I wanted to share a resource for reading practice that I stumbled across recently. It’s called the Chinese Reading World, and it was a project led by the University of Iowa.
The site was put together from 2005 to 2008, so it’s not super up to date. However, there is a ton of content! Everything is sorted into 3 levels: beginning, intermediate, and advanced.
Each level has 30 units, and each unit has 10 lessons. The lessons begin with a vocab pre-test, then there is a reading with some comprehension questions. Lastly, there is a vocab post-test, which is the same as the initial test (at least for the lessons I’ve done so far). There’s audio for each lesson text, but unfortunately it can’t be streamed—you have to download it. There is also an achievement test at the end of each unit.
My experience has actually been that I already know all the words on the vocabulary tests, but the reading passages contain other words that I’m not familiar with.
So far, the readings I’ve encountered are not very long. This is nice since reading longer pieces can be frustrating at times. With shorter readings, you can just read 1 or 2 on some days and read more when you have more time/patience. I believe the readings are taken from Chinese newspapers.
Also, every unit has a theme. With 90 units total, there are bound to be themes that interest you. Example unit topics:
Directions and Asking Direction 方向和问路
Sports and Outdoor Activities 体育和户外运动
Chinese Music and Musicians 中国音乐和音乐家
Chinese Minorities and Local Customs 地方习俗和民族风情
Chinese Sports and Olympic Games 体育和奥林匹克
Contemporary Chinese Literature and Writers 中国当代文学和作家
The 3 levels also each come with 5 proficiency tests. They seem to be based on vocabulary knowledge, so expanding your vocab is clearly a huge focus of this site. The only thing I’m unclear is about is I’m not sure exactly when the proficiency tests are meant to be taken. After completing all units? Or are they spaced out so you are supposed to take test 1 after the first few units, test 2 after the next few, etc.?
I’ve started working my way through the advanced section this week. With 300 advanced lessons alone, it really feels like I have an infinite number of articles to go through!
In your Chinese studies you’ve probably learned: 红色、橙色、黄色、绿色、蓝色、紫色、灰色、白色、黑色、咖啡色、粉红色
But there are so many beautiful colors out there! Let’s learn some more. These are color terms I’ve come across outside Chinese class.
In general you can indicate a light shade with 浅 and a dark shade with 深. I have also seen 墨 for dark and 淡 for light, but when I Googled various color terms, there were more results for 浅 and 深 than 淡 and 墨.
I spent way too much time messing with HTML to color the text to match (except for the shades of white).
褐色 hèsè - brown
橘黄色 júhuángsè - orange
奶油色 nǎiyóusè - cream
金黄色 jīnhuángsè - gold color
朱红色 zhūhóngsè - vermilion
米色 mǐsè - beige
棕色 zōngsè - brown
青色 qīngsè - cyan / blue-green
灰白 huībái - light gray / ash-colored
蔚蓝 wèilán - azure / sky blue
纯白 chúnbái - pure white
雪白 xuěbái - snow white
洁白 jiébái - spotlessly white / pure white
漆黑 qīhēi - pitch-black
铜色 tóngsè - copper
乌黑 wūhēi - jet-black / dark
靛色 diànsè - indigo (color)
金色 jīnsè - golden / gold (color)
银色 yínsè - silver (color)
Here are some single characters I’ve seen as well. Some of these are commonly used in names, like 彤 and 丹.
彤 tóng - red
丹 dān - red / pellet / powder / cinnabar
缇 tí - orange-red silk / orange-red colored
赤 chì - red / scarlet / bare / naked
碧 bì - green jade / bluish green / blue / jade
翠 cuì - bluish-green / green jade
皓 hào - bright / luminous / white (esp. bright white teeth of youth or white hair of old age)
颢 hào - bright / white
玄 xuán - black / mysterious
彤, 丹, and 缇 are all described as a red-orange color. I’m not really sure of the difference, so I just made them all the same shade. I’m also unclear on exact distinction between 褐色 and 棕色. Image search results certainly suggest that they are used differently. Not sure how 咖啡色 fits in either.
I stumbled across this giant Wikipedia table with many beautiful colors that you can check out to learn more!
If expression ‘cognitive studies’ means anything to you, this could be your opportunity to participate in a real associative experiment, the results of which will be later used for creation of a scientific research.
