Tea with Tarvos - Linguavaganza (ES, EUS, FIN and many more)! 2020s log

[tarvos]

Haven't written here in a long time, but I'm basically going further down the road I've already gone. Speaking Finnish here and there. I've improved my Polish sufficiently. I read Unterleuten in German (good book).

I ordered part three of the Hunger Games in Chinese (still not read that), and after that I will probably try to read an original book in Chinese.

By the way, I took one short Chinese class, and spoken the teacher said I am close to HSK-5, but in writing I am far from that level... more like HSK 3-4. So I will just have to focus on my reading and writing.

[tarvos]

2020 was a garbage year and doesn't deserve my regular summary. I got better at Finnish which is good. I graduated which is good, so my Spanish is good.

Other than that, my review of 2020 is "bugger off, we'll do better next year."

With more Finnish. And Chinese. And whatever else. Keep following and posting in this log. I know I'm a bit dead, but there hasn't been much to report. Maybe there will be once I feel like writing or when travel starts up again. I'm lazy

[tarvos]

Holy empty log cow!

Ok, so I have not been that active here, and for good reason - I haven't done much. With all the lockdowns and COVID and whatever, I've been busy doing other things and I haven't felt the need to write here. I'm just checking in to let you know that I am fine, alive, and still busy with languages - I had some interpreting to do the other week and I continuously use my other languages - especially Spanish, Russian and Finnish, but I'm not doing that much.

Ok, I started a poetry course entirely in Spanish. And read books.

But it's basically the usual stuff, and there isn't much here that is really new. I've rekindled my Korean.

Basically, I don't really feel like posting updates about my learning exploits here on a weekly basis anymore, but if you want to ask me questions or if you want to turn this log into a "Ask Tarvos Anything" kind of thread, this is the place to do all that.

[Iversen]

OK weekly entries may be too much, but I hope to see you return now and then to write about your latest activities.

[tarvos]

A large update! Yay!

Ok, so I've been absent here for months, mostly because I don't have that much to post about - I'm not interested in the age-old chestnuts about fluency and "who has the bigger polyglot genitalia" style arguments or how Duolingo is terrible (it's not great, but it is what it is). But I do have news to report to you this time.

First off, I've started my own one-woman-show as an interpreter, and this takes up a lot of my time. I'm a Spanish interpreter as you all know, and the kind of work I do is less conference interpreting, and more consecutive interpreting or conversation interpreting - things I do mostly include interpreting for the police, the prison system, the refugee centres, social services, and occasionally healthcare or notary assignments. The latter ones earn good money so they're the nicest to do. I've also got a thing where I help an NGO (I did an internship with them before). This means I speak loads of Spanish on a weekly basis, so I keep that up.

I should also mention that this year I finally managed to visit Finland (KIVA) and I've practiced my Finnish. It's not worth much, but it gets basic conversations done. (If someone sends me an official message I'll reply in Swedish though, pakkaruotsi be damned). My girlfriend is Finnish, and in September I'll be in Finland for three weeks this time. So there's a lot of Finnish on the horizon, which makes me a very happy camper. Or a leppäkerttu (leppis for short), which is what my girlfriend calls me. (That means ladybug by the way).

I'm also back to studying some Korean and maintaining that, just for the funsies of it. I'm no great shakes at this language, but I have an IDEA of what is going on in it at least and at some point I want to go back to Asia.

Now I should add that my girlfriend isn't exactly a polyglot, but she's got some interesting language projects of her own: she wants to learn Finnish sign language at some point. Normally we communicate in English (her English is quite good), but we do add some Finnish or Dutch here and there and even the occasional Swedish (which she also speaks to an extent and actually liked at school, pakkaruotsi be damned once again). She's also very interested in Japanese and has studied French, German and Spanish before, so she's pretty talented too. The plan is for us to go to Spain in winter (in summer, with climate change looming over our heads, seems like a suicide mission, especially since we want to visit Cádiz, which is in the south). Japan is also a future destination for us, since we both like Japanese culture.

Apart from this, I mostly spend my time doing other things. I'm still hugely sick (chronic illness will do that), but we find a way to live.

Other languages are kind of on the back burner. Russian turns up every now and again (don't forget, it's still part of my work), and I do use French and German once every so often, or watch shows in some foreign language.

