Family

Family - Language teaching - Tennis

No more time wasters please

February 4, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

My brother called me during the fifth set of yesterday’s men’s final at the Australian Open. I didn’t answer. I thought before the match that Dominic Thiem had a real shot, and arguably he should have won. Djokovic had been there so many times though, and he wisely chose not to press when he went two breaks down in the third set, deciding instead to save his energy for sets four and five. Djokovic’s serve is now more of a weapon than it used to be, and he’s certainly beefed up his second serve. Throughout his career he’s continually made tweaks to his game. This notion that he’s boring and robotic and does the same thing over and over is, frankly, bollocks. He’s a genuinely nice bloke and super intelligent to boot. I don’t get people’s dislike of him. The only dark spot for him in the final was at 4-4 in the second set. Having just broken back, he was twice pulled up for taking too long between points. He dropped his serve again in that ninth game, and having lost the set, he ranted at the umpire on the way to losing six straight games. Sorry Novak, the clock had hit zero both times. You don’t have a leg to stand on. As for Thiem, he’s knocking on the door now. Hopefully he can barge through it soon.

I saw most of the men’s final, but only a single game of the women’s in between my lessons. Another first-time grand slam winner in Sofia Kenin. She lifted the trophy by winning a whole bunch of tight matches including the semi-final and final. Muguruza’s big, high-risk game paid dividends at key moments in her close semi-final with Halep, but in the final it seemed to have the opposite effect.

It was a pretty good tournament all round. And heck, it looked for a moment that it might not happen at all. The tournament started amid orange haze. But we were treated to some fine matches, my favourite being Nadal’s drama-packed four-set win over Kyrgios.

When the tennis was over, I called my brother (who has zero interest in tennis) back. He was fine. He told me about their new hens. They aren’t laying yet because all their energy is being consumed in growing feathers. We talked about our aunt who, for some reason, seems to have blocked Dad’s phone. Dad can’t imagine what he’s done “wrong”.

My brother celebrated Brexit Day on Friday night. Yes, it’s become reality. He’s wildly optimistic about Britain’s post-Brexit future. (This attitude makes as much sense as the other extreme. Right now we simply don’t know, and it’ll be many years before we do.) My immediate priority is being able to stay in Romania beyond the transition period which expires at the end of the year.

My first Syrian student (I’ve since acquired another) didn’t last long. Last week he twice cancelled lessons on the day, and third time (yesterday) he didn’t show up at all. He told me he’d overslept. For his 6pm lesson. I said if we wants to continue he’ll need to pay me for the lesson. He said no thanks. I’m glad to get shot of him.

Family - Language teaching - Tennis

Supporting the underdog

January 25, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Latest news from Dad. His never-ending headaches have finally ended. They won’t dog him for the rest of his life as he’d feared, and it seems the culprit was his tooth after all. Being headache-free (apart from the odd ones he always gets) has given him a new lease on life. That’s the good news. The less fantastic news is that he’s found blood in his urine and will be having tests, and who knows what they will turn up.

Old age. I often forget that Dad is five months short of seventy. Today I bumped into the elderly couple who live on the sixth floor. She had just been to the dentist. She showed me her teeth – she’s one of the several million Romanians who have none of the ones that sprouted naturally. This time they told me their ages – she’s 79, he’s 88. He told me that in the fifties and sixties, people used to stroll up and down what is now Piața Victoriei: it sounded like an Italian-style passeggiata. Now he said it’s full of gypsies and people who don’t care. The lift was out of order, so they had no choice but to painstakingly climb the stairs.

It’s been a tiring but productive week of lessons. On Tuesday I had my five-kilometre walk from the end of the tram line to Urseni to meet the 12-year-old girl. It was quite a trek, even if he road had been sealed since Google went there, apart from the last little bit. After the lesson her father took me into town (he was driving that way anyway), and in future her mother will pick me up from the last tram stop. I enjoyed the lesson – it made a refreshing change to teach a girl, after having a string of boys who play computer games endlessly and dream of being YouTubers when they grow up.

