Tea With Tarvos - Tarvos' Log 2019

[Theodisce]

Starting with Czech. I'm going to read a Czech thriller called Smrtící Odkaz. (I think that translates to Death Sentence).

I would translate it as Deadly Link, I guess. Death sentence would be more like Rozsudek smrti. And if I could have my biased vote, I would chose Polish, although it will be probably better for you to concentrate on Korean instead.

[vonPeterhof]

My biased vote would be for Japanese, but Korean's close enough. Hopefully I'll pick it back up myself within the next couple of years..

[smallwhite]

- Shanghainese
- Korean
- Hebrew
- Icelandic
- Hungarian
- Polish
- Bulgarian
- Japanese

I suggest you do Shanghainese after you're advanced in Mandarin, then you'd learn it in probably a month.

I vote for Korean or Japanese because anything Cat IV or below is only for us mortals and would be a waste of your talent and almost a joke.

[Cavesa]

Starting with Czech. I'm going to read a Czech thriller called Smrtící Odkaz. (I think that translates to Death Sentence).

I would translate it as Deadly Link, I guess. Death sentence would be more like Rozsudek smrti. And if I could have my biased vote, I would chose Polish, although it will be probably better for you to concentrate on Korean instead.

I would translate it as Deadly Legacy. Link is odkaz, sure, but in the sense of an internet link.

[smallwhite]

Starting with Czech. I'm going to read a Czech thriller called Smrtící Odkaz. (I think that translates to Death Sentence).

I would translate it as Deadly Link, I guess. Death sentence would be more like Rozsudek smrti. And if I could have my biased vote, I would chose Polish, although it will be probably better for you to concentrate on Korean instead.

I would translate it as Deadly Legacy. Link is odkaz, sure, but in the sense of an internet link.

I get it!
Either Deadly Link as in a webpage with virus
or Dead Link as in Error 404 page not exist.
Czech is easy!

[mick33]

Besides that, I wanted to poll HTLAL members on what they think my next target language should be! I've got some options and they're all languages I have SOME background in (i.e. studied long ago or once in a blue moon). These options are:

- Shanghainese
- Korean
- Hebrew
- Icelandic
- Hungarian
- Polish
- Bulgarian
- Japanese


!!!! I am leaning towards the first two.

I vote for either Korean or Hungarian

[tarvos]

- Shanghainese
- Korean
- Hebrew
- Icelandic
- Hungarian
- Polish
- Bulgarian
- Japanese

I suggest you do Shanghainese after you're advanced in Mandarin, then you'd learn it in probably a month.

I vote for Korean or Japanese because anything Cat IV or below is only for us mortals and would be a waste of your talent and almost a joke.

I can learn Shanghainese quickly as is.

Also I still need time for things like Hebrew and Hungarian...

[Ezy Ryder]

Would love to see more of Sinitic languages, so I'll vote for 上海话.

[Josquin]

I'm voting for Japanese.

頑張ってください！

[tarvos]

Seems like I should do Korean, huh? I think it's time to stay in the Asian sphere anyway. I'm assessing my iTalki options for classes, because for these kinds of languages I need loads of conversational practice and I also need the classes to keep up my mood and motivation, because I am terrible with discipline when it comes to memorizing words in Anki.

Today I had half an hour of Shanghainese which I was totally unprepared for. My teacher just went on and on and on in Shanghainese - she expected me to just get it when half of it went WHOOSH OVER MY HEAD. (Fortunately I have context skills and managed to get something out in response, even if it was just a failed attempt at half-assed Shanghainese by shoehorning a Mandarin phrase into Shanghainese pronunciation, desperately hoping that Shanghainese uses that word too).

I also learned some useful phrases to deflect praise, very necessary when speaking with Chinese people. I asked for a translation of 差得远呢， something I often use in Mandarin. Once I used it on my other Shanghainese teacher and she reacted all surprised because she didn't expect it to come from a White Person. (Chinese people generally give you enormous leeway with these cultural faux pas - they don't expect you to get it, though they'll find you very uncultured. But when you demonstrate knowledge, they get confused. She told me "foreigners don't usually do that" and I said "I know that, but YOU do :p". And then she told me "but I am telling you the truth, your work is REALLY quite good".

The other thing is that I am very reliant on my Mandarin to understand translations. You have no idea what it's like to be reliant on a language you can only half-read in order to get your words right, but fortunately I can speak it okay. Mandarin is definitely not one of my best L2s, but more and more I am getting the feeling that I must have done a good job of learning it just because I feel comfortable speaking Mandarin at normal speed and it's starting to become noticeable that my vocabulary holes are becoming not only fewer but concentrating on more specific vocabulary and more advanced grammar structures. That said, I totally wouldn't say that my Mandarin is in the C-levels - it isn't - it's just a very honed beast in a practical sense because I've used it in real life for half a year. As hard as those six months in China were, they definitely had some result - it's evident in hindsight that they established an incredibly solid base (I haven't lost much of my Mandarin despite never having been back since).

That said, it's a double-edged sword. There is still so much that I can't do in Mandarin that makes me very reluctant to say I am a very proficient speaker, despite the fact that I speak it well enough to receive instruction in it. And I am sure that any people with high standards would rightly poke holes in my ability to speak Mandarin (I shudder to think what would happen if someone shot one of those polyglot interview videos with me where I spoke Mandarin). If a proficient speaker speeded up, they would most certainly lose me. And you know what - that's totally okay.