an amalgamation of nerd

I will update this list as I learn of any more useful ones. If you want general language learning resources check out this other post. This list is Mandarin specific. Find lists for other specific languages here.

For the purposes of this list "free" means something that is either totally free or has a useful free tier. "Cheap" is a subscription under $10USD a month, a software license or lifetime membership purchase under $100USD, or a book under $30USD. If you want to suggest a resource for this list please suggest ones in that price range that are of decent quality and not AI generated.

WEBSITES

Dong Chinese - A website with lessons, a pinyin guide, a dictionary, and various videos and practice tests. With a free account you're only allowed to do one lesson every 12 hours. To do as many lessons as quickly as you want it costs $10 a month or $80 a year.

Domino Chinese - A paid website with video based lessons from absolute beginner to college level. They claim they can get you ready to get a job in China. They offer a free trial and after that it's $5 a month or pay what you can if you want to support their company.

Chinese Education Center - This is an organization that gives information to students interested in studying abroad in China. They have free text based lessons for beginners on vocab, grammar, and handwriting.

Pleco Dictionary App - This is a very popular dictionary app on both iOS and Android. It has a basic dictionary available for free but other features can be purchased individually or in bundles. A full bundle that has what most people would want is about $30 but there are more expensive options with more features.

MIT OpenCourseWare Chinese 1 2 3 4 5 6 - These are actual archived online courses from MIT available for free. You will likely need to download them onto your computer.

Learn Chinese Web Application From Cambridge University - This is a free downloadable file with Mandarin lessons in a PC application. There's a different program for beginner and intermediate.

Learn Chinese Everyday - A free word a day website. Every day the website posts a different word with pronunciation, stroke order, and example sentences. There's also an archive of free downloadable worksheets related to previous words featured on the website.

Chinese Boost - A free website and blog with beginner lessons and articles about tips and various resources to try.

Chinese Forums - An old fashioned forum website for people learning Chinese to share resources and ask questions. It's still active as of when I'm making this list.

Du Chinese - A free website and an app with lessons and reading and listening practice with dual transcripts in both Chinese characters and pinyin. They also have an English language blog with tips, lessons, and information on Chinese culture.

YOUTUBE CHANNELS

Chinese For Us - A channel that provides free video lessons for beginners. The channel is mostly in English.

Herbin Mandarin - A channel with a variety of lessons for beginners. The channel hasn't uploaded in a while but there's a fairly large archive of lessons to watch. The channel is mainly in English.

Mandarin Blueprint - This channel is by a couple of guys who also run a paid website. However on their YouTube channel there's a lot of free videos with tips about how to go about learning Chinese, pronunciation and writing tips, and things of that nature. The channel is mainly in English.

Blabla Chinese - A comprehensible input channel with content about a variety of topics for beginner to intermediate. The video descriptions are in English but the videos themselves are all in Mandarin.

Lazy Chinese - A channel aimed at intermediate learners with videos on general topics, grammar, and culture. They also have a podcast. The channel has English descriptions but the videos are all in Mandarin.

Easy Mandarin - A channel associated with the easy languages network that interviews people on the street in Taiwan about everyday topics. The channel has on screen subtitles in traditional characters, pinyin, and English.

StickynoteChinese - A relatively new channel but it already has a decent amount of videos. Jun makes videos about culture and personal vlogs in Mandarin. The channel is aimed at learners from beginner to upper intermediate.

Story Learning Chinese With Annie - A comprehensible input channel almost entirely in Mandarin. The host teaches through stories and also makes videos about useful vocabulary words and cultural topics. It appears to be aimed at beginner to intermediate learners.

LinguaFlow Chinese - Another relatively new channel but they seem to be making new videos regularly. The channel is aimed at beginner to intermediate learners and teaches and provides listening practice with video games. The channel is mostly in Mandarin.

Lala Chinese - A channel with tips on grammar and pronunciation with the occasional vlog for listening practice, aimed at upper beginner to upper intermediate learners. Some videos are all in Mandarin while others use a mix of English and Mandarin. Most videos have dual language subtitles onscreen.

