#i really need to learn Arabic

[kosmicpowers]

I want to learn more languages but ughh all of them are pretty and equally important and I wish I could speak every single language ever

[envolvenuances]

I mentioned I am putting together new readings lists and in the order of what I've been most questioned about:.

readings I've found helpful in making sense of my childhood adverse experiences, particularly psychology theories on trauma and feminist texts about sexual violence

introductory pieces to marxism and economic/class warfare analysis

south/latin american feminists, particularly with decolonial and antiblacknesss lines

less Introductory Social Reproduction Theory works I particularly enjoy

I might expand the first into including some literary works as well. as always I want to give a little of my own commentary and that takes me even longer than making sense of my digital and physical files. but if anyone has their own suggestions I would love to hear them.

besides spanish portuguese and english I read french and my girlfriend Italian

[things-methinks]

Talking to [leftist/socialist/progressive/whatever] white people as a brown girl is always an experience

[dulac1882]

!! langblr introduction !!

salut !! i made this langblr to share my language learning progress and to be in contact with other people into languages<3 i'm especially interested in following people who post about their learning progress !!!

about me: - caroline (she/her), 21, finnish, uni student - other than languages i'm interested in almost everything art & culture related :) languages: - languages i'm concentrating on: french (high b1), german (b1), russian (high a2) - languages i'm learning on the side / have learned in the past: swedish (rusty b1), latin, italian (a1) (+ english). not planning on starting any new ones anytime soon..

language goals under the cut :)

some goals for this summer: - french: (1) finish b1 level textbooks and maybe go through grammaire progressive au français intermédiaire and/or avancé (2) get better at understanding natural speech (i can understand radio programmes etc just fine but movies, tv shows and youtube videos are a lot more difficult for me) - german: improve vocabulary, maybe go through a textbook (if i have the time) - russian: catch up on anki (i have over 5k reviews piled up….) and MAYBE finish my (final!) russian textbook - other: maybe try reading a book in swedish and listen to some easy italian podcast episodes, these aren't really that important long-time goals: - french: becoming as good as i am in english (or better..) - german: high b2 or c1 (currently my biggest problems are (1) vocabulary (2) can't speak…..) - russian: being able to read russian lit (+ having basic conservations without too much difficulty) - swedish: reaching a level that's ok/nice for a finnish person…??? as in being able to have a conversation if needed + being able to read contemporary texts (which i mostly am already) - italian: no big goals, i can already understand a lot based on french :) one day i'd like to be able to read italian books with ease and to speak semi-fluently but i'm in no hurry - latin: not forgetting anything i've already learned + finishing OLC 3 at some point (i only have 2–5 chapters to go)

[espectres]

as you can see, i do not know my mangas!!!!

[magnoliamyrrh]

-_- most of the resources for learning tamasheq are either in arabic or french neither of which i speak agH

[dahlya-honey]

In a mood where I'm wanting to pick up so many languages again aa

Most of them are different enough I think I could get away with studying them at the same time but I think it might not be the best idea haha

[emmcfrxst]

finished season 1 of narcos 🫡

[thatweirddolldude]

I will never forget when I was trying to learn Hebrew and using songs in Hebrew with English translations to help me learn. Found a lot of really good music, but *a lot* of it was pop. It was hard to find music that wasn't just pop, so I ended up listening to a lot of religious music. The comments on those were always a treat.

If anyone types G_d or L_rd uncensored in the comments they got constant replies about how they had to censor it, and sometimes youd have people with really early 2010 usernames.

[eggjaculations]

me and my friends have gotten so into outlander that we have started saying some of the stuff they be saying on there (like “dinnae fash” and “wee bairn” and little colloquialisms like that) and people around us have started using them that don’t watch that??? also we live on separate coasts so it’s happening in TWO completely diff locations. gonna learn gaelic and bring it back so the scots don’t lose important parts of their culture purely out of the love of the game lmfaoooooo

[fairuzfan]

The thing that's never made sense to me is the "Holocaust inversion" talking point and the idea that we are "moralizing" the Holocaust as something you're supposed to learn from which like aside from the fact that israel's entire pr is that it needs to exist because of the Holocaust, I really don't understand how feeling empathy based on past experiences is like... a moralizing action?

