moles spread out on her tummy. TATTOOS: she has a small knife with a rose lying atop of it on her left hip — reference —, she has nineteen tattooed in cursive on the side of her left hand, her dad's favorite number, and she has I of III on her right ankle — a matching tattoo she's got with her two siblings. she has a b behind her right ear and a z behind her left ear, respectively representing her and kendrick’s daughter’s bella and zoe.  PIERCINGS: she has her regular lobes pierced. VOICECLAIM: barbara palvin. ACCENT & INTENSITY: to this day, and in spite of having lived a good portion of her life between los angeles, new york and england, isla still has her quebec accent intact and it's still as distinctive and as intense as it has always been. ALLERGIES: lactose intolerant, white chocolate, vanilla. PHOBIAS & FEARS: solitude and oblivion. MENTAL & PHYSICAL ILLNESSES: she has rhinitis. ALCOHOL USE: in social situations, she does drink. SMOKING: she stopped smoking ever since she started trying to get pregnant. NARCOTICS USE: not anymore. when she was younger ( read from fourteen to sixteen ) she did heavier drugs such as heroin, ecstasy, shrooms and cocaine and she used to smoke weed and, occasionally, do adderall to focus during college. INDULGENT FOOD: occasionally, when she’s down in the slumps or having major cravings. SPLURGE SPENDING: it doesn’t happen often, it’s rare for isla to lose her mind and splurge. GAMBLING: no, never.

004. DIG DEEPER

CAN THEY DRIVE? yes, she can drive. CAN THEY COOK & BAKE? yes and ish. CAN THEY CHANGE A FLAT TIRE? yes. CAN THEY TIE A TIE? yes. CAN THEY SWIM? yes. CAN THEY RIDE A BICYCLE? yes. CAN THEY JUMP START A CAR? yes. CAN THEY BRAID HAIR? yes. CAN THEY PICK A LOCK? yes. EXTROVERTED OR INTROVERTED? extroverted. DISORGANIZED OR ORGANIZED? organized. CLOSE OR OPEN MINDED? open minded. CALM OR ANXIOUS? calm. PATIENT OR IMPATIENT? in-between. OUTSPOKEN OR RESERVED? outspoken. LEADER OR FOLLOWER? leader. OPTIMISTIC OR PESSIMISTIC? a balance of both. TRADITIONAL OR MODERN? modern. HARD-WORKING OR LAZY? hard-working. CULTURED OR UNCULTURED? cultured. LOYAL OR DISLOYAL? loyal. FAITHFUL OR UNFAITHFUL? faithful. NIGHT OWL OR EARLY BIRD? a balance of both, leaning more towards night owl. HEAVY OR LIGHT SLEEPER? not heavy, nor light. an in-between. COFFEE OR TEA? coffee. DAY OR NIGHT? night. TAKING BATHS OR SHOWERS? showers. COCA COLA OR PEPSI? neither. CATS OR DOGS? dogs. NETFLIX OR CINEMA? cinema. SHOWS OR MOVIES? movies. LAPTOP OR GAMING CONSOLE? laptop. HEALTHY OR JUNK FOOD? healthy food. ICE CREAM OR FROZEN YOGURT? frozen yogurt. PIZZA OR HAMBURGER? hamburger. LOLLIPOPS OR GUMMY WORMS? neither. BEACH OR POOL? beach. SNOWBALLS FIGHTING OR ICESKATING? both. LITERATURE OR SCIENCE? science. HISTORY OR ART? art. CHOCOLATE BARS OR COTTON CANDY? chocolate bars. XBOX OR PLAYSTATION? playstation. FACE-TO-FACE OR PHONE INTERACTIONS? face-to-face interactions. DRAMA OR SCI-FI? drama. HORROR OR COMEDY? horror.

005. ISLA’S FAVORITES

FAVORITE ACTIVITY: working out. FAVORITE ANIMAL: caracal. FAVORITE BOOK: requiem for a dream by hubert shelby jr. FAVORITE COLOR/S: black and red. FAVORITE CUISINE: mexican and spanish cuisines. FAVORITE DISH/ES: poutine, nachos, tacos, huevos rancheros, chili, paella, gazpacho and fideuà. FAVORITE DRINK/S: watermelon lemonade, caipirinha and margarita. FAVORITE FLOWER/S: lotus, yellow hibiscus and plumerias. FAVORITE GEM: ruby. FAVORITE MOVIE: it’s only the end of the world, although she loves anything by xavier dolan. FAVORITE SONG: sleep on it by gallant. FAVORITE SCENT/S: peaches, the scent of the earth after it rained, lavender and leather. FAVORITE SHOW/S: how to get away with murder and scandal. FAVORITE SPORT/S & TEAM THEY SUPPORT: basketball, american football, hockey, baseball, soccer and volleyball. FAVORITE SEASON OF THE YEAR: summer. VACATION DESTINATION: vaadhoo, maldives.

[kuronekonerochan]

GET TO KNOW ME Answer these questions then tag people you would like to know better!

I was tagged by @kdramasunshine, thank you!! :)

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Nickname: Rachel irl/ Lorelai on the webs Height: 1,675 cm Time: 19:55 pm Fave band/fave artist: Queen, Abba,  Beatles, Muse, Evanescence,Hozier,  early Coldplay, Creedence Clearwater Revival, David Bowie, George Michael, Guns n Roses, Aerosmith, The Doors, Eminem, Etta James, Frank Sinatra,Nina Simone, Billie Holliday,  Da Weasel, Sergio Godinho, Rui Veloso, Jorge Palma,Sara Tavares, Beth Carvalho, João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, BigBang, EXO, BTS, Taemin, Jonghyun, INKII, NaShow, Jang Jae In, Saltnpaper, Blackpink, 2NE1, Mamamoo, Drug Restaurant, Day6, etc. Song stuck in my head: No- CLC and Thank you, Next - Ariana Grande. Last movie I saw: Split - M. Night Shyamalan and Rampant (don’t remember which one I saw last) Other blogs: none. Ain’t nobody got time for that aka I’m way to lazy. Do I get asks: almost never and I wish I’d get more bc I love them, although there’s a big chance I’d take forever to answer and when I finally do I’ll write an essay for each yes/no question so... Why I chose this username: My pets. I have a black cat, so kuro neko in japanese, his name is nero and the chan is cute. My dogs are named zuku and cairo, so the kuro is also a mix of their names. Following: 202 What I’m wearing: the clothes I wore to work today under a comfy robe. Dream job: Film critic is probably my go to. Book critic? Play writer? Personal Shopper? Dog breeder? Mechanical Engineer? To be honest, as much as I complain and feel inadequate for my career, I have a hard time picturing doing anything else. But I do have at least a daily despair moment at my job of “f*ck it, I’ll just quit and be a stripper or something”, so there’s that... Dream trip:The whole freaking world. I love to travel. But to highlight some: Japan, Mayan Riviera in Mexico, Cambodja, Thailand, China, Korea, Russia, Jordan, Iceland, Croatia, Greece, Italy and the Disney World/Universal  Studios and stuff in the US for my inner child.

Fave food: Most of it. I’m into almost all of the traditional weird dishes too. As long as it’s well made. Luckily my country has great food cooked in a million different ways. And we do take pride in it. My grandma’s Arroz de Cabidela is my favorite, which is a traditional rooster risotto cooked with it’s own blood (sounds terrible, tastes wonderfully).

Play any instruments: Piano. Classical. Not good at it though. Hair colour: Brunette. Languages you speak: Fluent: English, Portuguese. I get by (can communicate and write, but not correctly, natives will be horrified but will understand me) : Spanish, French. Read and Understand well without Subs: Spanish, French, Italian. Understand a little bit depending on context in entertainment (an expression or word here and there or the general theme of it but not most of it): German, Dutch (way less than german), Japanese, Korean, Chinese (this one the least). Most iconic song: Show must go on, Bohemian Rhapsody (cliche, I know, but it is what it is). Random fact: I picture AU endings for stuff I’m watching as a sleeping mechanism.  Describe yourself as aesthetic things: a storm in a cup, at the bottom of the ocean, near a lava stream.

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I’ll tag: @kiironekolady  , @scoundrels-in-love, @lira21-universe , @letsflytoasiarenata , @gabycane2   @obsessivedilettante  @iksarai  and anyone else who wants to do it. The tagged ones, pls only do it if you really want to, I’d like to hear your answers but It’s completely fine if you don’t want to do it. Hugs everyone!  

[loseweighttoday]

Top Benefits of Learning Spanish Start Learning Spanish Right From Your Home

What are the benefits of learning Spanish? Well, learning a new language, like Spanish, is a good idea for a handful of reasons: you can increase your chances of being able to work from anywhere in the world, more easily meet and date folks in countries where most people don’t speak your native language and maybe even get to travel the world for free.

Each language comes with its own pros and cons. Some, like English, are spoken widely throughout the world, making it incredibly beneficial. Others, like Paakantyi, are only still spoken by a handful of people, but allow learners to be one of the sole speakers maintaining its existence.

BEST SPANISH AFFORDABLE SPANISH COURSE AVAILABLE

The benefits of learning Spanish are plentiful. But for the sake of brevity, we’ll only include the nine most major ones.

Start Learning Spanish Now Here

9 Major Benefits of Learning Spanish

1. One of the best languages to learn for travel

As of 2016, there were 437 million Spanish-speakers throughout the world. That’s 17% of the entire world. Not only does this heft number make Spanish the second most-spoken language in the world, but it is also the official or national language of 21 countries. In the Americas, 418 million people speak it, and in the European Union, 8% of folks speak it as a first language, and 7% speak it as a second language. The point of all of these fancy facts and figures is that if you learn Spanish, you’ll be hard-pressed to go somewhere where at least a few people don’t speak it. This will make you a better-equipped traveler, allow you to meet even more people and enrich your personal experiences.

Plus, you’ll be able to speak like a pro in some of the most beautiful countries in the world where Spanish is the official language:

Argentina

Colombia

Mexico

Peru

Panama

Costa Rica  

Best Source For Learning Spanish Online

2. Learning Spanish makes you more employable Yes, you read that correctly. Learning Spanish makes you more employable. At this point, we’re sure this isn’t surprising. Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and the third most-used language in the media. The importance of Spanish as a business language is hard to dispute. With the economic development of many Latin American countries, Spain being the 14th highest for GDP in the world and an influx of Spanish-speakers in countries like the United States, anyone who knows, or learns, Spanish will be at a great disadvantage. According to The Economist, learning Spanish will net you an additional $51,000 in life. Oh, did we also mention that 10% of the language used on the Internet is in Spanish?