After my lessons today with the Cîrciumaru family, I was glued to live score updates from the first-to-ten fifth-set tie-break between Roger Federer and John Millman. Federer won six straight points from 8-4 down; Millman will surely be devastated. I wasn’t too happy either – I’m kind of over Fed now, and would have liked the gritty Aussie to have pulled off the upset on home turf (he did shock Federer in the US Open in 2018). I did a rough calculation in my head of the chances of a Federer comeback from 4-8 (which is a deep hole for anybody, even Federer), assuming both players are of an equal standard. The “answer” depends on how big advantage you think the server has on each point, but it’s somewhere in the region of 1 in 18. Obviously, if you drop the “equal standard” assumption and instead assume Federer has some kind of edge (probably a psychological one due to his vast experience), his chances go up, but I wouldn’t go any higher than one in a dozen.

I’ve watched bits and pieces from Melbourne. My favourite match so far has been the one between Tommy Paul and Grigor Dimitrov. Paul was up two sets but Dimitrov came storming back and served for the match in the fifth, only for Paul to break back and play an absolute blinder in yet another deciding tie-break. There have been so many.

And Serena is out, beaten by Wang Qiang 7-5 in the third set, while Coco Gauff had another massive result in beating last year’s champion Naomi Osaka in two sets.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

The skis and ski-nots

January 19, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

This week has been pretty work-heavy and I’m OK with that. Today I had my 100th lesson with Octavian – he’s my third student to rack up three figures. My number of students (to date, since I arrived here) are rapidly closing in on that mark too – I got a call this morning from the mother of a ten-year-old boy who, on Monday, will be number 99. I was supposed to see Ammar (number 98) this evening, but he called me at the last minute to say he couldn’t make it. We’re meeting tomorrow instead. This morning I did meet the IELTS-obsessed Victor (number 97) for a 2½-hour session which he wants to make a regular Saturday fixture. We spent the first hour on a long essay he’d written – I can’t fault his commitment. As for Ammar, I’d like to ask him about his journey from Syria, but I don’t want to pry.

In my fourth winter here, I’ve learnt that Timișoara people can be divided into two groups – those who ski and those who don’t. It’s hardly an even split – skiing is beyond the means of most here – but the people I get to teach aren’t “most”, and among them, skiing is a status symbol. Like most status symbols, skiing comes in levels. Hiring skis and boots for an occasional weekend is one thing, but becoming an accomplished skier with all the latest gear and spending weeks at a time in some Austrian chalet requires a whole other magnitude of moolah.

After watching the darts last weekend, I dipped into some old footage on Youtube. First I watched the tail end of a 1984 semi-final involving Jocky Wilson. Back then, you could smoke and drink on stage. In fact it was almost compulsory. Jocky Wilson smoked and drank a lot. At the end of the match, which he lost by a whisker, Jocky collapsed as he tried to congratulate his opponent. Eight years later, and they’d banned the on-stage drinking, supposedly to clean up the sport’s image. As a little boy I remember darts was always on TV, but by 1992, perhaps due to the game’s seediness, they only showed one tournament. I watched the ’92 final live at my grandmother’s place; my brother and I were staying the night there. My brother wanted to watch the Crufts dog show, which was delayed by this marathon darts match that Phil Taylor won, famously beating Mike Gregory in a sudden-death leg. I then had a look at the 2004 BDO final, which I didn’t see because I’d just moved to New Zealand, I had more important things to do like find a job, and I doubt I couldn’t have seen it anyway in Temuka. Judging from the decor and the crowd atmosphere, it could easily have been the eighties, but the 2004 final was won by the one and only Andy Fordham. He must have been at least 30 stone, and his arms were thicker than my legs.

I had a good chat with my brother this week. They were about to buy some more hens; their current stock has been depleted to just two. He said they’ll get ex-cage hens that have been pecked to within an inch of their lives and have never seen the sunlight.

Family - Language teaching - Other sports

Dad, darts and a damn good student

January 14, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Four lessons today. The last, with Ammar, a new student in his mid-twenties, was the most interesting. Ammar arrived from Syria in 2012. Since then, he’s found a Romanian girlfriend, picked up the local language to a standard I could only dream of, and studied medicine. His English is very good too (on my 0-to-10 scale, I’d put him at an 8) and he now wants to sit the IELTS so he can practise in the UK. He’s altogether a smart guy. His parents live in Malmö in Sweden. We’ll be meeting again on Saturday.

