Introduction

I started learning Japanese on March 22 2023. At the time of writing, It has been about 70-80 days since. Currently I would place myself at N3 level. I became very inspired to study Japanese after (a) visiting Niseko (Hokkaido) and (b) reading a post on Reddit about someone who claims to pass N1 from zero in 8.5 months.
The purpose of this post is to offer (a) alternative perspectives to learning Japanese, (b) prove that it is possible to learn quickly, (c) challenge some of the existing recommendations. This post is part one out of eight articles detailing my journey to N1 from zero in 8 months. Disclaimer, this post will be very long and ranty!
This post will cover some of the study techniques and experiments I’ve conducted for the first month, as well as the results of my experimentation and insights. As for the elephant in the room, I’m currently studying N3 after 60+ days into my Japanese learning journey. I’m sure many are skeptical or might presume that I have bad mastery of N5 and N4 content, but by the end of the post, I’m confident that I would have responded to them.

Prior Knowledge

I started watching anime since Naruto. I think that was 15 years ago. I’m not particularly obsessed with Japanese culture but I do follow the mainstream anime like Bleach, Tokyo Ghoul, My Hero Academia, Attack on Titan, and most recently Demon Slayer. So I do possess 15 years of acclimatising to the sound of Japanese anime speech. However my Vocab is very limited. I know how to count from 1-99, konnichiwa and itadakemasu, and a couple more words that I might remember if I was prompted. I also know the hand signs from Naruto. Apart from that, I consider myself truly zero in Japanese knowledge.

While your brain can only hold 7-9 items in the short term memory at once, it does not mean you cannot study more than 9 items in a day.

I see most people on Reddit recommending 15-20 new cards on Anki. Personally I think this pace is way too slow, especially for the beginner. Most typical N5 vocab deck would have about 600-700 cards. 15cards/day means that it would take 40-50 days just to see all the cards. I also came across a study that says our short term brain cannot store more than 9 items at a time. This would seem to support support the recommendation of 15-20 vocabulary cards a day. While reading Moonwalking with Einstein, a book on the capabilities of the human memory, I read about a story of a guy who could draw the landscape of New York with shocking precision after flying pass the city on a helicopter once. The book also hinted at the idea that we possess some form of photographic memory.
And so, i tried to do about 50-100 new cards a day. Within 10 days, I’ve seen all the N5 Vocab. Around day 15 or so, i became concerned that cramming so many words in a day would mean that the retention rate will be low. So I tested myself on those 700 words and I think I got about 85% correct.
Personally i was very happy with that score. I thought I could do a lot worse. So clearly, trying to learn 100 new cards a day wasn’t detrimental to retention rate (I will address my thoughts on burnout on a later point). What is happening?
My hypothesis is that while we can’t store more 6-9 items in our short term memory, it doesn’t mean that when we study our 10th,11th, 20th or 100th item, our brain would completely reject the input. You are still imprinting something onto the brain. What this means is that while you should not expect to see a word once and remember it forever, it says nothing about the upper limit of how many words you can simultaneously start on the first stage of the SRS system. We all know that SRS takes time to turn short term memory into long term memory. It could take weeks or a few months. But if we can start 100 words on the SRS system vs 15-20 words, and there is no significant cost to doing more words, then starting 100 new cards a day will bring us to our destination much faster.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

When you read about many people agreeing that 15-20 new Anki card a day is a good pace, or that it takes 300-500 hours to pass N5, then it sets the expectation of what is normal. The reason I was able to Master N5 in approximately 150-200 hours and learn all its vocab a couple of weeks is because I did not pay attention to what other people can achieve.

How I use Anki

From my survey on Reddit, it seems that people get overwhelm by the amount of reviews on Anki. And I think this reveals that the are doing reviews differently from how I do it.
When I do my Anki reviews, I only entertain two state of minds when marking the flash cards. The first is I know the answer (the answer pops into my brain instantaneously) and the second is I don’t know the answer (mind is blank). I do not try to recall the answer. Recalling takes time. If I try to recall the answer, it might take me upwards of a minute or two to remember it (and even then, I might still be wrong). Instead i like my Anki reviews to be snappy. It feels like I take about a fraction of a second to answer my Anki cards, although the Anki statistics tells me that I take 4second per card. Still fast either way. At 4s/card I can do 900 reviews in one hour.
Next is how I use Easy, Good, Again and Hard. The rule of thumb is to be more liberal than strict. I try to use Easy, instead of Good as much as I can because I don’t want my reviews to pile up. I almost never use Hard even if I get the card completely wrong. Speaking of reviews pilling up, we need to define what marking an Anki item as Good or Easy means to me.
For a lot of people it means aiming for perfection. That means that the person only click Easy or Good if his answer exactly matches the back side of the card. For myself I set an extremely low bar, as long the vague feeling of what I think the answer is somewhat matches the answer on the back side, I’m happy to give it a Good at least. Why? Because it’s the nature of Anki or SRS system to return cards you previously click Easy and Good. I don’t have to worry about being too forgiving on myself and being ignorant about the fact because I can always count on the card to return eventually. And if I a card I previously marked as Good, came back, and feels difficult, I would then make a mental note to study it in greater detail. Secondly, a lot of the 700 words in a typical N5 vocab deck are so common that you will encounter them all the time in the wild. This is called organic or natural SRS. If you are strict on your Anki at this stage, it can be quite an overkill in hindsight. Of course it may not feel like an overkill in the beginning because you are still gettting cards wrong.