Even those who don't feel empathy, they still like... have the universal idea that you shouldn't do bad things onto other people. When you consider that yeah, when you live in the world, you experience terrible things and you relate those terrible things to other terrible things happening in the world. That's just what everyone does. Whenever I hear things happening to indigenous Turtle Islanders I always relate it back to Palestine. When I hear about violence happening to Black people, I think "Ah it must be terrifying" and I think back to my own family members and friends who were killed by Israel. When i think of antiBlackness in arab spaces, i relate it back to the occupation and compare myself to the occupation on whether or not im inflicting the same pain i and my family endure onto others. It's just how you experience the world. No one is asking you to "learn" from the Holocaust, people are just asking you to apply empathy.

A universal example is that you don't really understand the grief of losing a loved one until you yourself lose a loved one. And when you encounter a person who lost a loved one as well, you relate to them in a unique way that you wouldn't have without having that experience of grief before. It's not a moralizing experience, it's just... an experience. An awful one but you don't *learn* anything from it.

So it always confounds me that there's such vehement pushback against the idea that what Palestinians are going through is similar to the Holocaust because it's not like we're making light of the Holocaust? It's that we are asking you, a zionist (in this case one who is Jewish specifically), to acknowledge that there are similarities between the way Palestinians are treated and the ways Jews, Roma, and multiple other people were treated during the Holocaust. It's that we're relegated to second class status, we are considered lesser, we are confined to ghettos, we have our livelihoods stolen from us, we have weapons tested on us, we're survielled like we are dangerous monsters and we experience systematic segregation. And now we are experiencing mass slaughter campaigns within our concentration camps. But what's the issue? Are you offended that Palestinians can even remotely understand the terrible violence that Jews experienced in the Holocaust? Or are you denying that Palestinians are experiencing those things??

People always bring up like "Oh you don't understand what exactly happened during the Holocaust, you're just using it as a stand in for "a very bad thing"" and that's like... never made sense either because what does that mean? I'm not... using the Holocaust out of nowhere, I'm using it because Israel tells US, PALESTINIANS, that we need to be kicked out and raped and tortured *because* of the Holocaust. When us, Palestinians, ask you to feel empathy for us based on what you experienced during the Holocaust, we aren't just pulling it out of thin air, we are using a zionist talking point and pointing out the flaws. "Does experiencing a Holocaust allow you to conduct massacres and unbelievable violence onto other people?" and "Why are we paying for the terrible crimes of Europeans? Why is this our fault that we must suffer for it, as you, a zionist, insist we must?"

It's just so confusing how people would take offense at feeling empathy for Palestinians. We aren't denying the awful, awful genocide of the Holocaust, nor are we "making light of it..." but if you believe that comparing what Palestinians go through is making light of the Holocaust, then you must think that what we are going through is not bad at all.

[bat-the-misfit]

idc where you are from and what level you're at if you speak Brazilian Portuguese you're automatically adorable in my view as a native speaker

[thatweirdtranny]

you know? it’s really fucking wild that my actual opinions about israel/palestine — not the opinions people assume i have based off bad faith interpretations of my posts or what others have said my opinions are — are so fucking controversial???

my opinions:

a permanent ceasefire that everyone involved will adhere to needs to happen, and this ceasefire needs to at the very least include bringing the hostages home and allowing distribution of aid to palestinians

on that note, aid needs to be given to palestinian civilians in a manner that ensures they will actually receive it

netanyahu needs to go (not controversial but it needs to be said)

hamas needs to go (somehow this is a controversial statement?????)

tokenizing jews who agree with you while demonizing the other 80+ percent of jews is bad

palestinians and israelis are both entitled to this region of land and ideally a 2-state solution should be the goal, but any solution that a) respects the humanity and safety of both jews and palestinians, and b) is based in reality, is acceptable

the land of israel is the homeland of both jews and palestinians and both deserve to live there in peace

jews and palestinians deserve to safely visit their holiest places

people in general deserve not to suffer through wars, and i’d personally love if the next ceasefire doesn’t get broken and if this cycle of violence could be broken

the antizionist movement has a problem with antisemitism

there is an extreme amount of misinformation surrounding this conflict that gets spread widely without any consideration or scrutiny

oct 7 was a heinous and disgusting act of evil, and anyone justifying it as an act of resistance needs to understand that most jews are terrified of you and rightly so

