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asian-fiction · 6 months

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Cultural sensitivity will help you understand dramas better

People get sensitive over the idea that one should try cultural sensitivity because often it means self-reflection. Humans processing difference, is definitely still a problem today. But here we go. Honestly, this type of behavior is why I stopped doing cultural notes so often. It's always rounds of people jumping in to defend the outsider and telling me to be nice to their cultural insensitivity and let them track mud into my house, and then telling me that me calling them out for tracking mud into my house is a terrible idea and I shouldn't do that. Friends don't let friends drive drunk. Friends also shouldn't let friends be culturally insensitive and beat up the person trying to extend learning either.

First of all, I've been trained in Cultural Anthropology--I have a degree in it. I also taught classes for a big media company in cultural media sensitivity. And 101 class in Anthropology says the first thing you need to do is pause judgement--which is what I said. Pause judgement.

I mean, if Cultural Anthropology didn't teach about how to get over yourself and culture shock, more Anthropologists would be tossed out of the communities they've been studying. Which is to say I know what I'm doing when I'm pushing against things like imperialism and ethnocentricism. I had the same challenges presented to me. I have no need to be nice about it, but I will be kind. And yes, most of the time this it is white women socialization to ask people to be nice (which isn't wrong, but different, but can be problematic in some contexts--which my white women friends also like to make fun of because they know it so well and are so self-aware, but they also learned how to use it for good, not evil), but understand the context and if it really is helpful to let people walk around with ideas that might harm them later down the road. Which is the greater harmony? That's the difference between kindness and niceness. It is more kind to try to challenge people to self-reflect on their prejudices, than let them walk around with them for the rest of their lives. I did the recently for my cousin's son, too. He got judgy about what other cultures eat, and I worked hard to walk him through it with another family member, and then he came to understand the how and why.

I get your discomfort is why you're asking an entire population to change--I mean Anthropology used to do this sort of thing too. This was their first reaction was to judge, but Anthropology, as a field grew up and realized that demanding that a country change without understanding why things are that way in the first place can do a TON of damage to the communities. This is pretty much the whole history of imperialism. And honestly, most people of color hate imperialism in the first place. (Someone is going to chime in, but, but don't you mean only Asians, no, I mean the majority of the world has been imperialized by Europe and we've been beat up over it. Look up your nearest politics. Name a country outside of Europe, and I'll honestly give you a run down--yes, even Thailand *cough British anyone? Granted a month, but British Museum says a lot….)

The same discomfort that straight people have over queer people demands that queer people act more like straight people. The same discomfort white people have around Black people demands that Black people act more like white people and not talk in their own, very understandable Black English dialects (why else subtitle PoC english speakers?). The same discomfort is the type where people demand that they don't have to see or engage with people who are disabled. It's the same human behavior. And usually, people from the out groups chime in and say, how could that be wrong? Of course they have to bend to us. Of course the wheelchair user has to cope with a 2 foot drop from the curb. Of course we should never have to change our rules on hiring practices for Black people. But the thing is when a group is oppressed for so long, at which point are you punching down? This is what I'm asking. And it's likely you have a difference that's also been picked on and people have also asked you to change it when you couldn't. There is a high likelihood this is a case of this in the majority of the posters. Think about it, and self-reflect for a while-- would you want to bend to such demands when the person hasn't even come to try to understand who you are? And this is how I was taught to stop and think about it in my classes on Anthropology. You, outsider, understand nothing. You are approaching a different time, a different people, but you need to make them human to you first before you can judge them and say they are wrong. It would be like a stranger coming up to you and punching you for wearing a cultural costume. Or that Atlanta shooter for shooting massage parlor people (who to be clear weren't sex workers, though there is nothing wrong with that) shooting Asians because he was angry over covid.

Also, when you're absolutely used to everyone bending to you and your ways, it can be a huge shock to be asked to bend to a totally different way.

To me, asking a country to change, is like trying to grow cacao beans in a desert and then demanding the people live off of that. It simply doesn't work because cacao is tropical. The desert is not. You don't know the conditions that they work under. There have been "rescue" groups that go to Africa (the continent, yes) where they try to force the locals to grow crops that simply don't work, and then the people come there all mighty and ignorant, and then tada~~ a storm blows in or the river floods just like they thought, and those "rescue" organizations have their tails between their legs and then have to start from scratch, learn from the people about what is and isn't working and why and how the system can work better.

So processing your culture shock--100% it takes practice. But it's never, ever OK, to use your discomfort to demand a country should change without understanding how and why the system works like that and how and why your own contexts might also be flawed.

100% I've gone through culture shock and stared at things where I go, this makes absolutely no sense to me. 100%… but what I've been taught through my anthropology classes, is to travel through my discomfort, reflect on if my systems at home are really that much better, and if it's really that dire of a change needed. Am I going to literally die if Japanese chocolate doesn't taste like Belgium chocolate like I'm used to (c'mon, US chocolate is worse than Japanese… most of the time--opinion here)? Or can I reflect on that difference and go, ah, cool, that's why. I may not agree, but I understand. I won't always agree with the difference, but in understanding why, my judgements become less divisive, more cool, and I understand that this system is working (or not quite working) for them.

I really do get that self-reflection makes people feel icky, but if you want to engage with people unlike you, you have to travel through this sort of discomfort. You get better at it as you experience more of it, like anything in life.

Also, this is probably why more Koreans wish I would quit making these comments, because there is always that one person that can't stand culture shock, and think their discomfort is more important than learning.

When I didn't bend to the people of the country, they treated me colder, and I think I would have missed out on a lot of good experiences if I had doubled down on my discomfort. What I want is a bit of that magic that I experienced for you. This is why I write these comments. It's not to get judged as a Korean person trying to extend an olive branch on everything you dislike about Korea. I am not everyone Korean. I am not a symbol. Let people travel through their discomfort--if it makes you feel uncomfortable seeing that they are being asked to travel through it, maybe you also could work on that. Because I promise you something better is on the other side.

Ah, I'd have missed out on the Geta obaasan if I was that uptight. And I swear thinking back onto that moment, makes me still tear up because I could really appreciate her humanity because I learned to let go. I'd trade the entire trip to Japan for that one moment, it was that special.

#Culture shock #cultural anthropology #ethnocentricism #privilege #imperialism #travel through your differences #travel through your discomfort #don't defend imperialists

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inodev1 · 1 year

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hraeth-ethile · 1 year

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Lapine, most commonly known as Rabbit, and more incorrectly known as Lepee, is the cultural and historic language of the Sapiens Leporidii species. Unlike all other species-centric languages, where the majority of its speakers do not speak their species' own language, a vast majority (77%) of rabbitkind do speak Rabbit. It is thought to be a language at least as old as Sumerian, but several disputed linguistic records indicate that it may be even older - from 300 years, to 2000.

Rabbit recordkeeping is thought to be the reason for its widely-continued use in the modern age, with the rabbit religion - Lepee - using its priestesses to keep, monitor, change, and teach the language and about its typology. The lowest rank of these priestesses, who are known as Dawn Mothers, are held up as the language's custodians, where they offer free courses and language programs to any and all rabbits across every age. Curiosity, as much as tradition, brings in adult parents seeking to learn about their species and its past, who, after learning of its history and language, begin to teach it to their rabbit children.

The script for Rabbit is ultra-minimalist, with only six shapes representing the entire lexicon. These six shapes, when placed in certain ways or at certain angles, change the entire meaning of words or sentences. More than that, the script is able to be used as an alternate means to spell words from other languages, such as English and Russian. English and Russian speakers, if they are fluent in the script and its use, can use its six basic shapes as a replacement for the entire English and Cyrillic script and without having to sacrifice any meaning. This very unique trait has earned Rabbit nicknames, such as Puzzlespeak, but so has its simplicity, where it's been called the 'building block' or the 'mix-and-match' language.

Despite its linguistic abilities, Rabbit relies almost entirely on two words - or sets of two words, called hands or fluxes - to convey meaning in a situation. This is due to the language's history in rites and magic rituals, where the importance of certain words or their meanings would be revered to such a degree that they would bring the full attention of anyone who heard them. An example is included below.

'Léao hray / night runner' can, in certain contexts, mean 'pizza/food delivery person,' but it can also mean 'thief.' To add context, or to differentiate these things, a hand or flux is applied.

'Vao hray léao hray / food-running night runner' can now mean the former, and 'Léao hray silfessi ethreth / solitary outskirt night runner' can mean the latter.

To convey a much more complex idea, a sentence in rabbit is rarely more than 6 words, and a paragraph is rarely more than 12 words. For example:

English: "I have to go to the hospital to see my sister." Rabbit: "A hayth uthow il ma rusami hleengar bralrah."

Accurate translation: "I will be leaving to hear my sister tell me her prayers for good health."

Direct translation: "I will be hearing my sister's holly prayers."

Holly was historically the rabbit cultural symbol for health, medicine, and its practitioners, and prayers can be the literal sense of praying, but it can also mean listening to someone else's thoughts. In this way, hearing one's sister's 'holly prayers' can mean 'listening to what the doctors say about her medical condition.'

Subtle context clues, the historical meanings of certain words or their historical interpretations - like holly, and prayers - and their combinations, come together to form Rabbit, and then explain how it works.

#Hraeth Ethile #HEW #Language #Culture #Lapine #Baal Script

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meichenxi · 4 years

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Benefits of watching target language media without subtitles!

Or: why watching media without subtitles is not limited to advanced learners, and why you should incorporate it into your routine!

SO this is prompted by a personal anecdote: Yesterday I watched an episode of my favourite show (the untamed, go and watch it, heathens, it's gay and pretty and has beautiful sword fights and necromancers and revenge and insane character development and), and rather than keeping the subtitles on, I rather dubiously turned them off.

So no subs in Chinese or English.

And lo and behold - I could understand most things! Not everything, especially not specialised vocab or formal speech, but enough (with good knowledge of the plot already) to comfortably follow most conversations. Yeah, this was a surprise.

Watching media in your target language without subtitles is something that a lot of people think is restricted to advanced learners - learners at the stage where they can understand almost everything wihh subtitles in the target language (henceforth TL) itself, and is just used to train listening practice.

If you wait until you're at that stage to incorporate this into your language learning routine, though, you're missing out. And here's why.

Firstly, personal-situation specific: I usually learn best via reading, but my Chinese reading ability is much worse than my listening ability (immersion yay), and so turning on the Chinese subs just makes me annoyed and frustrated because I can't follow them quickly enough. I realise that for many people this may be the opposite way around, but for heritage speakers of languages that use an unfamiliar alphabet, or those (like me) who are not heritage speakers but because of various factors have had intense spoken immersion and little formal education (and thus some - SOME - of the same difficulties), subtitles can be a hindrance rather than a help. There are many posts targeting improving listening skills, but not so many looking at it the other way around, so it's important to remember such learners exist.

I found to my surprise that I picked up significantly more vocab with the subs off than with them on. Firstly, if you know the general plot and know enough to pick up the outline of the conversation, you contextualise any word automatically at the same time as using the context to provide clues for what the word could be - the example sentence defines the word, and the word comes automatically with an example sentence, which cements it in your memory far better than if you heard it in isolation. This fits nicely into the functionalist approach to language learning (which systems like Glossika try to utilise to varying degrees of success), where vocabulary and different variations and pronunciations of different words serve as individual instantiations of a particular token - in this case, it could be the vocabulary word itself, but that's not all the information you're getting. You're also getting instantiations of the actual SOUNDS of the language, as well as the grammar.

You're picking up information on the permittable pronunciation of certain phonemes and phonological patterns, to inform your brain how much variation is acceptable within native speech. So for example the finals <n> and <ng> in pinyin are notoriously difficult in Mandarin, with some native speakers doing away with it altogether. What the input tells you is how much like an /n/ the <ng> is allowed to sound whilst still being perceived as an <ng> by speakers - and thus what the range of permissable differences is, that you, as a non native speaker, can play with.

As I've already written about, one of my first hills to die on is the tone/intonation interplay. And listening to audio without subs is fantastic for teaching you how intonation works not only on an emotional level, but also how it helps people understand sentence structure - it teaches you which parts of an utterance to pay attention to. Even if you don't understand the word itself, you will gradually learn what is the focus point of the sentence and what is peripheral information. Why is this particularly effective without subtitles? Especially in languages that have differing sentence structure (like Chinese in longer sentences), you need to rely on the intonation to guide you towards finding the focal point of the sentence. With subtitles, you get lazy and you don't utilise your ear in the same way. And again, again, you're drumming these patterns into your head. Frequency = success!

Thirdly, by training your ear to listen for intonation, you are necessarily listening for grammar patterns that give you a clue about who is playing what role in the sentence. Our brains are fundamentally lazy (effecient)- they only pay attention to what is necessary to complete the task. Have you seen that video where you are asked to count how many times a basketball is passed? And then at the end they ask you if you noticed the bear? There is a lot of linguistic debate about what role exactly attention plays in the process of language learning, but for our purposes it suffices to say that both actively noticing a pattern and hearing it confirmed again and again when you are not specifically looking for it help us hugely when it comes to not only memorising, but also internalising, that grammatical pattern.

Going back to the attention thing, let's talk about another problem no subs solves: if you are reading subtitles in your native language (and even more so in your TL), you are much less likely to bring the full force of your listening abilities into play. Why? Well, because the answer is right there in front of you. Listening without subs forces you to use context, social cues like smiles or frowns, as well as supra segmental factors like tone of voice or volume, to determine what exactly is being said - in other words, the same social interaction and outside stimulus that many functional linguists believe is absolutely critical to the development of the language faculty in children. Of course, you're not actually interacted with the media, but being actively forced to pay attention to these things makes it a much more holistic process. Suddenly, your brain is fired up: it needs to pay attention to everything in order to understand. In other words, the vocabulary and grammar and intonation you're hearing has suddenly become relevant.

And what happens when it's relevant? We learn it - sometimes without even knowing that's what's happening.

For all of these reasons, then, whatever your level, I'd suggest listening and watching media in your target language without subtitles. The expectations you have at each level, from beginner to advanced, should not, however, be the same. Unless you find incredibly good targeted media, or the language is sufficiently similar to one you know, you're unlikely to understand even what's going on when you first start out.

That's ok. Your brain is processing things - it's learning how to recognise nouns, verbs, questions, declarative sentences, the way the language expresses surprise or fear or love. It's learning that some phonetic distinctions that you don't have in your native language are important in your TL. It's heading patterns of vocabulary and grammar and phonology again and again and again. Don't expect to understand everything - but try copying it, out loud, if you can. It will help you get an ear for word boundaries, which is crucial for parsing the boundless speech-stream that's suddenly presented to you.

