thetudes
une tasse de thé
mainly french (b1) + korean (beginner) + mandarin (hsk 1)
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How I'm learning bopomofo (zhuyin fuhao)
Why am I learning bopomofo?
Maybe around a year ago, I had a dream in which I was in a library/bookstore in Taiwan. I was trying to search their catalog to see if they had a book I wanted in stock. The only option was a bopomofo touchscreen keyboard, and I became quite distressed because I was unable to type anything. This dream inspired me to learn bopomofo, AKA zhuyin fuhao.
Why should you learn bopomofo?
Frankly, the consensus I've seen on blogs and language forums is that you don't need to learn bopomofo/zhuyin fuhao. But I wanted to share my thoughts on what there is to gain from learning it. Consider learning bopomofo if...
You find pinyin unintuitive or are looking for another input method for typing.
I learned pinyin very young, so it's second nature for me. But for some learners, it's difficult and may distract them from reading characters. Bopomofo offers an alternative.
You're really interested in Taiwanese culture and want to deepen your understanding of it.
My Taiwanese American friend tells me that you can find bopomofo in materials like children's books. I've also seen it used online, such as in it memes by Taiwanese netizens.
You're a total language nerd and think it would be fun.
It's been a fun challenge to learn something completely new to me after so many years of learning Chinese. It's forced me to reexamine the language and how pinyin works too!
How I'm learning bopomofo
My method is nothing fancy. First, I wrote down all the symbols my notebook and practiced converting syllables from pinyin to zhuyin fuhao. After that, I added the zhuyin keyboard to my phone and switched to practicing via typing.
As you may or may not know, I'm kind of obsessed with chengyu and try to learn a new one each day. So I practice typing with zhuyin fuhao daily by typing out my new chengyu of the day.
*Technically you are supposed to type the tone marks too, but I'm lazy and usually don't do that.
**Like with the pinyin keyboard, you can also input text by just typing the initials.
The downside of my method is that I fear I'm memorizing positions on the keyboard instead of the actual symbols. If you as me to read something written in zhuyin, I would need some time to decipher it. But I actually tried learning zhuyin previously using flashcards, and it didn't stick at all. So this typing method, while flawed, has worked for me because I've been able to practice consistently—a little bit every day!
I don't think I can write zhuyin out by hand, but I don't have to worry about my bad dream coming true anymore!
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What are those apps you usually post in your productivity updates?
hi! here's a breakdown of apps i use, as well as websites and other resources i've used/use for my learning (mainly chinese, though some of these resources can be used for other languages as well).
apps i use every day:
dot languages: this is a chinese-specific app where you select your hsk level, and then read articles at that level. there's a pop-up dictionary, an option to show pinyin, post-article vocab practice (audio, matching, translation, and writing), and the option to have your articles either in simplified or traditional.
TOFU learn: a blend between flashcards and writing, you can find decks for various things, including hsk level-specific decks, and you learn new vocab with the stroke order and then write each new term three times—once with an overlay (so the term is visible), and then two times from memory. there's also a review function, which helps you practice terms you've already learnt, and each term has audio that goes with it. i use it for chinese, but there's decks for esperanto, french, german, italian, japanese, korean, norweigian, portuguese, russian, spanish, swedish, and turkish.
the pleco dictionary app: my favourite chinese dictionary app; allows you to translate from english to chinese or chinese to english, has options for writing, radical, vocal, and keyboard entry, and has both traditional and simplified characters.
ankiapp: this one's not particularly complicated; it's a flashcard app, where you can make your own decks or download decks other people have made. it uses a spaced repetition system to help you remember terms—you rate yourself from worst to best on how well you remembered the term, and that determines how many times it'll pop up afterwards. it also gives you an overall grade for each deck, which is a nice way to measure your progress.
duolingo: probably my least favourite of all of the apps i use; the chinese course isn't the best, and now that they've removed the notes/grammar information option, there's no way for people who aren't already fairly familiar with the language and its inner workings to learn them if they exclusively use duolingo. it's okay for maintenance practice, though, but i'm already almost finished with the entire course and i would say it barely reaches to lower hsk 4, so i wouldn't say it's a good tool if you're more advanced.