Grace Mandarin Chinese - A channel with general information on the nitty gritty of grammar, pronunciation, common mistakes, slang, and useful phrases for different levels of learners. Most videos are in English but some videos are fully in Mandarin.

READING PRACTICE

HSK Reading - A free website with articles sorted into beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Every article has comprehension questions. You can also mouse over individual characters and see the pinyin and possible translations. The website is in a mix of English and Mandarin.

chinesegradedreader.com - A free website with free short readings up to HSK level 3 or upper intermediate. Each article has an explaination at the beginning of key vocabulary words in English and you can mouse over individual characters to get translations.

Mandarin Companion - This company sells books that are translated and simplified versions of classic novels as well as a few originals for absolute beginners. They are available in both traditional and simplified Chinese. Their levels don't appear to be aligned with any HSK curriculum but even their most advanced books don't have more than 500 individual characters according to them so they're likely mostly for beginners to advanced beginners. New paperbacks seem to usually be $14 but cheaper used copies, digital copies, and audiobooks are also available. The website is in English.

Graded Chinese Readers - Not to be confused with chinese graded reader, this is a website with information on different graded readers by different authors and different companies. The website tells you what the book is about, what level it's for, whether or not it uses traditional or simplified characters, and gives you a link to where you can buy it on amazon. They seem to have links to books all the way from HSK 1 or beginner to HSK 6 or college level. A lot of the books seem to be under $10 but as they're all from different companies your mileage and availability may vary. The website is in English.

Mandarin Bean - A website with free articles about Chinese culture and different short stories. Articles are sorted by HSK level from 1 to 6. The website also lets you switch between traditional or simplified characters and turn the pinyin on or off. It also lets you mouse over characters to get a translation. They have a relatively expensive paid tier that gives you access to video lessons and HSK practice tests and lesson notes but all articles and basic features on the site are available on the free tier without an account. The website is in a mix of Mandarin and English.

Mandarin Daily News - This is a daily newspaper from Taiwan made for children so the articles are simpler, have illustrations and pictures, and use easier characters. As it's for native speaker kids in Taiwan, the site is completely in traditional Chinese.

New Tong Wen Tang for Chrome or Firefox - This is a free browser extension that can convert traditional characters to simplified characters or vice versa without a need to copy and paste things into a separate website.

PODCASTS

Melnyks Chinese - A podcast for more traditional audio Mandarin Chinese lessons for English speakers. The link I gave is to their website but they're also available on most podcatcher apps.

Chinese Track - Another podcast aimed at learning Mandarin but this one goes a bit higher into lower intermediate levels.

Dimsum Mandarin - An older podcast archive of 30 episodes of dialogues aimed at beginner to upper beginner learners.

Dashu Mandarin - A podcast run by three Chinese teachers aimed at intermediate learners that discusses culture topics and gives tips for Mandarin learners. There are also male teachers on the podcast which I'm told is relatively rare for Mandarin material aimed at learners and could help if you're struggling to understand more masculine speaking patterns.

Learning Chinese Through Stories - A storytelling podcast mostly aimed at intermediate learners but they do have some episodes aimed at beginner or advanced learners. They have various paid tiers for extra episodes and learning material on their patreon but there's still a large amount of episodes available for free.

Haike Mandarin - A conversational podcast in Taiwanese Mandarin for intermediate learners. Every episode discusses a different everyday topic. The episode descriptions and titles are entirely in traditional Chinese characters. The hosts provide free transcripts and other materials related to the episodes on their blog.

Learn Chinese With Ju - A vocabulary building podcast aimed at intermediate learners. The podcast episodes are short at around 4-6 minutes and the host speaks about a variety of topics in a mix of English and Mandarin.

xiaoyuzhou fm - An iOS app for native speakers to listen to podcasts. I’m told it has a number of interactive features. If you have an android device you’ll likely have to do some finagling with third party apps to get this one working. As this app is for native speakers, the app is entirely in simplified Chinese.

Apple Podcast directories for Taiwan and China - Podcast pages directed towards users in those countries/regions.

SELF STUDY TEXTBOOKS AND DICTIONARIES

Learning Chinese Characters - This series is sorted by HSK levels and each volume in the series is around $11. Used and digital copies can also be found for cheaper.

