It is not unusual to get a partnership recognized just for this reason. (I honestly have a very down to earth view on marriage, so I’m all for getting married for the papers)

We only had to deal with three EU countries and it was already messy. We are married, but kept separate family names. One of the three countries did not allow the kids to have the mother’s family name (yeah equality…/s), so we had to go with the father’s family name.

I assume you already checked your situation, but few countries accept “the right of land”, aka citizenship upon birth in that country, so we didn’t have to deal too much with the country with were in. Except for filling in the birth certificate that generates all other documents.

Personally, it feels like sooner or later something is going to majorly fuck up, but it hasn’t yet.

In my country of origin, only your first name is your legal name. You can have middle names on your birth certificate but they don’t get put on any other ID document. I honestly discovered I had them when moving to a new country. So now I have an ID and passport as <First name> <Family name> but my education papers and marriage certificate are <First name> <Middle name> <Family name>. Somehow nobody yet called me a scam.

To avoid this problem, my kid has <2 First names> <Family name>. That is legal in my country of origin and where they were born… but I later learned not in my partner’s country, so my kid has two passports, one with <2 First names> <Family name>, one with <First name> <Middle> <Family>.

Anecdote: a Mexican guy I knew went to the US and got a visa. Went back to Mexico then back to the US again with a new visa. Apparently, between the two visas the naming conventions changed, and his US legal name got scrambled. It was a mess to prove he was still the same person… and he never really understood why it happened.

And it’s so rewarding to make something long lasting!

What does voluntary surveillance mean in this context ?

This is incredibly pretty! Thanks for sharing!

Once I build a cardboard key holder with the same thought in mind, I spend a couple of hours on it. Still remember its existence only once a week.

Misplacing my house keys. I always swear I will start putting them “always in the same place”, but i never do, and it’s been now some decades I have my own house keys, that I scramble to find them every time I get out the door.

I’m okay breaking the rules if that’s how the language is usually spoken, but It’s still interested in learning the rule

I think the whole premise of Duolingo that learning a language means translating to and from it is bonkers. I know multiple languages at various levels, and every time to speak I create my sentences in the target language directly. Translating is a totally different skill set

There are some limitations though: often native speakers don’t have a deep understanding of the grammar rules they use, because they use them intuitively. So sometimes learning this way makes it a bit foggy. I often use this technique when I’m already familiar with the target language, At a basic level.