On the Spanish front there's also other news. I enrolled in a poetry course in the spring, which I completed. The interesting thing is not just the course itself but the fact that we're compiling an anthology of the poems of the students, which should see the light in the fall (aiming for a September release date I think), but I will keep you posted nearer the date. A title for the anthology has already been decided, we have a cover, there's just some editing and things to do. It'll be published through the creative writing school I attended, and will contain a prologue from my teacher (a published poet), and the owners of the school (one of which is a published fantasy author) will also be promoting it! I'll be in that anthology and represented as the only non-native in the course, and I will thus be a published poet in the Castillian tongue!

Beyond that I've broadened my horizons to some political activities (I won't go into them here much, but let's just say I'm an active member of a political party) and there's some of that going on as well.

Oh, and both my dentist (who is Spanish) and my oral hygienist speak Spanish. So actually, all my dentist's appointments are actually conducted in Spanish.

Yeah.

[DaveAgain]

Ok, so I've been absent here for months

Congratulations on not being dead Tarvos!

[Dagane]

¡Enhorabuena por el trabajo! Se te ha echado de menos por aquí (aunque, en realidad, yo también he pasado unos mesecillos ausente).

Llevo mucho tiempo tratando de visitar Cádiz pero oye, que aún no hay manera. En fin, un día de éstos.

Lo del curso de poesía suena muy interesante. Ya sabes que escribo. Justamente hoy he recibido un libro en el cual me han publicado un relato...; pero, por el momento, esto es la excepción y ni mucho menos la norma. En abril me presenté a un examem de alemán y desde entonces he tomado la escritura como prioridad. Estoy preparando un par de poemarios y presentándome a concursos, aunque de momento sin suerte.

Por cierto, unos amigos me han regalado un libro que quizá conozcas, "An Apartment in Uranus" de Paul. B. Preciado. Todavía no lo he leído pero, si de hecho lo conoces, ¿merece la pena?

Editado: Escribí Venus en lugar de Uranus. Imaginé que quizá lo conocías por temática.

[tarvos]

¡Enhorabuena por el trabajo! Se te ha echado de menos por aquí (aunque, en realidad, yo también he pasado unos mesecillos ausente).

Llevo mucho tiempo tratando de visitar Cádiz pero oye, que aún no hay manera. En fin, un día de éstos.

Lo del curso de poesía suena muy interesante. Ya sabes que escribo. Justamente hoy he recibido un libro en el cual me han publicado un relato...; pero, por el momento, esto es la excepción y ni mucho menos la norma. En abril me presenté a un examem de alemán y desde entonces he tomado la escritura como prioridad. Estoy preparando un par de poemarios y presentándome a concursos, aunque de momento sin suerte.

Por cierto, unos amigos me han regalado un libro que quizá conozcas, "An Apartment in Venus" de Paul. B. Preciado. Todavía no lo he leído pero, si de hecho lo conoces, ¿merece la pena?

Desconozco el libro.

Si, estoy pensando en hacer salir un poemario bilingüe. Pero me da miedo, mucho miedo, que no te lo crees...

[tarvos]

I'm packing my bags right now to go to Finland (again), because I've been travelling back and forth a few times (and so has my girlfriend, she's been here too). In the future we'll do more of it, but in the long term the plan is that she moves in with me here in the Netherlands so that we can just live together as a couple (that's what we want). She'll have to learn Dutch... but you should all know that future Mrs Tarvos is very good at languages, just like her girlfriend. And I'm still working on my suomi.

However, due to that, due to an upcoming surgery that will take quite some recovery (on the order of several weeks), and because of my blooming language business, it means that this thread has not been as active as I would like. I probably won't post that much until the new year either because of the surgery. Yeah. Not so much study for poor old Tarvos, I'm afraid.

On a positive note, my poetry has been published in a poetry compilation of my poetry course and is available to download here for free: Disculpa la rima interna. My poetry is in Spanish, and if you're wondering - there's more on the way... but I will tell you all about that later, when I can do that.

In the New Year, Cádiz is still on the cards, and perhaps some other trips...probably to Spain and Finland as well.

So yeah. There's your update. Spanish, Finnish, and fiddling around with other languages. It's the life of an interpreter/polygl00t.

[SCMT]

On a positive note, my poetry has been published in a poetry compilation of my poetry course and is available to download here for free: Disculpa la rima interna. My poetry is in Spanish, and if you're wondering - there's more on the way... but I will tell you all about that later, when I can do that.

Thank you for this. It is very good, and very brave of you to publish and link it here; I cannot imagine writing poetry in a language other than my native. Reading your section of poetry is the most enjoyable Spanish practice I have had in a while, and I look forward to the "more on the way."