Burnt out

Okay what about burnout. Surely I might be overdoing it, and wouldn’t burnout eventually catch up to me. Yes and no. I think the phenomenon of burnout is highly exaggerated. I don’t like to use the word burnt out whenever I’m feeling “burnt out” because it has a lot of negative connotations and because negative connotations can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. Instead, I prefer to use the phrase, “I’m tired now”. I kind of compare myself to Shonen protagonists where there’s this big villain coming up and then some special training to level up. The special training is usually quite intense, and sometimes dangerous, and they will eventually be quite tired by the end of the training. But these protagonists always reemerge stronger with new abilities and can now overcome stronger foes.
Similarly, whenever I study too much, I would just acknowledge that I’m tired, watch some anime and something different. I’m usually okay by the next morning. I attribute my ability to resist burn out my thoughts and attitude.

Consistency, multimodality learning, and resourcefulness

I only believe in one kind of consistency, and that is that you have to show up almost every day. But I don’t believe in the kind of consistency that requires me to be on a 365-day Anki/wanikani/immersion streak. This is also one factor that helps to protect burn out. When I feel like doing textbook learning, that’s what I’m going to do. If want to do pure Bunpro and Anki for the next 3 days without reading any textbook, that’s what I’ll do.
I also believe in the idea of multimodality learning. I use everything at my disposal:
All the textbooks (Genki, Minna no nihongo, Tae Kim)
YouTube videos (Misa ammo, game gengo, tokiniandy)
Podcast
Songs
Doing active immersion with anime
Changing my phone language to Japanese (this one unfortunately is a bad advice. I recommend to stay away from this if you are still at N5)
Posters
Instagram and TikTok accounts of Japanese tutors
Websites (tofugu, human Japanese, Japanese tutors’ blogs)
Apps (wanikani, language reactor, bunpro)
Japanese grammar dictionaries
Assessment books
Discord or Reddit or forums
Japanese classes
There’s often this debate on which is better, Genki vs Minna vs Tae kim. If cost or ability to procure them is not an issue, why not use all of them? It’s okay to have one source as your primary source. Mine was Genki 1. But when I wanted to understand a nuance that Genki does not explain well enough, I’ll usually consult my other sources. And if I’m bored of Genki, I can easily switch to Tae Kim, for a change of scenery. If I don’t feel like reading, Misa or Tokiniandy is there for me.
My observation is that many people are usually only using one modality to acquire a new skill. This is causing their journey to be unnecessarily monotonous.

Sloppy learning and conjugations

One very integral component of the Japanese language is conjugation. It’s especially important for the N5. Conjugations can allow you to express many meaning in Japanese. Learning how to conjugate accurately is going to be a struggle for any beginner(think godan and ichidan verbs and conjugating to masu, te, negative forms, etc).
A lot of Japanese textbook and assessment will make you do drills. I skipped all of them. Rather than trying to brute force your way to memorizing conjugations I employ a technique called sloppy learning(this phrase is borrowed from “Japan Like A Breeze” on patreon). I define sloppy learning as learning just enough to acquire the essence of the concept.
For example, ,whether the verbs is in its polite form, short form, negative form or past tense form etc, can be easily recognised by looking at the last few syllabus of a word. If a words end on a “ta”, it must be past tense form. If it ends on a “masu” it must be the polite/long form. This concept can literally be understood in 5 mins.
Thus for me. When conjugating oyogu (泳ぐ）into past tense form, I just conjugate it as oyogu-ta (oyogu +ta) Or sometimes oyota. Now oyota is wrong of course. But that’s all I need at this stage. I desire to understand Japanese, not to get full marks on conjugation drill table. You must always try to look at the big picture. Trying to do well on conjugation drills is an opportunity cost. Ultimately one needs to judge what is worth spending effort on. Hence the idea of sloppy learning is to be deliberate about what to focus on.
Once I can consistently remember that masu means polite and ta meant past, this is where I try to conjugate them correctly. Conjugations is difficult because they all don’t behave like ru verbs. You cannot simply drop the ru at the end of a word and append ta or masu to them. Oyogu for example doesn’t even have a ru ending.
The path I chose was to hope that I can organically (I like this word a lot, but it also sometimes means magically) , know how to conjugate correctly one day. And to a certain extent I acquired some intuition on conjugations without any active involvement from my part. I soon became aware that if a word ends in a gu or a ku, then instead of a ta, it might be ita or ida.
The break through came on day 35. When I couldn’t endure the fact that I wasn’t able to magically acquire conjugation intuition for free. So i goggled “why are godan verbs conjugate the way they are”. And Tofugu came to the rescue.
Essentially they introduced three concepts (a) double consanent with small tsu, (b) assimilation with n, and (c)consonant removal. After that article, conjugating became a breeze. In hindsight, my ability to conjugate only costed me the time to read one tofugu article (and one month of passively intuiting the conjugation patterns) Because I did not spend time on conjugation drills, i was able to progress to the other grammatical points in Genki 1. I didn’t remain stuck in one place for too long.And this is another aspect of sloppy learning. You learn just enough to move on to the next level, you don’t aim for perfection.
Your brain can’t do everything at once. Your brain cannot remember that masu means polite form, and all the rules for conjugating verbs to masu in one sitting. If you try to do that, you can remain stuck, despite already understanding the general idea of conjugation. Better to move on and let the intuition develop. If you judge that the intuition is not going to progress or progress quickly enough, you can always intervene later by supplementing with new knowledge.