3. It’ll keep your mind sharp According to Alzheimer’s Today, “Speaking more than one language appears to help the brain resist the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.” Italy’s Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan conducted a study in which they studied CT scans of 85 older patients with Alzheimer’s disease. 45 of them spoke both German and Italian and 40 spoke only one of the two languages. As you can imagine, those who were bilingual performed better than monolingual speakers on short and long-term memory tasks. In fact, they scored three to eight times higher despite their brain scans showing more severe deterioration!     

4. You’ll become a better person Okay, we know this is a bold claim, but it’s true. At least, it’s true if you define being a better person as someone who is empathetic towards others and can read social cues. Learning another language, like Spanish, won’t only increase your ability to focus, but it will also help you understand cultures that are unlike your own. According to NPR, “bilingual children as young as age 3 have demonstrated a head start on tests of perspective-taking and theory of mind — both of which are fundamental social and emotional skills.

”5. A world of art, literature and beauty will open up to you One of the most major benefits of learning Spanish is that you’ll gain access to the unparalleled world of rich Hispanic culture. Watching classic movies, like Pan’s Labyrinth, in their natural language is more enjoyable than watching with subtitles. The same goes for reading literary heavyweights, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda, in the way that they originally wrote their books. Engaging with works in their original language provides you with deeper insights into them than you can access through translations. And while art may not have an exact language, being able to speak Spanish may help you better enter the mind of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and many others. The same extends to music of the greats, like Gloria Estefan, Celia Cruz and Tito Puente.         

6. Get a better handle on pop culture

In the same way that learning Spanish will give you access to classic literature, cinema, art and music, it will also open worlds to the the most dynamic and vibrant pop talent of today. If you’ve been to a club or bar in the last five years, it’d be difficult to hit the dance floor without shaking your hips to a song by Pitbull, Enrique Iglesias, Ricky Martin, Shakira or any other top Spanish-speaking musician. And aside from the dance floor, Spanish has entered the modern vernacular of many large brands and restaurants like Taco Bell’s famous saying of, “Yo quiero Taco Bell,” or McDonalds’ “Me encanta.” Other brands, like Walmart, are spending millions of dollars every year targeting Hispanic audiences. Whether you want to work for one of these organizations, or just be in the know when you see an ad in Spanish pop up, learning Spanish will help you get there.

7. It won’t take you too long

Now, how long it takes you to learn Spanish is entirely dependent on who you are, how you study and if you’ve studied it, or a similar language before. According to the American Council of Teaching Foreign Language (ACTFL), languages are divided into two classes:

Group I: Spanish, French, Portuguese, among others

Group IV: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean

The languages in Group I, which include Spanish, take 480 hours of professional curriculum to achieve mid-advanced fluency. It’s important to remember here that how one defines “fluency” is entirely subjective. Some folks say they’re fluent in a language if they can read and write without a dictionary. Others claim that true fluency is impossible because it’d take a lifetime to understand all of the cultural idiosyncrasies if you didn’t grow up in it. Either way, Spanish is widely regarded as one of the easiest languages to learn, so you can be up and running with basic reading and speaking skills in no time.

8. Slang will become a way of life

With 437 million Spanish-speakers in the world, it’d be crazy to think they all speak Spanish in the same way. Some people, like in Spain, speak Spanish with a lisp. Others, like in Argentina, shorten words (e.g. tranquilo, for calm, to tranqui) down and some people speak a Spanish creole, like in the Dominican Republic, that’s difficult for native Spanish speakers from other countries to understand. According to Wikipedia, Hispanic American Spanish can be grouped into:

Mexican

Central American

Caribbean (Cuba, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Panama, Caribbean Colombia and Caribbean Mexico)

Andean-Pacific (Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, West Bolivian, and Andean Venezuela).

Rioplatense (Argentina, Uruguay, East Bolivian and Paraguay)

Chilean (Chile, Cuyo)

Within European Spanish (Spain), there are also a handful of dialects:

Northern Peninsular (Asturias, Castilla y León, Cantabria, Basque country, Navarre, Aragón, Rioja, Provinces of Guadalajara and Cuenca)

Central-Southern Peninsular (Madrid, Toledo, La Mancha)

Southern Peninsular (Andalusia, Extremadura, and Murcia)

Canarian (Canary Islands)

Despite all of these dialects, most educated people will be able to understand one another regardless of which Spanish-speaking country they’re from. Standard usage of formal Spanish in Hollywood and many forms of literature helps to create a standard version that most people understand. But, on the flip side, all of this diversity can help anyone become a master in cross-cultural slang. Each dialect and Spanish-speaking region comes with their own sets of idioms and unique cultural differentiators, which makes learning Spanish fun and engaging. The number of ways you’ll be able to express yourself will be endless.

9. More chances to fall in love

One of the benefits of learning Spanish or any language is that you’ll widen your pool of romantic prospects. We live in a world where the number of Spanish-speaking people is only growing. Those who don’t attempt to learn even a little put themselves at a romantic disadvantage. How amazing would it be to travel to another country and connect with others in their own languages, versus hoping they speak your own? Learning a new language naturally enriches your life, and gives you the opportunity to meet people whom you’d never be able to communicate with before. It is a gift, and something you shouldn’t deprive yourself of.

Want To Start Learning Spanish Now From The Best Possible Source Online Click Here

[e-invoice123]

7 Good Reasons to Learn Swahili

You might be familiar with the very famous phrase “Hakuna Matata” from The Lion King, and that it means “no worries” or “no trouble” but what you might not know,  is that it came from the Swahili (Kiswahili) language.

Or you might be familiar with Michael Jackson’s song Liberian Girl, where the African singer Letta Mbulu chanted “Nakupenda pia, Nakutaka pia, Mpenzi we'” which means “I love you too, I want you too, my love.” In Swahili.

You might wonder, what would I benefit from familiarizing myself or leaning the Swahili language? Well, we are here to enlighten you!

1-  Kiswahili is a widely used language.

This might surprise you, but it is estimated that Swahili is spoken by more than 100 million individuals. That means more people speak the Swahili language than Korean or even Italian. Moreover, Swahili became the official language of the Eastern African colony of Germany in the 19th century, which is now known as Tanzania. Swahili language, which is part of the Bantu language family, has spread all across Africa, that it is considered the Lingua Franca of Africa.

2-  Swahili as an official language.

Kiswahili is considered an official language of the African Union and the Eastern African Community. Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo choose it as their primary language. Politically, economically, and even socially, Kiswahili is a language of power. A deeper understanding of this rich language will result in deeper business relationships. As mentioned before, the Swahili language is the lingua franca of Africa, meaning it is spoken by people who do not speak any other native African languages.

3-  It is important for trade in Africa.

The trade in Africa is low at this stage in time, it is partially caused by weak transport connections, which reduced the business and trade movements in Africa. Yet, the emergence of trading languages is going to help to facilitate communication between different countries and cultures. The Swahili language is granted to be one of the tools in the process to achieve that.

Nowadays, with the increase of Inter-African trade, foreign companies started engaging in trade and business dealings in Africa. African continents are ready to see increased growth. African languages, especially the Swahili language, will become a language that holds great power and is set to hold real influence.

4-  The Swahili language and Education.

Kiswahili is being taught in many prestigious academic institutions, not just in Africa, but also in Europe, America, and even Asia. You can take Swahili as a topic of your study in leading universities like Harvard, Yale, and others. Swahili language plays an essential part in education in many African countries. In 1992, primary schools in Uganda made Swahili a mandatory taught subject. Swahili is also considered a compulsory subject to be taught in Kenyan schools and is also an academic discipline in some private as well as public universities. Having that in mind, the leaders of the next generations will most likely be speaking the Swahili language, it will be short-sighted to disregard Kiswahili any longer.

5-  Swahili and Technology.

Soon, Kiswahili will be a language synonymous with IT and technology. To encourage national growth and improve the quality of life in African society, the Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology in Kenya established science and technology academic programs. In addition to that, a lot of institutions are embracing approaches to integrate programs in science, engineering, humanities, and languages. In Africa, science and technology are now celebrated in an attempt to alleviate poverty, and many African countries are urging to incorporate science and technology into their development plans. Many universities are now seeking professionals to train students of science and technology fields in Kiswahili. The economy will expand as investments in IT infrastructure and online solutions are expanding in countries like Kenya that consider Kiswahili their official language.

6-  Researchers:

The awareness and increased knowledge in Swahili will improve the reputation of researchers interested in Africa. Especially in areas like social media and digital knowledge that are growing, it will help them gain more insight into Africa’s emerging market. In that case, the search for proper and accurate knowledge will require you to have enough understanding of Swahili.

7-  Swahili’s Diverse History:

As a result of the Swahili’s exposure to Arab merchants, a significant number of Swahili words were derived from Arabic vocabulary. Furthermore, it can be traced to the Swahili Muslim people who read the Quran. Some Swahili words were derived from Portuguese, English, French, German, and other languages as they came in contact with foreigners from these countries.

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 10:  Learning languages linguistically

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 10:  Learning languages linguistically. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 10 shownotes page.

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch,

Lauren: and I'm Lauren Gawne, and today we'll be talking about how learning a language is a way of giving yourself great linguistic skills. But first, Gretchen, you sound amazing!

Gretchen: Thank you! You're hearing me on this new microphone, actually a recorder, which is thanks to our lovely patrons who have enabled us to buy this microphone. Lauren, how is it that you always sounded so good?

Lauren: It wasn't just sheer, natural magic, it's because I have been using, since the beginning of the podcast, an audio recorder called a Zoom H4N, which -- the H4N Zoom have a slightly newer model as well, but these recorders are kind of linguist-famous for being reliable, solid recorders, especially for doing things like fieldwork, so I've had one for quite a few years to do my linguistic fieldwork with, so if you listen to any of my recordings from Yolmo or Syuba or any of those in the archives that I have, they're made on this very same recorder and so that's why I've always been able to sound good without us needing any budget for that. But now we're twinsies, and you have a Zoom H4N as well.

Gretchen: So now I have a matching one. They're friends.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: They haven't met yet, but that's okay, they're going to meet in audio heaven, so that we will sound the same audiowise and so that I can learn how to use it from Lauren and we're going to sound really good, so that's exciting!

Lauren: Yeah, and a big thanks to our patrons for that.

Gretchen: Yeah! And it is thanks to people on Patreon that we were able to make this possible and keep doing that, so that is really exciting. Also, they get to listen to bonus episodes and this month's bonus episode is about hypercorrection.

Lauren: Bonus episodes will also sound amazing because they're all on the shiny new recorder as well.

Gretchen: Yes!