If you're at an intermediate level, enjoy spotting common verbs and watching the action, even if you don't know 100% what's going on. Even more than the beginner level, you're getting used to the speed of the language and its rhythms, as well as challenging yourself to understand more.

If you're at an advanced level, this is perfect for you. You'll understand more than you suspect. And if you don't, who cares, it's meant to be difficult. I never would have thought that I could understand and comfortably enjoy most of an episode of my show. And there were certainly conversations where I was totally lost!! But that's ok. You don't need 95% comprehension to survive - 50%, while incredibly frustrating, is good enough - as long as it's the right 50%! All you need is one key word - especially if you're watching media you're familiar with, which I recommend - and then click! You've got it.

加油！

#langblr #mandarin #chinese #chinese studyblr #studyblr #langblr study tips #study tips #learning languages #languages #chinese langblr #linguistics #lingblr #second language acquisition #learning second language #the untamed

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emerald-studies · 4 years

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Diverse Perspectives | Discussion 3

I sent some questions to @jasperwhitcock for her perspective as a POC woman and daughter of an immigrant.

[ It is required to participate and watch/read these discussions, in order to follow me. Participate or get tf out. We aren’t performative in my lil’ area on Tumblr.

This discussion isn’t representative of an entire population or meant to be super professional. It’s to share different perspectives and also is an opportunity for me to practice what I preach: intersectionality. If you’d like to participate in this series please send me a pm or an ask and I’ll get back to you ASAP. We can do a written, audio, or video interview.]

As a mixed person, do you feel isolated from your community?

J: If you mean community as in the community I currently live in, I’m fortunate enough to live in a very diverse place. Surrounding the city of Houston, there’s a lot of prejudice integrated into a lot of the suburban neighborhoods, but in terms of the city itself, I think the POC communities really uplift and support each other. I’m a concert photographer when there’s not a pandemic, and I’ve always appreciated the way latinos and black artists are respected in the indie community. Houston’s a very rap/hip hop/R&B city, so black artists are especially celebrated. There’s also great latinx bands that I know, latinx venue owners/employees, and latinx brands connected to the indie community. We’re very well represented in this area.

If you mean community as in the latinx community, I wouldn’t say isolated, but depending on the day, I might say that I can feel distanced at times. This isn’t particularly due to the latinx community itself, so much as it may be a distance that I create in my head. As a mixed person, I think there are times where you can feel confused on where you belong. I’ve brought up the quote before from the Selena movie, where Selena’s father Abraham is speaking on the potential difficulty of Selena being accepted in Mexico because of the fact she is Mexican American: “We have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time! It's exhausting!” It can be difficult at times to navigate your sense of belonging when you are in between two cultures because you want to recognize that you may have privileges someone of full Mexican descent may not have, but at the same time, your life is still very much defined by being Mexican and having Mexican blood while living in America too. You’re definitely not absolved from having latin experiences. Latina stand up comedian Anjelah Johnson made a joke in her stand up about there being a Latinx hierarchy. She said that Spanish speaking latinos are better than the rest of us who are not fluent in Spanish (such as herself), and it was funny because sometimes you do feel that that can be true. My tías will always ask me why I’m not fluent in Spanish, and my mom will be like “yeah, why don’t you?” and I’m always like… because y’all didn’t teach me! My parents speak Spanish to each other at home. My father is not only fluent in Spanish, but his Spanish is oftentimes superior to a lot of Spanish speakers according to my mom and my tíos. He used to teach English in Mexico, so there is no reason that my sister and I shouldn’t have been perfectly bilingual. The reason they didn’t teach us as children is because they didn’t want us to be speaking Spanglish. (Spoiler: it happened anyways). Around white people, I definitely feel that I am not a white person. I feel very much latina in a group of white people. But then around latin people, I sometimes feel white enough to feel a sense of shyness. I definitely feel more at home with latinx people, but overall in both groups, I definitely feel that I am mixed.

It doesn’t happen often, because I think although the majority of latinx people have pride in their background, the hyperawareness of our identities right now is relatively new, but there have been instances of latinx gatekeeping the latin identity. Growing up, I didn’t think about what I was labelled as or think about how my family structure is different to other families. I didn’t consider how in some areas, it is an abnormality to have an immigrant parent or a parent with an accent. I definitely noticed that my family was different, but I didn’t understand why until much later. My mom, her sisters and brothers, and my primos… They don’t live their lives with the awareness of being defined as Mexican immigrants. Of course, they again have pride in where they came from. They live as Mexicans and engage in Mexican culture, but overall, the way the youth today has really grasped onto the labelling of our identity is kind of a new thing. There are some young latinx people who do try to quantify and measure whether or not your experience is valid. I know it comes from a place of protectiveness of their own experience, but it’s ridiculous to gate keep because something that really characterizes latin culture is our warmth, our sense of family, our willingness to embrace other people as part of that. If you’re of latin american descent, you have a place in the latinx community.

Since your parents don’t have college degrees, do you believe college is important and/or necessary?

J: I think it depends! I think a lot of immigrant parents really push for their children to get a college education because they see that as opportunity, particularly when they did not earn college degrees themselves. I think college can be important depending on what you want to accomplish, but I also think it’s not completely necessary. For my career path as a photographer/videographer, I chose not to do college. I do think I would have enjoyed college because I like learning, but because it was something unnecessary for my job, I couldn’t justify the time invested or putting my parents into a difficult financial situation. Especially because my college education would have overlapped with my sister, and I saw how difficult it was to juggle handling my sister’s student loans. For my sister’s career path (she is studying to be a nutritionist/therapist to help teenagers with eating disorders), college was necessary.

Your Mom has been stuck in the US, unable to return to Mexico for awhile, has your Mom’s experience with immigration changed your views in some way?

J: As context, my father lived in Mexico for a decade and married my mom in Mexicali. They hadn’t planned to move to the United States, but when they came to the US to marry here so that she could have citizenship and be able to visit his family, there were complications that made it to where she couldn’t leave the country. Luckily, the time she was unexpectedly stuck in the United States didn’t last super long! Long enough to become comfortable enough to decide to settle down in California, but we have been able to travel to Mexico often. I think it really highlights how unnecessarily complicated a lot of the processes regarding immigration are. The people in the country who are very malicious about undocumented immigrants love to jump to saying, “well, why can’t they just become an American citizen?” when the reality is that every process in place has a lot of complications. Not everyone has access to the resources to be able to make these transitions happen smoothly. Also, the time it takes to acquire your visa is not an overnight thing. People severely underestimate the difficulty involved.

What do you think about the “hard-working immigrant” stereotype?

J: I hate the idea that immigrants work hard because they’re low-skilled, but I do love that there is a lot of pride in how motivated immigrants are. It’s always been a ridiculous claim that immigrants are taking American jobs. Immigrants work the jobs that the majority of Americans have no interest in doing, especially the people that make this complaint. For a country that prides itself on working to make your dreams come true, Americans neglect to recognize that immigrants have a drive that most Americans don’t have.

Which parent do you feel more connected to? Your Mother who’s an immigrant or your Father who was born in America?

J: I really do feel that I am a coalescence of both my parents, so I think I feel equally connected to each of them. I feel a very strong emotional connection and concern for my dad because his mental health suffers a lot. His mother had bipolar depression at a time where mental health was even more stigmatized, and she endured a lot of ridiculous, merciless treatments that are no longer utilized today. When he was nine years old, his mom committed suicide, and this was an event that really defined his life forever. I think that kind of heaviness passes down through your family. When my dad is not doing well, I feel really imbalanced and emotionally impacted even if I’m not home to witness it. It’s kind of like that idea of an invisible string tethering you to someone, and it’s a weight that I carry always. However, overall, he’s a very positive person. When he is going through his kind of manic highs, he’s a lot more of what I recognize of who my dad is. He’s creative, a musician, and deeply caring for other people. His mother’s death has empowered him to really try to make a difference and “paint a picture of a better tomorrow.” I’m a lot like my dad in personality, but in disposition, I’m so much like my mom. She’s tough and outspoken at home, but in public, it takes awhile for her to open up. My mom’s very selfless, kind, and very much shy and quiet. She definitely exemplifies a lot of the sacrifice that you see many immigrants make. I do like both sides of my family, but I definitely feel more at home with the Mexican side. My dad’s side is loud, vivacious, and very much funny, but I feel extremely shy around them. My sister and I have always felt a tiny bit left out. I think they’d be hurt to know we feel this way, but I definitely don’t think they do anything to intentionally enforce this division. But I think it developed because there is a bit of a cultural disconnect between my aunts and my mom. It’s also very interesting to me that when they first met my mom, my mom didn’t speak any English. It’s fascinating to consider how it might change your perception of someone to go from not being able to communicate with them to watching them learn your language. My mom enjoys the time that we do spend with my dad’s family, but she’s kind of the odd one out in that her humor isn’t the same and her experiences are so different. I think that my dad’s sister and brother’s families were able to connect in a stronger way, so sometimes my mom, my sister, and I feel just a little isolated. In those moments, I feel the most aware of my Mexican background. With my mom’s side of the family, it’s a lot more comfortable. My dad’s able to develop his humor in a way that translates well into Spanish, so he fits in very easily.

You’ve lived in a “Blue/more liberal” state and a “Red/more conservative” state, which state has affected you more?

J: Definitely the red state. Seeing how intensely and ridiculously conservative some southern people are has really radicalized me in a way. I feel overwhelmingly liberal because there’s a defensiveness that develops when you’re in a space like this where you have this intense disbelief that people hold the ideas that they do. Especially because in Texas, black and latinx culture is a major contributor to southern culture. There’s a lot to be said about how black culture shapes the south, but because I’m latina, I’m focusing on latinx culture with this question. White conservatives want our food, they want our work, but they don’t want us. I don’t understand how anyone can be all #TacoTuesday one day, and then the next, be anti-immigrant. If you really want Mexicans out of your country, then maybe you should start living your life without any Mexican influence. Stop eating Mexican food. Clean your own pool and mow your own lawn. It’s ignorant to speak down on immigrants when their life would be so altered to be rid of immigrants. They rely on immigrants. Their lives are shaped by immigrants and built by immigrants.

(I had to chime in here: )

Are you proud of your parents?

J: Absolutely. As a young teenager, I had a lot of problems with my parents. I think I still have issues I’m working through as a result, but now that I’m older, I really do feel a deep sense of admiration and respect for them. Growing up really makes you view your parents differently and understand them as people rather than just as parents. I held onto a lot of anger and resentment, but I’ve come to truly see how they really did do their best. They’ve worked very hard, and I think not having everything that kids around me did really helped me grow into a more grateful person.

Have you faced discrimination for your race?

J: Of course, but in all honesty, it really rolls off my back. I think hate that is personally directed at me doesn’t bother me, but the discrimination that does affect me is anything directed or related to my mom. I remember my parents had a customer who made a really ugly complaint to my father about my mom’s english. My mom essentially handles most of the written communication with their business, and she still speaks and types in broken english often. The majority of my parents’ clients are latinx, so it’s typically not an issue, but it’s unbelievably offensive and ridiculous the assumptions people will make about your intelligence based on your english. The customer had no idea that the woman she’d been communicating with was my father’s wife rather than just an employee. It’s really sad how someone can see someone as unworthy of respect until they’re tied to a white man, and then they’re suddenly apologetic. This is another extremely mild example, but I’ll get a few laughs when I mispronounce something or don’t know how to say certain words. People always find it funny as though it’s embarrassing –– and it definitely can be –– but people forget I learned english from a woman who speaks two languages.

As the child of an immigrant, how has the anti immigrant talking point affected your mental health?

J: I think the toll the anti-immigrant bias in the United States has on immigrant children is a relevant conversation to have, but I think I’m very lucky in that I feel very tough in the face of that ignorance (which is not to say anyone whose mental health suffers as a result is not tough!) If anything, I feel pity for the people who are so hateful that they see other human beings in such a derogatory and entitled way. Similar to what I said before, my outrage really comes from a place of defensiveness for others. The talking point doesn’t hurt me, but it hurts me that people can speak about my family and my community the way they do. It hurts me that there are other immigrant children who have to work as hard as their parents to make their sacrifices worth it, and people are so insensitive as to not respect that. I’m pretty strong, but it does break my heart when my people are disrespected. If someone were to say something to me, that’s fine, but if i saw someone mistreating a little mexican lady in the store… I may be 5’3 but that don’t mean I won’t come for your ass. Okay, in all honesty, I’m really not a violent person. I’m more of a rise above kind of person because the hate someone has in their heart is not worth our time, but some people do need a chancla thrown at them to learn some respect.

In your opinion, in what ways does the Latinx community need more support?

J: I think because the latinx community is so much so composed of hard workers, people really need to support latin businesses more. That’s a direct way to impact latin lives. There’s an abundance of latin small business owners in every category. So many white kids love going to Cozumel for Spring Break and love wearing sombreros on Cinco De Mayo, but then the rest of the year, they have no care or respect for the authentic culture. For every dollar a white man makes, hispanic women still make statistically less than white women, asian women, black women, and native women. We gotta back up these businesses. Choose local taco shops or restaurants over chains. Choose online shops and Mexican boutiques over fast fashion. And this applies to everybody. We can always support black business or asian businesses over large competitors. It really does make an impact. I also think a lot of latinx children need access to better mental health resources. I’m lucky in that because my father struggles with mental health issues, mental health in my family wasn’t exactly a taboo, but in a lot of latin families, mental health is something that is hard for older parents to validate. Latin children need those resources. A simple google search of “latin mental health resources,” bring up a bunch of organizations that you can support. I think every POC community needs to be boosted right now because although we’ve been under attack, conversations about minority communities are being had by white people right now. We have their attention, and we do need their support to enact change because they have the power as the oppressor. We need to be going to bat protecting black people right now because of the insane damage the community has been enduring at the hands of police, and we need to be protecting immigrant children from what’s happening to them at the border. I know the election is extremely controversial right now, but I would urge anyone who has the ability to vote to really consider the importance of doing so. People love to be cynical about how our votes don’t matter, and I understand that cynicism, but a lot of immigrants don’t have the luxury of voting when the results of the election will directly impact their lives. I hate that there is no option of a president that will perfectly support POC communities, but there are options whose party is far more aligned with supporting and protecting POC communities than Trump is. Trump spews hate and fuels racism and prejudice. He calls Mexicans rapists and black protestors thugs. He encourages the blaming of the coronavirus on the asians in our country. He does not need any help winning the election. We need to get this hateful man out, and I strongly encourage anyone who can vote to do so.

