In May, I went up to Pittsburgh for Mothers’ Day weekend. My brother’s New Zealand work visa had come through, so he was saying goodbye to the family.
In June, I got the notification that I had passed my DELE exam. Woot!
The breakdown on scoring is a maximum of 25 points each for reading comprehension, writing skill, listening comprehension, and vocal interaction. You need 30 points total between reading and writing and again between listening and speaking.
It’s the end of December, and I’ve barely blogged this year, so I’m going to do a wrap-up for the year. 2023 was an extremely full year. There was an absolute ton of travel and a lot of being usefully bilingual.
There was so much stuff that I’m splitting this into 5 parts.
At the beginning of February, I went to Belgium to speak in the Elixir/Erlang track at FOSDEM. My friend Nelson was also speaking on that track, and so our mutual friends Pablo and Diego came up from Spain to attend the conference too. We all stayed in the same hotel and stuck together the whole time. We introduced Pablo and Diego to Ethiopian food (Nelson had already tried it with me when visiting DC last year), and we all went to the only Cuban restaurant in Belgium our last night there. After explaining to the Spanish guys what we think of when we hear the word “tamal” (corn meal, with a stuffing, wrapped in a leaf), Nelson and I were very surprised to learn about tamal en cazuela, which is a casserole: no stuffing, and no leaf. It was tasty, though! Speaking Spanish even came in handy in Belgium in the “I don’t speak French, you don’t speak English, any chance we both speak Spanish? Oh good!” way.
A friend of mine (a native Spanish speaker) just started teaching one of his friends Spanish, and the first thing I said was:
Explain to her that ser is essence/identity/characteristic and estar is status, and that’ll go SO much better than the “ser is permanent and estar is temporary” that makes us try to say “es muerto” and “estoy bautista” (because hey, conversion exists). Like, death is pretty permanent, but it’s still a status.
Hey, are you leaving Twitter? Are you worried that with 80% of the staff gone, it’s just a matter of time until there start being unreported breaches? (Heck, maybe there have already!) Want to ensure anyone breaking into your account doesn’t read your messages? Have a bulk-delete script, on the house!
To use this, go to the messages page on a computer. Right click somewhere on the page, and choose “inspect” (Chrome) or “inspect element” (Firefox) to get the developer tools to come up. (If you’ve never seen that before, welcome to how so many of us learned to do things on the web!) In there, go to the tab labeled “Console.” Paste the following in and hit the enter or return key:
This past Friday, I spoke at Code Beam America, and The Quaker World was published.
I haven’t spoken at many conferences in the last decade. I did the Elixir Wizards one virtually last year, and this is the first time in person since 2011.
It’s just a surprising coincidence that the book was published the same day. I wrote that chapter two years ago!
[updated 2023-01-28]
I’ve studied a silly number of languages in my life, starting with Spanish from age 6 to 14. I returned to studying Spanish in 2017, when I was working with an Argentine client. We spoke primarily in English (I was far too rusty for the alternative), but I quickly became frustrated with not knowing how to speak in the past tense in Spanish. I hurriedly crammed “yo …é, tú …aste, él …ó” into my head and tried to keep up.
