How To Learn A Language When You Dont Know Where To Start:

How to learn a language when you don’t know where to start:

General Plan:

Weeks 1 and 2: Purpose:

Learn the fundamentals sentence construction

Learn how to spell and count

Start building a phrase stockpile with basic greetings

The Alphabet

Numbers 1 - 100

Subject Pronouns

Common Greetings

Conjugate the Two Most Important Verbs: to be and to have

Basic Definite and Indefinite Articles

Weeks 3 and 4: Purpose:

Learn essential vocabulary for the day-to-day

Start conjugating regular verbs

Days of the Week and Months of the Year

How to tell the time

How to talk about the weather

Family Vocabulary

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Weeks 5 and 6: Purpose:

Warm up with the last of the day-to-day vocabulary

Add more complex types of sentences to your grammar

Colours

House vocabulary

How to ask questions

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Forming negatives

Weeks 7 and 8: Purpose:

Learn how to navigate basic situations in a region of your target language country

Finish memorising regular conjugation rules

Food Vocabulary and Ordering at Restaurants

Money and Shopping Phrases

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Weeks 9 and 10: Purpose:

Start constructing descriptive and more complex sentences

Adjectives

Reflective verbs

Places vocabulary

Weeks 11 and 12: Purpose:

Add more complex descriptions to your sentences with adverbs

Wrap up vocabulary essentials

Adverbs

Parts of the body and medical vocabulary

Tips for Learning a Foreign Language:

Learning Vocabulary:

What vocabulary should I be learning?

There are hundreds of thousands of words in every language, and the large majority of them won’t be immediately relevant to you when you’re starting out.Typically, the most frequent 3000 words make up 90% of the language that a native speaker uses on any given day. Instead try to learn the most useful words in a language, and then expand outwards from there according to your needs and interests.

Choose the words you want/need to learn.

Relate them to what you already know.

Review them until they’ve reached your long-term memory.

Record them so learning is never lost.

Use them in meaningful human conversation and communication.

How should I record the vocabulary?

Learners need to see and/or hear a new word of phrase 6 to 17 times before they really know a piece of vocabulary.

Keep a careful record of new vocabulary.

Record the vocabulary in a way that is helpful to you and will ensure that you will practice the vocabulary, e.g. flashcards.

Vocabulary should be organised so that words are easier to find, e.g. alphabetically or according to topic.

Ideally when noting vocabulary you should write down not only the meaning, but the grammatical class, and example in a sentence, and where needed information about structure.

How should I practice using the vocabulary?

Look, Say, Cover, Write and Check - Use this method for learning and remembering vocabulary. This method is really good for learning spellings.

Make flashcards. Write the vocabulary on the front with the definition and examples on the back.

Draw mind maps or make visual representations of the new vocabulary groups.

Stick labels or post it notes on corresponding objects, e.g when learning kitchen vocabulary you could label items in your house.

How often should I be practising vocabulary?

A valuable technique is ‘the principle of expanding rehearsal’. This means reviewing vocabulary shortly after first learning them then at increasingly longer intervals.

Ideally, words should be reviewed:

5-10 minutes later

24 hours later

One week later

1-2 months later

6 months later

Knowing a vocabulary item well enough to use it productively means knowing:

Its written and spoken forms (spelling and pronunciation).

Its grammatical category and other grammatical information

Related words and word families, e.g. adjective, adverb, verb, noun.

Common collocations (Words that often come before or after it).

Receptive Skills: Listening and Reading

Reading is probably one of the most effective ways of building vocabulary knowledge.

Listening is also important because it occupies a big chunk of the time we spend communicating.

Tips for reading in a foreign language:

Start basic and small.  Children’s books are great practice for beginners. Don’t try to dive into a novel or newspaper too early, since it can be discouraging and time consuming if you have to look up every other word.

Read things you’ve already read in your native language. The fact that you at least know the gist of the story will help you to pick up context clues, learn new vocabulary and grammatical constructions.

Read books with their accompanying audio books. Reading a book while listening to the accompanying audio will improve your “ear training”. It will also help you to learn the pronunciation of words.

Tips for listening in a foreign language:

Watch films in your target language.

Read a book while also listening along to the audio book version.

Listen to the radio in your target language.

Watch videos online in your target language.

Activities to do to show that you’ve understood what you’ve been listening to:

Try drawing a picture of what was said.

Ask yourself some questions about it and try to answer them.

Provide a summary of what was said.

Suggest what might come next in the “story.”

Translate what was said into another language.

“Talk back” to the speaker to engage in imaginary conversation.

Productive Skills: Speaking and Writing

Tips for speaking in a foreign language:

If you can, try to speak the language every day either out loud to yourself or chat to another native speaker whether it is a colleague, a friend, a tutor or a language exchange partner. 