If not, this could be an opportunity to entertain yourself with a couple of weird questions :D
Anyway, any contribution would be of great - no, enormous - help. So any activity (participation, reblogs, etc.) is very much appreciated. Thank you!
nemzetközi nőnap - International Women’s Day nő -woman asszony- married woman feleség- wife hölgy- lady lány- girl; daughter kislány- little girl anya- mother nagymama- grandmother nagynéni- aunt március- March március nyolcadika - 8 March egyenjogúság- equality, equal rights egyenjogúsítás, emancipáció - emancipation választójog, szavazati jog - right to vote női jogok - women’s rights virág- flower (virág)csokor - bouquet rózsa- rose tulipán- tulips hóvirág- snowdrop jácint- hyacinth csokoládé, csoki - chocolate bonbon- box of chocolates sütemény, süti - cake, cookies ajándék - present, gift
So a few years back, I wrote my Master’s thesis while an Erasmus student in England and I thought I would share an abridged version with you. I wrote my thesis about the Northern Vowel Shift, under the title : The Old Scandinavian element and its impact in the actuation and development of the Northern Vowel Shift.
But first of all, what is the Great Vowel Shift ?
It’s an event described as a chain-shift where the lower vowels, in a push-change movement, forced the higher vowels to raise and the highest ones to diphthongise, as such:
[ɔː] → [oː] → [uː] → [aʊ]
[ɛː] → [eː] → [iː] → [aɪ]
This partly explains the discrepancy between sounds and orthography in English. For instance, <ee> in “meet” now pronounced /iː/ used to be pronounced /eː/and <oo> in “goose” now pronounced /uː/used to be /oː/. This large-scale shake-up took place between the mid-14th and the 18th century.
Why is the Northern Vowel Shift important?
Because, generally, when dealing with the Great Vowel Shift, it is often assumed that it affected the whole of England. However, the upward movement of vowels was not a unified motion as some British English varieties retain pronunciations that were left unmodified by the Shift and thus retain certain pronunciations similar to those of the period before the Shift intervened. The study of the phonological history of the English language, more often than not, tends to describe the evolution of the vowel set of English by the representation of its southern version.
It matters because this focus on the southern version is probably due to a form of social bias; the most prestigious variety in the United Kingdom in present days is RP (Received Pronunciation) / SBE (Southern British English).
The bulk of the literature published to this day on this matter does not really concern northern England. This fact is quite a shame for there are many differences between the Northern Vowel Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift that seem to indicate that the two phenomena are not likely to be connected and merely share a common vocalic shift.
How did the Great Vowel Shift/Southern Vowel Shift happen ?
In a nutshell, this Shift took place because of dialect contacts in the south of England. Smith (2007) mentions that early Tudor London offered economic opportunities to the people of the surrounding countryside, attracting large number of people with different dialectal traditions to the same place.
Smith (2007:130) argues that the socially salient pronunciation of [e̝ː ; o̝ː] inherited from French was used by a category of the population; System I speakers, and System II speakers from outside London, would perceive these raised [e̝ː ; o̝ː] as /i:/ and /uː/. A third group of speakers from System III, would come to London during the 18th century from East Anglia and bring more chaos to the situation. Smith believes that the diphthongisation of the long close vowels comes from System III speakers.
How did the Northern Vowel Shift happen and how is different ?
In my thesis I concluded that the NVS and the SVS were triggered by very different factors; while the SVS took place because of dialect contacts, it would seem that the NVS happened because of instability in Northern English vowels after the introduction of long /ɛː/ in the phonology following Open Vowel Lengthening, which took place between the Old and Middle English period. Open Vowel Lengthening happened as follows: CVCV structures became CVːCafter final vowels like -ewere dropped.
Examples:
Old English “nama” => Middle English “nām”(“name”)
Old English “faran” => Middle English “fār” (“go”)
However, as you can see, there is a blatant lack of symmetry in the upward movement of Northern English long vowels compared to that of the SVS. Basically, when looking at this graph, the NVS only concerns the front vowels, and not the back ones. I’ll add there is a level of detail missing in the graph depicting the rise of /ɔː/ to /oː/. However, contrary to what occurred in the SVS, the raising of Vowel 5, as Aitkens (2002) calls it, had no impact because once /ɔː/ rose to /oː/, there was nothing to move upward and force /uː/ to change quality in turn. This is why in Northern English and Scottish dialect, you can hear speakers pronounce the word “house” as /hu:s/ with a long monophthong instead of the usual diphthong /aʊ/.
