red lez

I was going to wait until I had the art finished for it to start promoting it publicly, but now's as good a time as any- the zine is done! It's available on itch.io here!

What you get for $10 USD:

• an explanation of the theory of language acquisition and principles of applying it
• summaries of a number of study methods based on language acquisition principles and a guide on creating your own
• an application section using the constructed language toki pona, including a couple (very) short stories and a dictionary
• an overview of basic linguistics useful for guiding language study, going from phonetics to semantics, with plain-English explanations of the relevant jargon- I went around and got feedback from a variety of people to make sure this was accessible to a wide audience

This thing is more like a small booklet than a zine- it's meant to be a pretty comprehensive intro into everything you might need to get started with learning languages, with names, terms, and links to useful supporting material that is out of the scope of the zine itself.

I'm using the sales from this zine to help with living expenses and transition costs (e.g. laser hair removal, voice training, etc.), so if you find this helpful, please share it around!

With the mass educational/informational stuff I'm writing, I try to manage accessibility, information density, and "sticking power" to optimize all of them at the same time. I'm not sticking to it 100% because the format doesn't allow for it, but I've taken a few key ideas from Pedagogy of the Oppressed and tried to adapt them to short-term booklets/zines.

• Don't act as a Holder of Knowledge™ depositing said knowledge into an Empty Brain
• Don't assume that people can't figure out complicated jargon where it counts- your audience is people with brains just as neuroplastic as yours
• At the same time, don't just hurl academic language at them with no context, or else you're just cutting them off from gaining knowledge- if you can't understand most of the key words, you can't understand the new insights
• Do treat your writing as a sort of conversation, explain terms in plain English and provide multiple angles, and allow the readers to analyze things themselves a bit

As I find my writing style while trying to keep to these principles, I'm realizing it's kind of like my favorite professors from college. Just the right amount of info, not really lecturing, but not trying to be too friendly, either, and not a whole lot of ego behind it. It might be kind of dry but it's almost satisfying in its dryness, like coming from Maryland to California during the summer.