NOT my opinions:

palestinian children deserve to die

palestinians don’t deserve a state

islamophobia is okay

anti-arab sentiment is okay

anything that could be described as kahanism

antizionist jews deserve to be targets of antisemitism

anyways!! i am once again begging people to support solidarity organizations that promote peace between israelis and palestinians like: standing together, allmep, eco peace, etc

[rohirric-hunter]

*props up table on its side between me and wrathful ghost of C.S. Lewis* So the Telmarines and Calormenes must speak a different language from the Narnians and Archenlanders, right? Like, the Narnians and Archenlanders most likely speak English, or something very similar to it, as all the humans are descended from the British Frank and Helen and Aslan probably would have given the talking animals the same language as their king and queen. But the Telmarines and presumably the Calormenes are descended from humans who made their way into the world of Narnia by accident, and most likely didn't speak English, so they would have their own languages descended from whatever languages their ancestors spoke.

(Actually, I don't know if the text ever establishes that the Calormenes are human. They could be something else; Narnia and Charn both have denizens that seem to be nearly indistinguishable from humans while not being humans, and there are thousands of pools in the Wood Between the Worlds. But for the sake of this argument let's assume they're human. Actually for the sake of this argument if they're not human they're even less likely to speak English. So it doesn't matter.)

Like, yeah, I know that Canonically they all speak English because C.S. Lewis thought this sort of question was a stupid thing to consider while inventing a fantasy world, but I follow a different school of thought and I think it's fun to consider the lingual barriers. Most characters we meet are some sort of royalty or nobility, but consider Shasta learning really odd English from Bree and Hwin, who haven't spoken it in years, and Aravis, who learned it as an elective in school and only knows a really stilted, formal version laced with cultural misunderstandings. His tutors try to train it out of him, to no avail, and when he becomes king he's always saying idioms he translated literally from Calormene and he has just the weirdest pronunciations of some things.

The four Pevensies learn Calormene and possibly Telmarine because they have to be able to speak to the other world powers and never quite forget it -- like their other skills that they learned in Narnia it fades somewhat the longer they stay in England, but also like their other skills it comes back quickly at need. When Peter goes to study at university his professors are amazed at the speed with which he picks up Arabic, and equally baffled by some odd cultural assumptions and seeming nonsense that he brought to the discussion.

Most Old Narnians speak a fair bit of Telmarine -- if they're of the sort that can pass as human it's useful, but even if they can't evesdropping and spying is an essential part of how they've survived this long -- but in their own hidden communities they never stopped speaking their own language. There are many factors in why they trust the fleeing Prince Caspian, but one of them is the fact that he speaks English -- awkward, rudimentary, unpracticed English, but English nonetheless. Someone taught him the language of Old Narnia, and he speaks to them in their own tongue, respectfully, like no Telmarine any of them have ever heard.

IDK. I just think it would be coo-- *Wrathful ghost of C.S. Lewis knocks the table over onto my head and I fall unconscious immediately*

[xyriath]

but seriously if you are at all blogging about the i/p conflict you NEED to read that standing together article from that post i just reblogged. please. please please please please please. these are the people who are actually doing something about freeing palestine and have been for years. And here's the thing:

IF YOU WANT PEACE IN ISRAEL, IN PALESTINE, THESE ARE THE PEOPLE IT'S GOING TO COME FROM.

Because yeah. The way this site is spreading around uncritical posts is a huge issue (and a reason I haven't been around since October). Standing Together is doing a hell of a lot more than blogging about it. They're on the ground putting in the work. Nine days before the October 7 attack, they were in Tel Aviv publicly protesting about the systematic oppression of Arabs (not just Palestinians) in Israel.

