#speak english course

[maxbrown01]

Best Spoken English Classes Near Me in Sharjah - Elite Stars

[the-nettle-knight]

To other English people, stop saying "England has no culture", it is actively harming us. There is a reason the Tories defunded the arts and heritage sectors whilst scapegoating immigrants. The fear that immigrants will come and destroy Englishness is only working as the government is literally trying to actively wipe it out. If we a) recognise the things that are distinctly cultural (eg architecture styles) and b) actively participate in the traditions you're always told are silly (Morris and Molly dancing, scarecrow competitions and folk songs), it will actually make us better as a country and more difficult to divide via classism, racism and xenophobia

To be extra clear, these traditions are for everyone, queer people, imagrants and anyone of any faith (including Islam).

The deliberate eroding of our folklore/traditions by conservatives (both big and little c) is allowing for the insecurities weaponised by the types of Tommy Robinson against imagrants. These traditions and folklore do still need challenging from a modern critical lense (like how blackface has been removed from Morris dancing). Nor should they be preserved exactly how they used to be, because folklore and customs have always changed with the times. Having a good understanding of our past, critically understanding and accepting of the problems in it will absolutely contribute to decolonisation. Hopefully, having a solid grasp of our own traditions and folklore in a meaningful positive way will allow us to step back from clinging desperately to the parts of Welsh, Scottish and Irish culture we cling to because we don't think we have our own. Doing so will also hopefully allow for more support of the Welsh, Scottish and Irish independence movements. Also, it will hopefully stop the rampant cultural appropriation of other sacred traditions - it's ridiculous that modern wiccans believe that smudging with a non native plant (white sage) that's being driven to extinction by over harvesting will clear any sort of bad luck.

[neversetyoufree]

Since writing my last post about how Vanitas understands "salvation" as the preservation of one's self, even at the price of death, I've been thinking about how that plays into Vanitas's thoughts on resurrection. It's only two short lines, but I find the view he expresses in this scene absolutely fascinating.

Vanitas tells Misha that the dead "don't come back," and the fact that he phrases it that way stands out to me. He doesn't say that resurrection is impossible on a physical level; he implicitly concedes that maybe Misha could "bring back" something that looks and acts like Luna. He doesn't quibble about the practicalities of reanimating someone whose body turned to ashes or bring up whatever concept of the afterlife he may have.

Instead, Vanitas says that a resurrected Luna would simply be "something else that looked like her." A resurrected Luna would lack some fundamental part of whatever it was that made Luna who they were in their first life.

But what would they lack? I don't think he's implying that a resurrected Luna would lack their soul—not really. Setting aside the absence of souls as a conceptual presence in VnC, I think that would be too concrete and specific for what Vanitas is gesturing toward. Rather, he's conceiving of the Self in a somewhat ineffable way. On a metaphysical level, a version of Luna brought back from the dead simply Wouldn't Be Her, and he can't put it in more concrete terms than that.

So why does he think this way?

I think the concept of resurrection is awful enough to Vanitas that he has to reject it outright for his own stability. He cannot even slightly entertain the notion that resurrection might be possible, because that would destroy one of his main coping mechanisms.

Resurrection is nightmarish to a man that relies on death as an escape. Vanitas is suicidal, but beyond his self-hatred, his relationship to death is very particular. He's someone whose body and being has been corrupted and violated several times—through violence, through experiments, and through Luna's bite, and he's desperate to retain control of himself in the aftermath. He's desperate for control in regards to everything in his life, but especially his body and his death.

Vanitas is being slowly transformed into something inhuman, and he plans to die someday to escape that fate. The idea that after he's gone, someone could override that decision and force him back into living a life he doesn't want must be unacceptably horrific to him. He dismisses it out of hand because he has to.

Vanitas says a resurrected Luna would, on some level, not really be Luna. Whatever comes back might look like them, but it would lack some fundamental self that makes Luna "Luna." Thus, if Vanitas himself were ever "resurrected" after his death, it would be the same. Death remains an absolute escape for him, and even if someone contrives to bring back something that looks like him after he's gone, it won't be him. That life won't be his problem.

In addition to whatever beliefs Vanitas might have about death and afterlives the feasibility of resurrection, I think this is a key part of his relationship to the concept. He lives his life knowing that death waits for him as an escape valve. He needs that looming death as his salvation. Thus, faced with the concept of resurrection, his argument basically boils down to "nuh-uh." He shoots down the concept and declares that a resurrected person wouldn't be themselves in some nonspecific way, because the possibility of anything otherwise isn't something safe for him to consider.

[rjalker]

you can still have gender in a species that's monoecious, reproduces asexually, or even is just physically incapable of the normal means of reproduction, you people are just fucking obsessed with biological essentialism and the white supremacist ideal of gender.

[energyprison]

If youre in customer service "i dont know" is your best friend. Even if you do know. At the liquor store i used to work at my boss would sometimes drop an "i dont know" or "id have to ask my manager" on people that didnt know he was the owner

[fisheito]

They turned my boy into Gary...

tbh it was kind of liberating because if the devs themselves can fall to the ol' gary keytrap, then i, too, can sometimes let my mortal follicles flow downward, and allow myself to lettersmash about gary and/or kary in my accidental overenthusiasm

[natelia-aldelliz]

more ghost!Roach with accidental necromancer Soap, their first interaction !