Write a list of topics and think about what you could say about each one. First you could write out your thoughts and then read them out loud. Look up the words you don’t know. You could also come up with questions at the end to ask someone else.

A really good way to improve your own speaking is to listen to how native speakers talk and imitate their accent, their rhythm of speech and tone of voice. Watch how their lips move and pay attention to the stressed sounds. You could watch interviews on YouTube or online news websites and pause every so often to copy what you have just heard. You could even sing along to songs sung in the target language.

Walk around the house and describe what you say. Say what you like or dislike about the room or the furniture or the decor. Talk about what you want to change.This gets you to practise every day vocabulary.

Tips for writing in a foreign language:

Practice writing in your target language. Keep it simple to start with. Beginner vocabulary and grammar concepts are generally very descriptive and concrete.

Practice writing by hand. Here are some things you can write out by hand:

Diary entries

Shopping lists

Reminders

What could I write about?

Write about your day, an interesting event, how you’re feeling, or what you’re thinking.

Make up a conversation between two people. 

Write a letter to a friend, yourself, or a celebrity. You don’t need to send it; just writing it will be helpful.

Translate a text you’ve written in your native language into your foreign language.

Write a review or a book you’ve recently read or a film you’ve recently watched.

Write Facebook statuses, Tweets or Tumblr posts (whether you post them or not will be up to you).

Write a short story or poem.

Writing is one of the hardest things to do well as a non-native speaker of a language, because there’s no room to hide. 

There are lots of ways to improve your writing ability, but they can be essentially boiled down to three key components:

Read a lot

Write a lot

Get your writing corrected

a typical Chosen One protagonist but they spend the entire book trying to evade their cosmic responsibilities 

AO3 blocking

Do you wish you had the ability on AO3 to block works by tag, author, title, or words in the summary? You need AO3 Savior. 

Step One: Install the Tampermonkey extension on your browser (link is for the Chrome extension, so if you use a different browser, just search for it). This will allow you to install the AO3 Savior userscript. 

Step Two: Install AO3 Savior. Click on the link and hit the Install this Script button (image below)

This will open the userscript in Tampermonkey. Click the install button there too (screenshot below)

Step Three: Install AO3 Savior config the same way. It’s a separate file because if you update the code, it resets all of your blocks so you need to input them again. By having the config separate from the rest of the code, the other code can update while leaving your block settings in tact. 

Step Four: restart your browser 

Step Five: Click on the puzzle piece at the top right corner of your browser.  Click on Tampermonkey and then into your Dashboard. From there, find ao3 savior config in your list of installed scripts and click on the edit button (screenshot below)

Step Six: edit the code to block the things you want to block. This might sound intimidating, but it’s okay! 

In this config file, scroll down and read through the text. The first settings are turning options on or off. Use “true” to have that feature or “false” to turn that feature off. For example:

// Set to false if you don’t want to see why works were hidden.    showReasons: true,

When the code starts with // that means that it’s a comment or instructions to you. Read that line and then make the change on the line below it. In this case, change the word “true” to “false” if you don’t want to see the reason why the work was hidden from you.

To block on author, edit this part:

// Exclude works with an author that exactly matches at least one term.    authorBlacklist: [‘Hated Author 1’, ‘smeyer’],

Find the author’s name on AO3 and copy it so that you get the spelling right. Then paste it in here. To make sure your syntax is right, make sure that the author name is inside the square brackets [ ] and also inside apostrophes ‘. Separate each author name with a comma , like you see in the example provided. 

You can do the same thing with tags by copy/pasting the full tag and putting it inside apostrophes in the tag blacklist section. Same thing for specific fic titles or for words that appear in summaries.

Step Seven: After you have made all of your changes, go up to File and remember to Save. 

Step Eight: You can now close that tab and head on over to AO3 where the only sign of those fics/authors/tags etc you blocked will be a little box telling you a fic has been hidden, and why. If you don’t want to see those boxes, change those settings to false in step 6. 

In future, if you ever want to block a tag, author, or work from your AO3 experience, just go back into your config file and edit them in there. 

Note: in order to get this on mobile, use Firefox. Other browsers do not allow userscripts on mobile

Shoutout to fic writers who put tags on their fics saying what the rating is for like ‘It’s M for dark themes, there’s no sexy content’ or ‘It should really be G but I put T because swearing’ y’all make reading far less stressful 

Why One Detail of Disney’s Robin Hood Bothers Me And Always Will

Hi, welcome to my Ted Talk, today we will be dealing with something that has bothered me about Disney’s Robin Hood since I was a kid and I still cannot get over to this very day.

