Whew child, I have about 15 minutes before the strict public library security guard comes over and grunts something about it being time to go. I appreciate his naturally unpleasant demeanor for its ability to intimidate the lady with her wild bird on a wheelchair and the man that hasn’t taken a bath with half his life in a Ralphs plastic shopping bag.
These are the sites sights you see at an LA County Library. The lady with a living bird and…
“Start closing up, miss…” There he is.
Dang, fifteen minutes surely passed quickly.
Goodness, I should’ve had that lion’s mane and chaga mushroom latte with decaf coffee when I stopped at the Wellness Wheels LA food truck. And I knew better than to have cheese on my traditional French crepe. My stomach is swollen and there’s a heaviness in the center of my chest.
I’m so good at doing what’s bad for me.
“Let’s go, we’re wrapping up,” here goes that public library security guard again. Sir, we heard you 5 minutes ago, and we still have 10 minutes ‘til the hour. Dang. My guy is ready to go, and not just today, that’s him everyday. Let me get out of here.
“Hey, y’all, if you’re not checking out materials, please head downstairs,” one of the library clerks follows behind the security guard only two minutes after his last announcement.
Child, I may go to the Beverly Hills Public Library tomorrow — they do the little announcements over the intercom and that’s that.. baby, I can read the time.
Later, y’all.
[another day logging into the public library computer 15 minutes before systems close]
after saying “later, y’all”, I clicked enregistrer (save) and not enregistrer et publier (save and post), sooooo it’s two weeks later that this is actually going up, which almost made me click supprimer (trash), mais… what that lady say on that video I was listening to in the gym today?
Now, I’m quite a ways away from being fully reunited linguistically with my Louisiana French Creole roots, but whoever miss Haude Georgelin is, when she said that, I immediately understood and FELT IT as one foot stepped up after the next on the stairmaster.
“Quality over quantity” goes the old saying, but this French YouTube creator is saying thee exact opposite when it comes to launching a successful YouTube channel.
One day, I was saying something to one of my cousins down in Louisiana, Raven Raquel, and she called herself correcting me on a translation. Now, my other cousin, Randi Lynn, who continued living in Georgia since graduating from Kennesaw State University in 2020, studied French as her major, so I could’ve seen her having the nerve to challenge someone that actively takes adult French classes at the local Alliance Française. But Raven Raquel that has only ever done French “lessons” on Duolingo??? Girl, you’ve got to be kidding me.
Learning a language is less about exact translations. Learning a language is about meaning and comprehension. An exact translation from one language to another will not always produce what was meant in the original language, nor sometimes even what’s comprehensible in the next. An expert language translator takes culture, nuance, and connotation, on top of denotation, in one language and brings it to words factoring in all of that again in the other language.
In English language culture, we might refer to something being agreeable to us as working; where in French language culture, we might refer to something being agreeable to us as walking. Who knows, in some other language culture, when something is good or functioning, they may refer to it as sailing.
English: Yes, that works.
Français: Oui, ça marche.
Oui = yes.
Ça = that
Marche = walks.
If translated literally (exactly), ça marche would be that walks, but we know in American English language culture, we don’t say no got damn “that walks”!
There are many of these instances when translating from one language to another language.
This is a very basic example. It was the first to come to my mind. Translation software even gets this particular word concept because it’s so common, but there’s plenty that a robot will never get. The human element can never be erased and replaced.
Anyway, my robot-a** cousin Raven Raquel didn’t get whatever it was that I was saying and was set on telling me how she remembers specifically what Duolingo said was the English word for that French word. She really went back and forth with me because she knew she was right. And, she was. She was right that yadda yadda translates to yadda yadda. However, it was causing her to miss the overall context and not understand what I was saying.
All of that to say, don’t use translation features when learning a language, and for daaaamn sure, don’t use it to come in my comments or messages to say, “well, I checked and Google translate says what the girl on the video actually said was…”.
Let your eyes glide over it and continue reading the English words that you do understand.
Don’t tell me “that doesn’t translate to quantity over quality.” DUH! Once again, when it comes to language comprehension, it’s not about exact translations; it’s about understanding meaning. I don’t know why I done got ticked off in advance, in anticipation of someone trying it. El oh el.
Now, if you are a native French speaker, or a committed French language learner, that went to watch the entire YouTube video, Je t’explique comment j’ai gagné 10 000 euros sur YouTube en 2025, and you have thoughts, or interpreted this piece of advice with differents words, whether it be in French or English, PLEASE SHARE! I absolutely adore hearing from folks who know what they’re talkin’bout.
Girl, now how did we get here? I only clicked modifier to open up this blog draft, add a title and the other lil’ behind-the-scenes SEO details, then publish it. Yet, I’ve written more in the closing note than was the original blog post.
I suppose it wasn’t even a post. Not yet, anyway. I’d opened up a blog draft in the library that day, who knows what I was about to say, to write something, but BOOM! Closing time. Whoah. Then, I didn’t want to throw it away because even though it wasn’t even a fully written out blog post yet on any given topic, I didn’t even have time to get to (open, introduce) what I would’ve been getting to, it could still serve as proof that I attempted to work on my blog today.
I wrote today.
I wrote that day.
Even if only 5 sentences that barely string together to form a coherent thought, I wrote today. Writers write.
When someone posts on Substack, do Substack users call it a blog or blog posts? Is Substack even a blogging platform? That’s how it strikes me. Well, whatever Substack is, is it around to stay for a while? If so, while I’m all blog this, blog that, I need to work in whatever trending word they’re using for user content over there on Substack. Let me get some of that good ol’ search engine optimization. Let the algorithm and web crawlers see that what’s going on over there on Substack — blogging, newsletters, social posts — is going on in my own way right here on AROUNDwithTK. Mm hm.
Okay, it’s 5 minutes after ten o’clock at night and I want to get up and go to the gym first thing in the morning. (I think I’ve said that about every morning for the past two weeks and didn’t go not a once).
Ohhhhhhh, that’s why I navigated to Squarespace in the first place. Wait, why did I choose Squarespace when I first decided to build a blog website, what, five years ago? I searched, “do they call Substack posts blogs or blog posts?” and the Recherches associées listed are: Substack, WordPress, WordPress[dot]com, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr. [stale face]
Was Squarespace never the optimal web hosting site for bloggers, writers, and content creators? I must’ve had a very specific reason. I’ll come across it in a notebook one day, how I do other random forgotten thoughts from years past. It could’ve been as simple as preferring the aesthetics or user interface of Squarespace, orrrrrrr the best deal (financially) at the time.
Whatever. Now, it’s fifteen after the hour.
Oh, the YouTube Short comment section where I left an entire paragraph…
A video appeared on my suggestions of a man in an empty apartment with words on the screen indicating that he’d moved in 8 months ago. I won’t tell the whole story here, as my mind has already jumped topics enough on this one page, so fast forward, I ended up leaving a long a** comment and I said, shoot, this could be a whole blog post. Let me go write (or start writing, at this point) that one.
Later, y’all. Fr this time.