Prickly

WHY IS EVERYONE ALWAYS MAD AT ME

Calque & Loanword

people reblogging this earnestly debating whether or not certain birthdays are ugly in the tags and saying how pretty their birthdays are......................guys please we just gotta wake up! we gotta get outta this freakin place! we gotta escapeeeeeeeuhh!

There's something about lazily studying Mandarin Chinese that's made language learning seem far more approachable. It would be cool to be fluent one day, but I've always been clear with myself that I don't have an actual goal with this besides maintaining a streak in my language app for a certain amount of days. I can quit whenever I want, which is remarkably good at making me not quit. Sometimes I have days where I study Chinese for hours because I'm having a good time, but mostly I'm lazily plucking at this language for sometimes literally a one minute a day. After a year of doing that, even though Chinese is so difficult and different from English, it turns out I can still get from knowing absolutely nothing to knowing slightly more than nothing in a pretty short period. An incredible jump in knowledge with not that much work. In fact, the gap between English and Chinese is so vast that microscopic progress feels incredible. When I have to write out literally any pinyin by memory, and I get 75% of the letters and none of the tones correct, I feel like a genius. Today I almost spelled 音乐会/yīnyuèhuì correctly on my first try, and I wanted to call everyone over to see how I effortlessly nailed two-thirds of it.