Let’s have a discussion! Did you learn anything new from this conversation?

Let me know here.

To close out each post, I’d like to write a lil’ paragraph about the person I talk with:

I’m so lucky to have you as a friend darling. You always bring a smile to my face when we chat. You’re funny and so smart. I admire you deeply for being able to share your perspective in a clear way. Thank you for putting up with my 2 am messages lol 🖤🖤🖤🖤Your continued support makes me feel safe and very, very, loved. I hope I encourage the same feeling with you.

You’re the best babe,

-Faithxx

#intersectionality #immigration #diverse perspectives #poc #twilight #discussions with faith

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how-to-portuguese · 4 years

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hey, hope this ask finds you well! I've been wanting to study EP (European Portuguese) for a while now but I can't find any resources available. I'd appreciate it greatly if you would recommend me any resources that you use (especially self-study methods that use the IPA, grammar books would help too!). thank you so so much and have a great day/night!!!

Hey! I know it can be really difficult to find EP resources, especially when you are starting out. I’ll give you a bit of background about my own journey and talk about the resources I have found along the way. (Edit: This is quite a long post, so the content is after the break.)

I started learning European Portuguese about 4.5 years ago. Like many others, I struggled to find good EP resources online, and so I ended up taking evening classes. I had a really good teacher and a very small class, and so the lessons helped me build a solid foundation. We used the Gramática Ativa 1 (A1/A2/B1) book by Isabel Coimbra and Olga Mata Coimbra and the Gramática Aplicada: Português para Estrangeiros (A1/A2/B1) book and the corresponding Caderno de Exercícios by Carla Oliveira and Luísa Coelho.

I moved about 2 years ago and am no longer able to take the evening classes, so I have only been doing self-study in my free time. I am currently working my way through the Manual de Aprender Português 3 (B2) by João Malaca Casteleiro, Luísa Coelho e Carla Oliveira. I also bought the Gramática Aplicada Português Língua Estrangeira (B2/C1) book by Carla Oliveira and Luísa Coelho and the Português Atual 3 (C1/C2) book by Hermínia Malcata, but I have not started them yet.

You can find all off these books and others by the same authors online at Bertrand.pt and Lidel.pt. Some of the book series come with CDs for you to be able to do listening exercises at home, which will give you some exposure to the pronunciation. I also bought the Harry Potter series in European Portuguese from Bertand last Christmas (there is a difference between the BP and EP versions!), and I think pushing myself through those books is helping me to reach a much higher level. I can really tell a difference from where I was when I started the Philosopher’s Stone to where I am now starting Prisoner of Azkaban.

I never had books on pronunciation since I took classes from a native Portuguese and my partner is Portuguese. However, I did a quick search on the Bertrand website and found Manual de Pronúncia e Prosódia by Carla Oliveira and Luísa Coelho. I can’t say whether they use IPA or not in that book, but it might be worth looking into. I liked the grammar books by those authors, so the pronunciation manual is probably good as well.

I recently reblogged a YouTube video called The Secret to Understanding Portuguese Natives by Practice Portuguese. That video uses IPA to explain EP vowel sounds. It is about 40 minutes long, but it is worth the time. The Practice Portuguese team have a handful of other YouTube videos and podcasts where they have their viewers submit recordings of themselves reading a text and then they review it and provide advice.

There is also a Practice Portuguese website with other material and lessons, but I have not used it yet as it is not free. It seems to have a lot of good content for beginners, but it’s not clear whether they have a lot of paid content for intermediate and advanced learners. (That is really the only thing stopping me from signing up, so if someone knows the answer then let me know!). I think they are working on a mobile app as well.

I tried A LOT of free language-learning apps offering Portuguese. Most of them only offer Brazilian Portuguese or are very bad quality. Portuguese with Carla did a YouTube video with a really good, in-depth review of the Top 10 European Portuguese Learning Apps. Talk the Streets also has a YouTube video about learning European Portuguese with free apps. Both of those YouTube channels, along with Practice Portuguese, are fully dedicated to EP language learning content.

I completed the DuoLingo tree a while ago, but I did the tree without sound (it was just too confusing). I still use it now and again to practice verb conjugations while commuting. It was helpful that my partner is Portuguese and could point out differences in word usage and grammar. You could potentially use DuoLingo with the DeepL translator and/or the Priberam dictionary to help determine whether a word is more common in Brazil or in Portugal. Linguee is also useful for definitions and to see how a word is used in context.

Memrise does have some European Portuguese lessons. Some people really like this app, but it just wasn’t for me. I think the content wasn’t a good fit because I only discovered the app after I had been taking Portuguese lessons for more than a year. I also really disliked their notification system (even more than DuoLingo), and the app design felt a little too childish and a little too gamified.

Anki and Quizlet are both good flashcard apps. I have heard a lot of positive things about both of them. I tried this briefly, but they mostly reminded how much I hate flashcards. I personally don’t enjoy rote memorisation, and I find that I learn better when I encounter new words in context and then try to use them in conversation or in writing. I think that’s why regularly watching/reading the news on sites like RTP and Público and reading the Harry Potter series has been helpful.

I also tried Tandem, which is a language exchange app. I use it now and again for writing practice, but every time I show myself as online I get flooded with dozens of messages which can be a bit overwhelming. It can be difficult to keep track of the active conversations, as your inbox keeps filling up and pushing those conversations further down the list. I think part of the problem is that you have to put your native language, and a lot of people jump at the chance to practice with a native English speaker. I also have yet to find a native EP speaker, although occasionally I have chatted with pople who make corrections to my messages in both Brazilian and European Portuguese.

One of the cheapest options for lessons is finding teachers through iTalki. You can arrange private lessons with a native speaker from Portugal. Some of these are professional teachers (very few in my experience) and others are native speakers (often linguistic students) trying to get teaching experience or just earn some extra money. I tried iTalki lessons for a while, but the people I had lessons with didn’t seem prepared to teach grammar to someone at my level. It was good for conversation practice, but it just wasn’t what I was looking for at the time. It does seem to get really good reviews from beginners.

You can also look into doing classes online through Instituto Camões. They have online self-learning courses, group classes, and individual classes. The self-learning classes are €180 for 12 weeks, and the price increases up to €320 for 12 weeks of individual tutoring. I have been considering this option recently, as I have found it difficult to commit to regular self-study while also working a full-time job (I’m a Tumblr ancient). I think the financial commitment and the regular schedule would really help me, but that is a personal preference.

If you ever decide that you want to do some language classes in Portugal, you might consider the University of Coimbra Portuguese language courses. They do short courses and several degrees in Portuguese language, literature, and linguistics. There are great language courses all over Portugal, but University of Coimbra is a really cool university in a very nice city. The student culture there is really famous even in Portugal. I haven’t studied there myself, but I have spent a lot of time in the city and the university makes me a bit sad that I am no longer a student.

Whew, this ended up being long post! I tried to give a variety of resources at different price points. I hope you find at least some of this helpful! I may reblog if I remember anything else, and maybe some of my followers will have more suggestions...

#portuguese for beginners #portuguese language #european portuguese #portuguese langblr #portuguese #portuguese resources #how to get started

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optomstudies · 6 years

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Hello, it’s optomstudies here with a multi-part masterpost with study tips to make you fluent in any language! These will work at any level, whether you’re just starting out or are an advanced learner!

READING SKILLS

When you first start learning, a little bit of reading nets you a lot of new knowledge. Everything is a new experience to you, and you can get to a cursory level using the apps and resources which are readily available. Once you get to the point where every new paragraph doesn’t give you something new to learn, you’ll need to be reading and listening a lot more in your target language. Immerse yourself in popular media in your target language - music, books, dramas, movies, podcasts, etc.

I would suggest not only speaking to native speakers (in a native context if possible) to develop ease and fluency, but also reading classic literature in your target language. A lot of words used for speaking are the more common ones, whereas written language will have more extensive vocabulary available for you to read. There are still situations where I learn a word or two in a 50K story that’s written in English, and I have native English proficiency.

It’s best to find a story which has a lot of descriptive language. The words that I find I’m learning the most are obscure adjectives and non-traditional or abstract descriptors.

Poems are also great for artistic expression as well as symbolic and culturally-imbued vernacular.

If classical literature is still a little bit out of your reach, I would suggest finding texts which are typically prescribed for high school students for literature classes. This is equivalent to young adult literature, which is a fairly accessible route for intermediate-advanced language learners.

Reading Intensively vs. Reading Extensively

When you are reading, you can either read extensively or intensely. Extensively means reading without stopping to look up unknown grammatical structures and vocabulary. Intensively means reading each sentence carefully and looking up words/grammar structures as you go. Do both.

If you are reading extensively - write down the word, but also jot down what you think it means from the context - this trains your actual language learning skills (not only your knowledge about one language) because it teaches you to make a hypothesis based on what you know and to extrapolate meaning based on context - a critical skill in any language. Check it up once you have finished learning whether you were correct, and each time, you’ll get a little better at it!

If you are reading intensively, then focus on the syntax and order of words as well as the new grammar structures. You want to pick up on how a native would write certain sentences. Even in English, there’s many ways to write a sentence with the same meaning, even though there’s a general order of Subject-Verb-Object, there’s varying ways to place adverbs and adjectives so that the meaning of the sentence changes a little.

WRITING SKILLS

Put all your new words into use by using them in your study journal. Try and write a mini-story or diary-entry (anything really) that uses these new words, making sure that you have the correct nuance.

Better yet, Lang-8 is a website where you write journal entries in your target language and have them corrected by native speakers!

Find a pen-pal! Without living in the country, what better way is there to learn, than to communicate with a native speaker using more than simple conversation. A letter or email allows you to get cohesive thoughts out in a comfortable way. It’s best if you and your penpal agree to write out the email/letter in both languages - if there are any mistakes, there’s a reference to the original meaning.

International PenPal

Conversation Exchange

InterPals

Global Penfriends

Expand Your Vocabulary: Part 1 (Link) Speaking and Listening Skills: Part 3 (Link)

MY STUDY TIPS AND LANGBLR POSTS

How to Format Language Study Notes

BTS: 봄날 (Spring Day), Outro: Wings, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Not Today, Run

SM Entertainment: Rookie - Red Velvet, I Got Love - Taeyeon

Requests: 예뻤어 (You Were Beautiful) - Day6, A Lie - B1A4, Don’t Recall - K.A.R.D

Other Artists: Rain - Soyou x Baekhyun, TT - Twice

My study tips directory (web only) for the full list (over 60+ original posts/guides!)

NOVEMBER STUDY TIPS

27/11 How to Be Fluent in Languages Masterpost 2 📰 26/11 Thinking about Stress 1 and 2 23/11 Motivation to Make You Study! 🏃 22/11 How to Be Fluent in Languages Masterpost 1 🙊 20/11 Advice: Art School vs. College 🎨 19/11 Exam Study Tips 💯 15/11 Digital Organisation System 💻 14/11 Library Adventures! 📚 11/11 Budgeting for Students 🏦 10/11 How to Deal with Leeches 🐛 08/11 Extra-Curriculars Tips 🤹 07/11 More Handwriting Tips ✍️ 07/11 APUSH Masterpost 🤠 06/11 Memorising Tips 💭 06/11 How Your ATAR is Calculated Infographic 💯 04/11 Reading a Scientific Journal Article 📜 02/11 Tips: Tackling Assignments while Sick 🤒

UNIVERSITY STUDY TIPS SERIES

Part 0 Choosing a Degree - what’s right for you? popular!!

> Things to Consider Before Switching Degrees!

> Changing Degrees

Part 1 Administration - choosing majors, available services, choosing class times etc.

Part 2 Getting to Class - pros and cons of attending class, when you should choose not to attend, advice about choosing a backpack and other essential equipment.

> Laptop Considerations and Recommendations

Part 3 Studying - differences between high school and uni, basic tips on how to keep on track, class types like lectures, tutorials, etc.

Part 4 Extra-Curriculars - what clubs to join, what to do outside class, and other great things to discover around campus.

Part 5 Exams - everything to know about examiners, how to prepare, what happens during the whole examination process.

Part 6 Social Life - differences between high school and university, some hard learnt lessons, etc.

Part 7 Part Time Work

Part 8 Four Secrets The Uni Tells You

Part 9 Best Study Spots On Campus

Part 10 Saving Money 1 - Food, Transport, Entertainment

Part 10 Saving Money 2 - Textbooks, Tax, Scholarships

Part 11 Adapting to Uni Study - 3 big differences from studying in high school popular!!

Part 12 How to Study From Textbooks in Uni

Dealing with Lazy Group Members - five options for what to do and how to do it! popular!!

OTHER POPULAR POSTS

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#studyblr #studyspo #study tips #languages #langblr #mymp #university #college #bullet journal #german #korean #mandarin #french #spanish #japanese #mind maps #mylangblr #polyglot #optomstudies

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clevelandstate · 3 years

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Celebrating Languages

This week people around the U.S. celebrated National Foreign Language Week – an annual event created to recognize what it means to study a foreign language and the roles that languages have in our lives.

With so many languages to study at CSU, we asked three different students studying three different languages – Spanish, French and Arabic – to share a little bit about their language journey.

CSU: Tell us a little bit about yourself. NN: My name is Nashline, and I am a junior double majoring in Spanish and Teaching Education. I desire to become a Spanish educator for elementary/middle school education. Hopefully, and with the help of God, I will graduate in Spring 2022.

CSU: How did you come to study Spanish? NN: I am a native Spanish speaker and I love everything about my language. I am originally from Puerto Rico. The reason I got into studying Spanish is that I wanted to learn more about the language’s history and different dialects. I also think that being able to teach kids Spanish in the future will be an amazing journey. I believe that learning a second language deepens your connections with other cultures. Learning a second language exposes you to see the world in many different aspects, which to me is very powerful.

CSU: Does studying Spanish change the way you think about the world around you? Has it changed your perspective? NN: Definitely, even though I am a native speaker. Knowing many things about my own culture and language is one thing but learning more about it is different. While studying Spanish, I have been able to understand my culture better and gain knowledge about all the elements that created and changed our language. It helped me acknowledge the importance of valuing different dialects. Studying Spanish allowed me to make a connection with those who speak the same language and share experiences and different perspectives, which is important.

