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#funfact: we don’t have dorms in italy, so students usually rent a house together.

28/04/19 :

hey it’s Sick Thoughts With Sick Person, tonight insomnia topic: Can

So one of the weird things about learning a language, any language, is that you soon figure out that some extremely basic concept in your native language does not at all correlate one-to-one with your new language.

Today we’re going to talk about the English word “can” and why this is a possible translation of a fuckton of Chinese words!

You see, in English, “can” seems like a pretty simple and basic word.

I can speak English.

I can cancel it.

I can do a pull-up.

I can see you.

These all seem like the same verb in English at first glance, but at second glance we can see that they will not all allow the same synonyms. “I know how to speak English” for example is more or less indistinguishable from “I can speak English” yet “I know how to see you” is somewhat odd and not the same thing as “I can see you”. We have

knowledge, permission, ability and success

 all put into one little syllable in English. And in Chinese, the most basic way to translate these would be like this:

我會英語。

我可以退訂。

我能引體向上。

我看得到你。

Here I have bolded the “can” part of the sentence and it’s different every time. I can speak English = I know how to speak it; I can cancel it = I am authorized to cancel; I can do a pull-up = I have the ability to do a pull-up; I can see you = I have succeeded in seeing you.

And the more languages one learns, the more one realizes that there is nothing obvious about even the most basic verbs and nouns and pronouns. In fact, it is in these basic categories that the differences are most profound and self-shaking.

The word “shibboleth” has come to mean, in English, a method of determining insider from outsider; it comes from a Bible story where they identified foreigners based on their inability to properly pronounce the sound /sh/ in “shibboleth”. (And then killed them.) And shibboleths still exist, these errors that only second language learners will ever make, because the alternative will not even occur to native speakers.

These are the categories where this tends to happen. Again, in Spanish, “to be” can be “estar” or “ser”; they are profoundly different in Spanish, the same in English. In English, “borrow” and “lend” are opposites; in Chinese, there is only one word and prepositions indicate whether it should be translated as borrowing or lending.

I have no grand point to make other than that human beings are fucking bananas and it’s amazing that we manage to get along as well as we do considering.

SPRACHBUNDS

Areal zones, linguistic areas of convergence or sprachbunds: they are areas that have different languages families but which, by prolonged contact, developed similar linguistc features, be it phonology or grammar. 

Northwest America (uvulars, aspirated consonants, ejectives, glotalized consonants, polysyntetic languages, 

Mesoamerican area (polysyntetic languages, uvulars, ejectives, rhotics, tones, nasal vowels, lateral fricatives)

Creole Caribbean (creole languages, analytical syntax)

The Andes region (highly agglutinative, uvulars, ejectives)

Standard Average Northwestern European (uvular rhotics, more analytic and fusional, obligatory subject pronouns/no null-subject, front rounded vowels)

North and Central Iberia (apical-alveolar sibilants and affricates, heavy verb conjugations, no b-v distinction)

The Balkans (definite articles as suffixes, simple vowel systems, romanian-slavic convergence)

The Caucasus (high number of phonemes, polysyntetic, ejectives, aspirates, retroflex consonants, ergativity)

Central and North Asia (correlated with Altaic) (SOV structure, vowel harmony, agglutination)

The Indian Subcontinent (retroflex plosives, split-ergativity, many cases and gendered classes or animated distinctions, vowel reduction)

China and Indochina (higly tonal languages, front rounded and back unrounded vowels, analytical syntax, few morphology)

Southern and Southwestern Africa (click consonants, simple noun class system)

The “jogo do bicho”(animal game) started back in 1892 by baron João Batista Viana Drummond, founder of the Rio de Janeiro’s Zoo, as a way of keeping it from closing it’s doors. Then, the visitors would buy the ticket and get one of 25 animals, and, by the end of the day, if you had the animal that was drawn, you could get up to 20x what you paid for the ticket. Nowadays we have bicheiros(people who work with the bettings) all around town who organize everything.

It’s bad for them

Bread can cause their crops to become impacted. This is only fixable with surgery which almost all ducks, being on a farm or in the wild, don’t get.

It’s also just junk food, fills them up with no nutritional value. This leads to malnutrition, which can cause a disorder called angel wing

This goose’s flight feathers are destroyed, leaving it open to predators, and preventing them from migrating.

Please don’t feed ducks bread.

Instead feed them something yummy and good for them! Like watermelon, peas, or halved grapes.

Irish is NOT hard.  It is NOT hard to learn. It is NOT impossible to learn.  Irish is actually quite an easy language. The keyword here is that it’s different. It’s a different kind of language. Not your Standard European Average language like German or French. There is a lot of influence from Semitic languages, which is attributed to either substratum, language contact and…coincidence?  Here’s a list of reasons why Irish is not hard to learn. 1. It’s phonetic.  Once you learn the rules of reading it, you can read almost any word, no matter how confusing and long it is. It’s phonetic. So each letter or group of letters correspond to one sound. There may be slight alterations in the various dialects, but you can’t go horribly wrong like you can in English.

2. It’s regular.  There are only 11 irregular verbs and out of those, only 6 are pretty crazy and have to be looked out for, other than that, there are very few exceptions. 

—

The Bloom is Not a Bloom (花非花) by Bai Juyi (白居易). Tang Dynasty. Translated by Mark Alexander.

Bai Juyi was a renowned poet and government official from the Mid-Tang period. Known for his short verses written in simple language, his poetry was based on observations of his daily life as a governor of three provinces.

Among his most famous works are the long narrative poems, Song of Everlasting Sorrow, telling the story of Yang Guifei, and The Song of The Pipa Player. Bai is one of the most widely read poets of the East and West, and was influential in the historical development of Japanese literature. 

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Website: ru.morpheem.com ; jp.morpheem.com ; morpheem.com Languages: English, Russian, Japanese Cost:Free  Targeted at : Beginning to Advanced/Native Students Features:

You can learn Russian, Japanese or (English for Russian speakers).

You learn vocabulary through real sentences and texts.

You take a placement test so that it knows what you should be learning.

Works by spaced-repetition to make it easier to learn vocab.

Has a progress bar so you can see how much you have learned.

Saves the words you don’t know so that you can review them later.

Let’s you choose the words you don’t know and translates the sentence for you.

Shows you multiple meanings for a word.

Click on a word to see it used in sentences, wiktionary, and images.

Has a large selection of vocabulary so you don’t have to worry about not having words to study.

So this is a website I recently found and haven’t seen mentioned anywhere. When I took the placement test, it estimated I knew 21,000 words, which I know is a lie. I then did the study session and it readjusted the words I knew down to 9,000, which is more accurate since it is able to identify the gaps in my vocabulary. I think that anyone can benefit from this site and it is my preferred way of learning vocabulary since I can quickly see the different contexts a word can be used and its different meanings. You can also set goals for yourself to learn more vocabulary and it will let you know if it is possible or not. My main complaint with this is that if you accidently click a word you can’t remove it. I hope that you like it and that it is useful for you!