i really love our generation’s joke trend of like, very calm but incredibly inflated hyperbole. like nobody says “oh she’s pretty” anymore we say “i would willingly let her murder me” and everyone is just like “lol same”
i think “same” is also great and “me,” i love when somebody reblogs a picture of like, a lizard, and just says “me” and we all know exactly what they mean. the current online Humor Discourse is remarkable because we trade exclusively in metaphors and implications and nobody ever, ever says anything outright and yet EVERYBODY understands each other perfectly
This reminds me of the time when I was on vacation with my family and we were hiking, and after using a rest stop, the conversation turned to the grossness of outhouses and port-a-potties, and I said that if I ever got splashback from a port-a-potty, “my soul would depart my body.” My parents found that hilarious, and my dad commented that my generation can be so clever with words bc he would only think to say something like “It would be disgusting” which doesn’t convey the sentiment nearly as well as “my soul would depart my body.”
First of all, I want to
say that this is all based on my own experience with learning English
and German, and it may not work or may be different for other people.
Well, it is common
knowledge that reading in a different language is a great way to
build on your vocabulary and generally improve your command on that
language, but often it’s hard to find books you feel like reading,
the plots in books for your level are not interesting to you and the
ones you feel like reading are too hard.
Besides, I sometimes find
that the beginning of books is the less interesting part and it’s a
bit hard to follow, since you are introduced to a bunch a new
characters and new situations, so of course it’s harder when you are
struggling with the language too. That has caused me to abandon books
I was trying to read in another language, often really early, before
giving the story the chance to get riveting or even entertaining.
The last issue I had is that
books in other languages are not always easy/cheap to access in all
countries.
Fanfiction fixed all those
problems for me.
To begin with, with
fanfiction I was already invested in the story even before starting it. I
already cared about the characters and the plot, I already knew these characters and had more context to
situate the words I didn’t know, so even if I didn’t understand
everything, I didn’t feel like stopping and picking something I could
understand perfectly as often as with published books.
Fanfiction is a great way
to learn all the slang you’ll never learn in class, you’ll rarely
find in published books and you wouldn’t understand on TV. There’s
all kind of fanfiction and all kind of books out there, so I’m not
saying all fic is full of colloquial expressions and all published
books use formal speech, but in my experience, fanfic writers tend to
use more expressions, slang and puns that I see in books I read. Also
NC-17 -rated stories. Where else are you going to learn all those
anatomy words in Polish/German/Russian/etc without having to memorise
looong lists of words?
Another good point for
fanfiction is that you don’t have to commit to a long story you may
not like or not be able to finish because reading in another language
can be frustrating. You can pick a 1,000 word story, or go for a
100,000 word one. You can also pick the genre, the rating, search fic
only with the characters you want… and then leave a comment for the
author in your target language, that way you practice your writing
too and may even make friends!
And it’s FREE! On the
INTERNET! Endless stories about your favourite characters within your
grasp! For 0,0 [insert your currency]! By the way, since you can read in
your laptop, being able to just copy paste anything you don’t
understand will facilitate the process of looking it up and creating
vocabulary list.
People also share their
podfic online, so you can even practice your listening skills.
To be honest, fanfiction is
not perfect. You may find grammar mistakes, weird plots, kinks that
will scare you for life, and maybe there won’t be fanfiction of your
fandoms in the language you currently want to improve, but I think
it’s worth a try 🙂
tl;dr:
Read fanfiction to practice the languages you are learning. It’s
free, it’s fun, it’s full of slang and will help you learn a lot and
maybe even make friends who speaks your target language!
Here’s
a list of fanfiction sites I have used. Feel free to add, since I
don’t really know a lot of places besides the ones I use!
Instead of telling yourself, “I should get up,” or “I should do this,”
Ask yourself, “When will I get up?” or “When will I be ready to do this?”
Instead of trying to order yourself to feel the signal to do something, which your brain is manifestly bad at, listen to yourself with compassionate curiosity and be ready to receive the signal to move when it comes.
Things I did not actually realize was an option
What’s amazing is what happens when you do this with children. I hit on it when working at the foster home, where nearly all our kids were on the autism spectrum, and they weren’t “defiant” around me because I said things like, “How long do you need to stand here before we can move?” and “Come into the kitchen when you’re ready” instead of saying, “Stop staring out the window, let’s go,” or “Come eat dinner,” and interpreting hesitation as refusal to obey.
I need to try this for trips I only bring a carry-on to.
I use to do this all the time in the military. Just forgot how to over time o.o
I wish I’d known about this when I was homeless.
