Batman 129 Variant Cover By Simone Di Meo

Mothers and daughters and fires.

good movie to think about

ADVICE FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT HAVING A GOOD DAY:

wait until it gets dark and make tea or coffee or hot chocolate, or if it’s too hot outside make yourself a healthy smoothie with your favorite things in it at any point during the day

put on your favorite underwear, it helps, trust me, it’s an old family secret (i’m not kidding)

if you have a pet, play the “how many things can i stick on you until you move or get mad” game (bonus points if they fall asleep, extra bonus points if a family member sees you and tells you to quit it, extra double ultra points if they join in)

rip a peice of paper into as many little pieces as you can

go to animeseason.com and click “random anime” until you see one that looks completely ridiculous (or actually good) and watch the first episode. repeat if it sucked or if you get bored halfway through

spend at least an hour making a music playlist for how you feel right now and save it for now or when you feel a bad mood rise again

curl up in bed and cover yourself with blankets and pillows and put in music and just lay there for a while (sleeping is also good)

eat everything

drink lots of water

it’s okay bad moods don’t last forever!!!!!! i promise!!! you will be yourself soon and there are people who love you very much, don’t be afraid to reach out to them

you are lovely

eat lots of bananas

FREE PADS AND TAMPONS

Hey all you lovely people who have periods, the world is starting to look a little bit brighter now that certain tampon/pad companies have started to allow people to receive small kits and samples of pads, maxi pads, liner, and tampons for free. And I mean 100% free and discreet. You just have to give them your address and name, and bam! You’ve got all the menstrual cycle products you could ever need for no cost. Links below!

U by Kotex

Always

Playtex

Poise

Guys what are some of the best Bakudeku fics that are a must read or some of your favorites?

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

General Plan:

Weeks 1 and 2: Purpose:

Learn the fundamentals sentence construction

Learn how to spell and count

Start building a phrase stockpile with basic greetings

The Alphabet

Numbers 1 - 100

Subject Pronouns

Common Greetings

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

Basic Definite and Indefinite Articles

Weeks 3 and 4: Purpose:

Learn essential vocabulary for the day-to-day

Start conjugating regular verbs

Days of the Week and Months of the Year

How to tell the time

How to talk about the weather

Family Vocabulary

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Weeks 5 and 6: Purpose:

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

Add more complex types of sentences to your grammar

Colours

House vocabulary

How to ask questions

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Forming negatives

Weeks 7 and 8: Purpose:

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

Finish memorising regular conjugation rules

Food Vocabulary and Ordering at Restaurants

Money and Shopping Phrases

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Weeks 9 and 10: Purpose:

Start constructing descriptive and more complex sentences

Adjectives

Reflective verbs

Places vocabulary

Weeks 11 and 12: Purpose:

Add more complex descriptions to your sentences with adverbs

Wrap up vocabulary essentials

Adverbs

Parts of the body and medical vocabulary

Tips for Learning a Foreign Language:

Learning Vocabulary:

What vocabulary should I be learning?

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

Choose the words you want/need to learn.

Relate them to what you already know.

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

Record them so learning is never lost.

Use them in meaningful human conversation and communication.

How should I record the vocabulary?

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

Keep a careful record of new vocabulary.

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

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

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

How should I practice using the vocabulary?

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

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

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

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

How often should I be practising vocabulary?

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

Ideally, words should be reviewed:

5-10 minutes later

24 hours later

One week later

1-2 months later

6 months later

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

Its written and spoken forms (spelling and pronunciation).

Its grammatical category and other grammatical information

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

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

Receptive Skills: Listening and Reading

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

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

Tips for reading in a foreign language:

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

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

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

Tips for listening in a foreign language:

Watch films in your target language.

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

Listen to the radio in your target language.

Watch videos online in your target language.

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

Try drawing a picture of what was said.

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

Provide a summary of what was said.

Suggest what might come next in the “story.”

