they’re filthy communists i tell ya

Small/Medium-sized Business

Maybe access to connected devices (e.g. your computer components or the phone you have plugged in to your computer)

Elixir? Is that the weird older cousin of Gleam?

mfw non-commutativeness

i use gnu/windows btw

Usually the best resources you can get online for free for language learning as a beginner or intermediate is mostly pirated photoscanned books, with some online pages or YouTubers mixed in as another supplement.

For example, for Japanese, I pirated the 3rd editions of Genki 1 & Genki 2, plus the workbooks for them. I also owe a lot to the YouTuber Tokini Andy (who has videos going over the updated Genki textbooks and explains a lot of things missing/poorly explained in the book, he’s pretty great). There’s also an interactive quizzing website for Genki someone made. For definitions and stroke order I used jisho.org, and for etymology I used Wiktionary, hanziyuan.net, and dong-chinese.com. The only other website/app I regularly used was Renshuu (a spaced repitition learning app for Japanese), which was pretty great and was a good supplement for drilling in what you learned from other resources – although you have to modify the settings quite a bit to really “optimize” it. A lot of people use WaniKani which is kind of similar but I think more Kanji-oriented and used more for students studying before a test. Oh and to learn the Kana, I basically just tested myself writing down the characters in the standard order for a few days until it got drilled into my head, I also used the Tofugu Hiragana learning resource thing but it only helped for a few mneumonics. Other than that, although I’m not exactly a weeb, I tried to force myself to watch anime (in Japanese) any time I wanted to do something like watch a show or play a game, and I’d look up all the stuff I didn’t recognize. Anime isn’t exactly representative of how Japanese people speak at all, and you’re going to get your shit kicked in (by that I mean disapprovingly stared at) by Japanese people if you speak like an anime character, but I suppose it’s like learning English off of Sesame Street and SkyDoesMinecraft…

For German, I heavily utilized Deutsche Welle’s learning resources, especially Nicos Weg. I also had people to practice the language with. My German still sucks though… for whatever reason, I had the absolute most difficult time with trying to learning German out of any language. The word order magic fucked with my head especially, but I just kept mixing up basic words.

For Russian I used Memrise at first, which worked for vocabulary and got me familiar with the most very basic vocabulary, but the features locked behind monetization eventually got too disruptive so I spent pretty much all my time on (pirated) beginner Russian learning textbooks and very technical grammar books (I was a very learned linguistics major so learning from linguistics-heavy books was significantly more feasible for me than it is for the average person). I probably had the least frustrating time with Russian out of any of the languages I self-studied. I self-taught myself Cyrillic when I was like 8 because I thought slavic stuff was cool so that didn’t really require any time…

I learned passable French in high school (despite my ADHD ass not paying attention 99% of the time and basically just not being present mentally for all of French 3), which then degraded a lot in my ability to use it since I never used it and was preoccupied with other stuff, but I can still read it fine, and I can understand it spoken depending on how they speak and my state of mind. I didn’t even study outside of school or anything really, I just had a teacher from France (she was my favorite teacher). Actually thinking of the words and grammar I’m trying to say though, I’m pretty fucked in that department unless I go back and practice it. French is my 2nd language.

I self-studied Spanish after school, not very seriously though, I could already grasp it pretty well enough because of my French knowledge. I got conversational in no time – still, randomly not being able to recall random words is a pain in the ass (that goes with English too I guess). I did a bit of Duolingo at first but then just started listening to podcasts and videos and stuff, and looked up the words I didn’t know (beforehand and during the time I was already doing a lot of Spanish linguistics work so I already knew “about” the language and its phonology/spelling to pick out the things I heard). This was really only possible because, again, I was already able to understand pretty much all the French you would encounter in daily life.

For Finnish I mostly used pirated books and YouTube learning resources. The first books I used were from Leila White, “From Start to Finnish” and “A Grammar Book of Finnish” which are both great. I would definitely suggest that anyone who wants to learn Finnish goes through those books – the second one’s a reference rather than something you’re supposed to go through from beginning to end though.