I spoke to Dad last night. He was much better. Maybe his headaches were really one big toothache, though that seems far-fetched. Their visitors were my US-based cousin whom I met on my trip there, and his wife. Dad said he was begging for them to leave. They’d been over for my aunt and uncle’s golden wedding celebration.

The BDO darts final was a good spectacle in a lively atmosphere. Both players were ripping into the treble 20 at the start, Jim Williams went two sets up, and I thought he might power to victory with a three-figure average. The critical moment of the match, looking back, came in the deciding leg of the third set. Wayne Warren needed six. Sounds simple, but it’s awkward. Two, double two? Straight down for double three? He chose the latter option, hit the single, but checked out on single one and double one. Miss that and he would probably have been 3-0 down in sets. Instead it was 2-1 and he could breathe. In the end, Warren’s performance in legs he started was decisive – his throw was never broken after the long intermission at three sets all. That included the 11th and final set where he zoned out at times, and was outscored, but he put all his energy into the legs in which he threw first. The match finished at quarter past midnight my time, so I was happy it didn’t stretch any further. Warren, the winner, is 57. Peter Wright, the winner of the more prestigious PDC title, is a couple of months shy of 50. Suddenly I don’t feel so old.

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Lost in the fog

January 13, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a very foggy weekend. The fog lifted for a time yesterday, but otherwise we’ve been blanketed in the stuff. Today is one of those negative days we get relatively often here, where the temperature stays below freezing all day.

This was the beer factory around noon today.

I had a half-hour chat with Mum on FaceTime this morning. I spoke almost exclusively with her because Dad wasn’t in a good state at all. He had a tooth out on Thursday and will now also need a root canal. (What horrible images the mere mention of “root canal” conjures up.) The pain from his extraction kicked in as the anaesthetic wore off, but now he’s also suffering from the severe headaches he’s been plagued with for the last six months. Predictably, Mum’s sympathy level was zero. She told me that at some point today or yesterday they had visitors, Dad didn’t want them to come over, but when they did he seemed to cope reasonably well, so he’s probably fine and it’s all in the mind. The same old selfish bullshit. Dad did show his face for a matter of seconds, then went back to bed. If this continues, they might have to reconsider their plans to come to Europe this summer, in which case I’ll be booking a trip to New Zealand.

The first full week of 2020 was a light one on the work front: only 19½ hours of lessons. While some of my students are probably gone for good, others were on holiday mode and will be back this week. I also started with two new students and have a third beginning tomorrow, so things are looking up. The guy who started yesterday seemed obsessive about IELTS and all things related to CEFR levels. I’ll try to expose him to as much real-life English as I can; just doing IELTS practice tests will only get him so far.

We’ve got the men’s BDO darts final this evening. The whole set-up has been chaotic and unprofessional at times, and the BDO as an organisation look like they’re dying on their feet. Plus the move from the Lakeside, which gave the tournament a pleasant eighties feel, hasn’t helped. But the ramshackle train is about to clatter to its destination, and two Welshmen have made it to the final. Wayne Warren (aged 57, so there’s hope for us all) beat Scott Mitchell 6-3 (a 49-year-old farmer) in the first semi-final. Mitchell led 2-0 but Warren turned it around in a pretty even encounter which could have gone either way; Warren just hit the double more often in those crucial fifth legs. It was a very watchable game. The other semi was closer on the scoreboard – Jim Williams (35) beat his older Belgian opponent Mario Vandenbogaerde (awkward spelling) 6-4 – but it didn’t captivate me in the same way. The play was slower, there were fewer big finishes, and it was getting late for me. They also showed the women’s final where the popular Mikuru Suzuki retained her title. Women’s darts has had a big boost – Fallon Sherrock hit the headlines when she beat two men in a row in last month’s PDC world championships – but the BDO insist on still having a women-only tournament, with insulting “woman-sized” match lengths (first to just two sets, except the final which is first to three).