Lauren: As you said, our current one is hypercorrection, but we also have a whole bunch of other bonus content and you can get all of it if you become a monthly supporter of the show.

Gretchen: On patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website/social media. And by the time you're listening to this, I will also be in Kentucky at the Linguistics Summer Institute, or Lingstitute as we like to call it, and we are recording this in advance because we're organised like that, but that will be having lots of stuff going on.

Lauren: 'Cause you're going to be a bit busy.

Gretchen: Ha, I'm going to be really busy -- that'll have lots of stuff going on on the Lingstitute hashtag, which we can link to, and as well my class at the Institute -- I'm going to be teaching a class on linguistics communication, linguistics outreach, how to be better at explaining linguistics and bringing linguistics to more people -- and so we're going to be using the hashtag LingComm, that's LingComm with two Ms as in communication --

Lauren: Awesome.

Gretchen: -- and so you can follow those as well if you want to follow along with the class and see what we've been up to.

Lauren: I will definitely be doing that.

Gretchen: Lauren is going to be, like, co-teaching the class from afar, she doesn't know it yet, but she's going to be like, "Hey, go support my students!" [Music]

Lauren: So, Gretchen, you're a linguist. How many languages do you speak?

Gretchen: That's a good question! That is a question that a lot of linguists get, a lot of the time.

Lauren: It's a question that a lot of linguists get -- it's a little bit annoying because it misrepresents the idea that linguistics is just about learning lots of languages, but independent of being a linguist, you'll find that people who study how language works are often interested in learning other languages as a way of kind of getting an understanding of how they work.

Gretchen: Yeah, and I think for me, because -- at least personally, the way I got into linguistics was in high school, I came across pop linguistics books and stuff like this, and I was like, "Wow, this is so cool, I want to do this when I get to university." But I knew that I couldn't do it in high school, there's no high school linguistics course that I could take then -- they're still very rare in high schools -- and so I said to myself, "Well, I know it's not quite the same as language learning, but I'm going to at least enrol in all of the language classes that I can because I'm sure it won't do any harm. And, you know, I could be learning about cell biology or something, or I could learn more languages and I think the language would be more useful," and I think they were for me. I mean, cell biology's fine if you're into it, but like...

Lauren: So what languages do you have experience of learning?

Gretchen: So, I started learning French in grade four when I was in school, because that's the latest age you can learn French in for Canadian schools. It would have been nice to learn it earlier, but that wasn't offered. And then I did a Scottish Gaelic summer camp when I was like 10 or 12 or something? I went to Cape Breton and I spent a week learning Scottish Gaelic. Everyone else was there to learn, like, fiddle and step dancing and stuff and I was like, "I'm just going to take all the language ones." I don't remember a whole lot of that, except for the fact that they put the verbs at the beginning of the sentences, which is really neat, and I have a couple songs memorised from that, so that's fun. So I can occasionally sometimes do something with a song. But I didn't really know much about grammar except what I'd learned from French at that point, so I didn't have a lot to hold on to there.

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: I also mostly self-studied Latin in grade 10, because again, I was interested in linguistics, and at that point in my mind, linguistics and Classics overlapped a lot, and the history of grammatical descriptions of English is very bound up in Latin. So I was like, clearly, this is the thing I need to do. So I got myself a Latin textbook and worked through all the exercises.

Lauren: Of course! This is a very good insight into how Gretchen's brain works there.

Gretchen: And then in grade 11 I convinced my guidance counselor against his better judgment to let me take both Intro Spanish and Intro German and continue my French --

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: -- because I was like, "Look, I'm not picking between these."

Lauren: That's a lot of language.

Gretchen: That was a really interesting experience, because one day, I remember, in German class we did numbers and then I went to math, and then in Spanish class an hour later we were doing numbers and I was like, "I can't... handle this..."

Lauren: Right, yeah, challenging.

Gretchen: But it really taught my brain. I really convinced my brain that there was more than one other language than French.

Lauren: Yup.

Gretchen: 'Cause this is a problem a lot of people run into you when you're learning another language is that you're like, "Okay, I have my native language and then I have, like, every other language" and they just blend into each other too much."

Lauren: Ah, that is how my brain is organised, definitely.

Gretchen: I have to say, if you really want to convince your brain that there are multiple languages, learning them all in parallel is one way to get that. It's not pretty at the time, but it has been very persistent! Yeah, so then in undergrad I was trying to do about one new language a year for about eight years or so. So in undergrad I took Ancient Greek for a year and then I was like, "I'm doing too many European languages this is ridiculous," and so then the next year I took Arabic. I took that for two years and then wrote my honours thesis about Arabic.

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: And then I did a field methods class on Kinyarwanda, which is a Bantu language spoken in Rwanda. And that was really interesting, but I learned more about that from kind of the linguistic side than from the conversational side.

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: I only remember a few words. And then I took Italian just for fun, because I needed to fill an elective.

Lauren: You needed to fill in your romance paradigm.

Gretchen: Yeah, I needed -- I was like, I feel really incomplete in the romance languages! I still have never learned Portuguese and I don't know if it would be a good use of time, but there's a part of me that wants to, just to fill it in. Yeah! And then I got to grad school, and then in grad school I did a field methods class in the first semester on Mi'kmaq, which is an Algonquian language located in Eastern Canada, and then I kept on working with that language and the language teaching classes and stuff for the rest of my degree and for my thesis. So yeah, that was kind of when I stopped learning a new language every year.

Lauren: Fair enough!

Gretchen: But I had a really good run of it!

Lauren: Yeah!

Gretchen: And the European languages got easier and easier as I kept learning more of them. The non-European languages were each their own unique challenge, as far as the grammar went.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Yeah, so I have a pretty extensive language learning history and I definitely don't remember all of these, so obviously the question of "What do you know, what do you speak, what do you learn?" is always one that comes up when you're talking about speaking lots of languages. But I did spend a lot of time in language classes.

Lauren: Yeah, fair enough.

Gretchen: What about you? You speak some languages.

Lauren: I kind of lumped my language learning into three different phases of my life. So, the first exposure I had to language learning was in primary school. My primary school taught Italian, but by "taught Italian" I mean in this very Australian -- Australia is, like, upsettingly proud of its monolingual educational focus, I think, so a lot of schools do some amount of language learning, but there's no real understanding, or nothing imparts to students why you might be learning this or why it might be interesting to care about another culture or a language, and so I learnt lots of random Italian vocabulary and some songs in primary school and at the start of high school. And then when I changed schools halfway through high school, no one felt at all compelled to encourage me to keep going with Italian or to take up one of the languages at that school, and I didn't really understand the idea of learning languages. Everyone in my family day-to-day spoke English, everyone in my social life day-to-day spoke English, and other countries and languages just seemed really far away. So that was kind of my early, underwhelming language exposure. Does mean I can navigate an Italian menu quite well sometimes, but not much more.

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, I guess for me in Canada, the French thing was, "Well, you should stay in French because it'll help you get a job later." Because if you want to work in tourism, or if you want to work for the government, it's useful to be able to speak French. So it was very kind of, like, mercenary-focused around learning the language.

Lauren: And also being in Canada, like, even if you're in an English-speaking province, you're exposed to this idea that French is a language in the wild, like it's on your groceries when you buy them and it's in the news --

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: -- kind of thing.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: So then after high school, I went to live in Poland for a year and that was interesting, because my grandmother's Polish and it's her first language and so I was interested in kind of reconnecting with that and also kind of just living somewhere different and doing something different. And that's my period of, like, understanding the motivation for language learning, but it was before I'd done linguistics or really had any good role models for language learning and so I became pretty competent, but I missed out on a lot of things that are kind of considered good practice for becoming a strong second language learner. So I was having some lessons, but I wasn't always good at kind of encouraging myself to speak to people in certain contexts, and so I really enjoyed doing that, but when I got to Australia there weren't many opportunities to continue that. And for some reason I think I was so annoyed about that when I started university that I never took up a language course.

Gretchen: I took, like, all the languages, I was like, "Oh, I can finally take other languages!"

Lauren: I really don't understand what 19-year-old Lauren was thinking, but I'm really thankful that she took linguistics, because obviously I've been pretty enthusiastic about it ever since. And that kind of led to my third era of language learning, which has been kind of understanding, like, post- studying linguistics, understanding my own motivations and practices and behaviours in language learning, and since then I've learnt Nepali, which I use in kind of day-to-day interactions when I'm on fieldwork, and Nepali is great because it's an Indo-Aryan language, so it's part of this larger Indo-European family, so it's not too hard for me to get my head around in terms of the structure, but it does some really cool, nifty things with the grammar. And I've also learnt -- to varying degrees, not as well -- a couple of different Tibetan dialects that I've worked with. I would say my competency there is more what we call passive competency in linguistics. So, I can understand a lot of things that are said to me, I often can't reply that speedily or I end up just falling back on Nepali. And then I've also been learning some Auslan at various points while in Australia, which is the Australian sign language. It's related to British Sign and New Zealand Sign Language, and now that I've moved back to Australia I'm really looking forward to getting back into Auslan. And that's been really great because it's completely unrelated to my study, I just really enjoy it. So that's kind of a whirlwind tour of my --

Gretchen: And it's related to your research in the sense that you do gesture, and so having a better understanding of sign probably helps you with gesture research? I don't know, I'm making this up.

Lauren: It helps with my gesture research, but, you know, I think as a linguist I can kind of make the excuse that any language learning is helpful for my job to some degree, but I also just love Auslan and learning a sign language is a really fun change from spoken language to a sign language is quite good for my brain, and it does get less chatted up with all the random bits of Italian and, you know, café French.

Gretchen: I never had the opportunity to learn sign language, although I'm sure I could find lessons now. If I was going to learn another language it might be either ASL or LSQ, which is Langue des Signes Québécoise, and I'm not quite sure what the relative linguistic situation there is about, which one is spoken more in Montreal, but yeah. I knew a linguist who could speak Mayan and was learning ASL and was like, "My brain is trying to do Mayan structures in ASL and it's the weirdest thing."

Lauren: Oh, that's great, that's so good.

Gretchen: Yeah! So, I don't know if that happens everybody, but I guess some people do get that kind of cross-modal transfer. For me, the question of, okay, how many languages do you speak is, I can answer that, but I feel like I'm kind of letting down the team in that case because I don't speak a lot of them terribly well, and I think for me one of the things that changed was when I started learning non-European languages, I mean the grammar was very different, but also the kind of cultural context that you come into learning those is a lot different. So, you know, as an English speaker, learning French, particularly in Canada where they're both official languages and so on, that's very different from being either an English- or French-speaker in Canada learning a Canadian indigenous language where, you know, indigenous languages aren't on the cereal boxes.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Where they aren't being taught in schools from a very young age the way English and French are.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So I think becoming more aware of kind of the colonial context in which language learning and denying people the opportunity to learn their language is a bigger issue that I became more aware of.