CSU: A lot of people find studying foreign languages to be too difficult, and they often give up. Do you have any tricks to help with that? NN: Although learning a foreign language is an option or desire that most people have, it is something that you have to be passionate about. If someone feels like giving up, they should start by remembering what got them into studying it in the first place. If they find a passion for the language among their reasons, they should continue until they make it.

CSU: What’s something interesting about Spanish that most people don’t know? NN: One thing that not everyone knows about Spanish is that the word itself has different names. The word “Spanish” in Spanish usually translates to “español,” but the only countries that call it that are the ones in Central America. Now, the countries in South America and Spain, except Colombia, call it “Castellano,” which means the same as “español,” or “Spanish.”

We asked Nashline to send us a clip of herself saying her favorite thing en español.�� Check it Below!

youtube

* * * ************************************ * * *

CSU: How did you come to study French? RJ: My mother studied French and because I was exposed to this idea at an early age, I just always knew I would study French. I didn’t necessarily have a firm plan to pursue a degree in French when I was younger, but by the time I was finishing high school, I knew I loved the language enough that I wanted to make it a major part of my studies. In fact, it became so important to me that I would not have chosen to attend Cleveland State had I not had the option to major in French!

CSU: Does studying French change the way you think about the world around you? Has it changed your perspective? RJ: I like this question. One thing I appreciate about knowing another language is that I can read the same text (primarily in a literature context) in both, and it gives me new insights. The actual process of learning the language has changed my perspective by opening a practical path to be a learner in every situation. To learn a new language and attempt to use it is like becoming a child again, but I think this is very good for our “adult” selves. It’s humbling to face a return to self-expression in highly simplistic terms.

CSU: A lot of people find studying foreign languages to be too difficult, and they often give up. Do you have any tricks to help with that? RJ: When I first started learning French, I imagined it as a disembodied entity, a tool I wished to learn to handle well. However, the further I got into language study, the more I realized just how much culture is intertwined with language. It’s possible to learn direct translations in a new language without actually learning how to communicate with speakers of that tongue. The way things are said, the order of words, the choice and availability of alternative vocabulary, are all reflections of a manner of thinking.

French is spoken in many countries around the world, and so it is impossible to say that you can understand the cultures of every francophone country by learning French. For the moment though, since I’m learning French in France, I’m re-orienting my own patterns of reasoning to understand those of native French. Later, I hope to do the same for French speakers in an African country.

All this is meant to describe the way that language-learning allows you to enter into the experience of someone from a different part of the world. In order to be motivated to learn to communicate in a new way, someone new to language-learning would need to acquire an interest in a particular culture first. My best “tip” would be exposure to the culture before any serious language learning even begins. This could be through a real, lived experience, through contact with people from the culture, or through online resources – even listening to music in the target language!

CSU: What’s something interesting about French that most people don’t know? RJ: In line with what I already said about language reflecting culture, it’s remarkable that the French language has a wider variety of verbs, nouns, and adjectives surrounding the process of preparing and enjoying food than does English. This makes sense given the importance of meals in French culture.

Because Rachel’s currently studying abroad in France, we asked her a couple of bonus questions on her experiences there.

CSU: How did you end up studying abroad? RJ: Ever since I started at CSU four years ago, I knew I wanted to study abroad for a semester. I hope to live overseas one day, so this experience was on the top of my list for my time at university. My plans were quite jumbled by the pandemic (as were everyone’s of course) but things worked out just right for me to still come to France for the current spring semester. It was a lot of work and honestly some very stressful weeks (*months*) to organize, but now that I’m here, it was worth it all! I never want to leave.

CSU: How does studying abroad change the way you learn French? RJ: When I arrived, I had the capacity in spoken French to make known what I wanted to say (most of the time), but it was very halting. Aside from facility with the language, however, I feel I’m learning a little more each day to speak in the WAY a French person speaks, not just in the French language. I would describe this as a shift from translation-speaking to natural-speaking. Also, now that I can read much more easily for pleasure in French, books and articles in French make up an even larger part of my language study than they did before. (The fact that there aren’t libraries of books in English available to me at the moment might also have something to do with this…) Studying abroad also makes me even more passionate about the language, because now there is a connection in my mind between the language itself and the people I know personally who speak it.

Check out Rachel’s favorite French phrase en français below!

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* * * ************************************ * * *

CSU: Tell us a little bit about yourself.

AD: I am a part of the CSUteach program, meaning I am receiving my BA in English and my minor in Education, which will certify me to teach grades 7-12. I am also receiving my minor in Arabic language and culture. In the summer, I will start a 500 level course for CSU’s program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and I hope to continue into the M.Ed program after my graduation in 2022.

CSU: How did you come to study Arabic? AD: Ever since high school, I have loved learning languages. I started off studying Mandarin Chinese for 4 years. I already had prior knowledge of Arabic before formal study at CSU. Also, as a future ESL teacher, I hope to immerse myself in various languages so I can study, observe, and undergo the process of second-language learning pedagogy in order to best serve my future students.

CSU: Does studying Arabic change the way you think about the world around you? Has it changed your perspective? AD: Yes, learning any language has a significant impact on how one is able to view the world. Many doors open in regard to culture, connections, friendships, and work, among other opportunities. Arabic is a critical language that I suggest for those hoping to tap into a rich culture and connect with many kind people around the world.

CSU: A lot of people find studying foreign languages to be too difficult, and they often give up. Do you have any tricks to help with that? AD: Fortunately, I have a natural ability to pick up languages very easily. I am the joke among people I know because I have random phrases within my head that I have picked up from people I have met who speak different languages.

I think that second-language learning in the American education system is viewed as a requirement rather than a gift. If we look at other countries, many people speak two languages with ease. I think that if someone wishes to learn a language, they mustn't focus on the difficulties they face, but focus on their ability to learn at their own pace in order to grow their strengths. Learning a language comes easier for some, but respect and perseverance is something that we all have inside of us.

CSU: What’s something interesting about Arabic that most people don’t know? AD: If someone is unfamiliar with Arab and Middle Eastern culture, they may assume that Arabic is reserved for those following a specific religion. Arabic is a language spoken within 25 countries and each speaker is from a diverse ethnic, religious, and cultural background! Arabic is not reserved for one religion and not all speakers of Arabic are Arab. There are also many spoken dialects of Arabic but at Cleveland State we learn Modern Standard Arabic which is mutually intelligible by all speakers of Arabic no matter their national or cultural origin.

We asked Alyssa to send us a clip of herself saying her favorite Arabic phrase. Check it out below! Assalamu Alaikum (السلام عليكم)!

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#EngagedLearning #engaged learning #Cleveland State University #cleveland state #foreign languages #NFLW

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strawberryspeachy · 4 years

Text

K. I know alt stands for ASSITANT language teacher

But 2 things. 1) assitants fucking DO THINGS

2) the way they sell this job is like youre a teacher.

Constantly in this job i am treated like a clown.

And im gonna tag this and im probably gonna receive the same comments i get irl from rose tinted glassed ‘japanese people can do no wrong’ people

Thus far ive worked in 4 junior highs and 3 elementarys

Most of the teachers no matter where they are just seem so incompetent

Its no big deal that the teachers arent fluent in english - isnt that literally why alts are here??? So why don’t they ever take advice?!???

Im so fucking sick of being told how to speak my fucking language.

And not the ‘speak slower’ ‘speak simpler’ thats fine and ill accept criticism on my ability to communicate to people learning english as a second language. Not that.

Grammar, pronunciation, sentence structure - and what sounds natural

I hate the videos that are made for classrooms. And the fucking books

“A native speaker wrote it” - k no. Having worked here i know exactly how that went down. A japanese person wrote it, then went to either a business kiss ass ‘japan can do no wrong’ person. Or. Bullied someone into saying it was good by doing that annoying ass thing japanese people do

Where they ask the question over and over with “ok?” At the end. Cause they dont want an answer - they just wanna be told that theyre right or to do whatever they want. And they do not plan on receiving any answer besides “youre correct”

Its awkward cause ive literally been annoyed at my friend in the past for complaining about having a job where she does nothing and gets paid. Now i feel bad because i HATE going to work to sit and do nothing. But honestly - it has more to do with the fact that of all of my schools - only 1 has given me a nice place to sit.

Not a table that they store junk on and pretend to be surprised by me everytime im there like “oops sorry theres all this stuff (but like youre not a real person and we hate that youre here so just be happy we tolerate your existance and tell is your happy to have giant things all over your desk literally sticking in your face)”

Not the extra desk behind the printer that blows dust in my face as it goes off every 20 seconds

Not the desk under the aircon blowing on me/ in the corner next to the coldest window/door

Not a literal broken chair

Not a desk in the path of the class files where teachers have to constantly get to the spot directly behind me

And i was also that person thatd say ‘well if you dont like it - quit - theres plenty of people who WANT that job’

But like it fucking sucks. Cause i have experienced REALLY good teachers who actually team teach with you. I have had one school where i worked full time and got to see my students more than once a month - hence being able to actually get to know them and want them get better. I have been at a school with wonderful staff who welcome me into the school like im an actual person - not like ‘oh is today already the day we let the rat in the school to make the children smile again. Ugh.’

It fucking sucks. I linger on the hope of being able to work at a good school with good teachers full time

I cant find a better job because im a ‘beginner’ and corona

And im stuck getting treated like shit

I AM NOT a kiss ass. Never have been. It kills me to have to work with people who dont want me around

Most of the teachers i work with ARE NEVER PREPARED like wtf why??? Why dont you EVER plan ahead??? When im not prepared its because i have to wait to get instruction from you - you get to chose what you do

And they do basically nothing (not all like ive said ive worked with good teachers)

But most just

Read the book OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. The students memorize the book passages - they have no clue about the context and if you ask them the same exact question but with a different subject like “do you have any shoes” instead of “do you have any bags” theyre lost. The teacher can get them to answer by saying the exact phrase from the book - but they dont know what theyre saying or how theyre actually answering. They just have it memorized

Then some teachers will have “conversation practice” where they take those exact sentences out if the book - put them together to form an awkward ‘conversation’ and then the students just read it.

Ooohhh look at them. Having a conversation!

Play fucking bingo.... why? They dont even make the students repeat the words for pronunciation practice - why the fuck do you play bingo everyday

Sing songs. UGHHHHH yea that could be fun if these 60 year old teachers would stop forcing shit from the 1940s on the teenage students. I cant decide if music too old for 30 year olds is worse or teachers who take japanese songs that have been translated into english is - lol you fucking hate english so much you cant find ONE english song to sing??? WHY are you teaching english?! - god forbid you let the students choose

Teachers who just give the students the day date and weather....??????????? Cool. Youve managed to ensure they cant come up with the simplest of fucking English questions on their own. Do you carry around those cards to look like you do a lot at your job when you dont? Oh yea probably

Because being in a school watching teachers is the way i learned that japan values looking busy over being productive. If you look stressed and busy all day - you are better than a person who got shit done but looked relaxed.

Why do you use the recordings when i am in the class?????????????????????????????????? THATS LITERALLY THE ONLY REASON YOU APPARENTLY HAVE ME THERE

K and like i said. I have worked with good teachers. In their classes the students are better at english (hur hur funny how that works) those teachers encourage the students to talk with me. Those teachers let the students try to come up with answers and questions on their own. Those students try and ask the teacher when they dont know how to say something to help with translation.

The shit teachers on the other hand - will jump in and stop a student who looks excited to try and trying to figure out how to say something. What does this teach them? Dont try. Just stay silent - the japanese teacher will just talk in japanese again soon - no need to try.

Jumping off that. Students who are good at english or go to juku - will dumb themselves down in classes with shitty teachers. Theyve learned its not good to know more or even nearly as much english as the teacher - pretend you dont understand. Pretends you don’t know how to say things - itll make my stupid teacher feel good. So. If i try to talk or do anything in those classes, even the students who understand will stop trying.

Speaking of just going back to japanese. WHY IS MOST OF ENGLISH CLASS IN JAPNESE???? Most of the teahers will jump at ANY chance to switch back over into japanese. English is just sprinkled into the class. Then they pretend to wonder why the students dont try and why theyre bad at english

And things ive been told in the last year

Dont ever be upset about anything ever

Lol yea just that for one

K but dont ever be upset about teachers doing ANYTHING because theyre just so GOSH DARN BUSYYYYYYYYY

Lol like intially i thought that was why ASSISTANT was in my title. I THOUGHT we were supposed to make them less busy by helping out with planning and grading and blah blah

Nope cause

‘Oh offer to help them! BUT dont be upset when they decline because theyd have to explain to you ANYTHING and.....’

So. Im a child?! I cant be trusted to do anything without proper instruction

Well yea exactly cause

“Oh! Hes probably your babysister haha! Japanese people are so nice! They usually have one teacher look out for you and help you with stuff - besides the head teacher- lol theyre kinda like your babysitter!<3”

K. So like. I need a bachelors degree for this job. Let me say again I NEEDED A COLLEGE DEGREE FOR THIS JOB. i had to move ACCROSS THE WORLD by myself. I have to ge able to fill out federal documents and find a house and pay my bills and follow foregn laws and figure out my way in a foregn country - but i need a BABYSITTER at work?!?!?!?? If im a minute late ill be docked an hours pay. If i do ANYTHING that slightly upsets ANYONE and japanese ppl are offended by EVERYTHING - i am liable for all reprucussions. But. I need a BABYSITTER.

Cant be trusted to be in a class alone (dont be offended its because your not a certified teacher) that would make sense except that YALL THROW ALTS IN WITH THE SPECIAL NEEDS STUDENTS ALL THE TIME - thats supposed to be an EXTRA certification on top of teaching. but Im too fucking stupid and untrustable to do anything with regular students alone, but because you dont like dealing with spefial needs - i can teach them alone.

