Gone fishin’

Hello everyone! Just a quick note to say, as it’s my birthday month and I posted twice last month, I’m giving myself the month off. So there’ll be no regular blog post this month. But fret not, dear friends, Romans and countrymen! As hard as it is (mostly for me) to believe, I’m actually about half way through my eighth year of doing this, so there’s plenty of content for you to sink your teeth into! In fact, I’m currently working out the logistics of creating a sort of directory where you’ll be able to find posts arranged not just by language, but also by subject matter. Fancy reading about true crime in Swedish? I’ve got you covered. Reviews of TV shows in Norwegian? Click this way! Although actually, there’s currently very little content in Latin, so Romans, you may be a smidge less catered for than I initially led you to believe. Sorry about that. But I’m adding new things all the time – new topics, new languages… you know me. As it stands, here are some posts I’d recommend:

Remember when I took an online class to learn Latgalian? If you weren’t aware, Latgalian is a minority language spoken in the easternmost region of Latvia, which is currently undergoing something of a revitalisation renaissance. This class sort of formed part of that, and as a way of testing an upcoming trilingual textbook to help speakers of English, Latvian and Russian to learn the language. Does that sound like something that might interest you? Well you can read all about it here!

If you were around on language nerd Twitter and Tumblr a few years ago, you may remember dabbler’s Christmas, also known as the Language Jam. The LangJam was an event where you would sign up and then be randomly assigned a language, which you would then attempt to learn over a weekend (or at least, you would learn as much as possible in a weekend, which in my case, wasn’t much). I took part three times, and was assigned Tagalog, Te Reo Māori, and Ukrainian. you can read about my experiences with each by clicking on the languages above.

If you happen to be sitting there and thinking, ‘surely it’s not all about languages?’, well, firstly, you must be new. And secondly, no, it’s actually not. Do you remember a couple of years ago when everyone got deeply obsessed with Chernobyl, and then spent hours reading and watching videos to try and work out how a nuclear power plant is supposed to work with little to no physics or engineering training? …maybe that last part was just me, but even so, I wrote a little bit about it in the wake of watching the Chernobyl TV show – if that’s something that would interest you, you can find that here!

Alternatively, if you’re interested in true crime and want to give your Swedish muscle a workout, then you could have a look at my write-up (I hesitate to call it ‘coverage’) of the Lake Bodom Murders, one of Finland’s most notorious unsolved cases – which is entirely in Swedish. You can find that here. I’ve also got an ongoing series about the most infamous missing persons case in Icelandic case, known as the Guðmundur and Geirfinnur case (also written in Swedish), the first two parts of which you can find by clicking on these links: part one, part two. Part three will hopefully follow in the next few months.

Well then, with these recommendations I hope I’ve not left you entirely deprived of things to read. And hopefully by this time next year things will be much more organised and easier to find, blog-wise. Until next month, then, you can find me in all of the usual places. Take care of yourselves, and thank you all for your loyal support over the past eight and a half years. I appreciate you all more than you know.

— J.