I tried (and failed) to learn Arabic a reeeally long time ago. It didn’t extend much past a few obscure and not-very-helpful learning internet resources plus Duolingo (which was kind of useless for Arabic, even moreso than Duolingo typically is useless for languages). I had an unusually hard time with the script for this one (is it racist to say the damn squiggly lines all look the same), and reading it without vowel markers is very difficult to me.

slovake.eu was a helpful resource for Slovak when I was doing the necessary stuff for citizenship – I could’ve probably gotten by with only English (despite doing it myself and without an immigration lawyer) but I felt it only made sense to at least try to learn the language. It… definitely happened… I basically learned much of the core vocabulary and some grammar quirks, and played fill in the blank with Russian/Polish words except how I thought they’d be in Slovak for words for ones I didn’t know. Would not recommend doing that, but if you DO do it then just know that Slovak is the absolute best slavic language to do it in, they will probably understand you if you outright are speaking a different slavic language.

Right now I’m using this book online for Italian that’s only in Italian which is basically like, introducing grammar & topics in the language with no actual instruction or anything, it’s just a bunch of Italian sentences with images and stuff to get you to remember the grammar based off of context. It’s sick as hell, but I can’t remember what it’s called right now.

After a long time (around B2 or maybe B1 level probably) you have enough comprehension to start learning well while watching content made for natives – e.g. you can watch YouTube videos or a TV show in the language and can learn from looking up the (still large) portion of words you don’t understand.

I was originally a monolingual English speaker – only 1 native language, I didn’t have like 2 or 3 native languages like most of the world (shout out to all the kids who acquired English solely off of TV and YouTube as a kid). On one hand, being monolingual definitely makes you more ignorant to other languages and your first language might be a little bit harder (but honestly it doesn’t get much easier from there, you will still writhe in pain 4 hours a day trying to learn any subsequent languages), but on the other hand being a monolingual ENGLISH speaker opens you up to way more possibilities (resources) than not being an English speaker, so I guess overall I was pretty lucky in that regard.

I have really bad ADHD and Aphantasia which is (for the most part) a hinderance to language learning – my working memory is extremely bad, I can’t visualize SHIT and ADHD makes my non-visual memory go kaput. Language learning takes significant time, energy, it’s frustrating as fuck, and most of this comes down to a lot of it just being brute forcing memory. There is no cheat to language learning, there is no “lern basque in 23 dayz”, it is just putting thousands upon thousands of hours of very regular, very (inter)active focus and memorization methods into it until it’s drilled in your head. It can be more challenging than any job you’ve ever done and you’ll want to cry due to how little progress you feel that you’re making despite the great amounts of time and energy you put into deciphering this mess.

On the other hand, I know Autistic people with Hyperphantasia and Synthesia (specifically, the kind where you see colorful words appear in your vision when you hear, read, or think about language) and they are SIGNIFICANTLY more capable at language stuff than anyone else, although it’s still a lot of effort to put in for them of course.

Language is pretty much about constantly pushing back against the force inside of you that says “you can’t do this, you’re not improving, it’s tiring” and managing your breaks/scheduling well. It’s easy to turn a “break” into just not touching the language again. You have to be motivated a LOT to learn a language (including being motivated by pressure/necessity, go get locked up in a country with speakers of your TL or something) or else you’ll just quit as soon as you hit your first wave of roadblocks.

on y office maybe? that could be interpreted as “we work there” with very poor grammar

Uh, yeah they would. Republicans and their general… hatred of mankind are already a pretty good motivator. It’s not like there’s any leftists to compete with them either, Americans are scared of those.

pretty sure i remember just pressing ctrl-c/ctrl-v on the android studio emulator

That’s painful to look at, I can’t agree that it’s easily readable

I feel as though the “human trafficking” part is more important than the bourgeois dog, why isn’t that in the headline? Or specifying the work hours or exact pay (under $8/day)?

Chomsky’s work undeniably transformed (cognitive) linguistics, but a large portion of Chomskyan linguistics is heavily debated/controversial.

His universal grammar, although debated, at least contributed a lot to Sapir-Whorf linguistics generally being recognized as wrong, which is nice. Unfortunately, a lot of laymen and even a tiny minority of linguists still believe linguistic determinism because it’s more interesting than reality. But that goes with all fringe, usually nationalism-driven, beliefs; like “Hungarian isn’t Finno-Urgic, it’s Turkic/isolate!” or “Tamil is oldest language and all other languages came from it!” or other crazy shit. Or Altaic, but that one isn’t crazy depending on which variation of it you pick, even if it’s likely wrong or unprovable.

Vintage clarinets can be very beautiful, but modern more standardized clarinets are also often beautiful (I’m quite partial to a lot of the Backun designs, but I have an old Selmer I really like too)

I can’t think of any instruments that aren’t made as “beautiful” as before. The only differences are that modern ones are just made… better, like way better. A $200-400 guitar now surpasses the quality of a guitar costing thousands of dollars from a few decades ago, and there’s way more diversity in the designs.