I’ve just started My Brilliant Friend, the first in a series of four novels by Elena Ferrante. It’s based in a poor part of Naples during the fifties, and is so far a very good read. Dad spent some time in Naples as a boy in the early sixties, and I’ll give the book to him the next time I see him, whenever and wherever that is. I’d like to visit southern Italy one day – I could perhaps take the train to Bar in Montenegro like I did last summer, and from there I could take a boat across to Bari in Italy.

Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Romania

Is Christmas even worth it? And happy new decade

December 31, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve now properly caught up with my family to find out how their Christmases went. My brother’s was draining. Endless eating and drinking and small talk with the in-laws and trying to appear somewhat entertaining. He said he couldn’t relax for one minute. When he spoke to me his wife wasn’t there, and as he gave me the gory details I built up a picture of Christmas from hell. I really enjoyed our unusually long chat though – I’d say it was one of the highlights of my Christmas.

My parents’ Christmas wasn’t much better. A couple of days before, Dad learnt that his main gallery in Geraldine had jacked up their commission to 50% from an already slightly piss-taking 40%. What’s more, the increase came unannounced and was even backdated, how far I don’t know. The woman who “runs” the gallery does so chaotically (to put it politely), and Dad has written her a letter to say, basically, stuff you. So that drew a black cloud over their Christmas. Like always, these things affected Mum more than Dad. My father is able to be philosophical: they will continue to live very comfortable lives even if he never sells another painting again (and hell, a few months ago, we were wondering if he’d even see out the year). But for Mum, it’s a case of “must be successful, must be seen to be successful”. Dad also had his ongoing battle with headaches to contend with, and it’s always a battle he has to fight alone. The weather down in Moeraki wasn’t up to that much either, so all in all it was a pretty crappy Christmas.

I got off pretty lightly, then, with my almost totally pressure-free, family-free Christmas. Tonight I’ll be seeing in the new year (and new decade) at Matei’s place. I’ll take along the unopened bottle of Rakija I picked up in Belgrade the summer before last. Matei’s dad called me to say they’ll be starting at nine, not seven as they’d originally planned, and that’s fine by me.

The 2010s have been a weird, disorienting decade for me. Twenty ten itself, when I still lived in Auckland, wasn’t too bad. I’d made some friends up there, I’d left the toxic world of life insurance behind, I had my tennis, my online poker, my trip to the UK to see my grandmother for the last time, bits of pieces of meaningful but low-pressure work, I was managing. Then came the move to Wellington in early 2011 and my insane step backwards into the corporate inferno. Not one part of me wanted to be there (my job I mean, not Wellington which I think is a great city). Then the beginning of 2012 was just horrendous – my grandmother died, the house of cards (a.k.a. my job) came crashing down, I made the disastrous decision to buy my flat, and so it went on. Whenever I hear one of the hits of 2013 playing on the radio, I want to gag – I picture myself in that office with the music piped through the speakers. The best decision I made was to take a four-week trip around America in 2015. The vastness of the place made me realise that there’s a whole world out there to be explored, and here I am. I still have my ups and downs, but I no longer feel that barrenness, as if I’m driving through a desert and there’s not even a tree to be seen.

Twenty twenty. It feels like a mini-millennium. The Romanian ex-prime minister became the butt of jokes when she called the upcoming year “douăzeci douăzeci” (which literally means “twenty twenty”) instead of the correct “două mii douăzeci” (two thousand and twenty). Even though things have improved for me, I’m happy to see the back of the old decade. The constant news cycle, the partisan politics, the toxicity of social media, the illusion of being connected when we’re in fact more disconnected than ever, the technological advancements that help us buy increasing amounts of crap at increasing speed and not a lot else. And the natural and unnatural disasters that have dominated the very end of the decade.

Before I go, I’ve just watched a brand new three-hour documentary about Romania’s rocky 30-year path since the downfall of communism. It taught me a lot, and best of all I was able to watch it with Romanian subtitles.

