Links tagged with “language”
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Language Transfer
Free audio courses for several languages. “Memorization is the most inefficient way of remembering.” (via Reddit somewhere)
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German resources - A language learners’ forum
Lots of courses, exercises, exams, etc. (via Ask MetaFilter)
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German exercises - practice grammar online
More of this. It helps me just to keep doing exercises but I soon exhaust any individual site. (vis Ask MetaFilter)
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Teaching Materials • Lehrmaterialien
Low-tech but good and extensive German-language-learning worksheets and tests.
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Amia Srinivasan · He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita: How Should I Refer to You? · LRB 2 July 2020
I had no idea there had been quite so many attempts to come up with gender-neutral pronouns for quite so long.
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Free German Online Courses Level A1 to B1 | DW Learn German
These seem really good, especially for free. (via Ask MetaFilter)
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‘Boomerspeak’ Is Now Available for Your Parodying Pleasure | WIRED
Fascinating. I use ellipses a lot myself but I don’t think I use them as randomly, or to end messages, as much as some older people seem to. Which comes across as passive aggressive apparently… (via Waxy)
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It’s not like taxi apparently - pronounciation | Ask MetaFilter
Fascinating and unintentionally amusing thread in which people with different accents attempt to descibe precisely how words are pronounced.
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The Linguistic Evolution of ‘Like’ - The Atlantic
On the recent uses of “like” in English. More interesting than I expected and, thankfully, not at all condescending.
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Slow German - Lerne alles über Deutschland!
A podcast about Germany, in German, but spoken slowly and clearly to help with learning.
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Wired Style: A Linguist Explains Vintage Internet Slang - The Toast
On the 1990s Wired style guide. ‘It’s like a “no dress code” workplace where everyone miraculously shows up in the same plaid button-down: informal, but tightly conscribed.’ (via Russell Davies)
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The Eggcorn Database
“This site is devoted to collecting the kind of unusual English spellings that have come to be called eggcorns.” Great reading. (via @joroach)
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Europe etymology maps 1
Maps showing which European countries use different common-ish words for something, and where those terms originated. (via @tomcoates)
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(326) Pushpendra Mohta’s answer to India: What are some English phrases and terms commonly heard in India but rarely used elsewhere? - Quora
I love this. To my eyes it reads entirely like language from science fiction. Brilliant. (via Kottke)
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Will someone rid me of this turbulent language | Robinince’s Blog
On the Ricky Gervais “mong” debacle. It’s thoughtful posts like this that confirm how ineffectual tweets are for serious, nuanced discussions. (via @D_Nye_Griffiths)
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Why Twitter’s Oral Culture Irritates Bill Keller (and why this is an important issue) | technosociology
Very good, and worth some time. On how Twitter is conversation, and how that compares with written language that some people are concerned is threatened by social media. (via @blech)
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LRB · Daniel Soar · Short Cuts
Fascinating, brief, look at the US government’s interest in analysing metaphors in foreign languages for security purposes. Well worth a read if you write, talk or think.
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LRB · David Runciman · Look…
For this: “a new divide in British public life: between the people who say ‘Look…’ and the people who say ‘So…’”
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Alibi_factory: There’s only one person in the world who decides what I’m going to do, and that’s me.
I love those Doctor Who/Citizen Kane stills compared. I also simultaneously love and hate the barely comprehensible syntax of the enthusiastic writing. “WHAT GIANT DOLLS O NO. Nightmare fuel for days.” (via Haddock)
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“Login” is not a verb
I’m forever correcting this when I make other peoples’ designs into web pages.
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Cnewton.com: List: Starbucks Terms of Art
A list of jargon used by Starbucks employees. Industry phrases always fascinate me but… how about explanation of what they mean? (via Waxy)
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SourceForge.net: Smarty Gettext
This *seems* like the best of many cobbled-together ways to do language localisation with PHP and Smarty, but I haven’t tried it yet. Any other suggestions…?
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POPjisyo.com - Dictionary Translation Japanese/Chinese/Korean/Kanji/Hanzi
Could be handy, but boy, do they ever need some decent info design to make whatever it is they do comprehensible.
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The relevance of
It’s, like, hard to understand. Innit.
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Ethnologue, Web Version
Browsable database of information about which languages are spoken in which countries, and lots of details about each language.
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Interesting Ian Jack article on how kids describe past events in the present tense
Although it tails off into irrelevant self-indulgence towards the end.
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Interesting article on the etymology of
Boy, am I out of touch.