It still blows my mind that I can read Chinese, even if a little bit. You see, I have this part of me that understands Chinese words but can't put them down in writing. Now I can match these floating meanings to characters and it's so awesome

Language peeps, do we know if it’s a bad idea to listen to podcasts at 0.5 or 0.75x speed? I’m guessing yes - that I should be okay with not understanding things fully - but figure I’d check with the class. Liking No Hay Tos, tho! (Listening to the oldest episodes..)

I’ve been thinking lately about how I grew up very strictly Anglophone in an Asian society, when my parents barely spoke English (not the same way my brother and I do). Like when we speak, we sound like we are speaking different languages (even in English). Depending on where I am, I can sound like the local native English speaker.

Many of my compatriots do not sound like me. There’s Singlish, which is a type of creole combining English, Hokkien, Mandarin, Malay and some Tamil. But that’s not quite it either: there is a ‘basolectal English’, the one that is grammatically ‘correct’ but unmistakeably places the English speaker in the location they come from (Singaporean, Aussie, Kiwi basolectal are very obvious).

It is usually a function of class and society and privilege that a person in a colonial society speaks English a certain way. In my parents’ time, our English teachers and newscasters spoke with a ‘stiff upper lip’. Maybe that was class, then. When I was a teenager, upper middle class people spoke like the BBC newscasters. But not stiff upper lip. Today, we sound.. American or some form of British.

And I don’t know how I started to speak like that. I went to an elite school, but my family barely spoke English. My language at home was not even Mandarin, the language of the upper class Sinophones, it was Teochew and Hokkien; the language of the pasar (the wet market). In formal situations in Singapore, I can code switch into basolectal English, kind of less American sounding formal English, so more older professional people understand me. In the cab, I can curse in Singlish at taxi drivers who ask me if I’m American.

In this video; I sound ‘generic American’, maybe Californian: https://youtu.be/I6m82wB2qhY

When I speak with people from ‘back home’ I sound completely different.

Trump’s order making English the official language is unnecessary, disregards the U.S.'s multilingual reality, and signals a restrictive stance on immigration and identity. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2025/03/14/world/america-official-language/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #commentary #worldnews #us #donaldtrump #english #languages

It still blows my mind that I can read #Chinese and when I go to xiaohongshu I can read about 30% of the text. From illiterate to semi illiterate! It's a kind of joy

Good post on moving to Taiwan to study Chinese on a student visa: https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/1j736ja/my_experience_moving_to_taiwan_to_study_chinese/

I love looking through https://native-land.ca. I learn something new every time I go, usually by just clicking on one of the random articles on the side. It's pretty clear that it's a small team behind it, and I wish they had more resources to be able to put more indigenous languages on the map (literally!).

If you have some time on your hands and a passion for language, I'd highly suggest checking out their Volunteer page: https://native-land.ca/how-to-contribute/volunteer It's a lovely way to contribute to/learn about global Indigenous sovereignty and lift up marginalized voices. Each language is a worldview; we can learn so much if only we look for it!

Also this is Ariel; I'd post this on my profile but wandering.shop has a very small character allowance and I am way too long-winded for it, I have found :P

#IndigenousLanguage #IndigenousSovereignty #LandBack #NativeLand #LanguageRevitalization #Languages #Maps #Mapping @arielkroon

'Times may be getting tougher but a hell of a lot of people are committed to doing good. And the best of the good is the #nature that makes up our planet.' https://steadyhq.com/en/naturematchcuts/posts/718b5dba-b9d3-448b-96a7-38e99d4ef017

My new blog post about #writing in hard times, developing a story, messy mind palace rooms, #accents, and the sweet poison of #passion. @writers @writing

What I really like about meeting other southern Chinese people in the diaspora around the world is sometimes Mandarin is all of our shared language and we love to speak it badly to each other. Speaking Mandarin as far away from the Beijing / northern accent is an act of pride for me

To a southerner like me, dongbeihua might as well be a Celtic language to an English speaker, or really to be more linguistically correct more like Portuguese to German, but some of this stuff is pretty funny

https://mstdn.social/@globalvoices/114102216592504099

Some of @older 's recent Global Posts have been language related, which is great in the month (about to end...) that celebrates mother tongues. Here is one on Aramaic, annnnd (1/2) #languages #MotherTongues

https://globalvoices.org/2025/02/26/for-how-long-aramaic-language-and-its-enduring-legacy-in-syria/

Found a fun English-language site for learning #Zhuyin, evidently geared to Anglophone Putonghua/Hanyu speakers--which just happens to describe me. https://www.dong-chinese.com/learn/sounds/zhuyin The site uses pinyin as an entry point and Simplified characters in their examples.

At first it was pretty brain-breaking to try to associate all these new (and/or confusingly familiar) symbols with these sounds, but broken up into lessons it's not as intimidating and I kind of like it! I feel like the system makes a bit more sense than pinyin for Mandarin phonetics? Looks like it could save unnecessary typing on #Chinese keyboard inputs, too. #languages

Ok, Seattle had the worst sounding Mandarin city name of all major U.S. cities (xi1 ya3 tu2)

How far back in history could you go to communicate in X language and be understood?

Mandarin: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qwgun/comment/cdhnwkv/

English: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kdymw/as_an_english_speaking_englishman_how_far_back_in/

Spanish: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7x4dyy/comment/du5n1q8/

French: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ja5va2/comment/g8r6393/?context=3

Currently going through the list of nouns in Chinese #HSK3 and marking unfamiliar vocab. Happy to report I know most of the vocab up to that level, say 90%. It's when I reach HSK4 that I start marking more vocab. Part of the reason is also because Malaysian Mandarin uses different words, I suspect. For one, I hardly hear anyone call public busses 公共汽车 here. We just call it... bus.
Malaysians have a tendency to use other languages to replace certain words.

My mother is confusing Cantonese people in San Gabriel valley by asking them (in Cantonese) where she can find ‘loh ti’ (Malay for bread, roti, said in a Cantonese way)

I had to poke her a couple of times before she remembered to use another word in Cantonese

I was telling a friend about the old Teochew names for Southeast Asian cities.

I wrote it down somewhere and I want to make a map of old SE Asian port names in Teochew

Swatow, homeland of the Teochews, was one of the first ports in China to open internationally hundreds of years ago. Many of these names I heard from my grandparents, still hear among older people from Vietnam and Thailand, but all the names are being replaced by Mandarin place names now.

I did this research some time ago

- Pontianak, Kalimantan was 坤甸 (khun diang)
- Jakarta was 巴斜 (pah sia)
- Phnom Penh was 金塔 (ghim tahp)

https://popagandhi.com/posts/tan-boon-chye/