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

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

Postby Ezra » Sat Oct 03, 2020 10:26 am

cjareck wrote:By the way using affixes you may describe almost everything using "pieprzyć" or "pierdolić"


In Russian we also have three-four roots, using which in conjuction with affixes, it is possible to describe almost anything. One might build a whole existentialist metaphysics even :).
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Re: Tea with Tarvos - Linguavaganza (ES, EUS, FIN and many more)! 2020s log

Postby tarvos » Thu Oct 08, 2020 8:56 pm

I finished the whole second season of Ultraviolet, and my girlfriend and I have decided to try and start to just speak Finnish together. I hope that that works because my Finnish isn't exactly magnificent. But we will manage somehow.

I have started watching Sorjonen to this end. The series is slow, but Finnish is important...

I haven't done that much though because I have a headache and I'm getting tested for corona tomorrow. (I don't think I have it but anyway)
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Re: Tea with Tarvos - Linguavaganza (ES, EUS, FIN and many more)! 2020s log

Postby tarvos » Thu Oct 15, 2020 10:14 am

You know you're an interpreter when...

You do sight translating exercises for fun during your Swedish classes and you remember how difficult you found those (and also how much your teacher says you're doing great because of the many good expressions you use).

In the end, I need to keep doing this anyway, and sight translating is always a good exercise for an interpreter. Furthermore, I might need Swedish in the future (I do plan on not staying here and Swedish is official in Finland, and my Swedish outstrips my Finnish something ridiculous).

(I actually do a lot of sight translating in my brain - I can't switch the interpreter brain off anymore! I anticipate what people say and how they will say it, and mentally I am always trying to find the translation to something to another language when doing something - and that language isn't necessarily Dutch, hehe...)
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Tristano
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Re: Tea with Tarvos - Linguavaganza (ES, EUS, FIN and many more)! 2020s log

Postby Tristano » Thu Oct 15, 2020 10:27 am

what is sight translation?
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tarvos
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Re: Tea with Tarvos - Linguavaganza (ES, EUS, FIN and many more)! 2020s log

Postby tarvos » Thu Oct 15, 2020 1:00 pm

https://translationexcellence.com/sight ... pros-cons/

You interpret a text out loud right as you read it. Very demanding exercise
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Re: Tea with Tarvos - Linguavaganza (ES, EUS, FIN and many more)! 2020s log

Postby Tristano » Fri Oct 16, 2020 1:23 pm

It looks indeed exhausting and very difficult to do efficiently.
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Re: Tea with Tarvos - Linguavaganza (ES, EUS, FIN and many more)! 2020s log

Postby tarvos » Tue Oct 27, 2020 9:31 am

Haven't posted here for a while, I've been busy so I would rather keep busy than post super-long updates here, but I did a few things:

- I watched a Taiwanese movie called Dear Ex (it's quite cute and indie, though not the happiest movie, about a son who gets caught up in the inheritance war when his father dies and leaves the inheritance to his gay lover rather than his ex-wife)

- I watched a Taiwanese crime series that was so weird I think I forgot the name on purpose

- I started watching Las Chicas del Cable, which I really like, and it takes three episodes for two women to kiss so I'm hooked

- I have finally nearly finished Barbara W. Tuchman's the Guns of August (which is a very slow read), which is about the outbreak of WW1 - very interesting to see how that panned out, although I get the feeling that whole war could have been prevented if people weren't the complete idiots that they were back in the day (man was there some bad decision-making going on)

- I have started reading an Aapinen in Finnish (those are basically children's books designed to teach children to read in Finnish). Mine's very old, from the 50s, and you can tell (even though the actual printing is a 2014 version). It still mentions Christmas prayers for children and talks about radio and going to work in a factory. However the special part about this is is that I am not reading it alone - I am reading it to my girlfriend who seems to enjoy me reading her bedtime stories in Finnish. She especially liked Pöllö ja poikaset (The owl and the baby owls). (If anyone is a fly on the wall during these sessions, you would just laugh at the whole spectacle. Man are we a pair of cheesy lesbians... )

I should watch more Sorjonen too, I finished the first season but there are two more. Oh, and I've got the idea I want to get my hands on some Anna-Lena Laurén books (she is a Finland Swedish writer who mostly writes about Russia). One of my English students, who is a Russian historian and political scientist, recommended this author to me. I read Swedish so that should be fun.
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Re: Tea with Tarvos - Linguavaganza (ES, EUS, FIN and many more)! 2020s log

Postby tarvos » Wed Nov 04, 2020 1:02 pm

I haven't done that much studying over the past week (and the elections across the pond worry me inordinately, though I am not a US citizen thankfully and I can't vote there) but I did do a few Polish lessons on iTalki. The result: I understand Polish fairly well and can also speak it to an extent. The real thing that causes trouble is the enormous interference from my other Slavic languages, which gives an odd effect: it's not the actual phonemes so much as the intonation and the vocabulary choice that make my Polish have that characteristic foreign lilt.

In the next class, my teacher is going to take notes, and we are going to work on the pronunciation.