Lauren: I grew up in Australia on Bunurong country and that is a language that is now taught in some primary schools around that area, which makes me so happy and I wish that was a thing that happened when I was a kid. There is a lot of complexity around, you know, language ownership, especially in the Australian context -- who is allowed to learn a language and which parts of a language -- it doesn't operate the same as, say, English or French or Italian where you can hand someone a textbook and they kind of have the right to speak the whole language. So there's an imbalance there, and there's also just -- same in Australia as in Canada -- that historical imbalance of who is expected to learn whose language.

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly, and if you say, like, okay, well, my ancestors are the ones that were preventing their ancestors from learning the language in the first place and now I want to come in and I've decided it's cool, like, that's a weird position to be in.

Lauren: And there's also a bit of a problem in Australia with heritage languages. So as I mentioned, my grandmother is a native Polish speaker and out of all of my aunts and uncles and my cousins, I'm the only one who speaks or, more likely, spoke that language with her to any kind of degree of competency, because in Australia there's this erasure, often, of people's migrant languages and their linguistic experience. And she was told to never speak Polish, or, she's also a fluent German speaker, and was told to not speak either of those to her own children because it would interfere with their English. And those attitudes are kind of changing...

Gretchen: Yeah, I think it's the same here, though a lot of people, at least -- I'm not sure so much about people who came over in like the '60s -- you get this kind of generation that immigrates, speaks their language, they learn English, and then their kids grow up and they're kind of more or less bilingual, and then the grandkids only really speak the dominant language.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Depending on the community, some of them try to retain their heritage language more -- they'll send their kids to Chinese school or Hebrew school or something on the weekends to try to have them retain that connection to their heritage language, and some of them don't have access to those schools, or don't feel the pressure to do that, so it depends on the community, but there's a lot of language loss. And I think that's something else that doesn't come up so much in language classes, is there's this sense when you go into a language class that you walk in and then you're starting with zero knowledge and you're going to have the knowledge, like, spooned into you the way that when you walk into a math class, you don't know any math, or when you walk into a science class you don't know what a cell is and you just have to get that told to you and then you know.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Whereas for kids that are coming from a heritage language context, they may know some stuff, and there may also be a lot more guilt about not knowing this stuff, or feeling like you should already know it, which you don't get so much, like, I didn't run into that learning French or something.

Lauren: And there's also a kind of prestige thing about learning certain languages as certain communities, and so a lot of English-dominant or English-monolingual parents might see a lot of prestige in sending their child to a bilingual English-French school because French bilingualism has this prestige status, but then we have these children who come in who are amazing bilinguals in, say, Vietnamese and English, or, in Australia we have a lot of indigenous children who are Kriol speakers, so that's a language that has a lot of English words that have created it, but it is its own language, or they speak a variety that's called Aboriginal Australian English. So they speak these varieties and then they come into school and they're in a similar position where they're bilingual or they're trying to become English speakers as well as Kriol speakers. Even though there are, you know, many cognitive benefits that people discuss in relation to multilingualism, there's not the social prestige and there's a lot of issues with getting people to accept that these children need additional support to move towards being full bilinguals and so that kind of thing, when you're kind of just signing up for your undergraduate Spanish class or you're taking Japanese or Arabic or some of the global languages, you can often not be aware that there's a lot of social prestige and a lot of good fortune to just be able to do that.

Gretchen: And I think also that our expectations are different when it comes to rolling up to a college-level language class and spending a couple semesters learning Japanese or Spanish or something, like, "Oh, now I kind of speak this!" And you can -- you know, you passed the test but if you go there you can barely do greetings. Whereas, if you have someone who speaks a different first language at home coming into an English-dominated school environment, that's gonna be a very different situation because they're now going to be expected to function at the same level as these kids that have all of this English at home as well. It's not just like, "Oh, I can say a few greetings and read menus and signs now and now I speak this language," it's -- you're not functioning completely 100% like a native English speaker, like you're doing something wrong, and like who we value bilingualism coming from.

Lauren: Yeah, and also what the motivation for people to learn a language is. So for a lot of people, to learn English is increasingly considered a kind of economic necessity to move forward in life. Like, when I was in Nepal, for me, learning Nepali was a great way to connect with people, it's a way to allow me to do my job, but no one is forcing me to learn Nepali in my family to improve my economic outlook or allow me to work overseas, whereas a lot of my friends are really struggling to learn English and and feel like they are obliged to learn English to have a more secure economic future and that's, like, it's such a gulf in expectations. And you know, if I didn't speak Nepali I would probably still get by day to day in Nepal because so many people can accommodate my linguistic needs and so many people there speak an amount of English now to get by day to day, and they're massively different motivations.

Gretchen: And something else that you run into, I think, in English-speaking areas is that, like, English is a lingua franca, so even people who don't speak the same first language, they all speak English as a second language. And in those contexts, sometimes the native English speakers can be the ones that speak too quickly or use too many idioms or aren't paying attention to doing the comprehension checks that you do if something's your second language, and so you have a kind of global English and you have a kind of too quick English, or too nativised English as well in some of those contexts.

Lauren: Yeah, I think -- and this is something you have a post on, about learning second languages -- like, learning other languages has made me far more tolerant and understanding of people who have different levels of English speaking.

Gretchen: For me, being able to say, oh, okay, so this person's English is around the level of my French, which makes me able to say -- I'll only say things in English to this person that I could say in French.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Or this person's English is around the level of my Spanish. My Spanish is much worse than my French, so now I'll only say things in English that I could say in Spanish.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And to be able to kind of put myself in the shoes of what do I find useful if someone's trying to do a comprehension check with me, you know, it's not just a matter of talking louder, but sometimes it's a matter of articulating a little bit more clearly, or a matter of saying something two or three times in the same sort of way. Yeah, figuring out, like, what do I appreciate when someone is doing for me in a second language and how can I do that if I'm talking to someone who's less fluent in English, I think is one thing -- I think another thing that comes up for me with second language speaking is there's a big rupture between the classroom experience of learning a language and the real-life experience of speaking a language that you're less fluent in.

Lauren: Oh my gosh, so much.

Gretchen: Let's pause it and think about how big that it is, right. Like, there's a lot there. And you can be, like, a straight-A student in your language classroom, or you can get all of the -- check off all of the things on Duolingo or Rosetta Stone or one of those, and tick all the boxes and yet when it comes to speaking, you're like, "Uhhh..."

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Or you don't even want to let on that you do speak any of the language because it's so terrifying.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: How have you dealt with this?

Lauren: Well, I consider myself pretty articulate in English and I've just kind of had to accept that I'm a different person in Nepali because I just don't have the same linguistic repertoire that I have in my native language, and so in Nepali I'm a very quiet person, I do a lot of listening and I make really bad jokes about my poor language to kind of offset the fact that my language is really poor.

Gretchen: Yeah, yeah, you become kind of more willing to laugh at yourself.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: To compensate. I think for me, yeah, I'm less verbally dexterous in French; I'm pretty fluent in the sense of doing stuff, but it's harder for me to make just kind of idle small talk.

Lauren: Yup.

Gretchen: Like, beyond one or two stock -- I have one or two stock things, but if I'm trying to make casual conversation about something, I don't always have those words, so maybe that's just not a kind of conversation that I'm currently able to have in French.

Lauren: So I think the big difference for me between learning Polish and learning Nepali is that I just -- even though my Nepali was atrocious when I first turned up in the country, I made a point, even with people who spoke English, to make our day-to-day social interactions in Nepali. And it was horrific for everyone and it was exhausting for the first little bit, but in a way I've benefited because there were all these relationships that I now have that I had so much more Nepali practice, whereas in Polish, because my language was really poor when I arrived, a lot of my initial relationships and friendships that I set up were in English and that kind of set the tone for those. So I've learnt to use that doggedness about just kind of sticking with it even though I've only got like three sentences' worth of interaction to have, but it is really exhausting. And it's the benefit of being in the country.

Gretchen: Yeah, I found this -- so I live in Montreal and when I moved here, I had, my whole life, this cautionary tale that my mom and my uncle had both learned some French in school and then they had tried to improve it when they were around university age, and my mom had gone to some sort of -- to a camp thing where they were only allowed to speak French and they had to sign a contract that said they'd get kicked out if they spoke any English, and --

Lauren: A contract!

Gretchen: Yeah! This is how you create this social pressure. This is not uncommon in language learning camps, actually, is that you signed yourself up for this contract.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: And my uncle instead had gone to Montreal where over half the population is bilingual.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And at the end of their respective summers, my mom's French was quite good and my uncle's French had not improved at all, really, because he just spoke English with everybody.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Because he didn't have to do it. And so I said to myself, well, I'm moving to Montreal, I'm not going to be like my uncle -- lovely guy, but I'm not going to do this thing. I'm going to decide that the city speaks French to me, that even when people try to switch into English, I don't have to accept that. The analogy I like to use is that somebody trying to switch into English on you is like them trying to pick up the check.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: It's a very nice thing for them to do, but you don't always want to be in the situation where other people are picking up the check for you.

Lauren: Yup.

Gretchen: And once you realise that you can sometimes pick up the check, it gives you this tremendous feeling of power and altruism to be like, "I am so magnanimous and I am paying for this now!"

Lauren: So smugness is one of your secret language learning powers.

Gretchen: Yeah, be more smug to speak better, to learn language better.

Lauren: Yeah, fair enough.

Gretchen: So, you know ,if you're in a context where -- like a service-type interaction where you're in a store or restaurant or something, and someone says -- in Montreal it's very common to hear "Bonjour hi," and what they're trying to do is say, "Pick a language so I can speak to you in it."

Lauren: Right, yeah.

Gretchen: And because it's pretty much impossible to get a job in downtown Montreal if you're not bilingual in English and French.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: And so, saying, okay, like, most people, what they want in that situation is they want to be able to speak their first language. And I know this because I worked at a museum for a couple summers and I was one of the designated bilingual staff members, and when I could find a tourist who was speaking French and I could speak French to them, you could just see this relief wash over them in waves. It was beautiful. And the nice thing about, you know, particularly if I'm going to the grocery store or whatever, is you have lots of microinteractions where it's just a couple sentences. And so even if you end up in English for one of them, you can do French the next time and it's okay.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So you have a lot of kind of micro- practice. And so I think, you know, they say that speaking a second language improves your executive functioning, or your --

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: -- you know, that kind of quick-wittedness and self-control and these kinds of things, and I think one of it is it gives you this practice in being very persistent and putting yourself in situations where you're uncomfortable and working through that, and I think that's one of the places where that benefit is really apparent.