As for the highlight of 2019, that’s very clear. All clear, in fact. I got out of bed on 25th June, a nondescript Tuesday morning, to find an email from Dad to say that he’d been cleared of bowel cancer. It was like a miracle.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Not cutting it

December 1, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

The final month of the decade, which I still haven’t got to grips with at all, is almost upon us. In New Zealand it already is. I feel firmly entrenched in 2005, or perhaps a few years earlier. I feel grateful that Romania, in some ways, has let me step back in time.

It hasn’t been a bad week of lessons. Before my usual 90-minute session with the teenage boys, I had a half-hour “taster” with their mum, who told me she could understand English but couldn’t speak it. Then I asked her to at least have a go at speaking it, and of course she could. “I have forty-four years,” she said. Well OK, that’s not perfect, but it gets the point across, and for any of you reading this blog now, just you try to say your age in Romanian. Bet you wouldn’t have a clue. Yesterday I had the session with the two younger boys, and their mum is now happily hands-off; she knows I don’t need a translator.

I made an appointment for 2pm on Thursday to get my hair cut. The place I went to the last two times has closed down, so I thought I’d try this new place. But when I got there, they weren’t having any of my shoulder-length hair. They told me that either it’s a number 4 or whatever, or it’s no can do. My hair is part of who I am now, so I walked away. I’ll try another place next week.

I had a long chat with my dad on Thursday night. We talked at length about my aunt, whose tale is a rather sad one. In her (much) younger days she had the fortune (or misfortune, perhaps) to be handed everything. The looks, the brains, the lot. She was on all the sports teams, received a string of top grades in her O-levels, and so on. Then she met an RAF officer while still in her late teens, and she was married before her 22nd birthday. She trained as a physiotherapist, but never practised. In fact she’s never had a job at all. Her husband earned enough to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed, and being married to the RAF was her job. Mindless lunches and parties and balls. She had two children, who were conveniently shipped off to boarding school at the age of eight, and neither of them now have any time for her. They see her at Christmas, but it’s a chore. Her adult life has been dogged by a complete lack of purpose. Everything she’s done has been play. And probably as a result, she’s suffered from ongoing depression. Unfortunately she’s never listened to anyone – as Dad says, she transmits but doesn’t receive – and has lacked the presence of mind to think, oh shit, if I carry on down this path things are going to turn to something pretty custardy pretty damn fast, so I’d better do something to arrest the slide.

Sometime in the nineties my aunt developed a drink problem, to go with her smoking habit, and that hasn’t exactly helped. She used to shop till she dropped, to give her a high about as temporary as the alcohol did. Her husband, an intelligent, kind man who at least provided some semblance of stability, died of lung cancer in 2002. When I saw her in 2008 on a trip out from New Zealand, she seemed positively evil and more than a little mad, and thankfully she isn’t like that anymore, but her world has gradually shrunk. She’s now almost completely isolated. Both my brother and I get on perfectly fine with her (unlike her children, she doesn’t perceive us as a threat) and I’d have been happy to spend Christmas with her, or heck, bring her out to Romania, but anything along those lines is a total no-go.

The UK election isn’t far away now. Right now I’d say there are three broad scenarios: (1) a sizeable overall Tory majority of 50 or more; (2) a smaller Tory majority, perhaps even just a working majority; and (3) a hung parliament. And I’d attach roughly equal probabilities to all three scenarios. (A Labour majority would require a massive shift from where things currently stand, and is highly unlikely.) I’m pinning my hopes on scenario 3.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

It’s only just begun

November 20, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning I picked up some ink cartridges that I’d had to order, and the man who served me said, “Sărbători fericite” meaning “Happy holidays”. A few minutes later I was in Carrefour, where Slade’s famous Christmas song was blaring out. This evening I was sitting at my desk next to the window when two people, just about close enough to touch, were up a crane fixing the festive lights to the lamp-posts. There had been little sign of Christmas until it all hit me today. Ten days from now, the market sheds will be going up, and with the waft of chimney cakes and mulled wine soon after, it’ll really feel like the festive season, particularly if daytime temperatures do eventually fall from the balmy mid-teens.