Mnemonics when I get something wrong too often

Often there will be a vocab or grammar point that I always can’t seem to latch on. No vague feelings, no guesses, just an empty mind. When this happens, it can be a scary feeling. It may feel like you are not good enough.
Really the solution is very simple. Just add one more inferential step. When I first encountered the word bengoshi（弁護士） , my mind does not produce any intuition or pictures or feelings. What I did was to create a mnemonic, a story. How to relate a lawyer to the sound ben go shi? I managed to came up with “when the judge announces his judgement, the bench(jury) goes “shhhh””Sorry, I know it’s really bad. But when I created that story, bengoshi never stumped me again.I’ve seen a lot of criticism of mnemonics that I don’t agree with

1. ‘they are not for me”>>I’ve seen people said that Anki is not for me. Srs is not for me. While I believe in individual differences and effectiveness in different methodologies, I feel that sometimes people decide too quickly what is or isn’t for them. What is optimal may first have a learning curve in the beginning. And instead of saying that something is not for me and moving on to the next thing, we need to consider if it isn’t we ourselves that should change to make it fit for us.
2. “If I’m trying to memorize something, how does adding more things to remember help. Now I not only have to remember the word, but I need to remember the story to remember the word.”>> Between a story and a random string of number “89779012879” , the brain can remember the short story more easily than the string of number despite the story consisting of more words. It’s just how our brain works.

​

On active immersion

Active immersion means trying to pick up words or trying to understand what is being said in Japanese media like anime or novels. Passive immersion means enjoying the content without really worrying about improving your Japanese.
On day 21 I tried active immersion with Weathering with You. I came to the conclusion that active immersion is not efficient for the new learner. I can imagine myself doing a lot of sentence mining and active immersion in the future (spoiler, I’m now on day 70-80 and I’m immersing a lot more now). But definitely a hard no for me to recommend new comers as the only and primary form of learning Japanese.

Why textbook learning and structural learning is important for fast gains.

Textbook learning is great for fast gains because it prioritises for you. Textbooks are not prepared by a random person. They are usually prepared while respecting certain pedagogical principles in mind by a team of qualified academics. While appealing to authority doesn’t make it correct, we should at least be cognisant that the textbooks might be doing a few things right.
One of those pedagogical principles is incremental or progressive learning. Building knowledge upon what was previously learnt.
Another principle is foundational concepts. A textbook will usually introduce foundational concepts that act as a scaffold for everything else as early as possible. And because textbook learning is progressive, it means that the difficulty is always going to feel just about right. In active immersion the difficulty can be wild because it does not respect your level of Japanese proficiency.
​

Completing N5 in 30 days.

In this 30 days, I was not only learning Japanese, but also learning how to learn. They call it building a plane while flying it hahahah. The principles outlined here helped me to finish N5 content at an insane rate. I was spending about 6-8 hours a day on Japanese (in chunks). So one point not stated here is time. There's no way around time investment.
On the 30th day I did a lot of mock tests and I performed quite well (80-90% correct).When I started on N4 on day 31, I was really surprised by the bump in difficulty. I gave myself 30 days to clear N4. That was the hardest 30 days in my Japanese learning journey. I’m fact I had a better time when I was studying for N3 on day 65 onwards. In my next post I’ll share why N4 was harder than N5 and N3 for me and share some more insights. Hope this has been helpful in offering new perspectives. Thank you for reading this long rant of mine.
There are also quite a few things missing in this post, namely

1. my studying regime for the first 30 day
2. the kanji problem (this one i struggled to settle on a study method. i was trying a lot of different strategies)
3. the psychological lived experience of studying japanese. the truth is, there is another battlefield happening in the mind realm. i often have self doubt and fear creeping. knowing how to address them is essential to a happy journey.
4. engaging in the larger conversation between Taekim, Curedolly, Refold, All japanese all the time, Moeway, immersion schools of thought, matt vs japan etc etc. I feel that a lot of my fundamental beleifs regarding where i stand can be glimpsed in this post. but i want to make my beliefs explict.

I will try to share more in the next post. If you have any questions on the specifics, I'll be there at the comment section ^^

My husband and I are expecting a baby girl soon, and we're shortlisting some names. His surname is a very typical Irish name, starting with O + apostrophe (e.g. O'Donnell, O'Neil, O'Keeffe).
His family have left Ireland many generations ago, and he is thoroughly British/English himself. I myself come from outside of the UK.
My question is: does anyone have any tips for pairing first names with these patronymic Irish surnames? Are there any rules or recommendations regarding first names ending in vowels for example? For example, would the first name "Amelia" have too many vowels, and be awkward? Would we be better off looking for a name which ended in a consanant sound?
We considered some of the many beautiful gaelic given names, but we felt like it might be disingenuous for our little girl if her father isn't strongly attached to his Irish ancestry. Hope that makes sense.
Thank you in advance! And sorry if this comes off as a bit strange!

