For those of you that like everything neatly organised, here’s links to EVERY ONE of my first 150how to THINK when you draw TUTORIALS, in ALPHABETICAL ORDER for#SkillUpSunday!Enjoy, link, pin, share! Cheers!
the Triplets of Bellevilleis about an elderly woman searching for her son who was kidnapped in the middle of a Tour de France race. It’s largely free of dialogue, but the sound effects and such are wonderful. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature—it lost to Finding Nemo.
A Cat in Parisis about a young girl and her cat who discover mysteries in the course of one night. It was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, but it lost to Rango.
Persepolisis based on an autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about her early life in Iran. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, but it lost to Ratatouille.
the Illusionist is about an aging magician and an imaginative young girl who form a father/daughter relationship. It was also nominated for a Best Animation Oscar, but lost to Toy Story 3.
The Rabbi’s Catis a story about a cat who swallows a parrot and gains the ability to speak like a human. It is set in 1920’s Algeria.
Ernest & Celestineis the adorable story about a big bear and a little mouse who forge an unlikely friendship. It was also nominated for an Oscar in Best Animated Picture, but lost to Frozen.
Kirikou and the Sorceressis a story inspired by West African folklore that tells the story of Kirikou, a boy who was born with the ability to walk and talk, who saves his people from an evil witch. The film was popular enough to spawn sequels and a stage adaptation.
A Monster in Parisis a 3D animated musical film that is reaaaaalllly loosely based on the Phantom of the Opera. It’s set in 1910 and is about, surprisingly, a monster that lives in Paris, and his love for a young singer.
The King and the Mockingbirdis an 80’s film about a cruel king titled Charles V + III = VIII + VIII = XVI, who is obsessed with a young shepherdess, and whose attempts to capture the young girl are thwarted by a mockingbird whose wife the King had previously killed.
Those are probably the most famous of the feature length animated films.
But the animated short films are just as glorious. Here’s a compilation of a bunch of short films and I can link you to others as well.
Sorry for the long answer but I just really love French animation.
Reblogging over here. French animation tends to do better with diversity than Disney does, hahaha.
I should add “Le Tableau” which is really beautiful, especially if you love art. This movie is highly poetic !
“A château, flowering gardens, a threatening forest, here is what, for mysterious reasons, a Painter has left incomplete. Three kinds of characters live in this painting: the Toupins, who are entirely painted, the Pafinis, who lack a few colors, and the Reufs, who are only sketches. Considering themselves superior, the Toupins take over power, chase the Pafinis from the château, and enslave the Reufs. Convinced that only the Painter can restore harmony by finishing the painting, Ramo, Lola, and Plume decided to go looking for him. Throughout the adventure, questions will follow one after the other: What has become of the Painter? Why did he abandon them? Why did he begin destroying some of his paintings? Will they one day know the Painter’s secret?”
I would highly recommend Ernest & Celestine as the animation is beautiful, the characters are really moving and the story conveys a great message about love, friendship and oppression.
Another thing : have you seen how these amazing movies lost to american big productions ?
Don’t forget about Kirikou et la Sorcière.
They didn’t forget! Kirikou and the Sorceress, up there.
May I suggest Dragon Huntersfor myself? This 2008 feature-length film is based on the 2004-2005 cartoon Chasseurs de dragons, by the same makers (available fully online, by the way). The music, by Klaus Badelt, is hypnotic. The world is beautiful and strange, the characters lovable… and the dragons, really good.
A young russian girl goes for a trip to the North Pole to find the boat that her grandfather, a famous explorer, used for his last adventure during which he disappeared… Visually stunning, and very cool story and characters.
Avril et le Monde Truqué / April and the Twisted World
The story is set in a world where science never went further than steam and coal, since it’s been years that all scientists have mysteriously disappeared. April is the daughter of two scientists who disappeared when she was a child. As an adult, April too turns to science in secret, and will discover the reason why scientists have been disappearing all this time. Humour, atmosphere, mystery… And based on the graphic style of veteran legend comic book artist Jacques Tardi!
Aya de Yopougon / Aya of Yop City
The everyday life of Aya, a young woman who lives in Ivory Coast at the end of the 70s. Very nice mood and humour!
Adama
A young african boy goes after his older brother who left to fight for France in the war. This will lead him for a whole trip to Paris and beyond. I mainly like it for the graphic style. An interesting look for a 3D movie since they used animated textures.
Astérix: le domaine des Dieux / Astérix: the mansion of Gods
By far my favorite movie adaptation from the Astérix comic books series. This one revolves around an ingenous plan set by Caesar. He builts fancy appartements for rich romans near the Gaulish village, hoping that the Gauls wont attack civilians but will sitll get annoyed enough by the roman population to want to leave their village… and the plan works way too well.