I could’ve taught it to all the other ladies at the shelter and Darlene could’ve sucked a sour one because she never would have been able to bitch at us for “having too many clothes.”
reblogging this to have it forever because holy god damn
Google has had the monopoly on search engines for the past decade. The service works in such a way that already popular sites always come up on top, while small companies remain undiscovered on page 10 or even 100, unless they can afford to hire SEO specialists and pander to Google’s algorithms. Now, Million Short is an alternative search engine, which enables users to remove up to the first 1,000,000 Google results, in order to make browsing the web more surprising and give the underdog a fighting chance. READ MORE…
there has been a pretty far-reaching trend on this website to blog about the effects of mental illness and trauma on emotional regulation and an aggressive campaign to get people to not only understand but accept boundary-crossing behavior from people because it is a reflection of their mental illness/trauma, as far as to imply that you are ableist if you are not able to tactfully handle and accept someone else’s dysfunctional coping mechanisms and behavior despite your own discomfort. i see this most often with posts about bpd but there are other topics as well. i haven’t commented on any of it because it’s not a pie i wanted a finger in, but it has over time led me to develop severe discomfort around people who follow that line of thought to the point that i have disengaged, unfollowed, and unfriended many people who agree with it.
the stuff i’m seeing passed around now about “supporting perpretrators” in addition to survivors is the horrifying track down which that train of thought has sped, because what people don’t seem to understand is that mental illness and trauma do no make you an exception to the boundaries of those around you. it is necessary to be aware of the ways that survivors and mentally ill people may lash out emotionally at those they are close to but it is not actually necessary to be “accepting” to the point that it is harmful to you. your emotional boundaries are important, more important than whatever obligation you feel to “accommodate” someone’s trauma.
it is not “okay” that survivors sometimes display manipulative/abusive behaviors towards the people around them and it is important to handle these situations with tact, sure, but not to the detriment of setting your own boundaries and checking the behaviors in question. when friends i know are mentally ill/ trauma survivors have lashed out at me with emotionally manipulation tactics in times of great distress, i have supported them afterward, but i have always followed this up with a discussion about how these kinds of behaviors can not and will not continue or our relationship will end. this is not “ableist” or refusing to support survivors’ trauma, it is setting strong boundaries within the context of supporting each other and providing the community in which we all can heal. what is important here is that these are isolated incidents – learned defense mechanisms arising in times of panic and stress – and not consistent grabs for power. these are not people following the deliberate, overarching pattern of actions abusers use to isolate and control victims, and their actions are easily distinguishable from such.
my point is that this discourse has allowed people to blur the line between these behaviors and abuse when it comes to community support. we should support abusers in our communities as well, they say, because otherwise we would be isolating vulnerable marginalized people who are just struggling with their own trauma. this is exactly what abusers want. this is not a radical attitude. abusers depicting themselves as helpless victims of emotions and circumstances out of their control has pretty much always been the abuser party line. there is nothing productive or useful or valid about carving out community resources for “accountability” in ways that perpetuate bad abuse politics and logics that have been used to silence survivors for years and years. you cannot support survivors and also support their abusers by continuing to welcome them in the same community spaces, period, and it takes some ridiculous mental gymnastics to pretend otherwise.
i apparently can no longer bold things in posts made by other people so can i just. make a short list of points that i think are REALLY important here:
“what people don’t seem to understand is that mental illness and trauma do no make you an exception to the boundaries of those around you.”
“it is not “okay” that survivors sometimes display manipulative/abusive behaviors towards the people around them [….] when friends i know are mentally ill/ trauma survivors have lashed out at me with emotionally manipulation tactics in times of great distress, i have supported them afterward, but i have always followed this up with a discussion about how these kinds of behaviors can not and will not continue or our relationship will end”
I have literally seen the argument made that asking people to apologize for hurting you is ableist because some people’s mental illness “doesn’t allow them to feel empathy” or that they literally cannot help splitting on you so that means they can do it all they want and if you can’t handle it then you’re ableist, and like. No. No. No. No. No. No.
a free grammar checker that was developed by French professors
not extremely sophisticated and won’t catch all of your errors
but WILL prevent you from making dumb conjugation or agreement mistakes.
MUCH BETTER THAN MICROSOFT WORD
What does it look like?
What’s it do?
it marks what mistakes you made (writes them out and you can also hover over them – I couldn’t screenshot the entire list because it is VERY THOROUGH)
(I feel like I need to mention this is an automatically generated example, I’m bad at french but I’m not that bad)
says what type of mistake it is
and what you can do to fix them.
What do I do with it?
Obviously don’t rely on it 100%, but if you’ve been staring at an essay for five hours it’s so nice to be able to run it through and have it catch the article you misused in the middle of the fourth paragraph.
make sure you check again after correcting the errors because sometimes new ones will be flagged
double check your work, sometimes it suggests corrections that you don’t need to make (since it’s a computer program and you’re a person)
BUT GO FORTH AND IMPROVE YOUR FRENCH GRADES (& share the good news)
lanablack 