HSK Standard Course Textbooks - These are textbooks designed around official Chinese government affiliated HSK tests including all of the simplified characters, grammar, vocab, and cultural knowledge necessary to pass each test. There are six books in total and the books prices range wildly depending on the level and the seller, going for as cheap as $14 to as expensive as $60 though as these are pretty common textbooks, used copies and cheaper online shops can be found with a little digging. The one I have linked to here is the HSK 1 textbook. Some textbook sellers will also bundle them with a workbook, some will not.

Chinese Made Easy for Kids - Although this series is aimed at children, I'm told that it's also very useful for adult beginners. There's a large number of textbooks and workbooks at various levels. The site I linked to is aimed at people placing orders in Hong Kong but the individual pages also have links to various other websites you can buy them from in other countries. The books range from $20-$35 but I include them because some of them are cheaper and they seem really easy to find used copies of.

Reading and Writing Chinese - This book contains guides on all 2300 characters in the HSK texts as of 2013. Although it is slightly outdated, it's still useful for self study and is usually less than $20 new. Used copies are also easy to find.

Basic Chinese by Mcgraw Hill - This book also fuctions as a workbook so good quality used copies can be difficult to find. The book is usually $20 but it also often goes on sale on Amazon and they also sell a cheaper digital copy.

Chinese Grammar: A beginner's guide to basic structures - This book goes over beginner level grammar concepts and can usually be found for less than $20 in print or as low as $2 for a digital copy.

Collins Mandarin Chinese Visual Dictionary - A bilingual English/Mandarin visual dictionary that comes with a link to online audio files. A new copy goes for about $14 but used and digital versions are available.

Merriam-Webster's Chinese to English Dictionary - In general Merriam Websters usually has the cheapest decent quality multilingual dictionaries out there, including for Mandarin Chinese. New editions usually go for around $8 each while older editions are usually even cheaper.

2024 Printable Monthly Calendars (4 Designs, 6 Colours)

Decided I'd post a few treats for everyone at the end of the year, so please welcome the 12 Days of Giving! For Day 1, I'm sharing 2024 Monthly Printable Calendars! I've loved posting these for the last several years and am back with next years version. This time, I've added an extra 3 colours to pick from. As always, they're available in Monday & Sunday starts, A4 & letter, with landscape or vertical designs for all.

Bone & Bein

The best part of drawing bivalves?

They’re mostly underground, so you don’t have to draw anything. But for those who want to *actually* draw bivalves for #InsertAnInvert, @spissatella helped me prepare these cheat sheets!

—

#InsertAnInvert is a series of invertebrate drawing guides done in collaboration with actual experts (like, literal Dr. Crabs and Dr. Cephalopods and all that) so if you could give them a follow on twitter that’d be swell.

Also common in Far Eastern Siberia (Chukotko-Kamchatkan Languages, as well as language isolates in the region: Ainu, Nivkh and Ket).

They are known as "sentence-words" and pack an amazing amount of information into just a few phonemes and are typically highly inflected.

My college professor for Cherokee actually created a really effective and brilliant method of learning polysynthetic languages by working with a fluent elder and her computer programming sister (along with her own linguistic background with a Doctorate in English) to basically map out and breakdown the processes and grammatical trends of the Cherokee language. Basically expediting the learning process for English/other isolating, analytic language speakers. (Also, it was the elder that had inspired her in their conversations so it was basically both of them.)

She hopes to eventually adapt this process for other polysynthetic languages but I'm not sure where that's at in process.

You learn a set of morphemes and arrange them to form different sentences:

yako- (her)

la- (his)

-i’yo-(good)

-(a)hkwe- (used to be/past tense)

-hne- (at one time)

tka-/ka- (it)

-ot-/-ote- (standing)

-nuhs- (house)

-aktutye- (near, around)

medial: Yakonuhsaktútye pre-pausal: Yakonuhsaktúti “near her house”

Lanuhsiyo:hne “his house was good at one time”

for example: he stands in front of the house in english is the same in german- each unit of meaning is its own word. (one of the) word(s) for speed limit in german- Höchstgeschwindigkeit- is a noun. that is just one noun with the meaning “highest speed”. as opposed to @kanikakwaho’s example in the previous post, where something that would be *an entire phrase* in english- his house was good at one time- is one word. 