And it all stems from THESE THREE PEOPLE:

Maid Marian, Prince John, and King Richard

I’m going to preface this entire thing by saying THIS version of Robin Hood is very very VERY different than the source material, much like all Disney animated films, but it wasn’t really DISNEY who did the big changes… those just came over time with making things more… I’m just going to say “normal for society”, which is ultra double lame.

BUT that’s not the point, because that stuff happens everywhere and with everything, and if I started to complain about THAT we’d be here all day, and I’m already going to take more of your time than needed to complain about something SUPER unimportant from a children’s animated movie made in 1973.

ANYWAY!

So, in the movie the titular character, Robin Hood, is a fox.  Makes total sense, foxes are crafty, hard to catch, cunning, and known for getting into and out of situations that other animals would have difficulty with.  Take that and turn it into an anthropomorphic character and you’d get someone who would easily be against the normal laws, not BAD, but would do BAD to do GOOD. Robin is a show off when he wants to be, and quiet when he has to be.

He’s a pretty perfect Robin Hood, especially in the case of animated kids movies, his characteristics just work SO WELL with his personification as a fox. GOOD STUFF, if I do say so myself!

Little John, meanwhile, is a bear. Not just any bear, but a big ol’ lovable brown bear. This plays on the idea of Little John being a cheeky nickname because Little John is a big, strong, and above all the calm, cool, and rationally smart one of the two. Robin may be clever, but John is the big picture guy. Pun intended.

These two designs and animal choices work SO well with each other, and it’s because these two are so different yet they get along and honestly NEED one another that makes the differences so perfect.

ALAN-A-DALE IS A ROOSTER. BRILLIANT. I don’t even have to go into this, do I? What a GREAT call by making Alan-A-Dale a rooster.  Though, I feel a bit of his characteristics were also borrowed from Will Scarlet for the Disney version, but even that still fits everything. And, honestly, I don’t mind the blending of Alan and Will, it kinda works? Especially with the movie being as short as it is.

ROOSTER BARD. ROOSTER. BARD. So good, I mean c’mon. It’s perfection.

The Sheriff of Nottingham being a wolf is… okay. It’s okay. I get it though, having the wolf hunt the fox. Haha. Cheeky. Cliche, but cheeky.

I really have nothing to say about him, he’s just…okay. Dude’s a cop, so whatever. Not a fan of bootlickers, and the fact that they’re dragging wolves in the mud by making a wolf into a cop is… whatever. /He’s A Wolf Cop/

Personally, I don’t like Friar Tuck as a badger. It really doesn’t make sense to me, and I lowkey hate it that they totally missed so many opportunities. DOVE OF PEACE? LAMB OF GOD? Like FOR REAL, you coulda done something super cute like that, but NOoOoOoOoOoO… he’s a badger. And they kinda pick on him for half the movie, for no reason, and I don’t like that.

Still, Friar Tuck is cute, and a really fun character and they do some clever animation stuff with his “badger”-ness. Still a bit of a missed opportunity.

OKAY NOW THAT WE’VE GOT THESE OTHER BIG ONES OUT OF THE WAY, IT’S TIME FOR MY ACTUAL PROBLEM!

MAID FRICKIN MARIAN IS A FOX.

WHAT THE FRICKEN FRICKITY FRACK?!

ABSOLUTELY NOT! Disney did this JUST because they wanted Maid Marian and Robin Hood to be THE SAME ANIMAL, and that’s ABSOLUTE BUNK!

WHY? Well there’s two BIG reasons that is irks me!

First, the idea that they HAD to be together because they were the same animal or they were made to be the same animal so it wouldn’t be “weird” that they were together.

LAME! UNINSPIRED! BULLSHI-

*ehem* Nonsense. Nonsense.

And it’s even MORE nonsense because of this little fact…

PRINCE JOHN AND KING RICHARD ARE HER RELATIVES!

MAID MARIAN THE NIECE OF PRINCE JOHN AND KING RICHARD!

Okay, you could argue that Maid Marian was adopted, or that King Richard married a lovely fox woman and the fox woman’s relative had a daughter and THAT was Maid Marian. And YES, that would make the situation plausible…

EXCEPT!

This is MEDIEVAL ENGLAND and they are ROYALTY and that kinda stuff wouldn’t fly even IF King Richard is the King.

WHAT I’M SAYING IS…

DISNEY ARE COWARDS FOR NOT HAVING A BIG LIONESS LADY DATE A TINY FOX MAN AND WE WERE ROBBED!

❤ VIOLET EVERGARDEN | THE BEAUTIFUL DOLL ❤

↳ Happy Birthday to my most marvelous baby Daisy @fairyheartfilias ( ๑ ^ ω ^ ๑) /✧*。❤ ★ credit for scans ★