I had a new student yesterday. She actually teaches English to groups of beginner adults, but if I’m being brutally honest, her knowledge isn’t quite what it needs to be. I’d put her no higher than a 6 on my 0-to-10 scale. She told me, “I have teached English for three years.” Oh yes. She then got confused between “taught” and “thought”. She didn’t know the word “narrow”. As it turned out, we had a very productive lesson, covering acres of notepaper in our 90 minutes, on all kinds of matters to do with vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, and I hope I can get her up to speed. I’ll be seeing her again on Thursday. The crazy thing though is that she wants to improve her English to help her get out of her English teaching job! She also plans to take the IELTS exam in March, which is pretty soon. Tomorrow I’ll have my last lesson with the woman who sent me that strange text.

Dad has had a successful local exhibition, selling a number of high-value paintings. Spring and the run-up to Christmas make it an opportune time to hold a show. There are quite a few people in the area who have sold family farms for colossal amounts of money, and I think that money was burning a hole in their pockets. My latest conversation with Dad was all very upbeat until we discussed my predicament in Wellington. My body corporate’s self-imposed deadline for me to sign the sale agreement is Friday. That ain’t gonna happen.

A new mural on an abandoned factory by the Bega
Books - Family - Life :) - Romania

Three years on, it’s still a great feeling

November 5, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a beautiful Tuesday morning here in Timișoara. Earlier I went to Piața Badea Cârțan where I had a coffee and bought some vegetables. Three years on, being amongst the fresh produce on a sunny morning, and watching the world go by, is still a wonderful feeling. As I sat on a bench near the market, I had a view of a brick wall I hadn’t noticed before. I couldn’t read what remains of the writing on it, but it looks like the letter to the right of the emblem is a W. So it’s probably more than a century old, dating from when Romania was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Back then, Timișoara was trilingual (Romanian, Hungarian and German), and German is the only one of those languages to use the letter W.

The writing on the wall

Yesterday’s weather was grim in comparison to today’s. My parents had ordered a book for me ages ago: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I think it will be a very good read, when I get around to it. But getting it in the first place wasn’t easy. It had come from Australia, via who knows where. Last Wednesday I finally got a note in my letterbox telling me that it was ready to be picked up. The next day I went to the main post office, where parcels normally go to, but I was told I needed to pick this item up from a different office, next to the railway station. On Friday afternoon I went there, only to find it closed at 1pm on Fridays and I was too late. Yesterday I went back – I got there ten minutes after it opened at 9:30. I went up to the first floor (where there was a poster telling me about the “new” notes and coins that came out in 2005) but was told I needed the customs office on the second. I spent the next half-hour in a forbidding waiting area, in which time six or seven other people collected their parcels before it was my turn. The room is what Romania must have been like under Communism. Everything was painted beige and brown, seemingly in about five minutes total. Aggressive-looking, bizarrely-printed signs adorned the walls. On the floor were some old scales, made in Sibiu in 1975, which had all the number fours printed in a typically Romanian way. I imagine they still work fine. The loud bang of metal doors closing in other parts of the building reverberated. I thought, I would not like to end up in prison in this country. When it was my turn, I entered another room, I handed over my passport, a man opened the package with a knife, decided there was no contraband inside, and I was free to go with my book.

When I got home I called my parents to tell me the book had arrived. We then moved on to the subject of Duolingo. I mentioned to Mum that I’d given 28 hours of English lessons in the past week, and she’d spent about as long on that site. I said it was an inefficient use of her time if her goal is to actually learn French, and she’d be better off doing 10 hours of Duolingo and 10 hours reading news articles, or something along those lines. Even the occasional conversation with me, perhaps. Suffice to say, this suggestion didn’t go down well. She wouldn’t speak to me. (That’s the way she’s always handled anything I say that she doesn’t want to hear. Even on a subject as unimportant as this.) I was just trying to help her. I honestly think it’s great that she’s trying to learn a language, and if she could get to the stage where she could go to France and communicate with people there, that would be fantastic. But I do have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t (it’s kind of, you know, my job).

After our chat, I bought a few bits and pieces from the supermarket, and on the way I popped into the second-hand clothes shop. Every six weeks or so, on a Monday, they have a new collection of stuff. I picked up a bronze-coloured leather jacket, made in Palma de Mallorca, for 70 lei (£13, or NZ$26). Yeah, I like this. It’s had some use, but not much. I thought it was pretty damn good value. It’s worth rummaging around in there sometimes. Beats going to the mall.

