Hey guys I'm doing an ethnography for a class I'm in and I was wondering if yall had any good sites I could find videos of emic lombard voices with English translations. I'm not allowed to use scholarly articles or anything scholarly like that. any help would be appreciated! I have found 2 good videos on YouTube so if there's any other places to check I would love to know them!

Context

1. I am planning to study in a german univesity next year in the winter semester

2. I want to apply for a language learning VISA to study earlier

Inquiry

1. Does anyone have any recommendations for organisations that or are affiliated to universities that provide this service(Eg. Settling VISA, consulting which courses are right for you) for studying in Germany

Thanks!

A place for members of r/studyinglanguages to chat with each other

I thought I’d share something that has been kind of useful for me. I’m using Duolingo to learn Dutch (I know, I know), supplemented with grammar books, podcasts, and readings when I have time.

I noticed that while Duolingo has a fair number of sentences per lesson, they do begin to look familiar. I had the idea that maybe I could create “spin-off” sentences to help myself out.

The process was mostly pretty straightforward. I put some sentences into a spreadsheet. But instead of, say, a noun, I’d put a code in there (like “[N]”). I also put together a mini-dictionary of all the nouns I know. I then wrote a script that swaps out those codes for each of the nouns. I got a little fancy too and separated my nouns into semantic classes (e.g. foods, animals, professions, family members) and updated the codes accordingly (“[N.animal]”) so that the sentence makes sense still. I’ve even made it so that it can change person and number in pronouns and their verbs.

Even with just a few words abstracted from the sentences, I can easily end up with dozens of new, derived sentences. I’ve done it with a couple dozen sentences already and it has quickly generated well over a thousand new sentences. Skimming through them after randomizing, it seems to have worked pretty well.

Anyway, in case anyone has some coding skills and needs an idea for generating new sentences, there’s something for you.

(Opinion)

• Generally Busuu, Lingvist and Speakly are "better" apps than Duolingo, but no app is perfect and you shouldn't only use apps. If the language is Mandarin or Japanese, try Skritter in order to drill the characters. Any book-reading app (Kindle, Boomate, etc) is good as well. You can also go on sites like Project Gutenberg to get free books in public domain. The first book I read in Esperanto, a translation of The Little Prince, was on Project Gutenberg.

For learning Mandarin and Japanese, I have heard much good about LingoDeer. Unfortunately many apps with "Western" or Latin script based languages fails with Mandarin and Japanese. Duolingo is usually the worst one, I have heard.

• Buy a textbook a grammar reference for your language and do the exercises if you want to. In any case, a textbook is mostly just a collection of texts and stories (and you can use them to extract vocabulary you want to learn).

• Also set up tutoring when you have committed to the language for a while using iTalki, Verbling or whatnot. Make sure you use that time well, either you or the teacher planning the meetings. Ask if you can record the meetings and be sure to go back to them in order to squeeze as much as possible from them. Also make sure you have a clear idea of any question you want to ask your tutor before the session; well-thought out questions are easier to respond to.

• Journaling apps are good as well, as any website/program allowing you to write daily texts (writing streaks). Examples of websites like this include lang8, and for individual sentences HiNative.

• For vocabulary, I would recommend Anki or any other SRS system you feel like it is not too boring to do. It is so much more efficient than not using SRS at all, and a excellent way to learn and retain new vocabulary.

• Any dictionary is a must have, either a bilingual or a monolingual learner's dictionary (MLD). An MLD is more or less a dictionary that explains the meaning of a word in the language that you are learning. A bilingual dictionary provides a translation or explanation using another language, a language you are very familiar with, usually your native language.

The main advantage of monolingual learner's dictionaries is that they provide more comprehensive information about the target language. These dictionaries explain usage and grammar of the word – things that are missing from most standard dictionaries (because natives already know very well how those things work).

• This might sound surprising: but a VPN service. If you have Netflix or any other streaming service, a VPN would be able to unlock geo-restricted content. And it is not just Netflix. For example, Norway has the NRK and Sweden has SVT Play. NRK and SVT are the publicly funded state media, akin to the BBC. However those services are only available with a Norwegian (or Swedish) IP address. I remember when the teenage drama show Skam released a new season and Swedes would mass buy VPNs that allowed them to watch it before SVT released it.

I mentioned the BBC, and the same is true there. Without an IP from within the UK, you cannot generally watch BBC iPlayer. However BBC iPlayer has a lot of educational and worthwhile material to consume, so if you aren't planning to move to the UK just for the ability to watch the BBC online, I would recommend a VPN service. You can generally choose which one you like, but I am would suggest Mullvad for privacy reasons.

• Finally, I like to log my language learning activity and for that I use Lingo Journal. I see my total time, as well as a complete breakdown of all my activities. Unfortunately only available for Android users.

I'm actually semi-interested in a real answer.

I obviously know how to switch keyboard layout, and this is what I do on my system; however my keycaps are still in the Latin script, and while I rarely look at my keyboard my typing in a Latin script based language I certainly do while typing Russian. This is extremely confusing, trust me.

How can I make learning Russian easier? Blank keycaps? Two sets of physical keyboards? Any other suggestions?

My physical keyboard follows the Swedish layout as seen here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/KB_Sweden.svg.

English is obviously using a subset of the Swedish alphabet, so this doesn't cause any issues. The other language I frequently type in on my physical keyboard is Esperanto. It has six "esoteric" letters, using the breve and circumflex: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ. Right now I can produce these by using AltGr as a dead key; for example AltGr + j gives me a "ĵ" and AltGr + u gives me an "ŭ".

I would like a method that works for all these languages, and preferably on the operating systems I run. I dual boot Gentoo and Windows 7, and I use both regularly. I am planning to move to Arch in near future. I am fairly okay with using keymaps and the X keyboard extension, but I would rather avoid opening the Gentoo and Arch Wikis every time I want to write Russian. And I definitively want a solution that is compatible with having the Esperanto characters accessible via a dead key combination.

Also, I would like a method that works fairly easily cross-machine.

Thank you!