This is really important, to me, and maybe to you, too. 

But first, here’s some background info on me and bilingualism in general:

I grew up speaking Japanese and English and started speaking them as a baby at the same time (simultaneous bilingual). Some of you may have learned one after the other (sequential bilingual). 

I grew up speaking Japanese because my grandma mostly raised me, and she’s Japanese. So through her, I learned Japanese. This is my heritage language. Another example, a common heritage language in California (USA) is Spanish, and I have friends who grew up speaking Vietnamese and Tagalog. 

By definition (for ease, through Wikipedia), a heritage language is is a minority language (either immigrant or indigenous) learnt by its speakers at home as children, but never fully developed because of insufficient input from the social environment. 

People who speak a heritage language range in their skillset: some speakers are more fluent than others, and some can only understand. Some may know how to read and write, but many don’t. Everyone is different. 

The past couple months, at 25 years old, I decided I wanted to start trying to learn Japanese again. Before starting to study it more actively, I could understand Japanese pretty easily, minimal ability to speak, read, and write (hiragana was the easiest, followed by katakana and some kanji). When I was younger, I attended Japanese school on Saturdays, which is where I learned to read and write. 

I had tried many many many times before to learn Japanese again, but I failed every time. 

Here are some things I wish I would have realized earlier:

 1. You can’t rely on passive skills to study if you want to improve your active skills 

Passive skills: Listening comprehension, reading Active skills: Speaking, writing 

Active skills focus on the production of language. For the longest time I wasn’t improving these skills because I thought that I could improve them by listening to more things in Japanese: TV shows, songs, YouTube videos, listening to my family speak. 

But why would that work if I’ve been listening to my grandma speak to me in Japanese for 25 years of my life and I didn’t gain any active skills from that? 

In order to gain improve your active skills, you have to practice by using your active skills. 

I know, if you don’t speak a heritage language and are reading this, you might think DUH! I learned Portuguese and the only way to get good at speaking it is to speak it. I don’t think I realized this was the case with my Japanese because I already had an “in.” But this still applies. I had to speak and write more in order to be able to, well, speak and write more. 

2. You have to try 

You grew up speaking another language. It’s a special gift. But if you’re lacking in certain skills, you still have to work to try and strengthen those skills. 

A couple years ago, I went back to study at my Japanese school as an adult because I thought it would help. It kind of did, but not really… 

I TRICKED MYSELF into thinking I understood all the material because I could understand everything the teacher was saying, when in reality I wasn’t able to retain the kanji or the syntactic structures I was learning. 

By tricking myself into THINKING I knew things, I sabotaged my own learning experience. 

You have to try, and you have to really want to learn it because already knowing parts of the language have the potential to hold you back. 

3. Use what gave you the language to your advantage

Don’t “use” them, but you know what I mean. 

For the longest time (childhood into recent adulthood), I was too embarrassed to use Japanese with my mom and grandma. I would only routinely use a select amount of phrases that I felt comfortable using, even if my grandma was speaking to me in Japanese. 

My mom would always say “You have the best resources around you, practice your Japanese while you can.” 

And while sometimes what parents say can be annoying, my mom was right. 

But it took a HUGE change in my life to realize this and take action. 

When I was 23, my grandma went back to live in Japan. It was an emotional and difficult time for me because I was so used to having her around. While she was living with my family, we learned to communicate in a mix of Japanese-English, and I expressed my gratitude for her by doing housework for her, or buying her things at the grocery store or brought her desserts after going out to eat with friends. 

But her moving across the world meant that I couldn’t do these things anymore. A couple days before her departure, I decided that I would try and write her a letter in Japanese and slip it in her backpack for when she arrived in Japan. 

Let me tell you, I had THE MOST difficult time writing that letter. I couldn’t express how much appreciated her because my Japanese sucked. And I hated that I couldn’t tell her that in her own language. 

So after she moved to Japan, I started to write her letters–*practicing those active skills though!!! 