(please ignore the fact that i can't draw the same character twice lmao)

[canisalbus]

Not dog related but have you been to Kuopio? My wife and I are planning to move there in a few years and I’m just curious what your thoughts might be as someone who actually lives in Finland. Also do you enjoy a cold dip after sauna or is that not really your thing?

I used to live in Kuopio! Spent my early childhood there. I still visit several times a year, it's one of those home-away-from-home places for me.

I don't enjoy cold, I rarely swim and I barely ever go to sauna (it always makes me feel sort of light-headed), so not my thing really :'> But if you think you might enjoy, like, the temperature shock and the adrenaline rush go for it.

[bidonica]

wait can you elaborate on "#not to be european on main but it's one of asoiaf's most tellingly american features to me" because I've never really considered this before

Well, if you look at the time frame of Westeros post Targaryen conquest that's roughly the same distance between the foundation of the USA and when GRRM started writing asoiaf, so there might be a (conscious or subconscious I can't tell, but it wouldn't suprise me if it was intentional) correlation with placing "the birth of this country as we know it" at that specific point in time. Which ties back to that feeling of "the beginning of history" while acknowledging that there has been a history before, but it's a lot more nebulous and badly documented and it involves ethnicities that are considered "native" vs more recent migrations (First Men vs Andals).

And it's something you don't really get to perceive from a European perspective because sometimes you might be living in a country that, in its current form as a nation state, is actually younger than the US (like Italy or Germany), but that state and its identity exists in continuity with what was there before, going back to several centuries. There are cultural and material callbacks to that history in your everyday life, be it the language you speak or still using very ancient buildings that sometimes even maintained their original purpose. I don't want to sound blasé but from that vantage point "300 years ago" is "a long time ago, but not that long". This is not a value judgment, and of course the key reason is colonialism -- I just think there are some contextual elements that might lead to a different perception of history. It's all relative in the end

[ditzyblues]

i've been in college for one day and im ready to drop out

like who invented this. Why would you do this to the innocent people (i chose to attend college and picked my schedule)

the worst part of it all..? i couldn't draw. because i was shy and afraid that someone would see me drawing.

[dandelionjack]

changing my place of residence… leaving my parents’ home (at least temporarily for the next nine months)… setting off alone into the big city and the wide wide world to study and learn… all on a wednesday, i hadn’t planned this i swear

[skunkes]

[journey-to-the-attic]

Probs a random question, but IK moved to England when she was quite young, right? Does that mean she developed one of the many accents there, and if so, could you tell us which one?

ooh i haven't really thought about this before... it's definitely not one of the posh ones, that's all i can say--

let me think about this... the boring answer is just "received pronunciation" but the thing about rp is that no one ever has a pure standard english accent anyway. now, this is going to be high specific, but!

take received pronunciation as the base, then make it softly yorkshire - but with an irish inflection on certain words that she learned from her aunt lisa

[yugocar]

need to go back to that naruto rewatch i think it was actually calming down my drivers nerves/concern with the whole system of serbian driving schools. i'd do something mildly correct while driving and the sasuke in my head would go 'got it that time. im starting to get the timing' and it would unironically calm me down and give a palpable serotonin boost anyway this is what they call permanent brain damage due to consuming naruto at an impressionable age

[roseofhybrids]

greetings unsuspecting followers and mutuals

it is time for me to info dump about the Latin language because if I had to learn how Latin declensions work

so must everyone else

@electronix-arts knowledge upon thee

Latin is what's called a highly inflected language, meaning that the endings of words will change a lot depending on its grammar

English does not do this nearly as much as language like Latin and German

for example, if you say: "the dog bit the cat" that sentence means that the dog was the one doing the biting, and the cat was the one receiving

but if you change it to: "the cat bit the dog" now the cat is the one doing the biting, and the dog is the one receiving the bite

in Latin you could translate that first sentence as: "canis felem momordi" whereas the second sentence would instead be: "canem feles momordi"

the word order is the same, but who is doing the biting has been flipped feles canem momordi canem momordi feles they all mean the same thing

there is a preferred word order, but it doesn't matter as much as in English for example, in my experience, a lot of sentences will end with "est" despite that being the word for "is" "the dog is white" "canis ablus est"

I'll use Ursus (bear) for this next example for a noun like "ursus" the ending changes depending on if it's nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, or vocative Latin is a gender language too, so it also changes depending on whether it's masculine or feminine is also changes depending on if it's singular or plural

there's also a neuter case, which in theory one could attempt to use if they don't know the gender to want to be vague on purpose

But it wasn't really used in this manner, typically a word would just be in 1 of 5 declensions each with its own endings, unless it's in first or third (masculine, feminine) in which case you could use either depending on the subject If it's a word that's in first or third and an unknown gender or a group of mixed gender, then you just default to first the word for friend is amicus/amica a group of all guy friends would be amici a group of all girl friends would be amicae a group of guy and girl friends would be amici

that's 24 possible endings for 1 noun

do not get me started on the fuckin verb declension I mean, just look at this:

[avispatr]

So now that its established IMP speaks English and not Spanish...I have to ask how tf that happened? Is it just the influx of English speakers dying and going to Hell? Does Hell not have its own language, or do sinners just influence Hell's culture that much???