apps i have but use less often:
readibu: this is sort of like dot in that it's an app for reading in chinese with a pop-up dictionary. however, that's where the similarities end; readibu has novels, short stories, and articles aimed at children, and each of those are further split into genres. readibu also lets you add your own web-pages and read them on the app, so you can use its pop-up dictionary with them. it's aimed more to intermediate and upper intermediate learners, with hsk levels ranging from hsk 4 to hsk 6. the only reason i rate dot above readibu is because dot has a larger range of levels (hsk 1 through hsk 6 i believe? but it may go higher) and exercises built in to help you learn the vocab.
the chairman's bao: also a chinese reading app, though if you use the free version, you only get one sample article per hsk level (hsk 1 - hsk 6). i believe that every so often you get a new sample article for each level, but i'm not sure what the interval on that is. it also has a pop-up dictionary and a flashcard option for saved vocab.
du chinese: another chinese reading app; it has articles divided into newbie through master (six levels in total, though they don't line up perfectly with the hsk in my experience), and new articles are free for a certain period of time before becoming locked behind a paywall. there's a pop-up dictionary and a vocab review/test option for vocab you save.
memrise: flashcards with audio, depending on whether you're using an official course or a user-generated deck. decent, but it can get repetitive.
hellotalk: not exclusively chinese, but i believe it started off mainly aimed that way. you set your language, and then your target language, and then you can talk to native speakers who have your language as their target language. potentially incredibly useful, but if you're like me and extremely introverted you may have a hard time using this app, since it requires a lot of one-on-one interaction.
slowly: i haven't actually gotten around to using this, but it's sort of like a digital penpal app, as i understand it. you can learn more about it here.
websites and other miscellanea:
this massive mega drive by @salvadorbonaparte (languages, linguistics, translation studies, and more).
this masterpost by @loveletter2you (linguistics, languages, and language learning books/textbooks).
this masterpost on chinese minority literature by @zaobitouguang
the integrated chinese textbooks by cheng and tsui, which are the textbooks i use for self-study—there's textbooks and workbooks, as well as character workbooks (though these can easily be cut out without suffering from the loss).
mandarinbean: graded readers, hsk 1 - hsk 6, with a pop-up dictionary and the option to read in traditional or simplified
chinese reading practice: reading, beginner through advanced (three levels), with a pop-up dictionary and some additional notes included on vocab and language-specific things non-native speakers might struggle with or not know.
hsk reading: graded readers, hsk 1 - hsk 6, divided into three sections (beginner, intermediate, advanced). does not have a pop-up dictionary, but does have an option to translate the text, post-reading quizzes, and notes on important vocab with example sentences.
my chinese reading: reading from beginner to advanced (four levels); has a pop-up dictionary, the option to play an audio recording of the passage you're reading, notes on key words, things that are difficult to translate, grammar, and post-reading comprehension questions.
the heavenly path notion website, which i would say is one of the best resources i've ever found, with a massive number of guides, lists of chinese media in a variety of forms, and general resources.
chinese character stroke order dictionary: what it says on the tin; will show you the stroke order for a given character.
hanzigrids: allows you to generate your own character worksheets. i use this very frequently, and can recommend it. the only downside is if you want to create multiple pages at once, you have to pay; however this can easily be circumnavigated by creating only one sheet at a time. you can download the sheet as a pdf and print it out for personal use.