Thus far in Age of Sigmar, we haven't gotten an answer as to why the Mortal Realms are named the way they are. Those who have followed the overall story of Warhammer Fantasy know that during the End Times, Archmage Teclis unbound the eight winds of magic (Azyr, Ghyran, etc.) from the Aethyr and bound them to eight incarnates (e.g. Sigmar becoming the incarnate of heavens).
While many Warhammer Fantasy fans understand the origins of the winds and therefore the Mortal Realms of Age of Sigmar, less actually know their meaning. As I will detail in this post, the names of the Mortal Realms are in fact derived from Anoqeyån, the divine language of the Old Ones, but it is more commonly known as the Dark Tongue, the language of Daemons. Whether the Old Ones learnt their language from Daemons or vice-versa is unknown, but source primarily point to the latter, which will be detailed later. Those of you more familiar with 40k may recognize a language known as Enuncia, the language of creation of the Old Ones, it is basically the same thing.
The primary sources we'll be using is Liber Chaotica, which in-universe is written by visionary/madman scholar Richter Kless, as well as Words of Magic found in Inferno! Issue 45, also in-universe written by Richter Kless as a follow-up to Liber Chaotica.
The real-world authors are Marijan von Staufer and Richard Williams, the former likely being the author of this post's subject matter. Marijan von Staufer is also an author for the 2^nd editon Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay supplement: Realms of Sorcery, which is also a primary source for several of my posts on the nature of magic in Warhammer Fantasy/Age of Sigmar. I honestly can't find anything on this guy, unlike Simon Spurrier (author of 40k's Xenology) who remains an active fantasy/science-fiction writer who still interacts with fans. So this means we can only really work with what we're given, unless another GW author wants to expand on the old lore. The best bet would be Dan Abnett for reasons described later.

The Origins of Daemons

Here, I would like to post the final excerpt of Richter Kless' exchanges with the First Supreme Patriarch of the College of Magic:

When the Powers speak, the Universe listens, for the Universe is little more than Form imposed upon Chaos, or the Realisation of Potential. The image of that Form, the expression of that Realisation, is determined through action, consciousness, and will, represented in the unimaginaly complex Great Language of Gods and Daemons, known to mortals as Anoqeyån.
The incalculable powers of Gods are in one (admittedly simplistic) sense a reflection of the fact that they are personifications of concepts, and therefore the gods are actually manifestation of broad areas of divine language in the sense that the language itself is the result of conceptualisation. For example, mercy is an action and abstract with no identity until it is actually named 'Mercy', and the attributes of what makes mercy are expressed, codified and debated - so one might say it is with the gods.
Metaphysical Vortices of rage or despair may form in the Empyrean as mortal beings experience these feelings, but I believe that these Vortices are blind and devoid of identity and independent will until intelligent beings in the Mortal Realms become self aware enough to analyse their own raw feelings, bind them into concepts by assigning them names and identifying their attributes, and thereby give these emotions, and by direct association their Vortices with the Empyrean an identity separate from the actual mortal experience of them.
Inferno! Issue 45, pg. 40

This is a lot to take in, but essentially the idea is that emotions alone are not sufficient enough to create daemons, as we know daemons require names. Magister Volans believes the greatest of daemonkind are those that embody the most vast concepts, while smaller daemons embody minute concepts and can therefore can only babble like children in the divine tongue.
Interestingly, Magister Volans does not believe even the Old Ones could comprehend every the ever-growing language of Anoqeyån. Anoqeyån is a language that continuously expands, for it is a language of concepts and concepts may merge and divide into new concepts infinitely. However, the final Magister of the White Order (College of Light) believes quite the opposite:

Magister Kant believes that the language was indeed the creation of the Old Ones. They were, he believes, the first and only beings to fully identify and quantify every single thing, state and process in this universe, and almost every single thing, state and process that was possible through and in chaos.
Liber Chaotica - On Matters Arcane and Magical

If I were a Seraphon player I would be absolutely giddy reading this. In 40k, the Old Ones were simply the first sentient races in the galaxy, forming a confederation and building the webway before the C'tan exterminated them and they devolved into lesser races such as the Slanni and Snotlings. However, the Old Ones of Warhammer Fantasy and Age of Sigmar are truly transcendent beings, almost horrific in their scale of advancement. It is clear that even at the height of the Grand Alliance of Order, the eight gods of the Mortal Realms could never hope to surpass the Old Ones.

Vowels and Consonants

First, we need the defined list of vowels and consonants, which I have just linked to. When it comes to the Dark Tongue/Anoqeyån, the subtle differences in sounds actually matters. In fact, Richter Kless specifically adds a warning for certain words, because mispronouncing them slightly can have dangerous effects. In Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn/RavenoBequin series, a character who mispronounced a word of Enuncia and ended up blowing his teeth out.
Some subtle differences in pronounciation that can carry major conseuences can be seen in the difference between k and q. To an English speaker (like me), they sound the same, but to an Arabic speaker they are two distinct sounds, which each have a separate letter in the phonetic alphabet of Arabic.

The Colors of Magic

This is the topic that first drew me into the subject. Here is what the names of the mortal realms actually translate to:

Phonetic Spelling	Standard Spelling	Translation
Aqʃi	Aqshy	Red
Orç	???	Orange
Azir	Azyr	Blue
Xamön	Chamon	Yellow
Giran	Ghyran	Green
Sliv	???	Pink
ʃyiʃ	Shyish	Purple
Gur	Ghur	Brown
Ulgu	Ulgu	Grey
Dar	Dhar	Black/Dark
Hyiʃ	Hysh	White
Qayʃ	Qhaysh	Spectrum

So the names of the realms translate to colors. Azyr is blue, Ghur is brown, Hysh is white and so on. Surely that seems silly, the mortal realms to essentially be a cheap crayon pack, but this is not exactly the case. They don't exactly translate to colors, but rather the symbolic significance of these colors.
In the old Realms of Chaos: The Lost and Damned book, it is noted that there is a separate word for the color red: Aqsh. So the realm of Azyr isn't the blue realm, but rather the realm that embodies the symbolic significance of the color blue, although blue is likely a popular color in Azyr.
On that note, you may notice four colors that don't have associated realms, which I'd like to discuss here:

• Orç - This one is very, very interesting. It is by far the most unusual thing I've seen in the lore in a while. It is clear that the author intended to convey that Orç (likely spelled Orch) is supposed to represent the color of Orc magic, which is weird because Orcs are green.
• Sliv - I have no idea what this is, but in the Lost and Damned book, Shyish used to be Purple and Pink, so this is new. If anyone has any more background on this I'd love to here it.
• Dar - Dhar is simply Dark Magic. In fact, we already have a Realm of Dhar, it is called the Realm of Chaos. The rune for Dhar (which I'll post about later) is literally the eight-pointed star of Chaos.
• Qayʃ - Qhaysh is high magic. It was never its own unique wind, but rather a combination of multiple winds working in perfect unison. If such a realm existed, it would have been the Allpoints, whose nature was inverted and now spreads corruption to the Mortal Realms. The rune for Qhaysh is the inverse of the star of Chaos. Eight lines converging into one, alternatively a perfect circle with a whole dot at the center.

EDIT: After actually reading on the topic of colors, it seems that brown is simply a shade of orange, and "all pinks are magenta and all magentas are purple", to quote this detailed answer on the topic. So really, the eight colors of magic, plus black and spectrum, essentially capture all types of colors.

Deviated Pronunciations

Unlike Arabic, where related words are rooted on consanants, related concepts are rooted in approximate pronunciation. For example, from the Lost and Damned book we are given the following example:

• Aqshy - Red
• Aqshy'y - Bronze or brass
• Aqsh - Red
• Akhash - Blood
• Akh - Battle, bloodshed, to slay in battle
• Aksha - Battleaxe
• Ksy - Key or solution
• Iakash - Lock or obstacle
• Akhshami - Secret
• Aksho - To seek
• Akhamshy'y - Slayers of warriors
• Akami - Guardians

You can see, that slightly changin Aq to Akh changes the meaning from red to blood/warriors. You can clearly see the connection to Khorne here, and why the Blood God would be so interested in Aqshy.

Orç

I want to follow up a bit on the potential magic of "Orç", the list of Anoqeyån words only shows two words that may be considered similar:

• Ulrax - Savage
• Urak - Enemy

So Orruk seems to translate to enemy, and certainly Orruks are known for wanting to make an enemy out of everything including each other. Similarly, they are savage. This is what leads to me to believe Waaagh! magic is a unique strain of magic related to the color orange.
Orruks, while they are heavily associated with Ghur, don't exactly encompass the concept of Ghur that I describe here. Ghur encompasses the primal instinct, the need to struggle and survive. Orcs/Orruks just like to fight for fighting's sake. Humans fight to live another day, while Orruks fight to fight another day. This is even reflected in the various spell lores of the Orruks, whose spells are all focused on pummeling an enemy.
This also explains why Orcs in Warhammer Fantasy possessed their own unique spell list. To clarify, if Azyr is the Lore of Heavens, Orch is the Lore of Waaagh!

More Interesting Words

• Qeyos (Chaos/Khaos) - literally means spirit energy, psychic power or magic. However, the contextual variations include 'Oversoul', abode of the gods, Sea of Souls, the Afterlife, the Aethyr, Paradise, and Hell
  
• Leth, neth - Lord/MasteRuler of
  
• Kurnas - Hunter : Kurnous was the Elven god of the hunt. Kurnoth, a similar being, would therefore mean Lord of Hunters
  
• Gor - Beast: Remember that Ghur is the realm of beasts, and Ghur means (conceptual) brown. This means that Gors, children of Chaos, must have been named by their Gods.
  

There's many more, but these are the ones that stood out to me.