You dont actually read their hw or check for correctness and most of their tests are just for fun it seems - but i cant be trusted to grade those either

You do the exact same lesson everyday and i only see each class once a month - but dont let me create any activity or lesson for them. Also dont tell me your plans until class is starting and then change it throughout the class and act surprised when idk what the fuck youre doing because you changed your mind while talking at them in japanese

Speaking of changing. I hate teachers who constantly change how they do shit. And again. Get annoyed at me when i cant follow their flow. Do i say hello first or do you? Are we even saying hello today? Am i asking how they are or are you? Are we letting them answer? Are we answering? Whose asking the day date and weather? Are we asking them for the day date and weather?? Whose saying goodbye? Are we saying goodbye? Which bingo version have you chosen today? Are they repeating the words? Yes? No? Am i saying each one twice? Do i have to spell out the fucking word today? Fast? Slow? What hell are you putting me through today

And when they ask me to take charge of an activity. But then change their mind. But then no no you go ahead please take charge. K no just kidding ill tell you and them what to do. Actually no you can keep going please be in control. K no too much english i wanna hear more japanese ill be in control - hey everyone thank the alt for doing that activity with you (me and the students look at each other visibly confused)

These teachers will ask me a question and no matter how i answer its wrong. I always answer shortly initially because... of course. But theyll tell me to GO ON!!! theyll keep doing that. So ill start answering questions with substance - then theyll cut me off - so i go back to answering shortly but NO! CONTINUE!!! im constantly caught confused exactly what they want me to say and now i barely ever tell stories to the students. I stare at the jte the whole time trying to guage by their face if i should keep talking or make it short. Its also awkward cause sometimes they jump in to translate and other times they want me to just keep talking in english with no translation. Regardless whatever way i choose is never correct and they always look at me like im an idiot

Yesterday a teacher did one of the things inhate that prompted this I WANNA WRITE ABOUT HOW MUCH I HATE THIS JOB

Hes a sub. Hes supposed to do the same lessson as the other teachers. He is NEVER prepared. And he does everything bad. So when he didnt have the stuff for the activity he said he wants the students to have conversations with me. GREAT! thats what im here for! Lets do it. So then he shows them videos he has of other students talking with an alt at another school for 5 minutes. Um.... k. Then we open the book to a page of 3 example convo starters. Except. Japanese teachers dont seem to understand that the book is meant to be EXAMPLES. he says ah like this but maybe change. Good ok! I think were on the right track. Lets read these examples and get to it. Nope. He has them have the example sentences with their partner saying its good practice.

No. Its not. Theyre just reading the book and then when they finish saying

“Do you know any good restaurants around here?”

“Yes i do! Theres a curry place over there”

“oh i love curry!”

Theyre not gonna make up more at the ......

Theyre just gonna talk in japanese about other shit.

Then he says ok lets have conversations. Finally

Nope.

He has the class repeat after him together as a unit to me “do you know any good restaurants around here?”

GFFEIWBAKDHWNDGDIEBS RAGEEEE

I said ive had convos in class before may i try like before

He feigns confusion

I ask a student “what kind of food do you like?”

She says sushi

“What kind of sushi”

The students in this class were excitable and chimed in each time.

This time (as usual because they dont know the fish names in english) She begins talking with the kids around her trying to figure out what the english word is for the sushi she likes

But the teacher jumps in and shuts it all down

Because the students are just way too shy to talk in front of the class. Their english is too bad. They cant.

Its extra aggrivating because the teachers at this school range from good to decent - except him. That was a second year class. The last time i was at this school the first years had a introduction 1 on 1 test - with me. And i was to ask them a question at the end. With the other 3 teachers when i asked the question if they didnt understand. I would try saying it in another way. If they still didnt understand - i would answer my question as an example. If they still didnt understand i would give them answers like

“What tv do you like” “do you like anime?” Wait for yes or no “do you like youtube” wait for yes or no (and so on)

If they still didnt understand (very few got here) the japnese teacher would translate the question)

And. If they still didnt understand. We would give them an answer and coax them into repeating after us.

If they didnt. Then they didnt get the point for answering the question.

This teacher. Him being the 4th teacher to do this test with me. Would IMMEDIATELY translate the question if the student didnt answer quickly after me asking it once and then talk to them in japanese and tell me their answer or make one up to me with something like “oh ahah they dont know when yet. So he doesnt know. Maybe he ate breakfast before school!” And then would shoo the student away and call in the next.

^^^ and this is how most teachers are

They sit during class. They play unrelated videos. They spend half the class acting like theyre too confused about their plan to even teach the class (but if i try to do ANYTHING like talk to a student while they sit in front of the class rummaging through their folder going “うーん」「じゃ」「じゃあー」「そして」「それから」「えーとー」 theyll instruct SOMETHING or play some recording over and over) have i mentioned how they never seem to want to talk in english or listen to students talk in english in english class?? Most of the time theyre just having aside conversations about nonsense in japanese. They read everything themselves despite me being there - in a way where they really just wannt hear themselves talk in english.

Just in general. I hate when teachers talk about me in front of me and dont tell me what the fuck theyre saying. And it’s annoying when students ask them stuff in japanese about me and then the students look at me waiting for me to respond/the teacher to translate their question- but the jte doesnt translate. Or they ask a question that im not in charge of the answer for so even though i understood the question they asked the jte i cant answer them because its not my decision and the jte doesnt wanna look like the asshole that gives them an answer they dont like so they just dont respond so that i look like the dick whose ignoring the students

They do this with regular questions too. Sometimes i hear the whole question and understand. So when the students look to me and the jte goes silent - i answer - then the jte gets all out of sorts because 1) they wanted me to look like an asshole who doesnt wanna talk to the students 2) they deemed the questions not important and didnt want it answered 3)ew! The alt knows more japanese than i thought and she knows what im doing and thats a little embarrassing also what else have i said in front of her today that she might have understand - awkward 4) oh no if students know she understands some japanese they might ask her stuff and i wont be the only means of the alt and students communicating 5) that awk silence just showed the students that i didnt plan to translate something to her and i wanted to blame her and say she doesnt wanna answer that but now i was made a liar of

These arent personal queations btw. For example a student asked why does the guy in one peice eat a lollypop in the america version instead of smoke a cigarette?

This is an incomplete liste. Just. Honestly being an ALT is draining.

I feel like im at a restaurant again just waisting my life away waiting tables.

I actually really like english so being forced to listen to people who are supposed to teach it - purposely teach it wrong and force me to use it incorrectly hurts

I hate watching people suck at their jobs....and be rewarded for sucking at their job

I hate feeling like an outsider in my workplace.

I wanna feel like a real teacher.... not a clown

I hate doing something where nothing i say, do, or feel matters.

That last one. I hate that i can be treated like shit in my workplace AND get in trouble for not thanking people FOR treating me like shit. Not just take it. Take it with a smile!!!

I try to focus on the good things... but its just so damn hard cause ther far and few between and honestly i just wanna feel like im actually an educator to my students and like i can actually be a teacher with the ones who like me and come talk to me and stuff. But its not like i have have a teacher student relationship with them - i cant be part of their school activities. I cant go to their school events. I wont be at the school with them for more than a year.

Even at good schools when the teachers like that you talk with the students - i always feel this vibe of ‘keep it superficial’ dont become an adult they would trust. Its like you can feel them watching - ready to jump in when they think the student should stop petting the stray before they get fleas

I have a lot of teachers i remember fondly. Who id talk to when i saw them even when i didnt have their class anymore. Id tell kids in grades below me that they were lucky if they got them. When i hear about things happening at the school after i leave im happy to hear they got something good. Teachers who helped me understand something better or were just nice to the obvious loser in the class or made me laugh

I wanna be one of them....

Not the police man that came into school a couple times. Or the guy with the birds. Or the nice lunch lady who let you take food when you didnt have money and pay it back the next day.

I wanna be a teacher with a name.

Or at least. Do one of the only things im actually good at

So this job is unfulfilling

#alt

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meyerlansky · 7 years

Note

In BWE, how many languages does Meyer speak? We see him speaking English, Italian, and Hebrew/Yiddish (IDK which) on screen, so he's at least trilingual. One could also assume he learned whatever language was native to Odessa when he lived there as a child (Polish? Russian?), and by the way he interacted with the blonde woman in Havana in S5, I got the feeling he speaks at least passable Spanish. I might be thinking too much into this, but I'd like your thoughts, if you've got the time. Thanks!

OKAY I WANT YOU TO KNOW I’M REALLY SORRY ABOUT THE LENGTH OF THIS POST BUT IT’S A REALLY GOOD QUESTION SO TL;DR ANSWER: depending on how we define “speaking a language,” and depending on certain historical circumstances that i don’t know enough about to speak on with definite certainty but am DAMN SURE GOING TO SPECULATE ON, the possible set of “languages meyer might be able to speak” ranges from four to eleven languages. english, yiddish, hebrew, italian/sicilian [which can count as one or two languages, depending on Many Things], and spanish make up the core possibilities, with the latter three[/four] being phrase-based as opposed to comprehensive fluency.

like you said, on screen we see him speak three languages; in terms of fluency, he’s obviously fluent in english as well as yiddish, though he doesn’t actually use a significant amount of yiddish in boardwalk; the stuff he says during the beatdown in all in is hebrew, not yiddish, and they use the same script but are different languages. based on what i’ve read meyer’s much more likely to understand german thanks to knowing yiddish than hebrew. as for the yiddish he actually does use, “mishegoss” and “emis” are pretty much it, iirc? ...you can maybe include “hocking” in 5x01 because i don’t think that one had entered the yinglish lexicon juuust yet? but anyway, he uses it on a phrase/word basis, mostly because americanization respectability not-wanting-AR-to-be-a-dick-about-it etc etc, but it would have been his first language and he continued to speak it at home to his parents historically, so presumably he did in bwe as well. so, so far, fluent in english and yiddish, at least passably fluent in hebrew to construct sentences on the fly while murdering a dude, and depending on how impressive we want to make Meyer The Polyglot out to be, yiddish’s mutual intelligibilty with german could count for a fourth.

as far as italian goes, apparently the phrase he says in ourselves alone is... extremely formal and stilted, as well as being italian, not sicilian. there’s a whole ongoing debate in linguistics circles wrt whether sicilian is a dialect or a language, but suffice it to say mutual intelligibility between the two is not very high, for non-native speakers at least; i’ve looked up the italian subtitles for charlie and masseria’s scenes and more often than not, what’s written in italian does not match up with what’s being said in sicilian in the slightest. it’s sort of baffling, considering the writers apparently did so well with the sicilian in the rest of the show, and charlie and masseria have a whole conversation in what i’ve read is fairly accurate sicilian a few episodes later, but at this point i just headcanon it away that meyer taught himself mainland italian from library books while charlie was away in hampton farms and tried to surprise charlie with his ~italian skillz~ when he got out and charlie was just like “WHY ARE YOU TALKING LIKE A SIXTEENTH CENTURY SCHOOLMARM sit down i have to fix this” and taught him enough sicilian to get by when surrounded by mafia guys, but the stupidly formal italian is an inside joke past 1920. again, depending on whether we’re counting italian and sicilian as different languages, and whether charlie actually taught him any sicilian phrases offscreen [which i cannot believe he wouldn’t have, not if charlie’s going around picking up yiddish himself], we can add either one or two languages to the total, but he’s probably not as fluent in either sicilian or italian as he is in yiddish, english, or even hebrew.

you’re probably right about spanish too, but my guess is if he does know it his knowledge is probably pretty phrase-based more than a comprehensive fluency. he can probably get by in cuba if he has to, though, which is more than i can say, so that’s another, though spanish is probably closer to his fluency level with italian/sicilian than yiddish or english.

then the question of “russian or polish” is... a complicated one. he was from grodno, not odessa; odessa is in present-day ukraine, whereas grodno is in present-day belarus, but lies extremely close to both poland and lithuania [”close” as in walking distance, less than 20 miles from either border] and was part of the russian empire when meyer was born, but was considered to be part of poland within the empire, kind of? russian imperial history is a whole nightmare of “officially, according to the russians, countries other than russia that were subsumed by the empire did not exist and retroactively never existed after they were subsumed, except for how non-russian peoples resisted russification where they could,” which means that there are potentially FOUR options for the vernacular language of the city: belarusian, polish, and lithuanian, with russian being the “official” language of the imperial government—and therefore what forms would have been written in and the language spoken by government officials and in schools, but not necessarily spoken by anyone in grodno.

while my guess for the spoken language meyer might’ve picked up is belarusian or maybe polish, i genuinely do not know enough about eastern european history to say what would have been spoken in the gentile parts of grodno when meyer was growing up there. but that in and of itself kind of presents another problem; i also don’t know how independently the jewish population of grodno operated from the gentile population in the early 1900s. the impression i get is “significantly independently,” because afaik the russian empire [ON THE WHOLE some of the czars were better than others but GENERALLY NONE OF THEM WERE GREAT ON THIS FRONT] didn’t admit jewish kids to the russian school system, so meyer may not have even learned russian because shuls wouldn’t necessarily teach it. by the same token, the population of grodno was more than half jewish in 1907, and considering he was A LITERAL FIVE YEAR OLD he may not have interacted with any gentiles in a significant enough context to learn anything other than yiddish as a kid ANYWAY. so the answer for “what non-yiddish language[s] might meyer have picked up while living in grodno” can be anywhere between 0-4, with either “none of them” or “written russian and spoken belarusian/polish” being the most likely answers imo, depending on how much interaction there was between the jewish and gentile communities in grodno before 1909.

for me, my headcanon regarding any knowledge meyer may have had of any of the slavic languages mentioned is, he may have known polish/belarusian/russian as a kid, but in contrast to yiddish—which he presumably continued to speak offscreen with his parents and anna if we’re transposing historical facts onto bwe canon—and both spanish and italian/sicilian—which he would have had to put in at least SOME concentrated effort to learn after emigrating from grodno—meyer would have had no interest retaining polish/belarusian/russian, because it is in no way useful to him as a teen/adult, and the only thing the people who spoke those languages did was force his family to emigrate out of fear.

so like i said in the tl;dr, it sort of depends if you consider certain things languages or dialects, if you factor in mutual intelligibility, the historical context of both non-russian languages during the russian empire’s death throes, AND the historical context of jewish-goy interaction IN the late russian empire, but the potential options for languages he can speak in bwe are:

english [confirmed, obviously]

yiddish [confirmed historically and on a word basis in bwe]

hebrew [confirmed in bwe but not to what degree]

italian [confirmed in bwe but outdated/overly formal]

sicilian [not confirmed on screen but i refuse to believe charlie picked phrases in meyer’s mother tongue up easier than meyer picked up phrases in charlie’s]

spanish [not confirmed on screen but pretty likely on a phrase basis]

russian [not confirmed on screen and dependent on historical context, also likely primarily written russian]

belarusian[not confirmed on screen and dependent on historical context, and probably an either/or situation with polish/lithuanian]

polish[not confirmed on screen and dependent on historical context, and probably an either/or situation with belarusian/lithuanian]

lithuanian[not confirmed on screen and dependent on historical context, and probably an either/or situation with belarusian/polish, also the least likely of the slavic languages]

german [not confirmed and mostly due to mutual fluency with yiddish, not any concerted effort or interest in the language]

#LONG POST #I'M SO SORRY #boardwalk empire #meyer lansky #everybody's got larceny in 'em #because i can't not address the history. god this is #a nightmare of a post #i'm so sorry #Anonymous #asks

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schoolenthusiast · 7 years

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Some tips I wish I had known before starting grad school

A couple of weeks ago I answered someone’s question on Tumblr about what to expect/what to do when starting a PhD. It gave me the idea to extrapolate about the subject just in case it could help some fellow tumblr grad school enthusiasts.

