Expressions à la Tushar

i see a lot of the same (sometimes unhelpful) tips being thrown around, so here’s my two cents:

1. write shopping lists/to do lists in your target language - often you don’t learn this vocab but it’s conversational & v useful! also writing yourself notes (lil pep talks on the bathroom mirror, for example) can work.

2. buy a small whiteboard and practice verb conjugation (esp. romantic languages) or script writing 

3. talk to pets in target language if possible!

4. look for quotes in your target language - often the turns of phrase are  more colloquial, and is a good opportunity to see how things are translated from your native language 

5. find a fairly easy news headline (in target lang) and try to re-write it w/ vocab you already have. you’ll quickly find gaps - this is a good thing! (if you’re feeling extra spicy, try writing a small subheading or description about the article).

6. create an imaginary friend who you speak with on the shower, or on the train, doing the laundry etc. talk w/ them in your target lang (in your head, obvs) about your day, future plans, etc etc.

~for more advanced learners~

7. when you’re more advanced, and have some grasp of past/future tenses, buy a children’s/tween’s/YA book that you’ve already read. highlight and annotate the shit out of it. you’ll know the general gist already, which makes context clues easier to find.

8. change wikipedia settings into target language - same goes for any social media site. this can be a mega challenge, but is so good for vocab, plus you’re more likely to remember the info since you worked so hard for it.

9. write a review for a book/film/record/whatever you’ve most recently consumed. maybe start a diary of them, or just have an ongoing word doc.

Sometimes when writing a character from the past, or even just when making memes about historical people, writers/creators use archaic words and phrases to emphasize their old-timey-ness. The problem is, lots of people just throw these words in willy-nilly, with little regard to grammar. Instead of making your character sound old-fashioned and sophisticated, they just sound like they don’t know what they’re talking about. For example:

So, instead of doing this:

Thou, thee, thy, and thine

‘Thou’ and its various forms are the informal second-person pronouns, and ‘you’ is the formal second-person pronoun. In English, the informal fell out of use and we started just calling everyone ‘you’, but if you’ve ever studied a Romance language like Spanish or French, you’ll be familiar with the formal/informal second-person split. Basically, if you’re addressing someone of your station or lower, you can call them ‘thou.’ If you’re addressing someone you speak to with respect, you should still call them ‘you’.

‘Thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thy’, and ‘thine’ are not interchangeable. They are comparable to the forms of ‘you’ or ‘I’ that still exist in English. If we make a chart of the different forms of modern pronouns, we can insert ‘thou’ in all its forms to compare:

If you’re struggling with which form to use, try swapping out the pronouns:

My friend will go with thou thee.

My friend will go with I me.

Some sample sentences:

Thou art a villain.

I want to be with thee.

Give me thy hand.

This book is thine.

Do it thyself.

Subject/Verb Agreement

Most people have noticed that archaic verbs sometimes have ‘-est’ or ‘-eth’ tacked onto the end. These aren’t just there for aesthetic; they have a grammatical purpose. ‘-est’ and ‘-eth’ are different verb conjugations. Again, if you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you’ll be familiar with conjugation charts, where you probably had to fill out different forms of verbs. ‘-est’ is the second-person verb suffix, and ‘-eth’ is the third-person verb suffix.

So for example, if we were to conjugate the verb ‘to run’ in its three singular forms:

I run

thou runnest

he/she/it runneth

Note that we cannot say “I runnest” or “thou runneth;” this is like saying “I runs” in modern English. The subject and verb need to agree. For some common verbs, the suffix can be contracted into the base verb, which is where you see things like:

thou do-est > thou doest > thou dost / she do-eth > she doeth > she doth

thou have-est > thou havest > thou hast / he have-eth > he haveth > he hath

Singing a song of angry men?

It is the music of a people

Who will not be slaves again

When the beating of your heart

Echoes the beating of the drums

There is a life about to start

When tomorrow comes!

There's always hope that tomorrow will be a better day!

But there are 2 things I love about this language.

Gloves are called "Handschuhe" which literally translates to "Handgloves" and that is very cute of them.