21st century chinese poety: a resource i only came across recently; has a massive collection of contemporary chinese poetry, including translations; much more approachable than classical poetry, which can often be incredibly dense and hard to parse due to the writing style.
zhongwen pop-up dictionary: if you're reading something in chinese on a website that doesn't have a pop-up dictionary, this is a must. i've never encountered any words that it doesn't have a translation for so far, including colloquialisms/slang. i use it to read webnovels, and it's been a fantastic tool. you can also save vocab by hitting the r key when you're hovering over a word/phrase, making it easy to go back and add terms to your flashcard deck(s).
chinese reading world: a website put together by the university of iowa; split into three levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced), with thirty units per level, and ten modules per unit, as well as multiple proficiency tests per level. each module is split into three parts: a pre-reading vocab quiz, the reading with a number of comprehension questions based on it, and a post-vocab reading quiz. it also rates you in relation to someone with a native proficiency based on how quickly you read and answer the comprehension questions, and how many vocab questions you get right.
jiaoyu baike: an extensive chinese-to-chinese dictionary, put out by the taiwanese ministry of education. you can find an extensive write-up on it here, by @linghxr.
social media etc: see this post by @rongzhi.
qianpian: another chinese-to-chinese dictionary; @ruhua-langblr has a write-up on it here.
this writeup on zero to hero by @meichenxi; initially aimed at chinese learning, but now has expanded greatly.
music rec's: this masterpost by @linghxr.
tv/film: youtube is a great place to find chinese tv shows and films, and they often have english subtitles. if you can't find something on there, though, you can probably find it either on iqiyi or asianvote, which have both chinese and other asian shows and films (though you'll want an adblock if you're going to use the latter). i use these a lot to watch things, and have discovered a lot of media through these, and then novels through those when i went searching to see what they were adapted from.
polylogger: a website for logging the amount of time/type of language study you do. has a wide variety of languages, and the option to follow other people. still, it's a fairly basic site.
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ustedes tous entendu parler franglais. ahora préparez-vous para españçais
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i hope december feels like a heated blanket and a kiss on the forehead
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are you French? are you bored? do you want to participate in a silly little experiment and help me pass my silly little course?
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4 years of Anki: How I make my Chinese flashcards
My first post on this blog was about 4 years ago on July 12th, 2019! That's also around the time I started consistently using Anki. I still review flashcards on Anki nearly every day, but a lot about how I make my cards has changed.
Fields:
Front: The word/phrase, in simplified characters.
Traditional: At some point I decided I wanted to improve my recognition of traditional characters, so I added this field. If the simplified and traditional forms are the same, I leave this field blank.
Back: The definition, written in Chinese and/or English. I try to use Chinese as much as possible, but sometimes I have to resort to English or mix both languages. I didn't start using Chinese definitions until a couple years ago, so my older cards only have English definitions.
Example: Example sentences or phrases that I usually get from Pleco or some other Chinese dictionary source. I replace the word/phrase in question with underscores because I used to mimic cloze deletion-style cards. Now I mostly do it this way out of habit.
Pronunciation: The pinyin with numbers for tones (since that's easier to type on my laptop). I also include variant pronunciations. Above I have both the Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese standard pronunciations.
Alternate: If I notice in the dictionary that there is some alternate form of a character or word, I'll often include it here.
Card front:
Here's how the front of the card looks. I use a cursive-style font called Swim the Wolf to hopefully improve my ability to read others' handwriting. It also forces me to slow down and focus on the example sentences.
This is how the front template looks in Anki:
{{Front}}
{{#Traditional}}
/ {{Traditional}}
{{/Traditional}}
{{Alternate}}
{{Example}}
This template is configured so that if there is text in the traditional field, the card will be displayed with a "/" separating the simplified and traditional text. If the traditional field is empty, the "/" separator will not be displayed.
Card back:
And here is the back. When I started using Anki, I actually had the definition on the front and the word/phrase on the back. That was back when I only wrote the definitions in English. I would try to guess the Chinese word/phrase based on the English definition and Chinese example sentences (thus why I had to use underscores in the examples). At some point, it got unmanageable, so I switched to word/phrase on the front and definition on the back.
Here's the back template:
{{FrontSide}}
{{Back}}
{{Pronunciation}}
So there we have it, my Anki set up! My method for making cards has changed so much over the years as I've learned more about what works for me and as my goals have evolved. I don't use any add-ons or extensions (unless the added font counts), so you definitely don't need to do anything fancy to get a lot out of Anki. I hope you can glean some inspiration from this!
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Excerpt from Kató Lomb’s “Polyglot: How I Learn Languages”
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Hello language learners!
Have you tried Librivox?
It's a website that has public domain audio books in TONS (47 to be exact) of languages! (my followers, yes, it has Finnish too!)
You can find loads of free books on there! I recommend it a lot!
For Finnish books, I noticed they even have Seitsemän Veljestä which is a must-read for every Finnish student.
Here's a link:
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4.0 Genshin's Fontaine - Vocabulaire
Les Lieux en Fontaine (Places in Fontaine)
fontaine (f) => fountain
poisson (m) => fish
chemin de l'espoir (m) => path of hope
fleuve cendré (m) => ashen river
quartier lyonnais (m) => Lyon quarter
quartier narbonnais (m) => Narbonne quarter
horlogerie (f) => clockmaker's shop
Les Noms des Personnages (Characters' Names)
(Mainly NPCs)
les Gardes => guards
livre (m) => book
Maison Gardiennage => security house (lit. house security)
vacher (m), vachère (f) => cowboy, cowgirl
semaine (f) => week
Petit Chou (m) => little dear (familiar, affectionate term) (lit. little cabbage)
Miscellaneous
bulle (f) => bubble
confrérie (f) => community, association, guild, fraternity
marcotte (f) => layer (horticulture term)
Oratrice Mécanique d'Analyse Cardinale (f) => Mechanical Speaker of Cardinal Analysis
pluie (f) => rain
blancheur (f) => whiteness, purity
noirceur (f) => darkness, blackness
Mot-valise (Portmanteau)
lumidouce = lumière (light) + douce (soft, sweet)
belleau = bel (beautiful) + eau (water)
French Localization Names
Tidalga => Maréalgue = maré (tidal) + algue (algae)
Condessence Crystal => Cristal de condensat (crystal of condensate)
Cultural notes from the Genshin Impact Fandom/Wikia: (spoilers ahead)
Marcel/Vacher's name is a reference to French serial killers, Joseph Vacher and Marcel Barbeault
Mélusines are female spirits of fresh water in European folklore
Méquignon and Bertin's House of Curiosities may be a reference to French fashion merchant Rose Bertin, known for her work with Marie Antoinette, and Bertin's mother, Marie-Marguerite Méquignon
Méropide (as in Fortress of Meropide) is the French name of the fictional island Meropis by ancient Greek writer Theopompus as a parody to Plato's Atlantis
#Genshin Impact#no spoilers pls#i may update later as i play through more of 4.0#That's right! I've been ignoring my language studies for video games!#vocabulaire#french#français#thétudes#thétudes français
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“’Petit-nègre’ French, a construction of the French colonial army.”
Two years ago in a history class, I learned that the French military made up a version of French that they taught exclusively to their Black soldiers, especially in the time leading up to, and during, World War I. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
During the war, France was totally dependent on these soldiers that were (forcibly) recruited from the colonies, because the French population had been declining for some time and there weren’t enough young men who could fight in the war. The colonial soldiers were referred to as “tirailleurs sénégalais” (Senegalese tirailleurs) because soldiers were initially drafted from Senegal, although they were drafted from all the colonies eventually.
The version of French that was spoken by these soldiers (and their white French commanders) was referred to as ‘petit-nègre’ (it literally translates to ‘little negro’) or ‘français tirailleur’ (tirailleur French). The thing is, it wasn’t some pidgin language that developed naturally as a result of several language populations intermingling. Instead, it was basically constructed by the French military specifically to be taught to soldiers from the African colonies as they were going through their military training. Why? Essentially, the language was a heavily simplified version of French with really basic grammar, and it created a power imbalance, by humiliating the colonial soldiers and making them seem stupid. The plan was probably also propelled by ideas of the superiority of the French language, and the wish to keep it separate and “untainted” by the “lesser” Black people.
