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Critter Challenge: How Many Animal Sounds Can You Make in Chinese? Do you know how to say "woof" in Chinese? Learn how to bark, squeak, meow, roar and hee-haw instead! This page provides the word for 22 kinds of animals, along with the particular sounds they make. Each item first lists the animal sound in Chinese, followed by the English name of the animal who makes that sound.

Animal sounds in Japanese are known as 動物の声 (どうぶつのこえ - dōbutsu no koe) - literally "animals' voices." Animal sounds in Japanese are usually one sound that is repeated twice, but are sometimes only said once. Sometimes there are multiple ways to say one animal sound. Check out this page for a listing: has hiragana+the transliteration of the sound in English.

British researchers say they have found 23 words that have persisted for a staggering 15,000 years. These "ultraconserved words" include some that you might expect (you, me, mother, man), others you might not (spit, worm, bark), and at least one somewhat heartwarming entry (give). Over the centuries, the words have retained the same meaning and almost the same sound. The team claims that's because they all come from an ancient "mother tongue" that was used toward the end of the last ice age, the Guardian reports. They assert that the ancient language eventually formed seven language families, which in turn formed the 700 modern languages used by more than half of the planet today. To find the ultraconserved words, linguists looked for cognates-words that have similar meanings and sounds in different languages, like "father" (padre, pere, pater, pitar)-shared by all seven of the aforementioned language families. They then translated the cognates into what they believed the cognates' ancestral words (known as proto-words) would be, then compared those. They ultimately found 23 that were shared by at least four of the language families, including one (thou) that was shared by all seven. Here are all 23 "ultraconserved words", listed by the number of language families in which they have cognates. 7 - thou 6 - I 5 - not, that, we, to give, who 4 - this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire ,to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm

The priming effect occurs when one is exposed to words or images that subconsciously influence decision-making. For example, seeing pictures of a shower would likely influence you to fill in so__p as "soap." But, seeing pictures of bread, you would probably say "soup." A somewhat controversial study has shown that subjects who were unknowingly exposed to elderly words (like bald, gray, and wrinkle) walked more slowly toward the next experiment than the control group. Another study asked participants to lie via email and another group of participants to lie via voicemail. Those who lied on the email were more likely to purchase soap, whereas the group who lied via voicemail were more likely to buy mouthwash. This wasn't included in the article, but I suspect the reason it's easy to come up with puns is because our brains are primed to think of words within a certain theme. The article mentioned that you can use priming to help you come up with new ideas around a central idea by writing related words in a list, until you think of something appropriate.

Studies have traced a range of impressive benefits to writing down the things for which we're grateful-benefits including better sleep, fewer symptoms of illness, and more happiness among adults and kids alike. Robert Emmons, a UC Davis professor who studies the science of gratitude, offers the following research-based tips to enhance journaling effectiveness: 1. Don't just go through the motions. Research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and others suggests that journaling is more effective if you first make the conscious decision to become happier and more grateful. "Motivation to become happier plays a role in the efficacy of journaling," says Emmons. 2. Go for depth over breadth. Elaborating in detail about a particular thing for which you're grateful carries more benefits than a superficial list of many things. 3. Get personal. Focusing on people to whom you are grateful has more of an impact than focusing on things for which you are grateful. 4. Try subtraction, not just addition. One effective way of stimulating gratitude is to reflect on what your life would be like without certain blessings, rather than just tallying up all those good things. 5. Savor surprises. Try to record events that were unexpected or surprising, as these tend to elicit stronger levels of gratitude. 6. Don't overdo it. Writing occasionally (once or twice per week) is more beneficial than daily journaling.

Writing down what you're grateful for greatly impacts your social, physical, and physiological health but to some the impacts are unclear. This article page has a link that has created their very own technological gratitude journal that deepens and practices efficient journaling. Included in this article are 6 tips: 1) Have passion behind jotting down your gratitude. It put more motivation and thought in your writings. 2) Be specific with what you're grateful for. 3) Lean towards focusing your gratitude on people rather than things. (You learn to become less materialistic.) 4) Consider mentioning what it would be like with out the blessings. 5) Record events that were surprising & out of the ordinary. 6) Occasional writing over daily writing because it's easy for us to get numb to the good side of life. Writing our thoughts down rather than thinking about them or saying them, deepens our emotional connection and makes us more self aware.

This article shows new evidence which suggests that language is learned in circuits that are used for many other purposes, instead of the common claim that language acquisition occurs in a specific part of the brain dedicated to the purpose. How good we are at remembering vocabulary relates to how good we are at declarative memory, which is used to remember shopping lists or people's faces. Grammar in children, on the other hand, correlates most strongly to procedural memory which is used for driving or playing an instrument.