Conclusion

I started this post, because I've been writing a series on the lores of magic in Age of Sigmar, and I feel that it's incomplete without this sort of background. In this post we got much greater insight into the nature of the Old Ones, their language, and the origins of the names of the realms. Reviewing what we've read, we've learned that concepts do not truly manifest within the Aethyr until a name is given. Given that daemons do not name themselves, this implies one thing:
The 8 winds of magic, and therefore the Mortal Realms, are in fact a creation of the Old Ones. Azyr is Azyr because the Old Ones creating the concept of the Lore of Heavens and named it Azyr. Alternatively, perhaps they only named the base root words, and these words formed together to form the magic that is Azyr as well as the other colours of magic.
Finally, this leads me to question the true nature of the Mortal Realms. We know at their centers, there are simply normal civilizations and lands, but could these realms themselves possess some sort of sentience? Consider the nature of endless spells, considered daemons of the mortal realms. Also consider the Incarnate Elementals, destructive fragments of the realms themselves. If Khorne (Qarneth) embodies the concepts of rage, hate, and violence, could there be an Azyrneth, Ghyraneth, Shyishneth looking upon their realms from the edge?
There are so many things left unanswered. If the Aethyr transcends all realities, and the Old Ones are the source of the language that formed the Aethyr as we know it in Age of Sigmar, does that make them the oldest beings in existence? Or could it be that there are multiple cycles of Chaos annihilating all existence and wiping itself out in the process only for everything to repeat? What happened to the other colors of magic, orange and pink?
I'm gonna end my ramblings here. In the next post, I'll be discussing the symbols of the Mortal Realms, and the nuanced meaning to them. I'd appreciate if anyone knew any more background information on the topic discussed here in the meantime.

Consanants

	labial	alveolar	lateral alveolar	velar	uvular
stop		t d		k g	q gq q ɢ
fricative	f v	s z	hl lh ɬ ɮ	kh gh x ɣ
africate		ts	tl tɬ
nasal	m	n
liquid	w	l		(w)

Vowels

​

	front	back
high	i ii i iː
mid		o oo o oː
low	a aa a aː

Phonotactics

Syllable structure

The syllable structure is (C)(L)V(C). Where C is any consonant, L is [l, w, j], and V is [a, aa, i, ii, o, oo, n]. Nasals are not allowed to cluster with each other. Liquids are not allowed to cluster with each other.

Alophony

before stops nasals assimalate to match the place of articualtion of the stop adjacent to a uvular stop [a] becomes [ɑ] and [i] becomes [e]

Tone

There are two tone levels high and low. In addition, long vowels can have a rising tone. Low tone is unmarked and high tone is written with an acute. The rising tone can be written with h nothing over one vowel and an acute over the other. Allowed tone patterns are H, L, HL, LH, and LHL. the rising tone is considered for purposes of the pattern a low town followed by a high tone.

Tone sandhi

Compounding

When compounding the melody of the first word in the sequence. For instance, if you compound an HL word with an LH word you get a melody of HLH which is not allowed so the high tone is replaced with a low tone. This causes upstep on the next syllable/word which is where the following tone is a little higher than others but not high enough to change the phonemic value. If a low tone get’s removed it causes downstep which is like upstep but lowers the next word instead of raising it.
Upstep is marked with an upside down exclamation before the vowel it’s acting on downstep is the same but with a right side up exclamation point for example !á is a downstep a and ¡á is an upstep a. This is important because compounding can cause upstep inside the word.

Affixation

When an affix dosen’t have a tone the nearest tone spreads to it. When it does have a tone but creates a disallowed pattern the tone changes to retain the melody of the word it’s affixing it can also cause uptstep or downstep depending on what the inherent tone was.

I’m trying to use RegEx to look for the first 3 consonants of a word. For example, let’s say I use Google for my word. The result should be Ggl (case sensitive). However, for words that start with a vowel letter, such as Amazon, the result should be Amz (also case sensitive), which is simply the first vowel letter, the first consanant letter, and the second consanant letter. I haven’t had much luck doing this myself because I’m a complete noob when it comes to coding and unfortunately, I haven’t gotten any input from the Shortcuts sub. Thanks for your help! If you need any additional information, feel free to just ask and I’ll provide it.

I’m trying to make a task that I can use to generate a password for any website or service and also store it somewhere on a cloud platform so I can access it anywhere. I want each password to have some kind of commonality so that I can remember it if I don’t have the ability to run this task. Specifically, I want the rules for the passwords to be the following:
If the account is my main account, then I want the password to have Main as the first word, the first 3 consonant letters of the website/service (first two letters if the website/service starts with a vowel and a consonant letter), a + symbol, and then 123.
So for example, for my main Google account, it would be:
MainGgl+123
For another Google account that isn’t my main account, then it would have the first letter of the email, first number of the email, the first 3 consonant letters of the website/service (first two letters if the website/service starts with a vowel and a consonant letter), a + symbol, and then 321.
So for my secondary Google account, which would be taskerfan567, it would be:
t5Ggl+321
To clear confusion regarding websites or services that have a vowel letter first and a consanant letter second, such as my main Amazon account, it would look like this:
MainAmz+123
So the third letter is always the next consonant in the name of the website/service.
How would I go about doing this? I would want Tasker to ask the following questions:
What service/website?
Is this your main account?
Which email did you use to sign up for this account?
If possible, I would want the passwords to all be stored in a Dropbox file looking like this with a double space between each entry:
Service: Google
Main: No
Password: MainGgl+123
This is way too complicated for me so any guidance/help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much!

