Not exactly your bog-standard meadow grass

Lately I've been up to:

learning mandarin (but all Mandarin related posts, about learning and other things will hopefully be tagged mandarin) and posts with new Mandarin vocabulary items are tagged 生词

and watching a ton of videos of the fantastic douyin group 酱油白米饭 in the process

as well as some general lingusitic language nerding about English, Swedish and more

and for a change re-reading some Jane Austen books for the x:th time.

Some other tags I use:

Ratty and Mole is the nicest couple. They are so good to each other.

And they are good to their friends as well.

And they just go out on the river and mess about in boats and have small adventures.

me encountering the Californian (?) vowel shift in an audiobook

For a second I actually thought mutual railery meant switching.

Very interesting video language learning wise with a Russian guy living in China. His powers of expression in Mandarin are truly enviable I think, but like all the learners he also has some struggles with pronunciation and tones that are really interesting to study.

Frequently heard prototypes to help me pronounce new words with the same tone combination.

For two syllable words with tones 1-2: