°• Learning Quenya, Norwegian, Latin, Korean and Toki Pona (and a little Finnish, old English and French) // Speaks English and Hebrew •°
"I will write what I love, and what I long for, in the hopes that for someone, it might be not only be a way out, but a way in.
In short, I will write in the hopes of writing someone else a door." -Victoria Schwab
Quenya is one of the languages Tolkien created, and the most developed one. I found that the site https://www.elvish.org/ contains most resources I could ask for, with good reviews of them and many in depth courses, all free. Right now I am studying with the following course (review is from the elvish site posted above):
Helge offers the most up-to-date and
accurate account of Neo-Quenya (that is, a synthetic and regularized
form of Quenya formed by the selective piecing-together of evidences
from across decades of Tolkien’s successive versions and elaborations of
Quenya) as a series of graded courses. The course is presented in a
series of RTF (text) files. Highly recommended as an introduction to
more rigorous and detailed study of Tolkien’s own Quenya(s).
French-
I use Pimsleur, an audio course (available in many languages) to practice speaking and listening, and read simple books to improve beyond that. I find french to be similar enough to English for me to be able to learn a lot from just opening a book (with a dictionary open if needed).
Norwegian-
I use Pimsleur to work on speaking and listening, and “The Mystery of Nils“ by Sonja Anderle and Werner Skalla to improve reading and writing. It is a mystery book written in Norwegian (with vocab and grammer explained, and exercises in the book) and the language skills used to read it increase as you progress.
Japanese-
I use Anki to memories Kanji and general vocab (cannot recommend enough).
For grammar I use “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar” by Seiichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui, which has in depth explanation of over 200 grammatical points.
Lingva Latina is an amazing book to learn Latin from. The entire book is in Latin, not a single English word (or any other language for that matter) and slowly teaches you all you need to know. There are complementary books with exercise and more information of grammar, but I usually create my own exercises.
friendly ass reminder that kit kats are the supreme candy bar and no other candy bar can ever compare and that’s tea
Yo have you ever had japanese kitkats tho? they come is like six million bomb-ass flavors, like green tea, strawberry, BBQ, Pumpkin, Taro… I had the Caramel Pudding ones once and I’ve never really recovered.
fun fact kit kats are very popular with students in japan because ‘kit kat’ sounds like a phrase that means ‘to do well’ so it’s a major study for finals snack
Was just talking about this with friends!
“kitto katsu” is basically saying to your friend “Good luck!” so handing them a kit-kat bar is the gift equivalent of the same~
forleden natt drømte jeg at jeg var på et bryllup og bruden sa jeg ikke kunne bli med i bryllupsfrokosten fordi jeg ikke hadde et led zeppelin kostyme (hva enn det skulle være). kjæresten min ble sur på henne og sa vi skulle dra, og at bryllupet hennes var dumt og jalla. vi gikk fordbi brudepikene hennes, som snakka japansk sammen. jeg ropte til dem: «shine!!» som betyr «dø!» på japansk (men kan oversettes litt nærmere «faen ta deg») og de lo på meg.
så… kan jeg si dette er første gang jeg har drømt på japansk? jeg forsto ikke brudepikene, men det hørtes ut som ekte japansk… er det mulig å drømme på et språk man ikke forstår?
Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th
No guys you don’t understand.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.
Today’s numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”—values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. But meaningful alternatives exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to.
Total Cookie Protection works by creating a separate “cookie jar” for each website you visit. Instead of allowing trackers to link up your behavior on multiple sites, they just get to see behavior on individual sites. Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to only that website. No other websites can reach into the cookie jars that don’t belong to them and find out what the other websites’ cookies know about you — giving you freedom from invasive ads and reducing the amount of information companies gather about you.
This approach strikes the balance between eliminating the worst privacy properties of third-party cookies – in particular the ability to track you – and allowing those cookies to fulfill their less invasive use cases (e.g. to provide accurate analytics). With Total Cookie Protection in Firefox, people can enjoy better privacy and have the great browsing experience they’ve come to expect.
“that language is useless!” “but everyone speaks english!” “you’ll never use that language, why are you even learning it?” “it’s pointless learning new languages” shut up shut up shut up
One of the best feelings you can get from learning a language is when you come back to a cartoon/video/movie/song/book/whatever after a while but this time you understand way more than before. It’s just so logical yet so unbelievable and is a pretty nice way to tell yourself you are progressing.
My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.
That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:
The publishing industry 100% loves DRM on books. Like the publishers themselves will often insist upon it because they think it stops piracy.
The only media industry that doesn’t 100% love DRM is the music industry, and that’s because they released digital content without DRM before they realized they might need it. (You might have heard of it - it’s called the Compact Disc.)
For a while, I was de-DRMing my Kindle books specifically so Amazon couldn’t spontaneously decide to just…take them all back. I should probably look at doing that more.
I love it when Cory does this.
Aside on How People Defeated The Music Industry With a Felt-Tip Pen/Sharpie.
CDs, like records before them, store their data in a long spiral track. Music CDs go from the inside out; data CDs go from the outside in. This prevents your CD player get confused/ruined by trying to play a data CD - it will look at the middle, see nothing, and go “nothing for me here!”. This is good.
When you put a CD in a computer’s CD player, it will check the outside first (assuming it’s more likely to be a data CD), then check the inside (so it can still play your tunes / rip them).
So a music exec came up with a dastardly plan: put something that ‘looks’ like a small data file on the outside of music CDs. CD players will still be fine (they will start from the inside), but computers will think it’s a data CD and ignore the music! No ripping possible!
… except people realized you could just do a quick line around the outside with your favourite black pen. The computer wouldn’t be able to read the data file on the outside, so would then (correctly) think it’s a music CD.
The ‘small file on the outside of music CDs’ thing died very quickly after that.
If you’ve got any amount of books on audible (hi) and want them to not be on audible, track down an older android phone (like android 5-6 era) and install audible from the play store on it. It’ll get you a build that uses Amazon’s ancient DRM format for storage instead of the modern uncracked variant and you can trivially reencode everything you own to m4a. Optionally when you’re done with that you can just strip all the apps off the old phone and use it as a dedicated audiobook player, too, so that’s a bonus.
You might think you can just sideload the older audible build on a current phone but on modern Android it will completely refuse to launch.
it will refuse to launch? wth?? ugh, amazon.
I used to get non-fiction eBooks on Amazon because of the way they allowed you to export your notes and highlights, which was super useful. I’d also use Calibre to deDRM them, but then that stopped working (I’m assuming the same uncracked code).
Now I buy books from Google Play and deDRM them. I also upload any DRM-free eBooks I have to Google Play Books because not only will Google save my notes and highlights, it saves them in Google Drive, each book getting its own Google Doc. Very useful for research! And works on books you upload as well as the ones you buy.
If you are still on twitter at all, you need to leave now. This, in combination with the other change that allows Blue Checks to earn revenue from their tweets, means that you now have no way of knowing whether you are financially benefitting someone by engaging with them.
Treat every single tweet as though it is an attempt to get money from your outrage. Leave the platform now.