Lascars
How 2 guys from a popular neighboorhood of Paris spend their holidays after being robbed of their trip to a paradise location. One of them tries to borrow money from a local criminal, and the other one finds a job in a rich family.
Very funny, but very not for children as well (drugs, violence, swear words, and sex!)
Le Magasin des Suicides / The Suicide Shop
The Tuvache are a really rich family in a town where nobody is happy to live. They made fortune in selling suicide articles. Unfortunately for them, their youngest son is a really nice, happy little fellow who wants to make people’s lives better… the first half is really worth watching, for the black sense of humour and originality.
Dofus, Livre 1: Julith / Dofus , First Book: Julith
For all you Ankama / Dofus / Wakfu fans! And for the others as well, since it’s not required to already know the Wafu universe to understand the movie. Follow the adventures of Joris, a young orphan who lives in a wolrd where the Dofus are special magical dragon eggs that grant tremendous power to their owners. Extremely good animation and funny characters.
Le Château des Singes / A Monkey’s Tale
A movie by the same director who made Le Ableau, Jean-françois Laguionie. A tale about two populations of monkeys, one tribe that lives at the top of the trees, and one that lives on the ground. One day, a young monkey form the tribe of the top will go meet the tribe of the bottom, who seem to live in some medieval kind of way.
U
Now that is one weird movie. About a unicorn named U, who came to help a girl who is not happy with her parents cruelty. Bur that girl isnt very nice herself…
Now a last quick word about studio Folimage, which is the one that produced A Cat in Paris: most of their movies are must-see. Like, really. Just look at all these visuals!!!
Phantom Boy
La Prophétie des Grenouilles / Raining Cats and Frogs
Mia et le Migou / Mia and the Migoo
They also produce short movies that can be gorgeous. My favorite is Le Bisclavret!
i was asked to recommande french animated movies by a friend so here is the full list for everyone to enjoy (again)
ahhh thank you! <33
For stop motion fans, please also accept Ma vie de Courgette (AKA My Life as a Courgette/My life as Zuccini)
Seriously, this and Prophetie des Genouilles have some of THE BEST acting and vocal performances of animated children I have ever seen (in the original French language, naturally). Played with such emotion and realism without being pretentious.
Also if you like Asterix I heartily recommend Asterix and the Vikings
And Asterix in Britain (a personal fave ;D It’s so accurate!)
everyone talks about immersion – how important it is to surround yourself with your target language in order to learn effectively, and I agree that it’s a crucial point in making progress. the standard solutions are reading books, talking to people online, listening to music etc etc, which are all good recommendations and i encourage everyone to try them out! this list will include some more ways of immersion which i find to take very little effort, but which still have good effects.
1. blogs, facebook pages, apps
“reading articles” is common advice, but how often do you even read articles in your native language, much less your target one? In order to still increase exposure to your target language, like news sources in your TL on facebook so you see what they post (even if you don’t click on it), follow blogs that post in your TL, and download apps that will send you push notifications (newspapers, magazines, football, you name it). if you see something interesting, read it.
2. play words with friends and other word-based games
if your TL is one of these, you can play words with friends and expand your vocabulary in absolutely no time. it’s very difficult in the beginning (i even had trouble with english first), but it gets so much better so quickly! you’re also being matched with similar skill-levels, so it should still be fun, and you can play games in different languages simultaneously without having to change the settings. there are many word-based games out there (it has its own category in the app store), so try what you like best! 🙂
3. talk to siri/voice recognition technology
siri/whatever programme you have listens to short sentences, will provide you with a written and spoken answer, and won’t make fun of you for mistakes. It’s also great for practising smalltalk like “how’s the weather”.sSet your alarm or ask to have appointments added to your calendar.
4. talk to yourself
ever wanted to be on graham norton and tell everyone about the imaginary grammy/nobel prize/oscar you’ve won? or explain your grandma’s chocolate cake recipe on the great british bake off? or write a novel about your gap year backpacking experience? now’s your chance – find some time when you’re alone (or not, if you don’t mind others listening i guess), and start talking. have your own cooking show while you make lunch, make a commercial for your shampoo while you’re in the shower, reminisce about your (imaginary or real) life experience, but do it in your TL. you’ll learn vocabulary for things you actually care about and you’ll gradually lose the fear of speaking. plus, you’ll be super prepared for when graham norton really does invite you to his show.
5. the “how-would-i-say-this”-mentality
this may take a bit of time, but after a while it’s there and won’t go away again. you use your native language presumably every day, especially for mundane things like buying bread or asking where the bathroom is, or reading an ad on the bus. try to get used to translating those small sentences from your native language into your TL. you don’t have to put a lot of effort or time into this – just reminding your brain of your TL’s existence and trying to form simple sentences every day does loads for your progress. sometimes you might look a word up, sometimes you might paraphrase or simplify it, but every bit helps.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of a decision I made to help writers think differently about what they’re writing, to give them one more perspective in a vast sea of other advice- and perspective-givers, but you’ve shown that it wasn’t a waste of time. You’ve stuck with me, and let me share with you what I know; you’ve let me encourage you, and you’ve let me in on a very special part of yourself: your stories and your dreams. Thank you! To celebrate the milestone, here’s your annual round up of what we’ve accomplished this year.