By being able to write letters with my grandma, not only was I practicing my Japanese, but I was creating a relationship with my grandma that I had never had before. I knew that I would regret it if I didn’t talk to her more before she’s gone. Which is sad, but it’s reality. 

And let me tell you. I’ve improved a lot. 

I can think in Japanese now. It may not be perfect, but I know how to structure my sentences. Words are coming more easily to my brain now. I can communicate with my grandma. 

4. It’s never too late

I considered late high school/early college the prime of my language learning career. I got myself to a decent level of Spanish, I learned Portuguese, I took classes in Mandarin and French. 

But for some reason, I thought my Japanese was always DOOMED because it was just way. too. hard. for. me. to. learn. 

Japanese is hard. But it’s not impossible. 

I realized that at 25. It’s never too late to learn a language, but it’s also never too late to try and relearn a language you were familiar with before. 

Just take it one step at a time. 

I always thought Japanese was overwhelming because I KNEW how difficult it was. I thought about everything–kanji, onyomi and kunyomi, all the sentence structures and everything all at once. This freaked me out and made me think I could never learn it. 

But if you learn it little by little, it’s not as overwhelming. 

# 

That’s pretty much all the major points of things I wish I realized earlier when it came to studying Japanese. 

Language is something I’ve been interested in for a long time in terms of academics, so Japanese is naturally, important to me as a language. For other heritage language speakers, it might be more of the food that’s important, or cultural aspects, or other parts of their heritage that is important. 

Everyone is different. 

Tonguecraft is the wittingshippish learning of mannish speech, or tongues. Tonguecraft can be broadly broken into three gatherings or underfields of learning: speech shape, speech meaning, and speech in withhanging. The earliest known workings in downwritten tonguecraft were bestowed by Pāṇini about 500 BSR (Before the Shared Reckoning), with his uploosening of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi.

Let’s talk about prairie, history, and language. For communities so focused on “native plants”/”native gardening”/etc there’s so little acknowledgement or engagement with indigenous Americans and their history. 

✨With most schools, colleges and unis closed around the globe and most studyblr students now having school at home I thought I would create a challenge to help everyone stay focused and productive and also to connect with people so even though most people are self-isolating, we don’t feel lonely✨

✨Info✨

Because no one really knows when we’re going to be able to go back to schools and I know it will depend very much on where you live, I’m going to do a month of daily ‘challenges’ starting on Monday 23rd March 2020 but if the quarantine keeps going I’ll try to add as the weeks/months go on

I want to see what y’all are posting so please use the tag #2020 quarantine challenge and I’ll track this tag and reboot as much as possible!

On this note, I will reblog basically everything even if you don’t think it is ‘aesthetic’ cause I love seeing how everyone does their notes and stuff so please get involved 💕

✨Week 1 - Questions✨

Mon - Have you made a study schedule to help you study at home?

Tue - How are you being taught your lessons? (google classroom, teams etc.)

Wed - What’s your favourite study snack?

Thu - How are you keeping active?

Fri - What is your favourite subject/topic to study at the moment?

Sat - Where in your house is your favourite place to study?

Sun - What are you doing to relax?

✨Week 2 - Pictures✨

Mon - Take a picture of your desk/study space

Tue - Take a picture of the book you are currently reading

Wed - Take a picture of your most colourful notes

Thu - Take a picture of the pens/highlighters that you could not live without

Fri - Take a picture of the view outside your window

Sat - Take a picture of a meal you’ve cooked or something you’ve baked

Sun - Take a picture of some of your art or doodles

✨Week 3 - Questions✨

Mon - What is your favourite food to cook or prepare?

Tue - If you could go anywhere in the world for a week, where would you go?

Wed - What is your biggest goal for this year? Have you done anything so far to achieve this?

Thu - What is the song that makes you happy no matter what?

Fri - What is your favourite TV programme at the moment (on Netflix etc)?

Sat - Where is your favourite place in the world (eg a city you’ve been to, a restaurant, or a particular hiking spot)?

Sun - What is your favourite joke?

✨Week 4 - Tips advice ✨

Mon - What is your biggest tip for staying focused?

Tue - What is your biggest tip for not getting cabin fever?

Wed - What would be your advice to you from five years ago?

Thu - What is the best advice you’ve ever been given (e.g. from a teacher of friend)?

Fri - What is your biggest tip for organising your study space/study materials?

Sat - What is your best tip on how to relax?

Sun - What is you biggest tip to someone starting to learn your major/favourite subject/degree?

I was last week years old when I learned that insect wing veins have specific labels and can be used to trace evolutionary relationships. It had just…not really crossed my mind before.

Anyway enjoy your slightly enhanced character design toolkit.

Transcript below the cut.

The Altaic language family is not a family! Like fifty years ago, most linguists thought it was a family, because they had some areal similarities, and they were all spoken by nomadic cultures. Since then, they’ve realized that that’s not a great reason to posit a genetic relationship, and also it’s kind of racist. Now it’s broken up into the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic families. A lot of the world hasn’t gotten the memo on this, and still thinks it’s a real family.

This map calls the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family the “Paleo-Asian” family. This is baffling, because nobody in the history of ever has called it that. Except the author of this map, apparently.

Similarly, “Eskaleut family” is a really weird name for the Eskimo-Aleut family.

From the way the map is shaded, it looks like the Siberian Yupik languages are Chukotko-Kamchatkan, but in reality they’re Eskimo-Aleut just like the Alaskan Yupik languages. That’s kind of the whole point; the Eskimo-Aleut languages were the first language family found to extend across both the Old World and the New World.

Speaking of which: Ket is not a language isolate. Not even close. Why? Well, first of all, it’s part of the Yeniseian language family, which has at least six recorded members (although only Ket and Yugh are alive today, and Yugh only has one speaker left). But much more importantly, the Yeniseian and Na-Dené languages are probably related! This was a huge deal back when it was first proposed, and most linguists in the know hold a bit of casual awe for the Dené-Yeniseian family, as it is the second family after the Eskimo-Aleut family to connect the Old and New Worlds, and the Dené-Yeniseian split is way older than the Yupik split. The family isn’t universally accepted, so if the other families in this map were more well-thought-out, I’d give this a pass and say, “I guess the author has the informed opinion that the Na-Dené family doesn’t exist.” But this is a map that also has Altaic on it, so clearly the author just didn’t do the research.

John McWhorter, The Week, December 20, 2015

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do nonspeakers saddled with learning it. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a spelling bee. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.

Even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. Our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels “normal” only until you get a sense of what normal really is.

There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian. If you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find Frisian more like German, which it is.

We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s we who are odd: Almost all European languages belong to one family–Indo-European–and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders.

More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third-person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talks–why? The present-tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult?

Why is our language so eccentric? Just what is this thing we’re speaking, and what happened to make it this way?

English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Old English is so unlike the modern version that it’s a stretch to think of them as the same language. Hwæt, we gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon–does that really mean “So, we Spear-Danes have heard of the tribe-kings’ glory in days of yore”? Icelanders can still read similar stories written in the Old Norse ancestor of their language 1,000 years ago, and yet, to the untrained English-speaker’s eye, Beowulf might as well be in Turkish.

The first thing that got us from there to here was the fact that when the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (and also Frisians) brought Germanic speech to England, the island was already inhabited by people who spoke Celtic languages–today represented by Welsh and Irish, and Breton across the Channel in France. The Celts were subjugated but survived, and since there were only about 250,000 Germanic invaders, very quickly most of the people speaking Old English were Celts.

Crucially, their own Celtic was quite unlike English. For one thing, the verb came first (came first the verb). Also, they had an odd construction with the verb do: They used it to form a question, to make a sentence negative, and even just as a kind of seasoning before any verb. Do you walk? I do not walk. I do walk. That looks familiar now because the Celts started doing it in their rendition of English. But before that, such sentences would have seemed bizarre to an English speaker–as they would today in just about any language other than our own and the surviving Celtic ones.