Here's what I expect to happen:

- The intonation is very Czech. For some reason I have a tendency to play with the Polish vowel sounds, and draw them out or shorten them when they should be medium length. I may misplace stress too, but I think that is actually less what happens than simply butchering the actual vowel quality. Czech has a tendency to stress the first syllable (with secondary stress on the third), and sometimes stress in Czech gets weird because of the long vowels (it feels like other syllables are stressed just because the vowel is long, when in fact the stress does NOT fall on that syllable). Because I am so used to that Czech pattern, switching to the Polish pattern is hard. It cost me a lot of time to adapt to the Czech pattern, I do remember that. And I wouldn't say I get the Czech one spot on, either - I don't - but in general I have the flow down. I miss that flow in Polish. The reason is that I have a LOT more experience listening to Czech and visiting that country (and some experience listening to Slovak as well).

- I mess up some endings. I'm not up to speed on some of the noun declensions yet, and even though I get the general idea (knowing one Slavic language means you know all of them structurally really, with the exception of whatever is going on in some corners of the Balkans), I miss more of those than I would like to. Honestly, that's kind of an eternal battleground when you don't speak a Slavic language (or one with cases) natively, so I am not too fussed about this, but it's annoying since in Russian I get them right more often than not (I'd say 95% of the time). But of course I speak WAY better Russian than I do Polish.

- Word choice is odd. I need to focus on that, at times I insert a Russian word (more likely) or a Czech word (occasionally) and once I make an effort to use the Polish word then it sounds more natural.

What is the conclusion, then?

All in all, my Polish is acceptable and completely comprehensible, apart from the odd word. A more educated Pole would likely be able to pick up even the odd divergence if they are familiar with some of the neigbhouring languages and countries. I can keep up my end of the conversation and understand the majority of what is said to me as well, bar the odd phrasing, a false friend, or some new vocabulary item that makes my ears prick up.

Does that mean my Polish is perfect? No, not by a long shot, and there is no reason to pretend that is the case either. But I'm not aiming for professional interpreting skills in Polish, I just want to be able to talk to my Polish friends and not get totally lost when I'm with them socially. Do I "speak Polish"? There are too many diverging standards for me to be able to judge that, but all in all by most practical standards most people would say "yes, you speak Polish". Is there going to be some keyboard warrior that disagrees? Yes. Have at me, then. Tear my Polish apart.

Also, a funny story: my teacher and her sister share the same first names with me. As in, my teacher's first name matches my second name, and her sister's is the same as mine. Coincidence? Certainly, but it's hilarious. My first name is actually pretty common in Poland, so my Polish friends actually just use the regular Polish diminutives when they address me.

Oh, and if anyone of you is into the whole name day thing, apparently, next Monday is my name day in Poland. So if you would like to do something with that, have at it. (I don't care, I'm not Catholic).
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Re: Tea with Tarvos - Linguavaganza (ES, EUS, FIN and many more)! 2020s log

Postby Cavesa » Wed Nov 04, 2020 5:06 pm

Your Polish adventure sounds fun!

tarvos wrote:Oh, and if anyone of you is into the whole name day thing, apparently, next Monday is my name day in Poland. So if you would like to do something with that, have at it. (I don't care, I'm not Catholic).


Why are people so confused by the name days tradition? The name days have very little to with religion nowadays. We were talking about it just a few weeks ago with colleagues here in France (on my name day). It is sometimes sad, how much many of them rely on dumb prejudices the Czech Republic=eastern europe=dumb country living in the middle ages=must be very religious. One was like "well, I guess the name days depend a lot on the individual Saint's popularity in your country, no?" :-D :-D :-D

The Poles are much more religious, the Czechs are one of the most atheist countries on Earth. No Saint is popular among the general popularion in the Czech Republic, most people might remember Virgin Mary as the only Saint they could think of, that's it. Perhaps St.Václav as a historical figure. Atheists and christians alike can celebrate the name day, the intensity depends on each family's tradition (in most, it is a much smaller deal than your aniversary, but a nice opportunity to gather. at least under normal circumstances). From what I've learnt from my contacts with the Poles, the name days in Poland are not a privilege of the religious people either :-)

The tradition of the name days has survived this evolution and stayed in both countries. Celebrating your name day has nothing to do with religion, unless you want it to. Anybody congratulating you is much more probably acting like "hey, I know someone with this name, so I should profit from being reminded by the calender and show them I care about them!", than like "hey, I should remind this atheist that they are named after a Saint!". :-D It's an opportunity to congratulate you once a year for people who care at least a bit, but have no clue about your anniversary :-)
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Re: Tea with Tarvos - Linguavaganza (ES, EUS, FIN and many more)! 2020s log

Postby cjareck » Wed Nov 04, 2020 6:59 pm

My first name is Slavic - "Jarosław" and it has its name day (even two, as far as I remember), but there is no Catholic saint with that name. That's why when I was baptized my mother gave me a second name that exists only in church papers, so I may have a saint as a patron.
Name day not only become secular but also lost a lot of meaning. I remember that in generation of my parents (my mother is now 80, my father would be 89) it was a common custom to celebrate it. I don't celebrate and I don't know any of my friends to do it.
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