That being said, I don’t see what the point of musical instruments that aren’t “utilitarian” would be. It’s not a sculpture, it exists to make sound, there’s no reason for an instrument that sacrifices sound or design quality to have fancy aesthetics, unless it’s for a movie/play or something and the sound doesn’t actually matter.

Do people in cities have planes circling them 24/7 or something? I see like a few planes every month maybe and I live not far from a city with an international airport.

The anime fandom is extraordinarily sexual. It makes sense when you see that in general, anime is one of the most casually extremely objectifying/sexualizing/tokenizing things you can find… specifically towards women and queer people. Even yuri (lesbian) animes tend to be shounen (aimed at young men) and often are very fetishistic, and anything that resembles queerness is usually used in shounen animes specifically as fan service to their male audience.

There are MANY animes that I guarantee you only exist for the purpose of porn (more specifically, designed to get popular from people making & spreading porn of them). Rampant and unavoidable horny fan service is a plague

In Italy, you have to travel to whatever city you have residence in to vote. A lot of (mostly progressive) people have to fly across the country to cast their vote, apparently it sucks for them

A clean room re-write of the books probably wouldn’t cost too much if the company that owns the copyrights to these textbooks don’t want to sell the rights for a reasonable price.

That’s a long way to say that you’re completely maliciously ignorant on endangered languages & language preservation, fascist bootlicker. Move to some other site to spread your corporatist-compliant “enlightened centrist” propoganda, it’s disgusting to see your comments littered everywhere like trash on a beach. Or at the very least, don’t shill on the behalf of greedy fucks who are abusing a group’s vulnerability and the law to exploit a nearly-dead culture for money. It’s a language with like 2000 fluent speakers, mostly old people who will be dust not long from now. You are, quite plainly, deflecting responsibility for them taking the work of a vulnerable group and claiming ownership of it to make money, against the knowledge and wishes of the group whose labor they practically stole.

And now you’re making a point of gaslighting the victims and the people who are rightfully against the exploitation, by comparing the work of the victims to basic facts of the universe that are observed in nature, while also using it as an attempt to defend your favorite shitty economic system/ideology. Like seriously, do you think languages are just something that exist in the wild outside of the confines of living beings? Do you think these people just observed some feral Lakota words and grammar the same way that Newton observed the laws of the universe? No, they obtained everything almost exclusively via the work of the speakers of the damn language, and despite being a “nonprofit” used it to profit a ton while depriving the native speakers of the records of their own language and oral history.

I am a linguist, and I can say with confidence that a strong majority of linguistics researchers and language preservationists find this, and practices like this, despicable – linguistics is a field where the overwhelming attitude is that knowledge needs to be open (even when facing the challenges of science journals being exploitative as fuck and not open at all, researches still put considerable effort into getting around that), especially in the context of an endangered or dying language/culture. You don’t just exploit a population for profit and refuse to leave, and still talk about how you’re doing a good thing. What these people do – and continue to do – is a disgrace.

Legally, using someone else’s non-recorded spoken language to make a profit without their consent is a gray area assuming you can prove that they got it from you (obviously these people can), but considering written language and recorded spoken language are both protected by the same copyright laws as any other tangible medium (and indeed, it would be a very clear-cut case if what these people provided to the consortium was plainly recorded), it’s obvious that what the LLC did was wrong and it’s very reasonable to say that they infringed on the Lakota peoples’ IP, considering that this was a collaborative work where the actual content came nearly entirely directly from the tribespeople themselves. This is fundamental ethical linguistics 101, even dictionaries of more widely spoken languages (like English) involve a bunch of explicit consent, consent forms, contracts, etc. from the speakers & contributors they use the labor of (or from the whole community that they use the labor of when it’s an endangered language), for both legal and ethical reasons.

I hate to come off as this aggressive, but this capitalist apologia & acting like this is acceptable behaviour in modern society is really crossing a line for me, considering how close the topic of dialectology and language preservation is to me – it’s the whole reason I began to do linguistics.

I uninstalled one drive immediately, it’s so annoying. It’s also really fucky with when it updates files. If I need to use it, I’ll go on my browser

I think that’s good when the objective is to improve the language. One key thing that holds many languages back is that they’re stuck with historical baggage, and it can be pretty difficult to replace/remove “outdated” stuff without breaking everything.

I do not want to be stuck using Python 2, or Scala 2 (although there exist people who use Scala 2 instead of Scala 3).