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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2329 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 1, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Here are some suggestions depending on what your exact interest in linguistics is:

  1. If you're interested in learning languages for travel, reading literature, impressing foreigners, etc. then you might want to check out Ecolinguist, Benny Lewis, Moses McCormick, Xiaomannyc, or Alexander Arguelles on YouTube and in terms of podcasts anything with slow in the title e.g. Slow German Podcast, News in Slow French, etc. for learning purposes.
  2. If you're interested in linguistics because you want to channel your inner Tolkien and invent conlangs for a fantasy novel, then jan Misali or the conlang and neography subreddits are your friends (and so is a historical linguistics textbook like this one).
  3. If you just think languages are cool for intellectual or aesthetic reasons, then ILoveLanguages, NativLang, Langfocus, Watch your Language, and the Lexicon Valley podcast may be of interest to you.

Also if you want to learn Latin or Ancient Greek check out ScorpioMartianus and if you want song covers in obscure dead languages then check out the_miracle_aligner.

I don't have much to say about the rest of your post, but Xiaomannyc is one of those Internet Polyglots that purports to have super language abilities and regularly makes videos "shocking" natives with his knowledge of their little-known language. It's safe to say these types don't really bring anything useful to the table. Learning languages is a game of dedication, not speeding through things in 24 hours and impressing everyone. At least his Chinese sounds like it's good, though.

I mean, some people's language learning goals really are "achieve a phrasebook level in 20 languages to receive social validation" rather than mastering any given language, and aside from that I think it's worth seeing how even quite a low level can get you through some basic interactions and make people much friendlier to you.

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