The reason for that is relatively simple: the absence of /oː/ in the pre-NVS phonology. This vowel had seemingly fronted to /ø:/ in earlier stages, leaving the mid-high back vowel slot open. Thus when /ɔː/ rose, there was nothing to push towards /uː/.
Since the NVS didn’t happen for the same reasons as the SVS, and it looks like the culprit is the fronting of /oː/ to /ø:/ : whence does this fronting come? My hypothesis was that it was under the influence of Nordic languages that /ø:/ arose or was maintained longer in the northern dialects of English than in the southern, which had lost its front rounded vowels by the 11th century (an example of what I called south-eastern distaste for front rounded vowels).
In a nutshell, what I argued is that northern varieties of English may have started losing their front rounded vowels, like down south, but contact with Old Norse speakers ranging as far back as the late 8th century in Northern England may have played a role in re-introducing a decaying phoneme in northern dialects of English. Furthermore, Scandinavians tended to remain in their own little closed communities, exchanging little with the outside world for a few decades after the end of the Danelaw. Their contact with neighbouring population must have played a role in the upholding of /ø:/.
Basically,tl;dr,English underwent massive phonetic change because of the Great Vowel Shift. However, it would me more accurate to refer to it as the Southern Vowel since its effects did not affect northern regions of England, which had experienced its own shift; the Northern Vowel Shift. It arose because of phonetic evolution between Old and Middle English. A back vowel was absent from Old Northern English, rendering a SVS chain-shift-like motion impossible in northern dialects. This back vowel may have fronted because of Old Norse influence in the region, which lasted longer in the north of England than in the south.
Icelandic-English: This is very indepth, but hard to navigate unless you know what you’re looking for.
Icelandic-English: A great resource, with links to common abbreviations and short grammar guides.
English-Icelandic-Danish: Online dictionary that has English-Icelandic, and Danish-Icelandic. Though it may require payments to access some information.
Slangurorðabókin: Icelandic Slang dictionary. It is in Icelandic, but fun for someone learning to see.
fuckyeahislenska: Posts pictures with words on them. The posts usually include notes on the declensions and uses.
icelandiclanguage: A really great resource for anyone interested in studying Icelandic, run by an incredibly nice person that is always very helpful to anyone with questions.
longicelandicwords: Like most Germanic languages, Icelandic has many long compound words. This tumblr shares some of the longer ones.
Greenlandic is an Inuit language, a branch of the larger Eskimo-Aleut family. It is spoken by 50-60,000 people in Greenland.
Greenland is unique as a new world country whose only official language is the native one, the colonial language Danish being demoted in 2009. Greenlandic’s rise to linguistic dominance comes hand in hand with the nations independence from Denmark and establishing a new modern orthography for the language, a source of pride for the now 100% literate nation. There are two primary dialects; West Greenlandic or Kalaallisut, and Eastern Greenlandic or Tunumiit oraasiat. Kalaallisut is the government standard and as a result Tunumiit oraasiat is considered endangered.
Like other Inuit and North American languages, Greenlandic is polysynthetic. This means that the language makes aggressive use of inflection and derivation to create single words with meanings that normally take who phrases or sentences in English. For a quick example “oqaq” is the word for tongue, “oqarpoq"is the derived verb for “he says”, and “oqaasilerisoq” is a linguist. Verbs are even more complex than nouns, and raise questions about the basic nature of word class. In some linguistic and pedagogic works on the language you will find the term “postbase” referring to a kind of semantically “heavy” verbal suffix. These “postbases” often have the same meaning as some common full verbs like “have”, “say”, or “think”, but exist only as derivations for other verbs.