Disclaimer: My trick works in the South, but ppl from more propper speaking regions might not get away with this method, because It might give u a southern accent
For my whole life, I had a noticeable stutter. I mostly struggled with the letters i, s, m, y, but I could get stuck on any letter. Today the word "I" is the only word that gets me. I used to get called r*****ed all the time just because of my speach, despite being a B student. I decided I had to make a change, because my insecurity became unliveable, and I felt like I couldn't talk to strangers or talk to girls because I thought nobody would like me.
STEP 1: SHRINK YOU SPEECH VOCABULARY
There are over 1 million words in the English language, but you don't have to use all of them. Small, easy to use words can communicate the same info as big, multisyllabic ones.
ex: utilze vs. use
"Use" has only one syllable, so get rid of"utilize" from your speech vocabulary. You can still use it in writing, but dont SAY the hard word when there is an easier version
STEP 2: USE SLANG WHENEVER POSSIBLE
Slang words can be just as useful to your communication as standard english words, but know when not to use them. Slang words tend to stay in use because it sounds cool, or it is an easier way to say something else. saying "im finna this" or "im finna that" may not help you in a job interview, but for most ocassions it will be fine.
ex: about to/fixin to vs. bouta/finna
"Finna" "bouta" are easy words. the "a" at the end replaces the word "to".
STEP 3: DONT WORRY TO MUCH ABOUT GRAMMAR
If you mess up your grammar while talking, the best thing to do is ignore it. Your stutter was more noticeable than a few grammar errors here and there. To be honest, I still haven't mastered this part yet, and I notice grammar errors in my speech occur a bit more often now than they used to (that's where the "k-kinda" from the title kicks in)
STEP 4: SLOOOOOOW DOOOOOWWWWNNNN
Stuttering, for the majority of people, Is either a result of trying to talk to fast or from anxiety. Slowing your speech will make it easier to talk because you will not have to work as hard to talk. Slower speech gives you a better control on your lips, which can make it easier to make the sound you want.
STEP 5: THINK BEFORE YOU SPEEK
Plan your sentence out. What words are you certain your going to use? Where can you use easy words to get your point across? Can you use slang words right now? This can help you feel more prepared and confident in your speech. It takes a while to get used to it but it eventually becomes automatic, for me atleast
STEP 6: SHORTEN YOUR WORDS AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
This is the part that might not work outside of the the south. The last step, I shorten my words. I tend to not say the last consanent of words. I dont know if it's just a southern thing, or if you can do this in other regions. This will put a drawl on your words, which will buy you more time between the next word so you can say it and complete the sentence. I'll put 3 examples
ex. "dificult" pronounced as "di-fi-cle" "child" pronounced as "chi-le" "probably" pronounced as "proll-y"
OPTIONAL STEP 7: TRY FREESTYLE RAPPING OVER A BEAT
Freestyle rapping is great practice for speech because it is a lot more dificult. I would strongly recommend you do this with a friend who can rap better than you. I would also recommend you dont try this with someone else who stutters.
This took me 3 hours to type so run me my upvote. Please give me feedback. This worked for me, if I can help 1 person stop stuttering it would be my proudest moment.

So I've started learning to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, 'cuz I'm an Ancient Egypt nerd that wants to name my daughter after the Rosetta Stone. One of the first things you learn in hieroglyphic writing is how to transcribe English words into the symbols, just to get a hang of the sound the symbols make. Writing names is perfect practice for this.
To give everyone some basics, Egyptian writing, like Arabic, does not write most vowels, only consanants. The vowels are inferred, which is why so many Egyptian names have multiple accepted pronunciations and spellings (ex: Ramses, Ramesses, Ramessu). There are a few written vowels though. The Egyptian language does not have every sound in English and has many more that aren't in English (there are 4 H sounds!).
We can read Egyptian hieroglyphs and completely understand them, but because of the inferred vowels and the fact that Egyptian is a lost language no one speaks anymore, we don't know how to precisely 'speak' the language. We know the sounds the glyphs make because of the Coptic language, which came to replace Egyptian in Egypt around 200-300 C.E and lasted until Egypt switched to Arabic a few hundred years later. Coptic was very similar to Egyptian, but was written in a form of the Greek alphabet, so the pronunciations were never lost.
Names can be written multiple ways in hieroglyphics. Some signs make one sound, like the k sound or t sound. Others make 2 or 3 sounds like sp, mn, or htp, and dsr. Remember, there can be inferred vowels between the consonants.
So request some of your favorite names and I'll do my best to write them in hieroglyphics! Here are some examples:
Example names
edit: fixed link
edit: If you're going to downvote, please explain why.