Lauren: It's definitely given me this ability to be, like, having a very basic conversation using one half of my brain and the other half of my brain going, "Okay, what's next? What's next?" Have we got words, have we got words? What are the words? What've we got? What can I talk about next?! Um, um, um..." And I find that knowing that my brain can do those two things and I can look relatively chill while doing that has definitely helped my English public speaking. Like, I know when I lecture now, my brain is kind of doing the same thing and I'm like, well that's okay, it's just running that parallel process and it's fine, and others keep saying sentences in this really like methodical one word after the other kind of way and so, yeah, I think it does -- it helps with that level of executive functioning.

Gretchen: I think it's also taught me more about how conversations are structured. And this is something I never got in the language classroom, but how to talk around something that you don't have the word for so that the other person can supply the word for you?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So, like, if I want to buy a zipper or something in Montreal, I don't know the French word for zipper, but I can talk around, like, "Oh yeah, I need this thing," and point to one and they'll be like, "Oh, of course, un zipper," or whatever it is. And then I'm like, "Yes, obviously, I clearly knew this word, I just chose not to say it right now until you did, obviously."

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And, you know, being able to use words like "this thing" or "that thing" or point to stuff or indefinite types of words, I think we spend a lot of time trying to get vocabulary lists of concrete nouns into people's heads when you can't learn all of the nouns. You need to learn how to learn nouns in context the way speakers do. You know, as a child you don't go memorise a vocabulary list of what all possible things you can put on a pizza are, you just pick them up as people are pointing to them and stuff like that.

Lauren: Yeah, definitely. I think also the difference in my language learning now is that I have moved through language and interactions and language a bit more with my linguist brain on, and so becoming more competent in the language involves more than -- like, when I was learning Polish or even Italian as a kid, it was all about learning the words and what order they go in and those kind of early language learning experiences, whereas now I pay a lot more attention to things that happen in social interactions. So how if interrupting someone is an okay thing to do or if people kind of leave a lot of silence. So in a lot of my social interactions in Nepal, people are very happy to leave long silences and I think when I was starting to learn Nepali and a couple of other languages of Nepal, I was always like, "Okay, okay, what do I say next? What do I say next? There's a silence, I have to say a thing, I have to ask a question, isn't that how it works?" And now I know the social rhythm of interactions allows for a lot more, like, "I want to sit here for a bit and then one of us can think of a thing to say, that's okay."

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Also politeness. So, like, who to be polite to and who you can be informal with. So for example, in Nepali you have different verb politeness registers for, like, a more honorific one if you're talking to someone who's more senior than you, and a much more informal one for friends, and an even more informal one that is, like, it would be so rude for me to learn it in a Nepali context that I've just never bothered to because that makes that easier. And at the start, learning who to say those things to -- and now, like, I know with some of the younger kids I know I'll occasionally use those more honorific ones if I want to be like, "Oh, I'm treating you as an adult now," like, "You're growing up," or if I want to bring someone in a bit more conspiratorially, I'll use the informal one -- and so knowing how to navigate those social features of the language, not just conjugating the verbs for those.

Gretchen: I think being able to say, like, having more tolerance for yourself on saying, if I'm going to make these mistakes, that's very interesting because this is what it tells us about my language capacity right now. Or I'm interested in what I'm doing, but I'm not as -- there's a sense of okay, well, you should just be able to acquire a language and now it's done and you've got it and you totally speak it, and that's not a thing that you end up at, but where do I have intuitions about this and where do I not have intuitions about this.

Lauren: There's a whole field of second language acquisition in linguistics that just looks at how people go about learning their second language and I remember taking that class as an undergraduate and just being really relieved to know things that we know are pretty common facts about language acquisition, like there's often a very rapid acceleration and then a plateau in learning. So moving from being an intermediate competent to an advanced speaker involves a lot more work for visible improvement.

Gretchen: Yeah, something that was very interesting for me to learn in second language acquisition classrooms was that we have this sense that, oh, you need to start learning a language as a baby because otherwise you're going to be doomed and you're always going to, you know, it's always going to be hard for you. But there are actually some domains where adults have an advantage or older speakers, older children even, have an advantage. And so children tend to be better at the phonology side, so they're going to learn the sounds, the subtle distinctions, because that's all they're being exposed to and they have that capability. But it takes a long time for kids to learn a significant amount of vocabulary or grammar. Like, if you think about a baby, right, a baby gets exposed to a language. And as many hours in a day as it's awake, for a whole year, generally, before it even says a single word. Like if you gave an adult that kind of exposure, if you had them literally only being exposed to that language and you're like, "Yeah, we don't really expect me to talk for a whole year," that's just not what our expectations are when it comes to adults. And the fact that an adult can walk out of an hour-long class and have half a dozen words that they pretty much know, even if they have forgotten half of them by next week, that's still six words that they've learned, and the baby takes like a year and a half to learn that.

Lauren: Six words up on the baby! And the other thing is that, like, I'm learning a language around having a full-time job and hobbies, whereas a child is literally doing nothing besides being fed, put to bed, hanging out listening to language, and they don't even have to speak.

Gretchen: They're not doing nothing but learning the language! You gotta learn to sit up at some point in there, too, that's pretty difficult.

Lauren: Yup.

Gretchen: But I mean, you've also got to learn a lot of stuff as a baby, like the fact that you have a mouth and that words exist and that language is possible. Like, these are things that adults don't have to learn.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And adults have these tremendous advantages -- you don't necessarily want to be doing all of your language learning by writing stuff down because that's one of the ways that people get very dependent on a paper and not very confident about talking -- but as an adult you do have the ability to write stuff down and go study it and, you know, spend an hour of focused practice on a bunch of words and then remember them next week. And the kids don't do that kind of focus practice, already knowing how to read and write in one language makes it easier to learn it again, so there are certain advantages. So adults learn, like, vocabulary and syntax a lot quicker than babies do, even if you end up still having an accent. Also, in addition to that kind of first year where you don't expect kids to be able to do anything, there's also the later period of if you have a three-year-old who's fluent in English or whatever language, you don't expect a three-year-old to be able to do a whole lot. You don't expect them to be able to negotiate business deals or follow complex instructions or, like, write novels. There's a lot you don't expect a three-year-old or a five-year-old or even like an eight- or ten-year-old to be able to do. You don't expect ten-year-olds to know contract law.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Whereas if you're an adult and you're learning a language for business purposes, you often want to be able to go directly into a business context or directly into complex social environments, like, we don't expect kids to be particularly good diplomats in a social context where you have to keep secrets and stuff. So our expectations are a lot higher as adults.

Lauren: Good work adults, you just have a pat on the back.

Gretchen: Yeah, adults: underrated language learners.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Even though it's difficult, and spending, like, three or four hours a week on it, which is considered a pretty good amount for a language class, is not very much at all compared to what a kid gets. I think there's a general idea that if you are really serious about being a language learner, you don't just go to class for three hours and figure you'll get it eventually. Like, people do watch movies and listen to books on tape and give themselves a whole bunch of extra exposure and stuff as well, but that's considered like a kind of high-intensity language learning thing.

Lauren: And I think it's okay if you get as far as learning how to order a coffee in Italian or you get as far as being able to make small talk with your friends in Swahili. If that's your aim, then that's great. We're not saying that you have to start a language and you have to become completely fluent in it, but knowing what social aspirations you have for the language you're learning and being aware that it's the language that exists in a culture and it has things like its own way of making jokes and being polite and having conversations definitely help you get the most out of your language learning experience.

Gretchen: It's also worth pointing out that there are different levels of resources available for language learning, like we're used to the idea that any language is going to have bilingual dictionaries or online resources or TV shows and this kind of thing in that language, and that's not something that exists for all languages either. So, you know, which languages you even can learn is something that also comes up.

Lauren: It comes back to that economic access and prestige thing that we talked about at the start and I think that's one thing to also think about when you're deciding to embark on language learning is the fact that some languages are more accessible.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts, and you can follow Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: And I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions, and help keep the show ad-free and sustainable, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website, lingthusiasm.com. Current bonus topics include hypercorrection as well as the behind-the-scenes story of doggo-speak, how to explain linguistics to employers, how to teach yourself linguistics, and swearing. And you could help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. Can't afford a pledge? That's okay too. We also really appreciate if you can rate us on iTunes or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire and our music is by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[Music]

[langblog]

11 questions tag

thank u @lemonadeandlanguages & @amor-fusion (i kno u tagged me a while ago and i told myself i would get to it eventually so here i am!!) for tagging me!!

rules:

1. post the rules
2. answer the questions given to you.
3. make 11 questions of your own.
4. tag 11 people.

@lemonadeandlanguages questions:

1. what languages have u studied?

mandarin, french, portuguese, spanish, a couple years ago i learned how to read hangul, & when i was in like 7th grade i learned a couple of signs in asl (idk if that counts lmao but w/e)

2. if you could have one wish granted, what would it be?

hmm this one is kinda hard bc up to now one of my greatest wishes was to see fob live and i did on sunday !! i guess maybe have a successful career and be financially stable 🤔

3. whats your favorite season? why?

i havent experienced seasons in years tbh over here is just Hot and Humid but i guess i would say fall 🍂

4. what language are you most comfortable speaking in?

english

5. did you ever sleep with a stuffed animal? how old were you when you stopped?

wym stop i still do sometimes when i get really scared at night 😤

6. do you spend a lot of time on tumblr?

hell yea i do i have 3 different blogs that i run

7. if you could study anything in university, what would it be? why?

if this is referring to just one class i guess portuguese bc i was really looking forward to taking it next semester but i had to switch it out for psychology 😔

8. whats your favorite tv show?

wow well rn im obsessed with stranger things i finished season 2 last night and it was just amazing i would DIE for the whole cast BUT my fav show ever would have to be the office

9. have you ever visited a country where you didnt speak the language? how did you communicate?

yes!! i’ve been to a couple of countries where i dont speak the language but fortunately in france, italy, portugal, and brazil, a lot of people speak spanish so thats how we got by. but in russia & the czech republic, we got by through our tour guides who did speak english and they showed us around the cities

10. are you shy?

yes definitely i am and surprisingly im more shy on the internet than in real life bc all my mutuals seem like such cool people that i want to talk to but i get way too intimidated so i kinda just keep to myself most of the time lmao

11. whats a fun fact about yourself?

i hate scary movies and getting scared so much but its ironic bc my fav movie of all time is a horror movie (the shining)

@amor-fusion questions:

1. what target languages do you want to learn?

well apart from the languages i already am learning i would like to learn asl, arabic, japanese, & italian in the future

2. whats the funniest word in your target language(s)?

mandarin: 屁 pì - fart (im literally 10 years old guys)

portuguese: borboleta - butterfly (its not really as funny as it is amusing the way its pronounced idk)

italian (its not a tl of mine but still): burro - butter (i find this funny bc burro in spanish is donkey)

3. what advice would you give to aspiring polyglots?

dont give up!!!! no matter how hard it gets!!! also dont feel bad if u need to take a break and come back later ur target language isnt going anywhere

4. would you learn a minority/ endangered language?

tbh i wouldn’t im just not very interested in them atm but who knows maybe i’ll change my mind later

5. what places do you wanna visit?

wow so many places but im too lazy to list them all lmao

6. do you have friends in your target language?

yes! i have one friend in brazil who i met in my junior year he actually inspired me to learn portuguese lmao

7. would you consider working in a field related to languages?

yup im actually aspiring to be an interpreter

8. is there a holiday you like in your target languages?

im assuming this question means holidays in the countries where my tls are spoken and yess i really like the chinese new year & mid autumn festival as well as carnaval in brazil

9. whats your favorite food?

pancakes 🥞🤤

10. if you had to convince a person to learn one language (any language), what language would it be and why?