1. Choose your program and advisor wisely

Before submitting your proposal, do some shopping for your graduate school program. It’s an important step because at this point, your future opportunities will often depend on where you are working and who you are working with. Who are the experts in your field of study? Where do they teach? What is their reputation → this is fairly important: try to get to know them as researchers (how often do they publish? where? what are their current research interests) but also as people (do they enjoy working with their grad students? are they involved in their faculty? are they easy to reach? how do they work? are they perfectionists or slackers?)

The main idea here is to find someone who will be willing to mentor you and bring your research to the next level without shoving their ideas down your throat. I’m not saying you will become friends with them (although you could), but since you will be working with them and even for them for quite a while, it is really important that you choose them carefully. Academia is highly competitive, and you have to be able to trust your advisor.

2. Do some research before starting

Most of PhD students start their adventure during the fall semester, which means they have submitted their candidature during the winter semester, presumably while finishing either an undergrad program or any form of master’s degree. This means there is usually some time between the time you submit your thesis research proposal and the time you actually start as a PhD student. Take it as your advantage. In most cases, you will already have done some topic-related research at this point to submit your proposal. Getting a head start doesn’t mean you should reread everything during the summer, because it is more than ok to take some time to rest. What could be a good idea is to look at your main research material and focus on it so you get a better understanding of what you know and what you need to know.

Example :

Let’s say you’re a lit student (like me). You know you want to work on Author X and have a critical approach inspired by the research of Y and W. Now, this has already been stated in your research proposal and you’ve read the necessary works before then (normally).

A good place to start during the summer would be to reread the books of Author X to a) single out the ones you will be focusing on and maybe even annotate them and b) get a better understanding of their work as a whole.

Then, you could reread the books by Y and W to make sure you understand them well.

Once this is done, try to find the alternate theories about their research: is there anyone who contradicts them? what flaws are there in their ideas? how could the same mistakes be avoided? is the research usable in your given context? what are the precautions to take while using their methods? etc. → This will save you a ton of time later when you have to defend your methodological choices to research committees and similar academic boards.

If you have time and energy, you can even start to take notes about your different choices about the things you encounter during this phase (especially concerning step 4, since you will more than likely have to discuss it in your thesis later)

3. Get involved

Motivation is often hard to find in this incredibly long process (4-5 years for most of PhD programs... when things go well! imagine having a child or an illness during this time!). One thing I found that helped me was to get OUT of my research bubble and participate in things organized either by other students or professors. It can be attending a book launch, or just the end of semester party, or just attending the lecture your advisor gives to undergrads. Although these are sometimes time consuming, getting out of your place for a couple hours, breathing fresh air while you commute, talking to people and looking at something else than your computer screen helps a lot. You’ll come back from these events rested, and it will help you focus more.

Is your field so narrow there is literally nothing available for you to participate in? Organize one ! Most universities have special funds for organizing conventions and colloquials. You will get experience in diverse skills (budget, marketing, communication, etc.), meet people (who will most likely be impressed of the work you did to make this event possible) and make sure your implication stays in your uni’s history. If you feel like you don’t know your professors/advisor that much, this is a great way to get to know them: invite them to be keynote speakers at your event. This might help you attract even more “renowned” people to the event, as their circle of acquaintances might be broader than your own. Organizing a set of conference sure is energy and time-consuming, but the rewards are huge when it comes to your career. Who knows, maybe someone you will meet there will become a future colleague or a friend?

4. Do other things

What usually happens when people get into grad school is that they start wearing blinkers. Although I’m not sure if the idiom translates well to English (^^), it means that they get so focused on their research subject that they don’t notice anything else. They read only research-related stuff, attend research-related events, and meet research-related people. Although it might not seem dangerous (after all, you get to learn a lot and you get closer to your goal!), it can lead to completely overlooking something that could be crucial to your research! Reaching outside your traditional field of research will let you encounter new theories and methodology, new thinkers and new ideas. When you feel like you’re stuck on a problem, taking a step back can often let you reconsider and see it differently. Talk to your problems to the people around you, but not necessarily people in your field. Their ideas and insight might help you get out of your research slump.

5. Plan wisely

Planning takes time and we all know we don’t have enough of it. BUT it will help you feel like you have a hold onto things (because you will, duh!). It will also be a source of motivation (grad school often feels like everything in our life is on hold, but making a daily to-do list will prove it is not). Planning early (and sticking as much as possible to your schedule) will let you have more breathing room when it comes to surprises in your life (a surprise teaching job? a travel opportunity? illness? an invitation to your annual field symposium? a child?). If these happen, you will have to do more work, that’s for sure, and you don’t wanna be so behind that you have to decline or quit.

Plan:

Daily things (chores, reading time, lab time, errands, FREE TIME)

Upcoming deadlines (keep track of them ! make sure you know all the requirements!)

Upcoming interesting events (either a research-related conference coming to your university or just a concert with friends)

If you have a job while you are also in grad school, try to take note on what you can do and when. If you have a teaching job related to your field, see how explaining things to undergrads can help you better understand your own research.

Required reading for your thesis (got dozens of pages in your bibliography? better get cracking! But let yourself some time to digest the information you read. There’s no point in reading so fast you end up skimming the whole thing and then having to reread it months from now when you’re supposed to be writing your thesis). Take good notes and create a system that works for you.

6. Take some time off

DO. SOMETHING. FOR. FUN. EVERYDAY. (Even for just 5 minutes! TREAT YOURSELF)

7. Get feedback

Show what you write to your friends. Talk to them about what you want to do next and ask if they know things that could interest you.

If you participated to an event related to your research, think about what you could have done better and think of ways to improve for the next one. Consider the questions people had for you and try to figure if they were overlooked in your presentation because of time issues (as it is often the case) or just because you never thought about them before.

#1 is really important here. Talk to your advisor. Have a chat in their office from time to time, just so they can keep up with you and see you’re involved (or still alive!) Send them drafts early in your process so you can assess how much time it takes before getting A) an answer to your email (this can take a while) and B) annotations and suggestions on your draft. You DON’T want to work for months on end only to scrap everything and go back to where you started.

8. Ask questions

“There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t even started wondering about yet.” — Roald Dahl

It was true when you were a child trying to understand the world, and it is still true now. Don’t allow yourself to become mediocre. Don’t ever be satisfied with half-assed answers. Sometimes the key to motivation is to stay curious.

9. Always bring a (leisure) book with you

This is directly related to #6. This point is especially important if you work in the humanities or any field that basically only requires a lot of reading-related research (i.e. not labs, because grad students working in labs do spend a lot of time in there, but they sure don’t bring it back home with them). If you’re really stressed about not doing enough research, it’s fine, but you have to admit that when you’re just waiting for the bus or in a line to get your lunch, doing research-related readings is simply not worth it. Hence the leisure book. Allow yourself some breaks and renew your love for reading!

10. Look for scholarships and other funding resources

I can’t insist on this enough. Being a grad student takes a lot of time and dedication. The few academia-related work opportunities you will get most likely won’t pay for your daily needs, much less your total tuition. Getting a part-time job can also be risky, as it will reduce the time you have for research, drain your energy, and also make you less available for occasional activities (conference, research trips, etc.). It doesn't take a lot of research to see that student loans are a huge source of stress and although it might be necessary for you in order to survive, taking less money from loans because you’re getting it as grants is the best opportunity. You can ask your advisor for suggestions, or look online either on your university’s website (they usually have a list available either for all of their students or to a specific group you might be part of) or other organizations. Some governments also have research grants available.

This is something you should do before starting your grad school program or even in your first year, as some of the grants are renewable over a specific span of years (you get an amount of money for 3-4 years), so you should definitely try to get it as soon as possible. Doing research early about grants can give you a better idea of what you can expect and how to budget. Keeping a budget is the key, since for most of the grants you will have to submit one to prove that you could benefit more from that money. Also, knowing your needs and the possible savings you could make is a lifetime-useful skill.

Your advisor can help with the process and give you advice on what to write in your proposal (they’ve most likely written a ton of those, or even been on selection committees before, they know what will be expected).

You’re already a grad student and have never asked for grants before? It’s never too late to start. Sometimes grant organizations will prefer giving the money to someone how has never benefited from it before, and this person might be you!

11. Stay or become friends with people outside your field and out of grad school

Grad school can be is hard on mental health. Students often have depression symptoms or other mental health problems during their grad student years. Grad school will most likely make you feel isolated, especially if you’re working a lot from home and/or in a very competitive field (who am I kidding, they all are). There is no magical solution to this, but keeping in touch with people might help you. Share how you feel with people you trust, either from your field or, preferably, your ‘outside’ life. Take time to visit your family if you’re living away from them. Take breaks to send stupid faces on snapchat. Play video games with your friends. Take your nieces, nephews and/or kids to field trips. Go grab a drink with someone you’ve met in college but haven’t seen in a while. Take up a class to learn something new.

Surrounding yourself with people who are not experts in your field or have no graduate school experience will prevent you from spending all your precious free time talking about your thesis or your grant proposal. It might not seem useful at first, but trust me, it is.

If you’re still struggling with mental health issues related to grad school, please look and ask for help. You will not regret it.

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mrsq8geek · 7 years

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Seventy-three Things “Wrong” with When Stars Are Scattered

First: I say “wrong” because this is, of course, completely subjective, and arguably you can do whatever you want with your writing.

Second: I received this story from a friend who wanted to know what I thought about it. I don’t know anything about the author; this was a cold read, so I won’t be taking into account the context surrounding the writing or authorial intent because… well, I don’t know any of those things.

Third: End note: As I read I got some idea of authorial intent, so my responses get less and less serious as the story goes on. Sorry about that.

When Stars Are Scattered will take you to the story on Tor.com

1. Right away the synopsis tells you that Ahmed is an atheist. Not just any atheist pretending to be a Muslim, but someone born Muslim and given a Muslim name who then became atheist. Because why would you want to write about a Muslim who likes being Muslim. (Later it’s specified he’d been an atheist since he was twelve.)

2. Why is “the imam” in the hospital? "Imam" isn’t some kind of religious title like “priest”. Anyone can be an imam. It just refers to the person leading the prayer. That’s it. They’re regular people who have day jobs and families and lives. Sometimes the imam is also a religious scholar, in which case the title “sheikh” might be used. "Sheikh" is used to denote superiority in knowledge or status, which is why we also use it to refer to country leaders and ruling or royal families.

3. “Ahmed forced himself to exhale slowly. Damn, did this guy ever love the word genocide.” I’m the one who’s exhaling slowly here. Immediately the imam is cast as a religious extremist. In today’s global political climate. I wonder what the author is trying to say here.

4. “If only God would tell us what to do.” Okay, this is the first of several lines of dialogue spoken by the Muslim characters that tell me the author didn’t do their research. I understand the intent of the sentence, wanting divine guidance, but the way it’s said as if it’s going to come directly just by wishing it is… “wrong”. Islam literally has a prayer called “istikhaara” dedicated to asking God to help you choose between two choices. If it’s not a matter of choices, then you just make duaa. You consult people in their field of expertise. The imam is written like a religious leader, he should know this stuff. I’d understand if it were coming from a layman Muslim, but the guy who’s written like a priest?

5. “the Muslim missionaries who came to “guide” the kites” Muslim missionaries? The Arabic word for “missionary” is practically never used except to refer to Christian missionaries, and the Crusades in particular. This also a) radicalizes the Muslims, because they’re here to spread Islam, not to lead their own lives, and b) Others them from the Nova Christos, who they are “opposites” from, and that leads to the question… why are they immediate opposites? Anyway, I’m not touching the “guide” in quotes, the context there is that the protagonist feels alienated.

6. “Christians killed them like pests, and the Muslims brought them to prayers” So the Christians, the Nova Christos, who are referred to by their religion and presumably have the same agenda as the Muslims, start by not showing compassion? Both religions are bad and the atheist is the only one who’s right? Given this rhythm, I’m sure if there were a Jewish character, they’d be horrible too.

7a. “Ibrahim is, like his namesake, a father of many nations. Twenty-four children.” Again, I understand the idea, but Ibrahim only had seven children, and the biggest conflict only arises from two: Isaac, son of Sarah, and Ismael, son of Hajar. Plus, the whole thing about converts changing names? They’re only supposed to do that if their initial given name had something that went against Islam. Besides that, converts are free to keep their old names.

7b. So my proofreader recognized this reference: Genesis 17:4-5 KJV “[4] As for me, behold, my covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations. [5] Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee.” So this Muslim woman is a. familiar with the Bible to some degree, and b. assuming the Muslim man she just met and doesn’t yet know is atheist will also know this specific Bible reference.

8. Arabic and “Standard” aka “Common”. This is its own topic and it’s been written about extensively by people better qualified than I am. Here’s one example.

9. The alien says: “Friend, sadeaki, allahu akbar, inshallah.” Aaaand there it is, Muslims only ever speak one sentence and it’s “allahu akbar”, without even capitalizing the A in Allah. “The little thing babbled in Arabic through the whole blood draw” If you’re going to be repeating Arabic to yourself during something that worries you like a blood draw, the phrase is “bismillah”, “in the name of God”. Bismillah is prevalent throughout Muslim culture because you say it like a million times a day, while praying, before eating, etc. And “not a native speaker” is not an acceptable argument either, because non-native speakers of any language can usually make more sense than “friend, friend, god is great, god willing”.

10. “The old kite muttered more in Arabic. Ahmed caught the word “jihad.”” How convenient that the protagonist doesn’t know a lot of Arabic but knows one of the most politically-charged words. In space. Even atheists who started out as Muslims generally don’t leave Islam because of “jihad”. They become atheists for the same reason people leave Christianity or Judaism or any other religion– the people surrounding that person make them hate the religion. “He supposed everything must look like “the struggle” right now to the kites.” Ah, the direct translation of the word, to explain it to the reader. The word is handled from the perspective of an outsider.

