Sleeping. Sleeping is the sentiment that resonates most with people. Or at least people who have Tumblrs. Clinomania is our winner, with 143,812 notes! It means “the excessive desire to stay in bed”. Close after that with 137,740 notes is serendipity, meaning “finding something good without looking for it”.
I absolutely agree with you. I realize that there are a number of things wrong with my pronunciation guide. In this case, it’s that I haven’t found a way to denote a U sound like oo (tsundoku) instead of uh (umbrella) or yoo (union). It also has problems with A sounds—I have ay (able) and ahh (apple) but not aah (anonymous) or ah (always).
Vowels are tricky, because as an English speaker (and not Japanese), it’s hard for me to differentiate consciously between similar vowel sounds. Plus, I’ve only got so many characters on my keyboard, and Tumblr only accepts so many kinds of formatting. Making a pronunciation guide that “makes sense” to everyone is tough. I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you, but know that I do try my best, and be assured that I am constantly trying to improve the guide.
But I hope that you see that six months of studying anything does not necessarily make you an expert, and that even being an expert does not necessarily mean you need to be angry about someone else’s mistakes. I accept your criticism (as humbly as possible!) but I wish you didn’t feel like you had to “rant” about anything that appears on my blog, or that one post ruined it for you. I hope you’ll find time to look at some of my other hundreds of posts and make your judgment with a wider sample to inform your decision.
1 | the click-through links
2 | the pronunciation guide
3 | the broken pronunciation links under older posts
4 | the URL credits
5 | the origins above the credits
and probably half a dozen other things I’ll only realize later that I should fix
:|
“You know, if you’re as good friends with him as you say, you wouldn’t lead him on with all this sphallolalia.”
“Uh, gesundheit? I have no idea what that means. And we are good friends.”
“Sphallolalia. And believe me, your sphallolalia is driving all of us insane. It means—actually, let me just show you this really cool blog, it’s got the definition and everything.”
“…Hey! I do not!”
I do indeed! A few, anyways. There’s wanderlust, the urge to travel; yoko meshi, the peculiar stress of speaking a foreign language; fernweh, the ache for distant places. There might be another one, but I forget what it is. If you have more travel-related words, send them in!
Wow, okay. Well, I’ve actually never heard German spoken at length. I don’t even think I know any German speakers. So I can’t really comment on how it sounds, but I appreciate the definitions of the words I’ve found for this blog. If you look at my tag for posts from German, there are some absolutely fascinating words there! Many of my personal favorites from this blog come from German.
Plus, language isn’t just about sounds. It’s about meaning and history and the personality of a people. And people are different, so they approach sounds differently. There are probably a good number of people who think English sounds horrible too. And that’s just fine.