We added post series on Creature Companions, Dialogue, Relationships, Space Building, and we’ve picked up the Magic Building series again to talk about practitioner tropes. Night of Asking and the Night of Musing events continued strong, and you all indulged me with the Title Stories meme. The gmail for one-on-one consultations still doles out advice to those in need of longer conversations; the NaNo Chatzy room returned; and you tolerated my 4th State of the Blog(ger) Address. Take a look down this year’s memory lane:
Linguasphere – Kind of like WALS, if I remember correctly, but not quite. (Note: The website is in French.)
GOLD – a unique listing of linguistic terms and definitions. Right now it appears to be having technical issues, but when it works it’s really great. Just click “View GOLD” at the top.
Many Languages (or General Resources)
This is a directory of apparently scanned PDFs of many, many, many books regarding various languages. There are grammars, dictionaries, and more for more than 25 languages.
Conjuguemos: An awesome website, Conjuguemos has verb and vocabulary activities in several (mostly Romance) languages.
Duolingo – don’t tell me you don’t know what this is.
Memrise – let me guess, you don’t know what this is either?
Quizlet – flash cards and accompanying games. There are also many apps that connect to Quizlet and provide Spaced Repetition or other activities with the cards.
Lang-8 – write in the language you’re learning, let others correct you. In turn, you correct posts in your native language.
LingQ links you (get it? LingQ, link you? HAHA) to native speakers around the world. You can join live conversations, get writing corrected, and so on and do the same for them.)
FluentU – a compilation of real world videos in your target language with interactive captions.
Babbel – another language learning resource with many languages available.
Ba Ba Dum – 1500 words, 11 languages, 5 games. Unique site.
Radiolingua – quick and easy sets of beginner’s lessons in many languages.
Busuu is yet another website for learning the basics of many languages. It also features video-chats with native speakers and many many units of grammar/vocab.
Omniglot – writing, writing, and more writing. Goes over the writing system and accompanying pronunciation of every language imaginable, including many conlangs and extinct languages. Truly amazing resource.
LanguageRealm has some good stuff for the languages that it features.
AncientScripts is another website for writing systems, but it is restricted to ancient scripts, many of which are for languages now out of use.
Transparent Language Blog is wonderful. The right side has a list of the languages for which they have any content posted – and for each language there is quite a bit.
SaySomethingIn… is most useful for Welsh but has a few other languages. It involves sessions of listening and repeating along with eventual reading and grammar.
Digital Dialects – games for learning basic vocabulary in lots and lots of languages.
LanguageReef – Indian languages. So many Indian languages.
200 Word Project – learn the basic vocabulary of six African languages by clicking and listening to native pronunciations.
Let’s not forget Wikipedia. Not only does the English version have something on just about any language imaginable, but the website has articles available in lots of languages. I like clicking the “Random article” button and reading whatever comes up.
AwesomeFrench is the greatest French Tumblr blog in the universe. She answers questions about culture and grammar, but don’t be one of those annoying people that asks homework questions or advice about how to turn on your French boyfriend or girlfriend.
Namasensei’s Japanese lessons on YouTube. Goes kind of slowly, and it’s unique because the guy doing the tutorials is usually fairly drunk when he records. But he is living in Japan and has some interesting advice as well as a good understanding of the language.
Japanese from Zero on YouTube – amazing collection of videos ranging from pure grammar lessons to questions and useful explanations
Tae Kim’s grammar guide is seriously one of the best resources out there. And it’s totally free. You can navigate the website, download a PDF for free, or buy a print version.
Just lots of good stuff here, including a nice list of important upper-level words.
One of many websites for learning kanji, Kanjidamage is interesting because the author has a good sense of humor and also explains a lot about the history of the Japanese writing system, so that you can understand it better.
Project Root List aims to list all of the roots and vowel combinations in the Quran. Since Arabic hasn’t changed much in that regard, it’s useful for modern Arabic, too.
A PDF of the book Arabic Verbs and Essentials of Grammar.
You can search the Quran in Classical Arabic here.
Classical Arabic: LearnArabicOnline.com. This is a fantastic resource in that it not only talks about reading and grammar, but also writing styles and eloquence in writing. It is strictly for Classical Arabic, however, not modern spoken or Modern Standard Arabic.
Hindi
Hindi script – really good animations of stroke order and how to write as well as providing instructions on writing.
Quillpad looks like a really great tool for typing in Hindi as well as other Indian languages. Simply type the English letters and the computer converts it. (Note: for beginners still trying to learn the script, learn the script and manually put the characters in. Force yourself to write the script to get yourself to think in that language!)
