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!

So, I'm actually making good progress on the the text of this one zine, and I'm starting to consider what I might do for actually selling it. I'm thinking I'll just throw it on itch.io and promote that around, and maybe have a few versions. Two digital versions, one text-only like a booklet, another with text and art for a bit more, and finally a printed copy of it (with the digital file as well) since I have the equipment to print it out myself.

Anyone who sees this have any thoughts about it?

So, I previously learned a bit of toki pona in order to use it in a demonstration on language learning. For those unfamiliar, toki pona is a constructed language with only 120 base words, designed to be simple, and each word is very broad in meaning. I didn't really do a whole lot with toki pona after the demonstration, but I did have the books lying around and every once in awhile checked the Discord for fun. But then I learned about the Swadesh 207 list and got a great (terrible) idea:

What if I made a similar list where you translate all the base words in toki pona into a target language, covering the different senses of each word and different parts of speech?

I'm finally starting to get settled into my new place (still moving in, just not as frantically trying to get the essentials covered) and I think I'll be able to get back into my language learning schedule pretty soon!

I'm hoping to make 2023 the year I actually get fluent with at least one other language- I've got a couple candidates (maybe Irish but that's a stretch). It'll be good to have that experience under my belt for the future.

I could also revisit Toki Pona for a bit for fun, maybe learn one of the writing systems for it, or use it as a bridge to learning other scripts (since it can be written in so many).