M A N D A R I N like its such a beautiful language and its so fun??? plus its the language with the most native speakers so why not 🤷🏻‍♀️

11. are there any memes in your target language(s) that you would like to share?

umm yea but they’re videos on instagram so idrk how i would share them here :-/

ok now my questions:

1. what is your fav song in each of your target languages?

2. what is your fav method of studying your target language(s)?

3. are there any tongue twisters you know in you target language(s)?

4. do you have any hobbies?

5. who are your favorite bands/artists/groups?

6. if you could become fluent in any language that isnt your target language what would it be?

7. what is something that most people dont know about you?

8. how long have you been studying your target language(s)?

9. what is your dream job?

10. what would you do if you woke up and realized you were in a country whose language you did not speak?

11. what do you like the most about your native language?

i tag @somalang @watashiwahaksaeng @woailanguages @rosyrevision @stuclyblrs @spanishland @aspoonfuloflanguage @chat-got-your-langue @bonbonlanguage @lukas-langs @languagemoon

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: Teens Are Going Viral With Theatrical History Lessons on TikTok. These History Educators Are Thrilled.

It’s no surprise that teens are trying for their 15 seconds of fame via TikTok. After all, the short-form video program only allows in-app recordings of up to 15 seconds. But while users often gain millions of views on the social media app by participating in goofy memes and dances with popular background music, a new trend has emerged — and, shockingly enough, they are history reenactments.

Brooke Pavek, a 17-year-old high school senior from Jacksonville, Fla., is pretty sure she got a 100 on a Cold War exam in her International Baccalaureate history class. But this isn’t just any history student. Pavek has amassed more than 78,000 followers and 3.5 million “hearts” on TikTok by sharing her history knowledge in the form of funny, theatrical 15-second clips. And she’s using her notes from Advanced Placement (AP) history classes to make them.

Pavek is one of a group of teenagers doling out their own history lessons online. “I take a lot of notes from those classes to make the videos, trying to fit the audio to those topics, and those key ideas in order to basically help kids learn,” she says. Some of her TikToks were included in a viral Oct. 25 Twitter thread that highlighted some of the trend’s most popular snippets.

Pavek started her account to help other students study for AP classes (what’s a better mnemonic than one involving a hip-hop song?). Some historians and educators say they’re delighted to see kids clearly enjoying history class.

“In order to be this irreverent and this playful with a subject, you have to gain some mastery of it. So the hardest thing to do is to synthesize something — to summarize it in a sentence. And these teenagers have done it in 15 seconds. It’s not the whole story, but it’s certainly a really aggressive and exciting way to look at it,” says Alexis Coe, a historian and author of the forthcoming You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.

Courtesy Brooke PavekBrooke Pavek, a high school senior who uses TikTok for funny videos about history, dresses up as Maximilien Robespierre, an important figure in the French Revolution.

One of Pavek’s most popular videos tells the story of how the League of Nations, an international organization formed after World War I, began. “U.S. showing up to create the League of Nations,” reads the text flashing across the screen, as Pavek dances toward the camera. “The U.S. when France and Britain expect them to join the League,” comes next, as Pavek dances backward.

Of course, the video quickly aims to retell a much longer story. Though U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had first proposed the league in his January 1918 “Fourteen Points” speech for a vision of peace in Europe post-World War I, the U.S. never joined the league. (Those 14 points served as the basis of the Treaty of Versailles.) Wilson battled the Senate Majority Leader, Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, who was opposed to the League of Nations, and Congress never voted to join. “Most historians hold that the League operated much less effectively without U.S. participation than it would have otherwise,” according to the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian.

While a TikTok tells the story in simpler terms, Grace Leatherman, the executive director of the National Council for History Education says this interpretation of history is “as good as you can do” in a short clip, and it should inspire students to do more research on their own. “I don’t know how else you would explain the League of Nations in 15 seconds,” Leatherman tells TIME. “But that certainly shouldn’t be all a student learns about it. This is a helpful tool, it’s a great way to help summarize and identify some of these key things, but obviously we certainly want students going deeper.”

But where is the line between interpretation and inaccuracy? “That’s what we do with history, is to try to figure that out,” says Leatherman. “So I think that’s wonderful, if they make a TikTok that describes key ideals about a time in history, but I would want to make sure that student is also looking at a variety of primary documents.”

Beyond your textbooks, she recommends using the Library of Congress and National Archives Leatherman highlights the importance of using a variety of sources to learn about history to help your understanding of a subject.

One example of a video that shares key ideas of a subject, rather than a specific snapshot of a moment in history, depicts European settlers intruding on native peoples who are “minding their own business.” It’s one of Coe’s favorites.

Another viral TikTok hit focuses on the colonization of Africa, illustrating a complex topic — European imperialism — through different dance moves for different European nations. Sharoon Bi, a high school senior from Lincoln, Neb., demonstrates how European colonizers began to impede on the lives of Africans in the 1400s.

colonization of the continent of africa, 1400s pic.twitter.com/xZlFUPSnu7

— nadia jaferey (@nadiajaferey) October 25, 2019

While the video depicts Spain, Britain, Portugal and France all invading in the 15th century, history books tell a different story. Only the Portuguese invaded African nations in the 1400s. But the British, French and Spanish followed suit in the subsequent centuries. “By the early twentieth century, however, much of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia, had been colonized by European powers,” Hunter College Professor Ehiedu E.G. Iweriebor wrote in an essay for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.

Bi, 17, didn’t realize that he’d gotten the dates wrong when he first posted the video. But he’s glad that commenters pointed it out. “I’m happy that they said it, because that let me know I should do more research,” he tells TIME. “For me, it was an actual learning experience.”

Despite the fact that historical accounts can inevitably can spark debates on the internet, both Coe and Leatherman had a lighthearted perspective on the videos — accurate or not. Coe says the overall point of the clip gets across so powerfully that it supersedes factual accuracy. “The message that he’s trying to communicate is really important here, and even in the act of fact checking what he’s saying, [students] are learning,” says Coe, who adds that these videos fill her with “pure joy.”

“This makes me so hopeful for the future,” she says.

The videos also demonstrate a student’s unique interpretation and understanding of history — and many history teachers nationwide are starting to use TikToks to assess students, according to Leatherman. TikTok is just one way “that students can show us what they know,” she says.

Pavek’s contemporary history exam on Thursday may not have happened through TikTok. But on Friday, as views continue to rise, she won’t be spending too much time on her phone. She’s headed to tour a college where she hopes to major in history, before getting her Ph.D.

Naturally, her dream job is to be a history professor.

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

[salilat-naymlap]

Capoeira songs and meanings

Capoeira songs are seemingly simple at the surface, but they are packed with so much history and meaning.

Googling translations isn’t always helpful, because many capoeiristas who are taking the time to document and translate these songs to English are not native Brazilian-Portuguese speakers, so I believe that many of the translations I’ve encountered are partially incorrect.

For example, a translation of a maré ta cheia provides a pronunciation guide, in which “de” is phonetically spelled “deeh,” but in Brazilian Portuguese “de” should be pronounced like the word “gee.” The same song opens up with, “a maré ta cheia io io,” and io io and ia ia are treated as sounds with no real meaning in English.

Ioiô and iaiá are archaic terms used by Afro-descendents in the Bahian backlands to mean "Sir” and “Ma'am.” These terms were used by slaves to address their owners, but “iaiá” could also be used to refer to a respected or cherished woman in the community (i.e. Tía iaiá). Slaves also called their owners “sinhá" and "sinhô.”

Here’s my attempt to make sense of some of them.

A maré ta cheia

A maré ta cheia ioiô The tide is high sir A maré ta cheia iaiá The tide is high ma’am A maré ta cheia ioiô The tide is high sir A maré ta cheia iaiá The tide is high ma’am

A maré subiu The tide rises Sobe maré Tide rise

A maré desceu The tide recedes Desce maré Tide recede

É maré de maré Hey tide, of the tide Vou pra ilha de maré I go to the island carried by the tide É maré de maré Hey tide, of the tide Vou pra ilha de maré I go to the island carried by the tide

Some capoeira songs reference orishas (alt. spelling: orixas), which are angelic forces of Yoruba context. They are emanations of the One Source, or Oludumare. Among them are Eshu-Elegba, Obtala, Oshun, Ogun, Yemoja, Shango, Oya, and many others (The Handbook of Yoruba Religious Concepts, Baba Ifa Karade).

When the descendants of Africa were transported to all over the New World, their beliefs and religious practices were mixed with and submerged into Catholic beliefs. Their orishas became hidden in saints:

O Santa Barbara que relampue Saint Barbara who brings lightning E Relampue que relampua Brings lightning brings lightning

Some sources claim that Santa Barbara’s Yoruba counterpart is Iansa, otherwise known as Oya. Baba Ifa Karade describes Oya has the deity of the storm and hurricanes. Oya is also the deity of death and rebirth, as things must die so that new beginnings arise. Other sources say that Santa Barbara is actually Shango, the deity of lightning and retribution. Other examples of syncretism include St. Sebastian for Oxossi, and Jesus for Oxalá/Obtala.