Although winter is around the corner, the markets are still full of tasty produce. Right now there are mountains and mountains of cabbages. Sometimes I buy a ready-pickled cabbage and try to make sarmale.

Two cancellations yesterday. I try not to let that kind of thing frustrate me too much.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

Mum, I think you’re addicted

November 4, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

In the last week I’ve used Duolingo a fair bit. Italian in the morning, and brushing up my Romanian in the evening. It’s important to keep the two languages separate as much as possible, because they’re fairly similar. It would be very easy to start mixing them up. This week I happen to have earned around 1500 so-called experience points (XP), which to me are meaningless apart from in one aspect: to gauge how long I’ve spent on Duolingo, in the absence of any clock. (The creators wouldn’t want a clock. They want everyone on there as long as possible, collecting gems or chasing promotion to the next gemstone-named league. It’s a great site, but the way it hooks you in is extremely Candy Crush-esque. Or even pokie-machine-esque.) I seem to pick up about 150 points an hour, so I’ve spent ten hours or so on the site this week. That feels like a reasonable amount if you’re splitting the time between two languages. But then I saw this:

MUM?!?!?!?!

I’ve connected with my mother, who is learning French exclusively. I’ll be generous here, and assume she’s doing tasks that yield points faster than the ones I do (because the points motivate her more than me). I’ll give her 200 points an hour instead of my 150, in which case she’s spent 25 hours on the site. Sheesh. I wonder how much she’s really learning, and how much she’s just mining fool’s gold. If her goal is genuinely to learn French, there isn’t much point in putting in so much volume. Little and often works well. Plenty and often (Mum’s strategy) doesn’t get you very much further. But it sure does get you a whole heap more digital diamonds.

I’ve had some interesting lessons, as I always do. In this morning’s productive session, we discussed the words analyse and analysis, two words that my student uses in her job but finds hard to pronounce, because of the changing stress pattern. After the lesson I sent her a video clip of me saying the pair of words repeatedly. On Thursday evening I had a particularly awkward situation in my lesson with two women in their twenties. They’re both at around a 4 on my 0-to-10 scale. One of them started to get angry with the other woman when they discussed learning styles (What works for you doesn’t work for me!) and out of the blue she burst into tears. I think she’d had a stressful time at work, and I realised that (unusually) we hadn’t discussed their work day at the start of the session. Perhaps, ultimately, it was my fault. The one who cried has always seemed a really nice person, and my biggest worry is that she’ll be embarrassed about her outburst and they won’t come again. I hope that doesn’t happen.

The week before last I had one of my (sadly rare) half-English, half-Romanian sessions. I asked the teacher how I would say “My living-room window faces west” (which it does) in Romanian. She simply said that Romanians don’t say that, and instead I should just say that my room gets the sun in the afternoon. But it doesn’t always, and certainly not today it doesn’t! She told me that compass directions are used fairly infrequently, apart from sometimes to talk about parts of the country. One thing I really noticed when I moved to New Zealand was that compass directions are used all the time there, much more than in the UK (and, as I now know, considerably more than in Romania). Especially where my parents live, there’s always a nor’wester springing up, or perhaps a cold southerly about to hit. The mountains tell you precisely where west is. There’s Northland, Southland, Westland (but no Eastland). Even the two main islands are simply called North and South. I remember when I lived in Wellington and I’d sometimes go on day tramps, the trip leader might say “if you just look to the east…” and I’d be thinking, where’s east?! It’s as if all Kiwis are born with an internal compass. Quite a lot of New Zealanders sail, some of them still build their own homes, and there’s still some of that pioneering spirit.

This morning I went to the chemist to pick up two medications (an antidepressant and something for my hair) but they were out of the hair lotion. That meant I had to go to their other branch at Piața Unirii. It’s in Casa Brück, one of the most wonderful buildings I ever have the pleasure to enter. After that, and just before my lesson, I had a Skype chat with my cousin in Wellington. I also caught up with her husband and all three of their boys. The eldest is now 17. All of a sudden, he’s a man. Time is shooting by.