Happy Fall, my lil’ agaves! Here’s a vocabulary list of transition phrases and expressions to improve the fluidity of your Spanish writing and speaking. I actually have an exam on these phrases next martes,and I thought this would be an excellent vocab list to share with you. The Quizlet deck for this list can be found here. This vocabulary list is from the textbook I’m using this semester for my advanced Spanish comp class: Taller de Escritores.
asimismo also, in addition to
así/ de ese modo so/ in that way
con relación/ respecto a regarding
como se puede ver as you/one/we can see
además de in addition to
por suerte fortunately, luckily
desgraciaunfortunately
de hecho in fact
al igual que like
a diferencia de unlike
en cambio/ por el contrario in contrast
en vez/ lugar de instead of
no obstante/ sin embargo however
por una parte/ un lado on the one hand
por otra (parte)/ otro (lado) on the other hand
a causa de because of
debido a due to, on account of
entonces/ por lo tanto therefore
con resultado/ consecuencia as a result
por eso/ por ese motivo/ por esa razón for that reason
who doesn’t love languages? or free resources? or free! language! resources!?
i was on duolingo, reading a discussion, and saw a link to a free swedish grammar book! and when i checked the website, there were loads of free language books in downloadable pdf form just waiting to be put in a tumblr post. i even used proper capitalisation for the book names! but that was shortlived, as i have a nonchalant online presence to consider.
obvious disclaimer: i don’t own any of the rights etc etc to any of the above etc etc, i just thought i’d share.
and while i’m here, if you want an actual free online course to do, FutureLearn has some language ones (as well as lots of other disciplines too!) i did a few modules of their Italian For Beginners which i really had fun doing and i learnt a lot of the basics- unfortunately they don’t offer those at the moment, but do check back as they introduce new courses all the time!
Open University offers loads of free courses, including some language ones. i haven’t done any language specific ones through OU, but i have done a few history ones which i enjoyed (although personally, i prefer the format and structure of FutureLearn, if i’m being honest).
Open Culture seems to have lots of language courses (48 languages, to be precise), although i have never personally used their resources they have been recommended to me, and they seem to offer a lot of languages not previously covered by any of the above, so it may be worth a look!
YouTube and Spotify also offer some good visual/aural learning resources which really helps with pronunciation, but you’d have to check for your specific target language. i am currently trying to learn swedish and italian (although i have fallen dreadfully behind in the latter) and i’ve found some useful things on both!
I was reviewing lesson 1 of my Icelandic ‘textbook’ today. I felt like sharing some of my notes, so here they are! they are not very detailed, but they can still come in handy. Perhaps some of you will find them useful (especially if you are just starting out). My apologies, by the way, if the handwriting is a bit sloppy; I’m not used to taking digital notes quite yet.
Since I didn’t include the vocabulary section of my notes, heita means ‘to be named’. So, for the last picture of this photoset, ég heiti… means ‘I am named…’, þú heitir… means ‘you are named…’, etc.
In Urdu we don’t say “I won’t give you what you want” if that person went out of line and then asked for a favour, we informally say “تیرے باپ کا راج چل رہا ہے؟ (Teray baap ka raaj chal raha hai ? [“ch” as in “chair”])” which roughly translates to “Is this your father’s kingdom?” and I think that’s beautiful.
In Sylheti Bengali, there’s a sweet dish called “ফিদা (phida)” and it sounds like the word for “punch/hit” which is also “ফিদা (fida)”. So as a joke, cousins and siblings would ask “ফিদা খাইটা নি ? (Fidā khā'iṭā ni ?)” which means “Do you want ‘fida’ ?” and if you say yes they might punch you playfully because after all you agreed to a punch (fida), not a sweet dish (phida).
We had a similar joke in Brazil. The word “bolacha” can mean cookie or a hit/smack depending on what region of the country you’re in. So one kid would ask “quer uma bolacha?” which the other kid interpreted as “do you want a cookie?” and would answer yes, and then would be given a slap, because they did agree to taking a hit/“bolacha”
In Dutch we’ve got this thing where you say a fruit or vegetable and you tell the other kid to say ‘mij’ (me) after every fruit/vegetable, and then at a certain point you say ‘sla’ (lettuce, but also imperative of ‘slaan’, to hit) and the other kid says ‘mij’, so they say ‘sla mij’ (‘hit me’) and you can hit them.
If you attempt to gatekeep anyone learning Italian you are legally obligated to tweet the phrase “cancello culture” at least once, I don’t make the rules
![IN [LANGUAGE] WE DON'T SAY ...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/avatar_84ac7e4b41dc_30.png){kind=avatar}
ALT![[D]ude, [S]end [M]emes](https://64.media.tumblr.com/39c7ffb0d579bf10949faecc1ffcf203/195e405a9327157e-fb/s30x30u_c1/f629cb4a99f875359e33edaea2d032053f0ee51c.jpg){kind=small}