Translate what was said into another language.

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

Productive Skills: Speaking and Writing

Tips for speaking in a foreign language:

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

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

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

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

Tips for writing in a foreign language:

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

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

Diary entries

Shopping lists

Reminders

What could I write about?

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

Make up a conversation between two people. 

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

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

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

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

Write a short story or poem.

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

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

Read a lot

Write a lot

Get your writing corrected

What should you be reading to maximize your language learning?

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of literature we can learn from. Baby books bore you, but you’re not ready for any type of novel, so what’s left?

Here are some tips 

For beginner/A1/A2 learners

Watch a YouTube video in your target language, then read the comments

you’ll already have vocabulary from watching the video, most of the comments will probably use that vocab

it’s a short enough text that you won’t get fatigued

the only downside is that sometimes people utilize abbreviations and slang terms, but even these are good to know

Read news headlines and if you find one you understand almost fully, try to read the full article

sometimes the vocabulary used is not common in everyday usage, but it’s a total win for an A1 learner to fully read and mostly understand any text

while vocab is not used everyday, it will give you the ammunition to talk about that particular topic

Watch Netflix in target language with subtitles in the same language

believe it or not, you will learn to read better, especially because you don’t have to understand written description of visuals (usually uses very niche vocab) or emotion

and now you can slow down or speed up 

I watched DARK in German before I felt like I could read a book, and I understood 85% of it. This is because I looked up some vocabulary in the first episodes and they continued to use it throughout the show so it really cemented in my head to the point where I don’t even think about it. Now, I had to rewatch some conversations the characters had, but that’s much better for understanding than switching it to English or looking up full phrases and sentences. 

For intermediate/B1/B2 learners

read fanfiction

it’s ALWAYS good to read about something you’re interested in so if you like any major movies, books, television, this is the perfect option for you

most people use relatively basic language and you can choose the length 

find a comic book or graphic novel

like watching tv, that visual aid really helps with understanding of the plot without all those tricky descriptions

read a book in your target language that you’ve read and loved in your native language

this is by far my favorite way

you don’t have to worry about trying to understanding the bigger picture because you already know what’s happening/what will happen, you really have to discover the meaning of each sentence and then you begin to picture the scene using only your target language

Check out my other post for methods of how to get the most out of reading !

learning to be my mother

What We Become, Hailey Noecker / Mirror Traps, Hera Lindsey Bird / unknown / On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong / legitimately fucking dean winchester from supernatural / Elektra, Sophokles / When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Chen Chen / The White Dress, Nathalie Leger / Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn

Playing games

diverse and good fantasy books to read + hype up that AREN’T harry potter

since the entire hp stan community is shitting its pants over the fb3 trailer and ignoring jkr’s continued transphobia and homophobia

the shades of magic trilogy by ve schwab

queer author (uses she/they pronouns, is openly gay)

queer characters

characters of color

disabled protagonist

gorgeous prose + worldbuilding

a film adaptation is in the works!

a sequel trilogy of books is currently in the works!! it’s going to be called threads of power and it sounds amazing so far

the grishaverse by leigh bardugo

queer characters (literally so many across so many identities)

characters of color

multiple disabled protagonists (and the author is disabled too!)

IMPECCABLE worldbuilding and writing

it has a netflix series called shadow & bone that’s an absolute banger! season 2 is on the way too :))

an ember in the ashes by sabaa tahir

inspired by ancient rome

strong female protagonists who don’t hate on other women

non-toxic male love interests

absolutely heartbreaking

extremely intense (look up content warnings if you’re worried!)

many characters of color (+author is a poc too)

these violent delights by chloe gong

characters of color (+author is a poc too)

queer characters (including trans rep!)

an absolutely incredible love story (enemies to friends to lovers to enemies to it’s complicated?)

romeo and juliet retelling set in 1920s shanghai and featuring rival gangs—need i say more?

look up content warnings, especially if you’re scared of bugs!!!