11. “We praise God five times a day,” she whispered. “It is to remember what God has done for us.”” We pray to God five times a day. We praise God whenever it suits us. “To remember what God has done for us” is an adult concept. When you teach children about God, you’re more likely to say something like, “You pray to God so that God will love you and take care of you”. Children will often think of their deity like a parent, an invisible parent if you will. This isn’t character exploration, this is an opening line for the next thing: ““What has God done for us?” Ahmed asked.” Which, again, I get that he becomes an atheist when he grows up, but that question is used by adults, not children.

12. “I’ll get the stain out, habibi” So Arabic is a gendered language, and the male form can be used to address women if there’s a mix of men and women. Think of it like French. In some dialects, it’s also okay to use the male form “habibi” when addressing a female, but it has to be a very close relationship. So yes, mother and daughter qualifies. But given how weakly the rest of the Arabic has been utilized so far, I’d say it was used out of Not Doing the Research.

13. “Doctor, this is Khadija Sofia” I don’t understand what’s happening here. Does she have a compound name like Mary-Anne? If so, where’s the hyphen? If not, is it supposed to be a middle name? Because Islamic naming conventions don’t have a middle name. More from my proofreader: If they’re using Latinx naming convention, they’re both her name… so why isn’t she called Khadija throughout the story?

14. “On a Nova Christos world it wouldn’t be enough to avoid pork, booze, and loose women; they wanted a Qur’an-quoting, happy member of the ummah, who would help resolve disputes and argue the meaning of scripture. Ugh.” HolyBook-verbing used in a derogatory manner, now where have I heard that before. Also, news flash, the common garden variety Muslim doesn’t know enough scripture to argue the meaning. Most Muslims will know just enough to pray with and that’s it. Ugh indeed.

15. “He reached into the crumpled lab coat and grabbed the flask of whiskey, splashed a bit of it into a fresh cup of coffee and gulped the mixture with a deep, satisfied sigh.” …under the assumption that, what, whiskey doesn’t smell like alcohol on one’s breath, or that coffee would mask the smell? Muslims stand shoulder-to-shoulder in prayer. Believe me, you can smell what the person next you had for lunch hours ago, along with whatever toothpaste they used. Also, since he’s pretending to be a HolyBook-verbing Religionman, he should know by this point that Friday prayer is the one prayer you go to like you’re going to a wedding. So that includes taking a bath, putting on your best clothes, and yes, brushing your teeth and not going to prayer with coffee on your breath. I’m not even going into how is it Friday on this planet, because I’m sure Muslims have found a way to calculate that stuff using our scientists.

16. “It was an especially godforsaken place to inspire so much debate about the guy.” More disrespect coming from the narrator rather than the character. It’s almost like a self-insert.

17. “Allah, I see that you have brought me another man who knows everything.” When addressing “Allah”, you don’t just say “Allah”, you are as respectful towards your God as you are intimate. “Ya rabbi”, “O my God”, would have been a better choice here. At the very least, if it really must be used as an Othering device, it would be more likely to include the calling device “Ya”, ie “Ya Allah”, which is used in Real Life Arabic. We do say God when speaking English, you know. Excuse me, I mean Standard.

18. “Well, mashallah.” This isn’t wrong, just so forced it’s cringe-y. It’s like when you read anime fic and the author uses Japanese where it wasn’t really necessary.

19. “Yes, well, if something is important, I want you just to say it. Don’t worry what I will think. I need your help, and I appreciate the good nursing. I apologize again if I devalued your opinion.” She actually blushed. “I…well thank you.”” So Said the Enlightened Atheist to the Oppressed Muslim Woman, “I’m not like your husband, whom you can’t speak freely around for fear of being beaten.” This is barely a quarter of the way into the story. ““Say exactly what you’re thinking.” Even if it was religious nonsense, it didn’t pay to ignore a nurse.” Ah, more devaluing the intelligence of Others.

20. The mosque is a. an octagon and b. “The riches of the mosque were a sharp contrast to the poor colony outside.” A. I get it, because octagons are often used in Islamic patterns, right? It’s not like that would be impractical and wasteful of space, space that is precious because we’re in a space colony. It couldn’t just be a square or a rectangle like most mosques are. That would be too normal. B. And now the mosque is written like a church. Yes, there are fancy mosques, but they are built by people who can afford it. You can pray on any clean piece of ground. The only reason a particular building is designated as a mosque is practicality, so people don’t step in there with their shoes and bring in the dirt. That’s it. Full stop. You can even pray in your shoes if you’re praying outside. “Ahmed supposed that the only mosque on the continent, maybe the whole planet, had some kind of duty to impress.” Again, this is HIGHLY unlikely, because you can pray anywhere, and there’s probably a tiny mosque out by the fields somewhere, and another near the market, and another somewhere else. Any “riches” that were in the mosque in an environment like this one happened because of a surplus of resources at that point, not because The Religious Institution Steals From The People, Who Are Poor.

21. “We were taking kites with us on hajj next year, all the way to Earth.” Did you know there are Muslim astronauts? Not just Muslims, but Saudis, one of the strictest places when it comes to Islam. Scholars came up with new rules for prayer in space. Here’s something I quickly Googled: https://www.infoplease.com/askeds/how-long-mars So this Planet is presumably a little ways farther than that. Going to Earth for hajj sounds like it would take a long time. I’m no scholar, but under those circumstances, it might be dropped, just like other core rules can be dropped. If you’re too sick to fast Ramadan, you don’t have to. Also, one of the rules of hajj is that you have to be able to afford the trip yourself. If you can’t afford it, you don’t have to go. It’s why you see so many old people from the poorer parts of Asia and Africa at hajj– because they’d spent their lives saving for that trip. So I don’t know why hajj was chosen as a topic of conversation. Islamic atmosphere? (Later there’s a “In the hundred years of faster-than-light travel” so I stand corrected, there’s faster than light travel within a hundred years’ time– but the other reasons remain. The kites don’t sound like they can pay someone for the trip.)

22. “Ahmed pulled a prayer rug from the wall, rolled it out, and sat, trying not to show his irritation.” If the mosque is filled with “riches”, then the whole place is already covered in rugs or one big carpet. This is just writing consistency. Also, I doubt the author has seen an actual prayer rug. They’re not “rolled” like a yoga mat, they’re folded, because they’re made of fabric. What does that even mean, pulling a rug from the wall? If anything they’d be stored on shelves or in boxes or something.

23. “Jose, the imam, took the stand, clutching a Qur’an.” If he’s the imam, he already knows the Holy Book back to front and again. He doesn’t need to hold it, why is he holding it? He’s not a priest?

24. The Friday sermon is about jihad, because of course it is. My dude, have you ever heard a Friday sermon? Unless something of interest is happening in the area, it’s not about ~grand topics~ like jihad. It’s usually more like “be good to your parents, give to the poor, have patience upon your temper, have faith in God when you encounter difficulties in your life”… just boring, everyday things. Oh, but this is to incite jihad on behalf of the kites? Look, I wouldn’t put it past human beings to fight wars on remote planets, we’ve proven ourselves to fight about everything. But if you’re going to use Islam to incite a war, at least set it up right.

25. “The Qur’an asks us all a question. Will you not fight in the cause of the oppressed?” Okay, now the author’s just making stuff up. The Quran exists in English. You can look it up. You can google the phrase “Will you not fight in the cause of the oppressed” in quotes and there is only one instance of it, and it’s in this story. Was that not meant to be a quote from the Quran? Then why is it preceded by the question and implied as such?

26. “The congregation rose to pray. “Allahu akbar.” Choking voices. Weeping voices. “Allahu akbar.”” Again, have you seen a Friday prayer, my dude? It’s pretty boring. Common Muslims aren’t terribly faithful, they’re just average people doing their thing. No weeping, no choking.

27. “and nearly fell over while she was praying. One of the other women took her arm and whispered, “Get some sleep! You were up all night! We’ll watch your son.”” So this other woman interrupted her prayer to talk? You can’t talk during prayer. Nearly fell over means what, she swayed a little? So what? I’d maybe understand if she’d actually fallen over unconscious, then maybe one woman might cut her prayer to see what’s up. But besides that, no.

28. A Nova Christos woman is introduced. She’s a hick. A Space Bible-Belter. Aren’t stereotypes convenient?

29. “Couldn’t this empty-worlder read? Each pack declared its weight. Probably not, Adéla realized. A life coaxing crops from Isach, perhaps following life as an asteroid miner—neither was conducive to much reading.” The weight would be written as “five” or “5”. My nearly-illiterate gramma could read that much. This woman is a farmer who might have once been a miner? She can read numbers. She’s poor, not stupid.

30. ““Ya Allah,” she whispered. “Keep us safe.”” See point 17.

31. ““Good meat on a cricket,” Ahmed deadpanned. She didn’t laugh. “We ate bugs last year. The first shipment flooded and we had no food at all. The kites showed us where the good grubs were, along the creek. I know they’re haram and everything, but my papí said that God would understand.”” a. I don’t know whether all bugs are haram or not, but crickets in particular are not haram. Quite the opposite, they’re a delicacy. Well, they are with the older generations, I’ve never tried them even when given the chance because creepy-crawly. b. “God would understand”? God made a rule saying if the choice is eating any of the haram things or death, eat the thing. You’re starving somewhere and there’s nothing but pig? Eat it. You’re at a restaurant and you’re choking and someone hands you a glass of wine? Drink that glass like your life depended on it, because it does. Isn’t this girl’s father the imam/priest? He knows this.

32. “She looked as if she wanted Ahmed’s approval for eating haram bugs. He nodded in what he hoped was a reassuring way. It seemed to work.” I didn’t want to pull out Orientalism, but there you go. Hispanic, Muslim Female Child seeks approval of Previously Muslim Atheist Man Of Indeterminate Race But Probably White Because That’s the Default.

33. “Habibati.” Okay, that’s good, that’s the right word to address a woman you love, except nobody pronounces that second A, it’s only there as punctuation. This stuff is easy to Google.

34. “She rubbed cold water into the bags under her eyes and began re-pinning her hijab.” She’s alone with her husband in their room, why is still wearing her hijab? The whole reason they got married is so she can take it off and they can get it on.

35. ““What would the ummah say if they knew the imam offered to wrap his wife’s hijab?” They’d say, what a kind gesture, the imam is good to his wife. Also he’s got great coordination. Then they’d give their husbands some stink-eye and ask why they don’t treat them as nicely as the imam treats his wife.

36. “She wished someone else had asked first. The doctor, or Sofia, or the other Muslims, or even a kite. Jose would feel betrayed if she didn’t tell him first. But he’d also…I need to tell him first. He’s not just my husband; he is the imam. The community has to know. She wished she didn’t have to use that kind of logic so often. “I saw a homesteader.”” I don’t relate to this woman at all. Why didn’t she run and tell people the minute it happened? If there’s such hostility between the two groups, they need to figure out how that person got through whatever defences they had. I’m not even touching the order of wishing, first the new doctor, then her teenage daughter, then “the other Muslims”– who are other Muslims? Surely she has a close friend? A relative? Or is she just a plot device who isn’t a person?

37. “"I can’t believe it! Here! In the camp! In our own camp? They came in here!” Jose stalked out of the kitchen, toward the closet where he kept his home office. “I have to call the men together.“ The cupboard was full of bullets. Packs of bullets, in small, oiled-cloth wrapped, flat packages, stacked atop each other.” Not like that. Is that what the author really thinks happens? That this is how Muslims think? Or that this is how wars start, for that matter? They’re in space; even if they were enemies, both groups would posture a lot and want to avoid open conflict. Is this supposed to be jihad? He hasn’t even asked about his beloved wife’s safety, and the very previous scene had them being a sweet couple together. Is the imam, priest of the Muslims, so barbaric that the first thing that comes to his mind is I’m gonna take a gun and shoot those bastards? Oh no wait, it’s for… “hunting”, wink wink. The sweet thing was just a façade, this is the real guy.

38. “Have you thought about our children? She wished she could believe that would make a difference. What will change?” More evidence the imam is just a ticking bomb.

39. “Adéla put her arms around herself. It wouldn’t take long. She would walk back in there, and ask him what he was planning, and he would talk about how helpless they were, watching the kites die. She would ask him to be patient, to wait and find out what the doctor could find out, to not do anything rash, and he would say they were already out of time, and he would leave to pray, because he was a good man, one who never raised his voice or showed his rage, saved it all for his prayers, and sometimes she would have sold her blood to know what he said in those prayers. And what answers he received.” The woman, this sweet oppressed woman, needs to be saved from her violent husband, who is such a ridiculous caricature of a person, even the author’s getting sarcastic about. Brown women are hot. They need to be saved. And then maybe one thing can lead to another. More from my proofreader, who’s more familiar with the Latinx community: This plays to the stereotype that Latino men are violent, thugs, murderers, or rapists.

40. “We call them thugs, because they fight each other endlessly. Don’t worry, they’re halal. They’ll maul each other, but they eat bugs and grass.” I’m not even trying to take this seriously at this point. See, it’s funny, because the violent man is making fun of the animals for fighting each other. Get it??

41. “Little habibi.” Habibi is not a noun. You can either say something like “little darling” or “habibi ilsgheer” but not both. Ask any bilingual person and they’ll tell you how pidgin languages form. There are rules to combining languages, established rules that exist, because Arabic-English bilingual people exist. Some of them are atheists.

42. A scene where the enlightened doctor is trying and failing to allay the fears of the paranoid imam’s conspiracies.

43. “It was the stupidest thing to say in the whole galaxy. But it came out of Ahmed’s mouth anyway. “Don’t be so quick to consult God. No matter which way you look at it, He’s responsible for the virus.” Sofia, Jose, and Adéla all stared at him. Sofia looked shocked. Jose looked angry. Adéla put her face in her hands. Was she laughing?” See? I told you this knight in doctor armour would enlighten the brown woman. See how he makes her laugh with his blasphemy? Let’s not even talk about Jose’s views. Of course God is responsible for the virus. But as Muslims, we’re meant to do what we can with that, like we do with real diseases. It’s almost like Islam’s attitude on diseases is documented in the Quran and Sunnah? Nah.

44. ““Don’t question,” Adéla snapped. “Trust me.” Sofia nodded quietly. “Okay, Mamí.”” This just in: Muslim teenagers are so brainwashed, they don’t even backtalk to their parents! Astounding!

45. “She took a drink from the flask.” Yooo, he did it! He charmed the Muslim woman! Years of practicing faith because she believed in it can do nothing in the face of this handsome doctor’s assets! You go girl, drink that haram! “First time in quite a while” Oh never mind, she was never religious to begin with. Of course she’s the one with sense. Plot twist!

46. “He could smell her breath, sour with whiskey.” Funny, déjà vu. See 15.