The following capoeira song is about the orisha, Iemanjá (alternative spellings include Yemanya, Yemayá, Yemoja, and Iemoja). Iemanjá is often syncretized with the Virgin Mary; she is said to be the mother of all orishas.

Artist: Bernadett Bagyinka

Rainhá do Mar

Quando a maré baixar When the tide is low Vá lhe visitar Go visit her Vá lhe fazer devoção Go make your devotion to her Vá lhe presentear Go offer gifts to her

No mar In the sea Mora Iemanjá Lives Iemanjá No mar In the sea Mora Iemanjá Lives Iemanjá No mar In the sea Mora Iemanjá Lives Iemanjá

Vários negros foram pro Brasil Various blacks were brought to Brazil Bantus, Nagôs e Iorubás Bantus, Nagos, and Yorubas Dentro do navio negreiro In a slave ship Deixaram suas lagrimas correr no mar They let their tears run into the sea

No mar In the sea Mora Iemanjá Lives Iemanjá No mar In the sea Mora Iemanjá Lives Iemanjá No mar In the sea Mora Iemanjá Lives Iemanjá

Sua lagrima que correu no mar The tears that ran to the sea Tocou no peito de Iemanjá Touched the chest of Iemanjá Ela podia mudar a maré She could turn the tide Fazer meu navio voltar pra Guiné Make my ship return to Guinea

No mar In the sea Mora Iemanjá Lives Iemanjá No mar In the sea Mora Iemanjá Lives Iemanjá

Finally, some capoeira songs reference where the slaves and their descendants came from. Capoeira in general is peppered with references to Western Africa. For example, there is a type of capoeira called Capoeira Angola, which is characterized by slow and smooth motions near the ground. Those who play it are called angoleiros.

In capoeira jargon, sometimes they call people mandingueiro/a, which is used to describe a capoeira player who is skilled, experienced, and has the ability to trick their opponent. The blog, Mandingueira, describes the meaning in more detail. This word comes from the name of a huge ethnic group in West Africa, called the Mandinka or Mandingo. Today, there are about 11 million Mandinka spread throughout present-day Sierra Leone, Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Gambia, and in other West African countries. For more detail about the interesting history of Mandinkas in West Africa and Brazil, read A small lesson in history: Mandinka.

The song, Rainhá do Mar, mentioned the Bantus, Nagos, and Yoruba. The Bantu people were natives of southwestern Africa, and lived in present day Angola, Mozambique, and the Congo. Nagos is the name given to the Yoruba people living in coastal regions of modern-day Benin and Nigeria, especially one taken to the Caribbean or South America as a slave. For more detail on the most influential African nations on the African diaspora in the New World, read African Roots I - Ancestors.

Capoeira é luta de mandingueiro Capoeira is the fight of the mandingueiro E luta de nego nagô It’s the fight of the black Nago Angola que jogou seu Pastinha Mestre Pastinha played Angola* Regional mestre Bimba criou Mestre Bimba created Regional* *Respective founders of capoeira angola and capoeira regional

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

Reportage: Why Cleansing is Totes Necessary // A Comedy // Bougie AF

So, this weekend I felt like being a mixture of regimented and “mindful” and I felt like a caricature of privilege. Despite the fact that I live with ten people and am unemployed, I am not impoverished. I have grown up with the privilege of Costco and homegrown radishes and Portuguese soap dishes. I’ve always felt a little bad (but not really) about my inclination towards the more nicely packaged/ more expensive items everywhere, although I usually write out budget lists that are realistically sketched out to include a $13 budget in entertainment. And intend on reading THICH NHAT HAHN and then quickly loop back to Wikipedia-ing and trolling celebrity gossip.

So while I was googling “how to really cleanse/simplify your life” yesterday, I had to have a moment of reprieve from my privileged ways. Why are we so obsessed with this word (”we” as in me and millions of lifestyle blogs) and why are there usually only the options of zen and moneybags reloaded into formulas for us to refer to? Just for humor’s sake, I created a list of stereotypes of my search results. There’s no answer on how to cleanse other than to purge what’s not needed, which is subjective-ish. 

Cleansing is perhaps just saying “no” a lot of the time... Just doing the minimum of what is necessary and picking two things that are important to you for each day. Because drinking miso soup and eating celery and drum circle-ing some subpar world music to reactivate your sexual organs are not the only ways to get rid of anything keeping ya down. 

-- CLEANSING: A MANUAL OF WHO NEEDS A CLEANSE--

“Cleansing” : The Rich Bitch Earth Mother

She carries her African woven basket full of farmers market carrots everywhere, because she loves Farm to Table! It helps her imagine the simpler times of vacationing in the South of France when she smells the freshly cut lavender on the West Elm birchwood counter engraved with affirmations to keep “elevated” as she breaks bread/macca. 

She beams with gratitude as she meets each person EVERY SINGLE DAY IN HER BUSY LIFE with a gaze as “sensually earthy” as amber candelabras. Of course, she made those last weekend at her glassblowing class - after her 5 AM ashtanga practice - because her next thing will be pottery and selling spirulina goji berry energy fragrance to Gwyneth at Goop.

Her Woodstock turned financier husband doesn’t pay attention to her even when she suggests tantric weekend getaways in Oregon wine country for a “cleanse” from the modern world. He always sighs at her after smoking some high-grade vape Sativa and buys her another turquoise ring from the Iroquois she “volunteers” her time for because she’s always been certain that she is Native American… or at least 1/16 Sacagawea.

She has made it her life path to realize her full potential as a Capricorn Sun / Aries Rising in the sweat lodges she invites herself to. She finagled her way into these sacred ceremonies by what she believes to be a “calling” but more accurately occurred after procuring a bankrolled friendship with a local Native American artist. She knew they were kindred spirits after buying his sacred geometry blankets at her best friend’s boutique “Gather.” A new one called “Savor” is going to sell her wrap dresses that she buys from her Guetemalan Shaman, who always forgets that she doesn’t drink regular milk only ALMOND MILK and no gluten when they trip together on $500 ayahuasca that keeps true to her frugal roots of growing up in Marin County. She just loves the “spirit” of Central American people because it makes her feel like she is in the Peace Corps when they smile back at her and offer her the opportunity to pose in photos next to a “saddening” market stand.

All of the Instagram photos of posing in collectivos with poor people will be framed at the cafe where she namaste-scolds the barista everyday for her stupidity in not knowing her clear distaste for regular hummus (acidic!). It’s always only going to be beet hummus until edamame hummus gets on the menu for godssakes. Here she always meets with her caftan-clad yoga friends who all used to be dancers and now have rich husbands who built them modern Adobe lairs to be bored in but pretend like blackberry sage tea gets them high from well being.

She feels forlorn that there is something discontenting about the “minimalism” she has so ambitiously set out to create/dump shitloads of money into, so in the only way she knows how, she will book an Iyasca retreat in Peru. Maybe poor Peruvian people can teach her the meaning of life so she can write a memoir about how life changing it all was. Holding hands with the street children… and never returning again because it makes her too sad, but the lessons of the third world will be tattooed literally and figuratively in a Quechua phrase for life on her wrist so she can talk about it to the young hot river guide men in Telluride…

“Cleansing” : The Twenty-Something Project

She has had way too much casual sex for her pressing emotional need to find someone who loves tequila and rock climbing and contemporary fiction just as much as she does. She drinks way too much tequila five days a week as well as wine during the day because she feels like she can’t access who she really is (that’s what a partner would help her discover in his egocentric artistic ways of being).  She spends eight hours on the computer writing shit that doesn’t matter to her (like emails) and trolling pointless social media sites that make her wonder if models really are people. This is usually the apex of her day, when she recounts how she is in charge of her own happiness but jesus how many genetically modified Victoria’s Secret models are there out there? These girls are now chronicled to be “anti-social-media-bullying” and are just “regular girls,” which she intellectually realizes. But she thinks and researches for a long time how they can be just so: how can they get someone to take their photo at just the right moment when they are writhing around in the water so that you can see that they are so in tune with and gently being kissed by their sexy actor boyfriend (bio in link for his new film with Harrison Ford!)? This is happening while being blessed by the Tahitian palm tree shading themselves, because they’re responsible so they use La Roche Posay SPF and feel #grateful that they are very hot people and have so many loyal followers.

She decides that becoming a massage therapist will likely zen her out all the time and make her like wheatgrass and never drink again and only date “spiritual” men with man buns. Maybe being a masseuse will train her to refuse being around “negative vibes” and only will be in the same room as people who make her feel “full.” And being a masseuse will likely get her laid because she’ll be a healer. So like the google-generation, she finds a massage training in Tulum. But it’s $5,000 over-budget. Instead, she thinks she will just clean her room and eat a mango from the bodega around the corner because it’s only $1. And only have 3 apps instead of 13.

“Cleansing” : The I-Came-of-Age-In-The-Rob-Lowe-Coked-Out-Power-Dressing-Glamor-of-The-1980’s-Workaholic 

EVERYTHING IS FALLING APART. She works so much that she has no life. She hates her pantsuits but started working in the age of Anita Hill and thought she had to break the glass ceiling more because her mom would quote Betty Friedan and preach to not be “ungrateful” to the women like Jane Fonda who paved the way (and the song “9-5,” too). She used to dream about working in transportation and logistics just so she could scan her government card everyday.

Now she hates the Boys Club. She even hates most of the women, who are such mechanical bores and all majored in “Political Science” like smart girls do at Dartmouth. They’re the sociopathic philanthropists who only “endorse” International causes that pay people to publicize the plight of poor people because it looks good in photos and they don’t actually want to help poor people. Unless you’re George and Amal Clooney, you can just show yourself the door.

So guess what? She QUITS HER JOB and decides that something must change... and also that she absolutely loathes Elizabeth Gilbert. This means that she doesn’t want to be BORED hanging out doing yoga in some fucking yurt pagoda thing and she doesn’t want to get FAT in Italy with some boy toy whose worshipping would be as aging feeling as a lifestyle blog… and she doesn’t want to SHUT THE FUCK UP in India in some ashram with annoying as fuck Californians who think using crystalized deoderant is as repenting as when they culturally appropriated Ganesh on their saggy backs.

So what does she want to “cleanse?” Anything committing or societally-fulfilling for women her age (like the constant suggestion of growing a damn garden to be happy…). The solution is to do whatever she damn well pleases from the comforts of her current home and maybe tell people what to do from her computer every once in a while “freelancing” and occasionally go on a few dates and walking out when they’re just blah blah blah. 

Perhaps trying to be “budget-y” but realizing she earned her accolades thirty years ago, so only voting with her dollar when she feels like reusing the same dishtowel or using up everything in the fridge. She learned long ago that you’re not better than others just because you “know how to be poor and sustainable” by eating pumpkins from the garbage … and living with a commune of people you kind of hate for judging you about not knowing the merits of free speech feminism and cleaning with vinegar absolutely everywhere (...everywhere).

