te amo gatito gordito

nice little spanish tidbit: a way of saying receiving some unexpected news, first hearing about something (particularly if it's bad news) is by using "desayunar" (to breakfast) as a pronominal verb. for example el lunes nos desayunamos que teníamos un evento hoy. i like it it's like first thing in the morning you eat this piece of bad info. i guess.

ok but are the names for "hide and seek", "tag", and "merry-go-round" in your og language literally "hide-hide", "grab-grab", and "spin-spin"? no? yea thats what i THOUGHT

Fun fact: the etymology of "Chengdu" (the capital of Sichuan province) has nothing to do with the meaning of the character used to write it (成都). 成都 is a phonetic transcription of an ancient indigenous name for the area of unknown meaning. We have no idea what language family it (and other cities in Sichuan written with 都 at the end) belongs to, which kinda sucks. We do know that those ancient inhabitants of Sichuan were called the Ba (pronounced in old Chinese as *pˤra or *praː) and Shu (pronounced in Old Chinese as *djoɡ or *dok)

i know that the beginner stages of learning a lang are super exciting because of the rapid growth, but i will say i do feel super (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ everytime i recognize a russian word out in the wild. such a high cannot be taken for granted

on the flip side, my hubris in assuming a person was speaking russian bc i recognized это - they were actually hungarian 😭 and idk any hungarian or enough russian so who's to say if they were speaking one or the other, but definitely need to not overestimate myself. lmfao. i got too excited

the proliferation of ads on every major language app (many of which are copies of each other, too) is so annoying and sad. they all have the same marketing tactic. here's a pop-up for premium when you open the app. here's a little ever-present reminder of our premium sale (with a timer) on the top/bottom of the screen. here's a tab to subscribe. here's a timed ad for our premium service after your lesson. did you remember you can pay to get rid of our ads that weren't there a few years ago? don't you hate time watching these pesky ads instead of language learning? don't you know learners with premium are 40x more likely to finish their course bc they aren't constantly bombarded with ads? do you want premium? it's 60% off! it's 90% off! limited time offer! want to review the words you got wrong in your lesson? try premium! want to practice your listening skills exclusively? you guessed it. pay us! tired of our advertising? go onto another app and get the same thing. you'll come back to us, don't worry. you will pay or you will quit or you will push through but you won't escape our subscription service. want to pay for a 10 year subscription? it breaks down to $1.39 per month! it's cheaper to buy a yearly subscription upfront than pay per month, silly. we're going to highlight this deal in green so you will know you should definitely not miss out on this amazing offer! save now! pay now. pay forever