A neologism is a newly-coined word. The website Word Play Masters keeps an archive of humorous neologisms: words created by changing a real word by one letter, in order to give new, witty meanings to existing words. Some examples: 1.Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it. 2. Beelzebug (n.) : Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out. 3. Coptimism The irrational hope that the police car behind you is pulling over someone else FYI: This contest is often (incorrectly) attributed to either the Washington Post or Mensa International, but is actually an Internet phenomenon. You can view the present year's winners, and listing of winners dating back to 2010

"Many refer to Hawai'i as the melting pot of cultures, and along with that comes a wide range of languages. A recent U.S. census survey looked at languages spoken here in the islands and for the first time Hawaiian Pidgin English was included on that list." Ugh, bad reporting: surely the US Census Bureau meant Hawai`i Creole English (HCE)? But still, interesting that it's receiving federal validation as a bona fide language...

This article discusses the importance of sincere apologies and the consequences of over apologizing. It also lists other alternatives to apologizing (ex. expressing gratitude).

TechRadar spoke to Dr Matthew Voice, an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the UK's University of Warwick, to find out the science behind the struggle to deduce Wordle Puzzle #256. "[In your live blog] you've already talked about _ATCH as a kind of trap. This is an example of an n-gram, i.e. a group of letters of a length (n) that commonly cluster together. So this is an n-gram with a length of four letters: a quadrigram," Professor Voice tells us. "Using [this] Project Gutenberg data, it's interesting to note that _ATCH isn't listed as one of the most common quadrigrams in English overall, but the [same] data considers words of all lengths, rather than just the five letters Wordle is limited to. I don't know of any corpus exclusively composed of common 5 letter words, but it might be the case that _ATCH happens to be particularly productive for that length." "The other thing to mention," Professor Voice adds, "would be that the quadrigram _ATCH is made up of smaller n-grams, like the bigram AT, which is extremely common in English. So we're seeing a lot of common building blocks in one word, which means that sorting individual letters might not be narrowing down people's guesses as much as it would with other words."

According to Ethnologue, of the 115 Indigenous languages spoken in the U.S. today, two are healthy, 34 are in danger, and 79 will go extinct within a generation without serious intervention. In other words, 99% of the Native American languages spoken today are in danger. Despite the Cherokee Nation's efforts, the Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ) is on that list. There are 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and most are battling language extinction. Since 2008, thanks in part to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, the Administration for Native Americans (ANA), through a competitive grant process, has allocated approximately $12 million annually to tribes working to preserve their languages. In 2018, only 47 language projects received funding - just 29% of all requests, leaving more than two-thirds of applicants without funding, according to ANA. The Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Education's Department of Indian Education and the National Science Foundation allocated an estimated additional $5.4 million in language funding in 2018, bringing the grand total of federal dollars for Indigenous language revitalization last year to approximately $17.4 million. Compared to how much the United States spent on exterminating Native languages, that sum is a pittance. At the height of the Indian boarding school era, between 1877 and 1918, the United States allocated $2.81 billion (adjusted for inflation) to support the nation's boarding school infrastructure - an educational system designed to assimilate Indigenous people into white culture and destroy Native languages. Since 2005, however, the federal government has only appropriated approximately $180 million for Indigenous language revitalization. In other words, for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in previous centuries, it spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in this one.

This article was about how a gratitude journal can affect someone's life. A college student began writing monthly gratitude lists when she was "at a point when [she] was just not in a very good place in [her] life." There is an increasing amount of research being done on the benefits of a gratitude journal. Multiple studies show that expressing gratitude can help people sleep better, lower stress, and improve relationships. Then there is a lack of research on how the expression of gratitude can affect those with clinical depression, anxiety, or suicidal tendencies. Gratitude journals aren't for everyone, it's all dependent on how you feel.

While most are pushing towards being more grateful, researchers are explaining the benefits of journaling gratitude. The research on gratitude is beneficial to us emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually. It's a simple practice that can benefit people, and it's free! While being grateful is something good to practice and turn to habit, it doesn't effect everyone the same. There is still undergoing research on the impact that gratitude has on those that have depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.

This article serves as an update in the new year of 2024 on which states require their public schools to teach kids how to read and write in cursive. New to the 27 state list are California and New Hampshire, as they now all require some form of cursive education for the youth in school.

This website comprehensively lists events associated with Mahina ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Language Month). Feel free to participate and attend!