She will damn well do as she pleases in purchasing a sugaring appointment or buying a $50 solo dinner. Or online shopping at FreePeople if she feels like she’s lagging a bit on her “cleanse” and wants to look a little like she had a love affair in Barcelona and went cray at the flea markets that apparently only sell pillow case dresses that are so bright and flouncy you have to dance in the streets when you wear them and look like you’re having an enlightening experience even when you drink “fresh mint water.”

“Cleansing”: The Legit Monk Woman

She GOT RID OF EVERYTHING to be noble to a million sutras she can’t quite name but she tries to, usually when she’s drinking a single cup of tea for four hours. She went to Ladakh in 1987 and comes back to Los Angeles in 2017 named Nag Champa and gets a job teaching at some liberal theology college in Orange County where Steven Spielbergh’s kids occasionally come to class. At least they link the school website in their online interviews with Vogue all the time. They are using the Tibetan sound bowls to create a new experimental electronic album that can maybe buy their way into Coachella and they may have her be their life coach while on tour to “combat the stressful perils of the industry.” 

She writes a few blog posts for Depak who is always trynna hit on her. She goes to Wanderlust and blesses the dreadlocked crowd with a hybrid Buddhist-Rastafarian-Katy Perry lyric blessing, throwing Whole Foods rosewater on their toned bodies that they got growing up skiing in Aspen. All of them say they want to be mentored by her in between their barista/yoga teaching/juice cleansing lifestyles, maybe when they’re done setting up their kombucha bar they can swing by and have like a $6,000 certifying sesh that has all inclusive vegan food? Or they can barter with nuts and berries that they brought back from their trip to INDIA.

Yes, she must capitalize on this moment of “wellness.” You can find her speaking and retreat information on LinkedIn that she’s still waiting to customize in a more boisonberry color for calming effects…

“Cleansing”: The-Doesn’t-Want-To-Give-A-Shit-But-Still-Kind-of-Does Woman

She needs to get her finances in order a bit and is somehow always “busy” so she gets rid of what’s not needed by saying: Yes, she needs her organic food. No, she doesn’t need her Argan oil face wash. Yes, she needs a drink at somewhere other than a dive bar every other Friday. No, she doesn’t need to go to Brazilian dance yoga with Shanti for $40 every day. Yes, she needs to go see a concert every once in a while. No, she doesn’t need five paid-for “music experience” apps that “customize” user experience depending on their ever-fluctuating mood and will bring you to “up and coming artists.” Because honestly, these musicians sound like they took a Xanax and hipsters just go to their shows because they’re insecure that they’re being called “hipsters” and hate “categorization of gender norms” but totally need reassurance that they’re doing life right by the Anthropologie curtain-esque crop tops and leg tattoos they appear bored in everywhere. So every grainy film Insta shot is in fact very intentional but they won’t admit it because they will always be pale-faced underdogs just like these up and coming artists who have long hair and little annoying vegan kids with no manners who have ginger hair and are gonna grow up to be soft-core racists because they intentionally want to have black friends (only with septum piercings and a denim jacket) so they can show how liberal they are because their parents were once underpaid touring musicians and they know what struggle is because they tried acid when they were 14 and they saw how we are all “the same.”  

Yes, she needs stupid email to make a living. No, she doesn’t need Snapchat because so much meh and overwhelming tapping all the time.

…DONE. Now she’s livin’.

[high-liters-and-tea-blog]

Language Learning Tip!!

GREETINGS ALL! (I’m rly sorry my posts are always whole novels but like I say as much as I can to make sure you get the idea.) Idk if I’m the best person to be giving out language tips but like this is just something I personally have been doing and I found it actually helps a lot.

1. Find songs in that language or take your favourite songs and translate them to that language. I, personally, started small with like nursery rhymes and things like that because the vocabulary and syntax is at a beginner level, then I moved on until I got to my favourite songs. II’m now at a level of french where I can listen to fast, harder, heavier music (like rap/trap/real underground stuff) and I can understand and catch a lot of the idomatic expressions and play on words etc

2. Similar to the first, find movies, tv shows, or other short videos with your target language. This especially helped me for sign language since the whole thing is basically watching, body language and facial expressions make up a good chunk of it. For spoken languages, this really helps with pronounciation, common expressions, idioms, and all those other things that you dont get from just studying/reading. French is all about tone, if you don’t sound nasal and slightly exaggerated you can potentially change the meaning of the sentence and with Hausa intonation is a major key. Plus with the various dialects, it’s good to be exposed to different pronounciations of the same word. If you can I’d definitely suggest something like a talk show (think oprah or Dr. Phil, not Ellen) because there’s not so much scripting and it’s a lot more natural (?)

3. (This tip is something I’ve jsut started doing as my Hausa vocabulary is starteing to grow) Incorporate the target language into your everyday life! I’ve gone around my room labelling everyday items (phone, eggs, clock etc) and if I need to use them I repeat the word and try and construct a basic sentence. ALSO RLY HELPFUL EXAMPLE but I’ve started doing my BuJo spreads in Hausa as well. This has greatly improved some of the more common calendar-related vocabulary like days of the week, numbers, time, and that sort of thing. I still write down quotes and tasks and things in english but hopefully that will change soon

4. LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN AND LISTEN. If you can find native speakers actually speaking pls befriend them and do the most to listen to them. Listening is so important because you will again get to learn so much that books and vocab lists can’t teach you (Refer to the first two points!!). If you can do some sort of exchange program, for the first little while, just sit and blend in, listen, and observe, only speak when you are spoken to!! If that’s not an option then for sure the internet is a great place, you should be able to find a radioshow or something like that to listen to. Find something that is fairly natural so you pick up on the way people actually speak (I hope youunderstaand what I mean). This was a huge issue with me for french because the french you learn in school is like incredibly formal, only a conversation between the Queen and your great-great-grandmother would sound like that, literally the interview I had was so informal I was confused. I’m fortunate enough that my parents (obviously) speak Hausa to eachother at home still and I rly take advantage of this.

5. The last (for now) and possibly one of the most important tips I have today is DON’T WORRY ABOUT GRAMMAR AND WRITING AND ALL THAT RUBBISH, speaking and pronounciation is far more important than understanding written things. The spelling and things might confuse you and impair your speaking or pronounciation. Think of learning to speak as a baby, your parents didnt sit you down with a notebook or dictionary and write things out then have you try and read them back, they spoke to you and the writing came YEARS later! (That’s why I believe lanuages are taught so backwards in school). A lot of people learning French for the firs time pronounce things the way they would in English, forgetting that there are a lot more soft consonnants and silent letters. When I as learning spanish I got stuck in the french mode and kept things silent that should have been pronounced. When I was learning Portuguese I got stuck in Spanish mode and even tho things are spelled similarly or the same, they are said completely differently. Don’t even get me started on Russsian, I’m taking my precious time to learn how to read/write that! With Hausa I made sure to learn from these mistakes. Plus, I already knew a lot of words so when I finally saw how they were written I was a bit surprsed but I had a better understanding of pronounciation so it was easier to learn new words.

Side note; If anoyone has any apps/websites to recomend for languages that aren’t as popular to learn (such as Hausa) PLS LEAVE THEM BELOW OR SEND A MESSAGE!!!!!

***Language-Related Backstory****** ***Don’t feel obliged to read but here are my (somewhat) qualifications***

So my first language WAS NOT English and I went to french schools for the majority of my life so I’ve kinda always hated and struggled with English in school and just in life. At home we spoke exclusively in Hausa, It wasn’t until I started school (age 4-6) that I we started speaking english at home (my mom sent me to school with a list of common words in Hausa so that my teachers could communicate with me, but thats a whole other story)

From preschool to second grade (age 4-7) I actually went to french immersion schools, so in the morning we did our lessons in english and in the afternoon we repeated them in french, or we learned the concepts in english but execution and any key vocab was all in french. From third to 5th grade I went to a French school, as in native french- speakers only, I was rly lost and so were my parents (literally ALL communication was in french). So by this time we only spoke English at home and I lost all my Hausa. From then on I went to english schools and just took a lot of french classes, even in uni.

But after 15 years of constantly taking french in schoool and my teachers saying im fluent and never getting less than 96% in all things french, I applied for a bilingual job position and COULD NOT communicate fluently in french with the interviewer. It was then that I realized that I had just been taking the same grammar course for 15 years and obviously what you learn in school is not representative of what you apply in real life but with languages its REALLY much so.

SO, I’m now continuing my french studies on my own, I’ve been trying to teach myelf Sign Language for years but I get frustrated a lot easier, I’m (quite sporadically, I’ll admit) self- teaching myself Russian and Portuguese, and I’m (re-)teaching myself Hausa. Ideally, I’d love to speak at least 5 Languages fluently before I die

[cxro1]

Hey there!

My name is Carolline and I’m new to the studyblr community. I’m 18 (will be 19 soon) I’m natural from São Paulo, Brazil - but I’m currently living in Rio de Janeiro since I was very little - I started this studyblr in order to get motivation and good tips from students all around the world. In fact, this year I’m gonna be applying for some local colleges and that’s why I need to boost my productivity and get good results. Here’s some facts about me:

- I’m really into art and architecture. My favourite art moviments are Postimpressionism and Surrealism. At college I want to study architecture and specialize myself in sustainability, so I can help building environmentally friendly places all around my city and country.

- I enjoy watching horror films and reading almost all kinds of novels. My favourite book is The Little Prince since I was 13 and my favourite film is always the last great film I have watched.

- I plan to taking part in a course for exchange students in the future. I’ve just finished my english course, but I’m still not sure if I master the language yet, besides the fact that many people tell me that you can only be sure about that when you’re in the ideal place to practice with language native’s.

- My favourite band is The Smiths, but I just can’t choose a favourite song by them following the fact that I always feel comforted by their music and the emotion which makes me love the honest atmosphere from all of their songs.

- I’d like to live abroad for a while, but I still need to work on my self-assurance first. There’s some stuff that makes me feel insecure about leaving and staying on my own.

- I’ve been a vegetarian for 10 months so far and I’m dealing pretty well with this new lifestyle. I can certainly feel the benefits and I feel awesome.

- I’m into seeing art exhibitions and writing poems in portuguese. My favourite national poet is Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

- I also used to watch tv series like How to get away with murder and Hannibal.

- I’d like to learn new languages like french and italian. I’m accepting book recommendations for beginners ☺️

Thanks for your reading ✨