So I'm enamoured with Welsh, seeing as i'm spending time learning and studying the language, and I really like the idea of having a welsh-like langauge for one of the major story parts of an upcoming story. I tend to use VulgarLang as a sort of jumping off point for a lot of the languages I use, going into more detail about how they're crafted, typically to either A) See how the script would look before working on it or B) getting a basic starting lexicon that I can then diversify from there.
The problem that I have, is i want to have a phonological mutation system that I'm not sure what's going on or how to achieve it, as well as have in the rominization of the language, it mimic welsh to a certain degree.
The first bit with the mutation, part of welsh mutation I'm not sure if Vulgarlang can handle right now (Though it'd be a cool feature to add) and that's the physical changing of words to nearly completely different words. A good example of this is if I count the numbers four five six seven in welsh, individually it would be pedwar, pump, chwech, saith [IPA pədwɑr pɨmp χʊɛχ saɪθ] but if I actually count something, it can change the world. pump often ends up losing the last p when confronted with anything voiced (Vowels, voiced consonants. EG Pum orennau] and a lot of times voiced consanants become voiceless and vise versa depending on the context (A good example is again Pump, which can also be bump or bum depending on words that precede it.) Now I'm pretty sure having a simple phonetic change of (If word encounters a voiced vowel before it, and it is not voiced, become voiced, unless voiced is not allowed otherwise) could be a thing, but I'm not sure how to do that. The rest of it I'm onte entirely sure because those rules can sometimes be very specific and a bit wonky.
The second question regarding spelling is as I've been trying to get this language to work so I can spam 'create language' over and over until I find something I like I'm having some troubles figuring out more complex orthography rules. Like, I want to make it so that /j/ is represented as an I when it encounters anything but a front unrounded high vowel (Es and Is and everything) in which case it should be a Y, but I also want it to occasionally also be a Y elsewhere. Similarly, I want /ʃ/ to just be a standard s when written in front of any high front vowels so something like siop would be [ʃiop] instead of spelling it shiop. But if it encounters a word like [ʃani] it would end up spelling its self like shani, but every time I try and do something like this it just prints the code out as my replacement.

It's not a Shaggy Dog Story. A similar example is from Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks:
"When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle's on a poodle and the poodle's eating noodles... ...they call this a muddle puddle tweedle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle.
From what I can remember, this type of joke is similar in that the "punchline" usually consists of consecutive alliteration or consanance/rhyming.

So I stumbled upon this subreddit a few days ago. You guys were like "Hey, some people do this," and I thought to myself, "Hey, I also do this now." So here I am with a very rough idea of what this language will be. I made a subreddit, but it only has the alphabet posted. So, I'm going to give you what I have now, and some feedback would be appreciated. So I'll start with the alphabet. It has eight vowels (apologies for tentative IPA):

Letter (Upper, lower)	Sound
A, a	/a/
E, e	/ε/
I, i	/ɪ/
O, o	/o/
U, u
Í, í	/i/
Ü, ü	/ʌ/
Æ, æ	/ai/

and 19 consanants:

Letter (Upper, lower)	Sound
X, x	/x/
C, c	/t͡ʃ/
Ć, ć	/ʃ/
B, b	/b/
D, d	/d/
F, f	/f/
N, n	/n/
M, m	/m/
K, k	/k/
J, j	/j/
V, v	/v/
P, p	/p/
R, r	/
S, s	/s/
L, l	/l/
T, t	/t/
G, g	/g/
H, h	/h/
Z, z	/z/

I also have some basic verbs down, with -ot, -ut, -at, and -ét as suffixes, similar to how Spanish has -ar, -er, and -ir verbs. There are also 8 conjugations. I'll give the forms and their corresponding conjugation with an example verb, falut (to be):
I (Eo)- falu
You (Co)- falux
We (Ecü)- falud
He/She (æn/æne)- falun
It (re)- faluk
You (pl.) (cü)- falur
They (people) (ænü)- faluv
They (things) (reü)- falul
These are present-tense only, as I haven't figured out the past or present tense conjugations yet, so those are I am, you are, we are, he/she/it is, you guys are, and they are.
I have some nouns, which will be capitalized (along with any adjectives that go with them), and a few adverbs, but I'm shaky on those and don't really want to show those until they're a bit more fleshed out. But I'll probably show them later anyway.
I also have four articles, two definite articles (lon, lonü), and two indefinite articles (ic, icü) whose use depends on whether the noun is singular or plural.
Speaking of plurals, I think I have an okay-ish system for them. For examples, I will use the basic sentence, "Lon Æ-Min xikun," (the boy runs). If I want to make it "the boys run," it would become "Lonü Æ-Minü xikuv." Basically, if there is an adjective attached to a noun (Æ-Min is literally "small man"), the adjective becomes plural and the base noun remains the same. To contrast, "the men run" would translate to "Lonü Æü xikuv," since "man" has no adjective attached.
Now onto adverbs. Since I had adjectives go after the noun, I decided that adverbs would go before the verb, because fuck you I feel like it. So, if I wanted to say "The boy runs quickly," It would become "Lon Æ-Min aleg-xikun." However, that's not the part I'm shaky on. I'll show you what it is by example. If I wanted to say "The boy runs slowly," it would be "Lon Æ-Min ne'aleg-xikun," because I actually only have one form of every adverb, and essentially a "not" form of it, but I'm not sure that would work. If not, I'm also considering having a system where there would be a translation for "quickly" and "slowly," but also one for "not quickly" and "not slowly," the one you use depending on what you want to put emphasis on.
This is pretty much all I have so far, I've only been working on it for a couple days, maybe two or three hours total so far. Sorry if this is hard to read, if I notice anything later I'll try to fix it, or you can ask and I'll try to answer. I'm not the greatest at formatting. Feedback is appreciated
EDIT: We are
EDIT 2: Taken lots of suggestions, thanks! Still open to more, though. The subreddit alphabet post will need some editing