Upon finding out the truth of what they’d been taught, many of the soldiers strove to learn proper French, but the idea of “the stupid Black subject” had already become widespread in French society and was near-impossible to shake off. Many of the racist stereotypes born during the French colonial era lingered in the shared French cultural consciousness for a long time, and some still do. One of the most well-known examples is probably the advertisement for the chocolate drink Banania, which had the slogan “Y a bon…” (It’s good) and looked like this:
The current design has ditched the racist slogan, but the image of a “happy, but stupid” colonial soldier (complete with the red soldier’s cap) is still present:
I just… reading about this infuriates me. It sadly does not surprise me, though. I tried to find sources in English, but everything I found was either in French or part of the history course where I learnt it in the first place. If you can understand French, though, I recommend reading the article that I linked at the top, which explains the history of it quite well and refers to some further sources as well.
Feel free to correct any factual errors or other mistakes that I might have made. I’d also be interested in learning more, if anyone knows more about this and wants to have a chat (or can direct me to any good sources).
Image sources: x / x
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You know you chose the right target language when you keep falling in love with it again and again and again
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What this time of year feels like on studyblr/langblr
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A Few Fun Little Language Learning Tips
Hello, these are a few little tips I've found on my language learning odyssey that you may find fun or helpful
Accents! This can be a great way to 'warm up' before speaking more in depth, or a training exercise, but a fun way I've found to get myself to make French sounds (it works for any language really) is to speak English (or insert native language here) with an exaggerated accent that comes from someone speaking your target language, I find this a fun way to get the sounds of a language you're trying to speak into your head in order to make speaking easier (great for speaking exam practice)
Use addictive social media for profit! So this would be best for intermediate to advanced learners, but a way to learn more slang, grow your vocabulary, and just generally get more language input in an easy way is to create a dedicated social media account in your TL and simply lurk, do you spend hours doom scrolling short form video content? Do it guilt free by doing it in your TL, do you like cat memes? read them in your TL, it's addictive, and low energy, so you can do it even when your brain feels like a fried egg
Need a pen pal? Try Ai! So, speaking to real people in your TL can be a daunting task, for reasons ranging from the fear of saying something wrong to just plain stranger danger, so a safer (and totally free) alternative can be through ai chat bots, you can do this with dedicated language learning bots or with just plain old ChatGPT
Nostalgia Bait! One of the most beautiful things about visual art is the fact that it is a universal language in itself, certain symbols can hold significance wherever you go, so re-watching animated TV shows from your childhood or watching new TV content made for kids in your TL can be a great way to add to your vocabulary, and in call & response shows, generate responses and make them more complex if you like, to add more intrigue
When in doubt, write it out! I personally struggle a lot with conjugation, so if you do to, here's a solution I found, use Quizlet learn to help drill conjugation, and when your free rounds run out, you can manually use the flash cards to use the same effective learning strategy (or pay for Quizlet plus, but I, personally would rather eat a dusty lamp then pay for something that, in my opinion, should be free to all learners)
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thétudes updates - august 2023
i hope the langblr masterpost has been helpful! let me know if you have any feedback for it!
i made a page on notion with all the resources i actively use for all the languages i'm learning, check it out here! (if you have any questions about how i use them, i'm happy to respond!)
i am also sharing my personal french vocab reference spreadsheet. it's still a work in progress, but can be found embedded on my blog here.
as always, stay hydrated and good luck with all your language studies!
–– tea
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for anyone looking for material for comprehensible input, this site has masterlists for 45 different languages, go wild
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Hii I have a question! Is there any expression in french to say something like "do not try me" or "do not provoke me", something like that? google is not really helping me much :')
yes, you can say :
"(ne) me cherche pas /(ne) commence pas à me chercher" (literally "don't look for me/don't start looking for me"),
"(ne) commence pas" (literally "don't start"),
or simply "ne me provoque pas" ("don't provoke me") but that's less familiar than the previous two.
I put the "ne" between parenthesis because if you want to be more familiar/agressive you'll need to remove it and add an exclamation mark at the end
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