7.12.19 // These Pictures Are From Earlier In This Week When I Was Writing An Essay On David Hume’s

hiii ! i'm a big fan of your blog i've found it vv inspiring re. my studies :) just wondering what sort of DA things you do outside of your studies / academic things you do in your spare time that aren't necessary to your grades ??

hey! here’s a list of academic things i do outside of university.

if your question was about my non-academic activities that are reminiscent of the dark academia genre, lmk and i’ll make another post!

i read a lot of literary fiction and poetry

i write poetry and am always on the lookout for lit magazines and journals/independent presses to submit my work to. i’ve been published a few times, i don’t really talk to my friends or family about it because i worry they would think i’m arrogant for mentioning it

before the quarantine, i went to art galleries and museums several times a month (i have a free annual pass) and learned a lot from each visit

i do freelance journalism; i interned at a news outlet last summer

i watch international and experimental cinema on criterion collection. i also sometimes go to an independent theatre that airs niche documentaries. i think it’s really important to expose yourself to thought-provoking films

ive been to a few book awards ceremonies + literary events with my mom and her friends before. i’d like to do that more often, especially since many of the events are free

i spend a lot of time in secondhand bookstores looking for old crumbling hardcovers. my friends and i often buy the same book, read it separately, and then report back to each other with impromptu reviews

Hiya, your blog is so informative! I'm hopefully going to be studying a bachelors in linguistics starting in 2023, is there any reading or activities you could recommend to do/start to do now? Thanks 😊

Hey, I don't know where you're from and what your universities are like, so I can only talk from my experience here in Germany (or in my university at least):

Recommendations for Reading/Activities before starting Linguistic Studies:

In my first semester, the lectures were quite challenging for many students, since they're designed to give you a basic understanding of all of linguistics as fast as possible, so that you can progress in your studies. I think they were also designed to 'weed out' anyone who wasn't fit for this course or didn't take it seriously enough.

I had to learn the IPA alphabet, the terms used for how vowels and consonants are pronounced (e.g. open front; voiced alveolar fricative, etc.), how to note graphemes, allophones, morphemes, etc., what each of these terms means and how they work, word formation processes, all of the parts of speech, word classes, phrases, and clauses, semantic relations, some theories (e.g. speech act theory), and more. Most of it was just a lot of memorising / learning by heart.

But that's no reason to be scared :) in my uni, there were loads of "tutorial courses" where we met up once a week with a teaching assistant who was there to answer all of our questions and to repeat what we learned in that week's lecture. We were also repeatedly told that it's absolutely normal to struggle in the first semester; some of our lectures had a failure rate of 50% or higher. And that's perfectly fine. If you fail and have to do a course again, there won't be any new material, so you'll basically just get one semester more time to revise & study everything you learned.

So I would recommend to try finding out which books you'll be using in the "big" introductory courses (these lectures and books are usually called "Introduction to Linguistics" or "Introduction to [subject]"). Books like that are usually intended for students without any background knowledge. You could start looking through these books to get a first broad understanding of the different parts of linguistic studies and what you'll learn in the first semesters. The book I used in my "Introduction to Linguistics" lecture was "Introduction to English Linguistics" by Becker/Bieswanger (2017).

Also: if you have to write term papers for your lectures, try to schedule as few as possible in the first semester (if that's possible in your uni course). It's your first time writing a term paper, so it won't be perfect and you'll make mistakes. It's better to write one bad one at the beginning of your studies and learn from your mistakes than to rush ahead and write several bad ones. Maybe you could already find out which kind of citation rules your course uses and learn how to use that citation style.

Another thing I'd suggest is to inform yourself about your course beforehand. Read the exam regulations, what lectures you need, and what your suggested work load is. Don't go over this suggested work load in your first semester! In my course, I had about 6 suggested lectures a week which were each 2 hours long. That doesn't sound like a lot, but you'll also get homework and have to revise everything you learned. Some courses have midterm exams in addition to the final exams, so you basically have to revise/study from the start. And, as I said before, some courses have additional tutorials which you can attend during the week (most of them were 1 hour long).

I hope that this helps a bit :) All of this is solely based on my personal experience in my university, so your course outline and work load and schedule could be entirely different. But maybe it'll give you some first ideas about what to expect and what to keep in mind :) Good luck with your studies!

my masterpost | my studygram | ask me anything

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Other advice posts that may be of interest:

How To Stop Procrastinating

How To Study When You Really Don’t Want To

My Experiences With GCSEs

6.2021

Hands and flowers collage weekly

day 52/100 of productivity | november playlist!

I started a new vocab book! Finally! I am so excited because I’ve been stuck on that 쏙쏙 TOPIK book for so long, but finally pushed through and memorized all the words that were left. I really like this new book pictured on the left (토픽 어휘 2300) because they organize it by themes rather than going alphabetically. It’s also bigger and feels much more like a textbook, which I love. Going to try to finish this book in two months!

my masterpost | my studygram | ask me anything

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[transcript under the cut]

Other advice posts that may be of interest:

How To Study When You Really Don’t Want To

Active Revision Techniques

How to Revise BIG Subjects

The OSCAR Revision Model

The Diffuse Mode of Thinking

Keep reading

listen I ended up regretting saying anything about this on my old blog because people will interpret literally any and every statement maliciously on this hellsite but I want to start like. a helpline for people who are like “hey I pretty much only read YA but I’m like 22 now and don’t relate to teenagers as much, it’s such a shame that there are no fun books written for adults :(” because boy HOWDY are there some fun books for adults