47. “Quicker than he would have thought possible, she unpinned her hijab and removed it, letting it fall to the ground. Her black hair fell around her shoulders. She leaned over and her hair brushed his ear. “Please, tell me what to do.”” Okay, we’re past establishing that he’s saved her, now let’s focus on how this woman can wear her hijab without tying back her hair. Like a sexy librarian, she removed her hijab and her hair just flows.

48. “Are you using me for a convenient way to divorce?” Wait, is the assumption here that adultery automatically equals divorce? Because that’s a whooole other topic that’d take a long time to explain even for Muslims. Rules on adultery are complicated. The first of which is there has to be witnesses. Four witnesses. Unless four people are looking in through the window, which I don’t know, I’m not writing this.

49. “And Jose never sleeps. He prays, and he reads the Qur’an and hadith. All night long sometimes. Prays and reads and prays.” Hmm. What did I say about the imam knowing his religion?

50. “I suppose it would be a horrible scandal if I asked simply to sleep here? Simple sleep. I don’t want to be alone.” See, the thing is, he’s the doctor and she’s the nurse. It would have been so easy for her to ask to sleep on of the patient beds, to rest. But nooo, she had to throw herself at him. Kinky.

51. “How can you not believe? The universe is such a cold place if you assign everything to chance.” “It is a colder place when you have to know why a merciful God would do horrible things,” Ahmed said. “You got me there.” Well, the atheist won with his superior logic that hasn’t at all been debated for literally centuries. Game over, gg.

52. “the Muslims, knocked down doors, forced other humans out of the buildings with the crosses on them” Yeah, that’s what Muslims do in this story. They’re the villains, you see. The protagonist is brave because he has to pretend to be one of these evil, soulless men.

53. “The friends, the Muslims, made prayers, allahu akbar and bismallah.” See 9.

54. “Muslims shot homesteader after homesteader.” The homesteaders have guns, they are not helpless. Where are the guns?

55. ““Ibrahim,” Ahmed said. The barrage of chirpy Arabic would have been impossible for even a linguist to understand. But this was good. Ibrahim wanted to pray, and he had the faculties to do so—that meant the old kite was actually recovering.” Again, you can’t just talk to people while they’re praying, and even if you did it not realizing, they’re not just going to stop and talk to you. Also, you do of course know one of the reasons the Quran was revealed in Arabic is because it’s one of the most complex, nuanced languages in the world? "Impossible”? For a linguist of Arabic?

56. “What did you do last night?” He waited too long to answer her. “Cut myself, for one.” Really, now he’s lying? The zealot is lying? Shouldn’t be proud of what he’s done? He’s so fond of the word genocide, after all, he should be happy. Characterization!

57. “I did what Islam decrees— It was justified! They were warned!” Look, is this guy sure of what he’s doing or not? If he is, he doesn’t need to defend himself, he needs to ask her why she’s questioning him. If he’s not, then he’s uncertain of what his faith supposedly tells him to do, and Islam is all, well, “wrong”. Not even going into how convenient that phrase is “what Islam decrees”.

58. “she realized that her hijab was gone” …she’s been a Muslim for at least thirteen years, Sofia’s age. She’s been wearing the hijab all these years. Any human doing any habit all that time would not simply “forget”. Truly the powers of the doctor are great.

59. “threw her arms around him” Well they’ve already slept in the same bed, I shouldn’t be surprised at this woman’s sense of personal space.

60. “The missile hit the mosque.” I told you the Christians had weapons!

61. “No! I’m not going to wrap him—put him in the death, in the cold, I’m not…” Where’s the faith she wanted so badly a moment ago?

63. “Salaam.” Not what you say when someone dies, but at this point it’s pretty clear authenticity isn’t the point.

64. “One of the Arabic hangings, on woven grass, had blown into the square, torn right through the swooping characters invoking the name of God, tearing Bismillah in half.” Poignant imagery, reminiscent of how when mosques are attacked in real life, people focus on the ruined decor. Of course.

65. Another poignant symbolic scene where the atheist climbs up the top of the minaret to announce that science triumphed and religion was wrong after all, his worldview safe from challenge.

66. “He crossed the carpets, woven with fine patterns in Arabic, praising the name of God. He walked across blessings of mercy, praise for He who had made the universe, made man from a blood clot.” And then the doctor couldn’t even bring himself to take an extra two steps to avoid these people’s religious symbols, because they are all bad men and evil murderers. Never mind the “blood clot” part that’s just wrong, not “wrong”, actually wrong.

67. “So you drive these people insane and make them fight? Ahmed said. This is part of your good, merciful plan? This is what you taught Jose? Something whispered No. You’ll teach them.” Y’all. God spoke to the atheist.

68. “The words parted like curtains and revealed a huge T cell, a shining version of the antibodies he had seen in Ibrahim’s blood.” SCIENCE. The anti-religion!

69. “finally Ahmed brought out his flask and passed it around” That’s how you know the Christians are bad people too, because they drink.

70. “Salaam alaykum” said the Muslim to the Christian, not like they have Standard to communicate it, no it has to be symbolic.

71. “Ahmed put an arm around her. She leaned into him. Their dry lips touched, locked in a long embrace.” Still married. Divorced not implied. She could have divorced him but she didn’t. Yes, it does have to be explicit. It’s not complicated. Also, even if not married, still a Muslim woman. She knows he’s an atheist.

72. “Like you said. The universe looks different when you have to ask why a loving God would do horrible things.” Because as a Muslim, you couldn’t have possibly had those thoughts on your own.

73. “When the sky is torn, when the stars are scattered, then a soul will know what he has given and what he has held back.” Quran reference. So there is research, but where it goes into is erratic?

Some final notes:

1. The writing itself is good, my inner editor only found two issues, one misplaced comma and one run-on sentence. The pacing could use some work, but it was okay compared to the length of the story. The author does seem to struggle with consistency, in particular when it comes to characterization. The research is wanting. I say that objectively– if your story is based on a real thing that exists, regardless of the spin, agenda, or context of the narrative, the story has to maintain both internal consistency and some degree of accuracy.

2. Both my proofreader and I were surprised at Tor for publishing blatant hate. We’ve both owned many Tor books and this is, well, not up to their usual standard. Not just because of the hate, either, but because that story had to get past at least one, if not more, of Tor’s editors, who could have and didn’t check the research, spot consistency issues, or point out that misplaced comma.

3. At least when OSC shat on Islam in his fiction, he was halfway subtle about it. And it was done with great technical skill, there’s a reason he’s considered a master of his craft.

This ended up being way longer than I expected.

#tags how do they work #writing #islamophobia #tor.com #ender's game even has that muslim boy who's portrayed in a positive way #like seriously #osc did his research #he may personally hate us and wish us all dead but he can separate that from his work #well at least at first #but even when he went for it #it was done with such skill i almost can't be too mad #like #if you're gonna write about how much you hate us #at least be creative about it #don't use the same old tired tropes #even hollywood knows that #that bit in iron man with the british actor playing the terrorist #prime example #ugh i tell you

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dasakuryo · 7 years

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If you live somewhere where everyone speaks Spanish why are you so worried about people with thick accents when they speak English if you live somewhere where you aren't required to speak English?

Translation: I amentitled gringx who can’t wrap their head around how English imperialismfunctions.

Sorry for not coming back to you sooner,

I live in a country wherepeople are required to learn English since childhood, I live in a country whereEnglish is a mandatory subject in schools since primary school (that’selementary school, in some provinces as early as first grade). I live in acountry where even kids in kindergarten have to learn English.

You know, unlike yougringxs who learn a language in high school to add it to your credits orwhatever, we actually HAVE TO learn English since we’re children. Parents knowthat their kids learning English is extremely important because as ourcollective unconscious dictate “if you want to go far in life and besomeone, you’ve to learn English, you need to know English,” this is whyparents will go out of their way to send their kids to English institutes orfind a teacher who can give them private lessons since an early age, evenparents who struggle with income and are not in an advantageous economicsituation will save money so their kids can learn English and “aspire togreater horizons”.

Our collectiveunconscious, regardless of the efforts and reassurance of teachers of tellingus the exact opposite, immediately connects accuracy and fluency withnative-like accents. Since we’re children we feel our thick, clearly non-nativeEnglish accents, are inadequate, we feel inadequate. And that’s why? Becausenative-speakers have consistently looked down on people who have a non-nativeEnglish accents, and in the USA and Europe, Latinxs accents have always beenfrowned upon and considered as a sign of our backwardness, ignorance andinferiority.

Media reflectssociety, and also has the power to pose discussions and change it. When peoplemake fun of thick accents, of non-native English accents, of Latinxs speakingSpanish, they’re making fun of Latinxs. So the fact that USA media making funof accents and using them as the punchline of a joke, or a joke in and ofthemselves, it’s problematic, is wrong, it adds to Latinxs (particularly KIDS)self-loathing of their own accents and, what’s even worse, it teaches them thatin order not to be mocked by native English speakers they have to sound likenative speakers. So kids will struggle, refuse to speak, try to mask theiraccent, try to become this carbon-copy of the native English speaker they’veseen on TV… because, nobody is mocking them.

It takes a toll onyoung people and adults learning English as a second language, the very firstthing anyone says is “I don’t speak right”, why? Because the ‘speakingright’ is synonym with native accents, because our accents are ugly, laughableand a sign of our backwardness. You know, what we get from what English nativespeaker say and perpetuate about us with their representations and mockery.

What’s that? Youthink learning English in Latin American countries ends in high school? Thinkagain, it goes on in universities, it goes on all throughout your studies ifyou want to get any higher education degree, and in many fields keeps on beingpresent when you’ve already acquired your degree. Over 90% of reference andtext books used in Universities are only available in English, there’re notranslations unless some students does it, which means that you’ve to knowEnglish in order to study. Want to get your degree? Yeah, you’ll have todemonstrate you can read and translate a whole text in English. Want to applyfor a scholarship? If you know English your chances are better? Oh, you’repursuing a career in STEMs, for example, oh well… all publications and papersare available in English, so you have to know, understand and have some degreeof proficiency in English if you want to keep up with new discoveries andtheories. You have made a breakthrough and discovered something important andwould like to present it to the scientific international community? Oh, well,guess you can only do that in English.

Which prompts thefollowing in more than a handful of people: Oh but… you don’t know English, notquite… and your accent is thick and clearly non-native, are you sure you can dothis? Remember what we all know about them, they don’t like our accents, ourskills, knowledge and qualities will be questioned as soon as we open ourmouths… are you really sure you can do this?

That’s why one of mybest friends, with one of the best GPAs has downright been telling me for yearsthat she won’t even bother to apply for a scholarship abroad. She’s brilliant,but she’s taking her accent as an obstacle instead of as an asset. You know, adirect consequence of what ill-intended, biased representations and mockery ofnon-native English accents from native English-speakers can do EVEN TO PEOPLEWHO DON’T LIVE IN AN ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRY.

Oh, and please, I amnot even talking about all the multinational companies which operate in LatinAmerican countries and which demand their employees with a university/collegedegree to give their job interviews in English.

We’re constantlybombarded with the message from native speakers that our English is not goodenough, that we have to pass as natives if we want to aspire to something,particularly if we come even remotely close to study and/or work with USAmericans,Europeans, and the like –if we want to better our chances and not being mockedthat’s.

Non-white Latinxsalso experience this in a whole new level, because not only does theirappearance will grant them suffering discrimination and racism, but on top ofthat they have to add their discrimination towards their accent because it isyet another sign of their otherness. Non-white Latinxs have it even harder.

Furthermore, in caseyou think I am making shit up, linguists have talked about English as animperialistic language, like Phillipson expresses:

Linguicism: the ideologies and structures which are usedto legitimate, effectuate and reproduce an unequal division of power andresources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined onthe basis of their language (i.e., of their mother tongue). This condition isbest seen within the broader context of linguistic imperialism - an essentialconstituent of imperialism as a global phenomenon involving structuralrelations between rich and poor countries in a world characterized byinequality and injustice.

Language expansion isconsidered an essential part of a core country’s policy of extending its powerand influence in order to achieve its imperialistic strategies. Phillipson holdsthat the legitimization of English linguistic expansion has been based on twonotions: ethnocentricity and educational policy, with‘ethnocentricity’ being the “practice of judging other cultures by standards ofit own.” These two practices have been used to impose a distinction betweenlanguages. It has also been a way topromote the notion of the assumed inferiority of secondary languages withrespect to the norms determined by the dominant culture.

Phillipson takes thisnotion one step further with ethnocentricity transformed into that of ‘anglocentricity’ with the consequencethat the dominance of English isjustified in terms of such oppositions as superiority/inferiority,civilization/backwardness, progress/regress, the first element of which isconstantly attributed to the dominant English language.

According toPhillipson education serves the imperialcenter by having three functions: ideological, economic and repressive. Theideological function serves as a channel for transmitting social and culturalvalues. In this role English is regardedas a “gateway for better communication, better education and higher standardsof living.” The second function – economic – legitimizes English as a means of qualifying people to contribute totheir nation and operate technology that the language provides access to.The third function – repression –serves to dominate languages.

Linguisticimperialism calls attention to the potential consequences of English teachingworldwide when center country ideologies are embedded in instruction, having the effect of legitimizing colonialor establishment power and resources, and of “reconstituting culturalinequalities between English and other languages.”

[Cited and paraphrased from

Phillipson, R. 1992.Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

-Phillipson, R. 1988.Linguicism: structures and ideologies in linguistic imperialism. In J. Cumminsand T. Skutnabb-Kangas (eds.), Minority Education: From Shame to Struggle.Avon: Multilingual Matters.]

So when someoneperpetuates the idea that thick accents and non-native English accents are tobe mocked of, which ties directly to the First-World perception of Latinxs (inthis case) as ignorant, backward, unqualified people, I have every right to bemad as hell about it. Because as a non-native English speaker and Latina I amdirectly affected by its consequences, even though living in a non-English speakingcountry.

Unlike USAmericanswho actually get to choose whether to learn Spanish or not (who cares thatthere’re more Spanish speakers in the American continent than English speakers,right?? Why should you ever have to be forced to learn that backwardlanguage??), Latin Americans don’t have a choice, we have never had a choice.That’s how linguistic imperialism functions, besides forcing us to learn aforeign language, is telling us that we won’t be taken seriously if we don’tadjust to the GoodEnglish™.

By the way, I have a non-native English accent,and I am extremely proud of it.

And finally,

#ai replies #Anonymous #linguistic imperialism #anti latinx racism #anti latinx sentiment

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