Vili, I thought I had read something about the Finland connection in these posts. I’ve been to Helsinki, but that’s as far as I’ve been able to get, and when I’ve been there it’s only been passing through. I would say the Saarinen train station is one of the coolest bits of architecture in all of Europe. Those massive figures holding the polygonal spheres…fabulous (and reminds me of Prague).

I study Chinese, but am a rather stupid and poor student. Your language ability is something I am quite envious of…

I’m a big fan of technology and its democratization of art.

I did, however, have two major problems with the film. The first was the animation, which was lifeless and quite uninteresting. The second problem I had was the unnecessarily strong sexual innuendos throughout the film, ranging from the obvious (a naked Angelina Jolie, or Ray Winstone leaping around naked with his private parts covered by random objects — what is this, Austin Powers?) to the suggestive (lots of phallic symbols, and the entrance to Grendel’s cave is a 10-metre vagina). I don’t really know why they had to go down that route, it felt at times like watching a 10-year-old’s fantasy.

But all in all, I quite liked the film. Too bad I didn’t manage to catch it in 3D.

Understanding the line-ending “e”s in Chaucer, by the way, is quite helpful if you want to read Chaucer aloud. Some of them get pronounced (often altering the pronunciation of earlier words on the line), some don’t. The meter helps, of course.

Funny, how you can spend weeks after weeks talking about those line-ending “e”s!

Glad I didn’t come at it from the linguistics angle, to be honest. It was never my strong point. I’m more at home talking about the naughty bits in The Miller’s Tale.

Yes, I did see Beowulf. I get a thrill, to be honest, just watching anything in that sort of dark ages setting, and as with The Lord of the Rings it was nice to finally see a version of the story with impressive visuals. But the changes to Grendel and his dam, to the dragon, left me a bit muddled. I think the script was by Neil Gaiman. I’ll need to watch it again to understand what he was getting at.

Chaucer and the Gawain poet were also repeatedly on my reading list, but Gower I never got acquainted with. Also, strangely enough the literature department gave no special courses on Chaucer, but I did attend two courses run by the linguistics department called simply “Chaucer”. Basically, we looked at his language and how he used it. Funny, how you can spend weeks after weeks talking about those line-ending “e”s!

I loved Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Searfarer and the rest but translation was never my strong point. Middle-english was more within my grasp, especially Chaucer, Gower, and the Gawain poet.

Also I have TEFL qualifications, as I completed a pedagogy degree on the side of my MA proper, which was in English Philology. I am not a practising teacher though, and try to do my best to stay that way, although I may sooner or later find myself back in the class room (if so, hopefully at the University rather than the secondary school). I actually really like teaching, but it is such a demanding job, and at least here it doesn’t really pay as well as it should.

While in University, despite ending up specialising in theoretical linguistics, I actually attended more courses in literature. Medieval literature was my favourite, especially the Anglo-Saxon works. I even took some course in Old English, although all we ended up doing there was translating the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.

I actually learnt Japanese through English, and I use English also for learning Hungarian. But then again, whenever I need to write anything more proper than an email in Finnish (which is my mother tongue) I end up having to look up words in an English-Finnish dictionary. But that, I suppose, is only normal considering that I mostly speak English these days.

I’m a teacher of English as a foreign language, by the way. I had planned on an academic career, something in the field of medieval literature, but my Greek wife dragged me out here and now I’m doing the only thing I can do. I run my own school so I don’t have to bother about working for a headmaster or headmistress. I had a pupil a couple of years back, by the way, a mature student actually, who also likes Kurosawa and who is now learning Japanese. He tells me that there are no books in Greek for learning Japanese, and that they have to learn the language using English books. Seems a bit strange to me - learning a language through another language. I suppose the resulting essays would be up to the standard of some of those Mei Ah DVDs.