At this date there is no documented language on Earth beyond Celtic and English that uses do in just this way. Thus English’s weirdness began with its transformation in the mouths of people more at home with vastly different tongues. We’re still talking like them, and in ways we’d never think of. When saying “eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” have you ever felt like you were kind of counting? Well, you are–in Celtic numbers, chewed up over time but recognizably descended from the ones rural Britishers used when counting animals and playing games. “Hickory, dickory, dock”–what in the world do those words mean? Well, here’s a clue: hovera, dovera, dick were eight, nine, and ten in that same Celtic counting list.

The second thing that happened was that yet more Germanic-speakers came across the sea meaning business. This wave began in the 9th century, and this time the invaders were speaking another Germanic offshoot, Old Norse. But they didn’t impose their language. Instead, they married local women and switched to English. However, they were adults and, as a rule, adults don’t pick up new languages easily, especially not in oral societies. There was no such thing as school, and no media. Learning a new language meant listening hard and trying your best.

As long as the invaders got their meaning across, that was fine. But you can do that with a highly approximate rendition of a language–the legibility of the Frisian sentence you just read proves as much. So the Scandinavians did more or less what we would expect: They spoke bad Old English. Their kids heard as much of that as they did real Old English. Life went on, and pretty soon their bad Old English was real English, and here we are today: The Norse made English easier.

I should make a qualification here. In linguistics circles it’s risky to call one language easier than another one. But some languages plainly jangle with more bells and whistles than others. If someone were told he had a year to get as good at either Russian or Hebrew as possible, and would lose a fingernail for every mistake he made during a three-minute test of his competence, only the masochist would choose Russian–unless he already happened to speak a language related to it. In that sense, English is “easier” than other Germanic languages, and it’s because of those Vikings.

Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good European language–but the Scandinavians didn’t bother with those, and so now we have none. What’s more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once lovely conjugation system: Hence the lonely third-person singular -s, hanging on like a dead bug on a windshield. Here and in other ways, they smoothed out the hard stuff.

They also left their mark on English grammar. Blissfully, it is becoming rare to be taught that it is wrong to say Which town do you come from?–ending with the preposition instead of laboriously squeezing it before the wh-word to make From which town do you come? In English, sentences with “dangling prepositions” are perfectly natural and clear and harm no one. Yet there is a wet-fish issue with them, too: Normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way. Every now and then a language allows it: an indigenous one in Mexico, another in Liberia. But that’s it. Overall, it’s an oddity. Yet, wouldn’t you know, it’s a construction that Old Norse also happened to permit (and that modern Danish retains).

We can display all these bizarre Norse influences in a single sentence. Say That’s the man you walk in with, and it’s odd because (1) the has no specifically masculine form to match man, (2) there’s no ending on walk, and (3) you don’t say in with whom you walk. All that strangeness is because of what Scandinavian Vikings did to good old English back in the day.

Finally, as if all this weren’t enough, English got hit by a fire-hose spray of words from yet more languages. After the Norse came the French. The Normans–descended from the same Vikings, as it happens–conquered England and ruled for several centuries, and before long, English had picked up 10,000 new words. Then, starting in the 16th century, educated Anglophones began to develop English as a vehicle for sophisticated writing, and it became fashionable to cherry-pick words from Latin to lend the language a more elevated tone.

It was thanks to this influx from French and Latin (it’s often hard to tell which was the original source of a given word) that English acquired the likes of crucified, fundamental, definition, and conclusion. These words feel sufficiently English to us today, but when they were new, many persons of letters in the 1500s (and beyond) considered them irritatingly pretentious and intrusive, as indeed they would have found the phrase “irritatingly pretentious and intrusive.” There were even writerly sorts who proposed native English replacements for those lofty Latinates, and it’s hard not to yearn for some of these: In place of crucified, fundamental, definition, and conclusion, how about crossed, groundwrought, saywhat, and endsay?

But language tends not to do what we want it to. The die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin–note how one imagines posture improving with each level: Kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.

Then there are doublets, less dramatic than triplets but fun nevertheless, such as the English/French pairs begin/commence and want/desire. Especially noteworthy here are the culinary transformations: We kill a cow or a pig (English) to yield beef or pork (French). Why? Well, generally in Norman England, English-speaking laborers did the slaughtering for moneyed French speakers at the table. The different ways of referring to meat depended on one’s place in the scheme of things, and those class distinctions have carried down to us in discreet form today.