Learn Russian Language – another good website for grammar rules along with the alphabet, pronunciation, and a bit of culture.
100 Top Resources for Learning Russian according to some person. Actually a really good list, includes rough level at which you’ll find each resource useful and the list is broken down by category (textbooks, online, stuff, etc.).
Here is Beowulf in Old English. There’s also a link to a modern English translation just under the title of the page.
Korean
Set of graphics that are wonderful for explaining the Korean script.
Really great website for grammar, script, and vocab. Also offers many of the beginner’s lessons and some of the more advanced ones in Spanish and/or Russian, for you overachievers out there.
Estonian
Here is a nice PDF on some of the characteristics of the Estonian language.
Grammar. This page links to the intermediate stuff; you can go to the menu at the top, and the really basic stuff will be under Discover Estonia.
DW – German news website. Available in 30 languages, however.
Welsh
Lots of vocabulary. (Note: In my experience, this website has only been marginally useful because it doesn’t give gender, some of its nouns are plural when they should be singular, and so on.)
A long, detailed, well-explained resource from the BBC on Welsh grammar.
This is a really good video for listening to the clicks involved in Xhosa pronunciation, including the one that begins the language’s name. He has other lessons, as well.
Mandarin
Some themed vocabulary lists. Actually lots of them.
Here is a more or less miscellaneous collection of concepts and vocab about the Chinese language and culture.
MandarinMadeEZ – Some fun and simple YouTube lessons from Fiona Tian. She’s kind of awkward so if you’re looking for something really serious, don’t go here. Also, cats.
Native American Langauges
Here is an excellent resource for many Native American languages in general.
More links – only some of these are really good, but most of them are useful.
Cherokee language lessons. The link goes to the Cherokee syllabary and pronunciation. Also some readings available.
And finally, I recently started a resources tag (here) that I think I’ll just link to rather than trying to transfer all that stuff over to this post.
I apologize that some of these headings have only one or two resources for them… but remember that the “Many Languages” category can not only provide a lot of further resources and information for the languages listed here, but can also provide stuff for languages not mentioned here!
If you guys have more stuff you’d like me to add for any language, send it to me and I’ll check it out and maybe update this post 🙂
School’s tough, and when you’re getting hours of study and homework dumped on you every class, it’s easy to feel swamped, and it’s even worse when you feel like you’re not making progress anywhere else either. These things have seriously helped me with my mental and physical well-being, hopefully they can help you too!
1. Get the Forest App. It’s $3 on the app-store, and trust me its $3 well spent. i use this app pretty much whenever I shouldn’t be using my phone. in class, studying, working out, not only does it make sure i stay off my phone, it feels really good to look back on all the time I’ve spent focused throughout the week.
2. If you’re gonna waste time, do it properly. Limit the time you spend scrolling social media to 10 minutes. I can’t count how many times I’ve been on Instagram explore page and suddenly an hour has gone past. This makes you feel crap. If you’re gonna waste time, do it in a way that can be measured. watch a tv show, ted talk, or youtube. make a social media post. It’ll make you feel like you’re spending your time doing something and that’s good in it’s own way.
3. Clean your room. Feeling ridiculously overwhelmed? Clean your room. I don’t care how much work you need to do, or how soon it’s due. If you’re stressed you wont get anything worthwhile done. So clean your room, make your bed, vacuum the floor. It’ll calm you down and make you feel better about yourself. I promise.
4. Leave the junk food to the weekends. I know, everybody says it. But if you’re eating crap 24/7, it’s going to drag you down. I hate the idea of diets, they’re designed for failure and then you feel even worse, but trying to avoid junk from monday to friday helps a lot with your general perception of yourself.
5. Work out. Another cliche! But they’re cliche’s because they work. I don’t care how often you work out or how much you do, just make sure you do it regularly and do enough to feel tired but good about yourself after woulds. it makes a difference. trust me.
6. Do a skin care routine & use face masks If you dont have a skin care routine, you need one. Not a fancy one by any means (some of us are uni students, I know) just a cetaphill cleanser and moisturiser day and night (with any creams / other products you may use) does the trick. It helps maintain routine and feel refreshed. Facemasks will help you feel like a self care goddess, even if they’re $2.
7. Burn candles & paint your nails Get a few cheap candels (just make sure they wont give you a headache) and burn them whilst you listen to music and paint your nails, its incredibly relaxing and makes you feel like you’re really taking care of yourself.
8. Have a hobby Last one! Learn something completely outside of school. Cooking, art, writing, photography, even if you suck, find something you enjoy and do it, you need a break from everything around you.
These things have honestly helped turn my esteem and habits around these past years, it wont happen over night but just remembering to do these things every now and then will help you feel better, I promise.
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