"The global left has to be synced with what we need." Trust me, the right is. Boy HOWDY is the right synced. I have gotten more support about my Judaism from the far right than the left and it's??? kinda fucked up??? Someone who worked for Pat Robertson should not feel safer than someone dedicated to activism, but here we are. I can feel how easy it would be to be radicalized towards the right, and I'm actively fighting against it. Now imagine that multiplied by millions of people, plenty of whom don't have the same desire to do so, or feel like they don't have the luxury of safety to do so.

Seeing Hamas being portrayed as sympathetic and talked about like they had a right to commit all of the atrocities that they have is making me lose my MIND. They're a group run by corrupt billionaires who actively started this conflict with the intent of silencing the Palestinian people who have been protesting their tyranny. They have been siphoning money from Palestinians for years and this entire attack is them deliberately throwing Palestinians into the path of slaughter to distract from that fact, the same way that Netanyahu absolutely took advantage of the threat and tragedy to try and get himself off the hook for his own corruption.

Also check out the google doc linked in the article. It's not just a good way to learn how to communicate, but a very good resource for finding out if something you're sharing is worthwhile. In fact, it does a really god job of breaking down why I've felt so uncomfortable about a bunch of the posts on my dash. Some excerpts:

This got way longer than I had intended, but hopefully does its job. Go read the article and, yes, if you need to, reevaluate your activism. Because if it's not what people involved actually want or need, then it's just for you. And that's kinda fucked up.

[rad-batson]

Billy Batson and Damian Wayne being weirdly good friends (ft. the occasional Jon Kent)

Billy befriends Damian after the JL learns his real identity. Batman approached him and told him they should meet since they’re the same age.

At first, it’s awkward because Damian isn’t interested in making friends, and Billy’s mad that Batman is essentially sending him to the kids' table. Until… 

Damian: “Why must my father insist that I socialize? I can handle myself!” Billy: “Thank you! I’ve been on my own since I was six. I don’t need an adult to tell me what to do.” Damian: “…I like you.” Billy: “Wanna spy on the Justice League?” Damian: “Yes.”

Batman immediately regrets his decision.

At first, the two don’t really talk outside of meetings or happenstance, but when they do, they’re like twins. They know exactly what the other is thinking at all times. (The adults are terrified.)

Both end up bonding over their upbringing, specifically the fact that they were abused/traumatized/malnourished for several years. That marks the point where they start talking regularly.

Damian nearly jumps out of his skin the first time Billy speaks to him in Arabic (courtesy of the Islamic Prophet, Solomon.) They now speak exclusively in Arabic when they gossip.

They will cut a bitch. Do not get on either’s bad side.

Every time one of them says something out of pocket, the other one high-fives them. Even Jon is concerned (and very jealous.)

Billy is required to attend the same school as the Teen Titans and YJ for a bit as a condition of staying in the JL so he and Damian end up taking a few classes together.

Billy “I have Zeus on speed dial” Batson and Damian “I got a PhD in The Classics at age six” Wayne proceed to roast their history professors in the back of the classroom for all of the misinformation.

Damian: “Okay so I really need a human skull, but you can’t ask why.” Billy: “As long as you also don’t ask why.” *pulls out several pristine human skulls from pocket dimension* “Take your pick.” Damian: “…this one.” Jon: “what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck”

They’re both eerily good at schooling their emotions due to countless years of emotional abuse and neglect. If anything goes wrong during a mission, it’s like a switch is flipped. They are suddenly completely level-headed.

Damian gifts Billy a PC that he built himself so they can play games together without so much lag. (It’s literally just Minecraft on creative mode. They design a working amusement park together.)

Both have been permanently banned from all zoos on the eastern seaboard. Damian tried to “liberate” the ostriches, and Billy taught the gorillas swear words in sign language.

Everyone Else: “We need to find civilization on this desert planet we crashed landed on or we’ll starve.” Billy and Damian: “The human body can go ten days without food.” Everyone: “…Are you okay?” Billy and Damian: “Not important.”

Billy, Jon, Colin, and Damian have a group chat where they regularly place bets on dumb mishaps the adults get themselves into. The one rule is they can’t bet with cash. Thus they create a trading system made entirely of local snacks, Pokémon cards, supernatural knick-knacks, and dares.