The multiple influxes of foreign vocabulary partly explain the striking fact that English words can trace to so many different sources–often several within the same sentence. The very idea of etymology being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a fascinating story of migration and exchange, seems everyday to us. But the roots of a great many languages are much duller. The typical word comes from, well, an earlier version of that same word and there it is. The study of etymology holds little interest for, say, Arabic speakers.

To be fair, mongrel vocabularies are hardly uncommon worldwide, but English’s hybridity is high on the scale compared with most European languages. The previous sentence, for example, is a riot of words from Old English, Old Norse, French, and Latin. Greek is another element: In an alternate universe, we would call photographs “lightwriting.”

Because of this fire-hose spray, we English speakers also have to contend with two different ways of accenting words. Clip on a suffix to the word wonder, and you get wonderful. But–clip an ending to the word modern and the ending pulls the accent along with it: MO-dern, but mo-DERN-ity, not MO-dern-ity. That doesn’t happen with WON-der and WON-der-ful, or CHEER-y and CHEER-i-ly. But it does happen with PER-sonal, person-AL-ity.

What’s the difference? It’s that -ful and -ly are Germanic endings, while -ity came in with French. French and Latin endings pull the accent closer–TEM-pest, tem-PEST-uous–while Germanic ones leave the accent alone. One never notices such a thing, but it’s one way this “simple” language is actually not so.

Intro

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it’s all based on louise desalvo’s concept of a process journal for writers, from her book ‘the art of slow writing’ which i read way back in 2014 but has stayed with me all this time. she based that concept on sue grafton’s journal, which “stands as a record of the conversation she has with herself about the work in progress.” desalvo talks about her own process journal : “to plan a project, list books i want to read, list subjects i want to write about, capture insight about my work in progress, discuss my relationship to my work (what’s working and what’s not, whether i need to make changes to my writing schedule, how i’m feeling about the work)” 

her view of the concept is so interesting and can easily be applied to grad school : “keeping a process journal helps us understand that our writing is important work. we value it enough to plan, reflect, and evaluate our work. a process journal is an invaluable record of our work patterns, our feelings about our work, our responses to ourselves as writers, and our strategies for dealing with difficulties and challenges.”

she says, and i quote : “our progress journals are where we engage in the nonjudgmental, reflective witnessing of our work. here, we work at defining ourselves as active, engaged, responsible, patient writers.” and like ???? yes, go off louise!

every week i make an entry with my three to five priorities. since i currently still have seminars, my entire week cannot be dedicated to my thesis, so these priorities allow me to really focus on specific things. they can be bigger or smaller depending on the amount of time i have to work on my thesis.

every day i work on my thesis, i make an entry. i try to answer two questions : “what did i do that day to make progress on my thesis?” as well as “how am i feeling & what i can do to feel better?” i also choose two to five specific tasks to achieve that day and write about the progress. for example, if my task is reading an article, i’ll write it down, check the box once i do it and write a summary of the “experience” (how was the article, was it useful for my research, should i read more of that author’s work, etc.) that way, i can look back at previous tasks, know what happened and learn from it.

i also use the journal almost like a bullet journal (the OG kind) with ongoing lists of important things. of course, there are some to do lists here and there (even though i prefer having my comprehensive task list on todoist), but it’s mostly things like

names of people who have helped me so i can thank them in my thesis

call numbers of books to borrow or archives to consult

research hypotheses 

things to look for in the archives i consult

questions to ask my professor/advisor/archivist/etc.

issues that need to be fixed in my thesis

books/articles to read

additional things to research

i also use it as a regular notebooks for all things thesis. one of my seminars this semester is a methodology course, so i take notes in my journal as reference. i also sometimes will write some reading notes if i don’t have my computer on me, such as key quotes or arguments. also, all of my notes from meetings/calls/emails with my advisor are put in the journal, as well as a any pertinent meeting notes (with an archivist, fellow student, my mom, etc.) lastly, sometimes it just becomes a catch all for brainstorm sessions and random thoughts.