Language learning

Cat - Family - Films - Language learning - Language teaching - Scrabble

The attraction of a cat

January 19, 2026 by 0 Comments

In family news, today is my niece’s first birthday. It’s also the eve of Mum’s cataract operation on her first eye. She’ll get the other one done next month. I think the bill for both eyes is around NZ$10,000, a staggering amount. In Romania it would cost a fifth of that. Mum is pretty dire need of this surgery (which only takes ten minutes per eye, though there’s considerable faff when you get to the clinic). Her eyesight was pretty terrible when I saw her last May and June, and has deteriorated further since then.

Yesterday was a reasonably busy day for a Sunday. The twins, whom I normally see at their place on Wednesdays, came to my place yesterday morning instead. They seemed to enjoy the lesson because they got to see (and play with) the cat. Kitty has been a boon to my face-to-face lessons at home. Later I met Mark for lunch at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. He tried a few words of Romanian with the waitress but she didn’t understand him. You can see why I hardly bother. It can be like that sometimes. It’s rare for a non-native to speak Romanian, so Romanians aren’t “tuned in” to imperfect, non-native versions of their language. That’s in sharp contrast to us native English speakers who hear imperfect second-language English all the time to the point where we don’t think anything of it, and it creates a barrier for anyone trying to learn Romanian. You have to reach a certain level before you can even cross the start line. The barrier has even been raised somewhat in my time here; Timișoara is fairly cosmopolitan by Romanian standards and as a result more and more people are gaining a command of English, so if you’re not careful you can find yourself dealing almost exclusively in English even after living here for years. That’s especially true of someone like Mark who works at a British school and lives a far more “expat” lifestyle than me. Our lunch was done and dusted in a very swift 50 minutes; quite often it’ll take you that long just to get served.

In the evening I went to Dorothy’s for our monthly English Conversation Club meeting. She managed to start it up again in November. There were ten of us, of whom eight were women. (Language learning – and teaching – can skew pretty heavily in that direction.) I had to cycle home, and by that stage the temperature had plummeted to −6. First thing this morning we were at −10.

On Saturday I had my first lesson with a seven-year-old boy called Noah. I don’t really like teaching kids that young, but he was very nice and our session went well. Unusually, he was happy to see me. (Most small children have a look of either puzzlement or fear on their face the first time I see them.) The name Noah is very un-Romanian; the Biblical Noah is called Noe in Romanian, while a final h is pronounced here with a guttural sound like the ch inloch.

In a recent conversation with Dad, he mentioned his decision in the late seventies to quit his job as an illustrator for the Ministry of Defence and go his own way as a painter. It takes a lot of courage to step away. As you also did, he said. It would have been so easy to have stayed where I was, he then said, rather than take that leap. Ah, I said, this is where we differ. The idea that insurance was any sort of comfort zone for me is laughable. I simply couldn’t have stayed there; it would have been dangerous to have done so. Staying there might literally have killed me; I had to leave. Moving to the water company was a useful stopgap – it got me away from a lot of that corporate toxicity – before I decided what I really wanted to do. (I was also several years older than Dad was when he made the move.) Talking of the corporate world, Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comics, died of cancer last week. Those comics were extremely popular and funny; they did a great job of satirising office life and the practices that came to the fore in the nineties. Sadly in later life he became a Trump-supporting attention-seeking twat. (It’s quite possible he was always a twat, but only with the advent of social media did he gain an avenue for his twattishness.)

Scrabble. I’ve had three wins and five losses so far in my latest round of league matches, but my six outstanding games aren’t looking too bad. I’ve also got a decent tie-breaker this time if I happen to finish on the same number of wins as another player. There has been some controversy this time around as one player in our division has been kicked out, presumably for cheating. Before his expulsion he managed to beat me. Six of his matches were still outstanding, so I’m guessing his opponents in those games will be given walkover wins, but I don’t know if his earlier victims (including me) will be compensated in any way. Last week I had a crazy game on ISC, the other site. I put down a bingo only for my opponent to respond with the huge 158-point triple-triple TIDYTIpS, a word I didn’t know. (It’s a very pretty yellow flower found in America.) But a couple of turns later I put down BURTHEN (an old form of burden that I’d seen in books) for 97. A very close finish ensued, and eventually I won by a single point, 428-427.

I’ve just got one episode of The Queen’s Gambit still to watch. It’s been great so far. Obsession with something like chess can certainly drive one to madness. In addition to the story I’ve been enjoying the sixties music as well as the cars and decor of that time.

Family - Language learning - Maths teaching

Daily dose of maths

August 2, 2025 by 0 Comments

This week I’ve had five 90-minute maths lessons with a girl who is 16 coming 17. I taught her the basics of trig, which she took to like a duck to water. It’s always good on the (relatively rare) occasions that they just get something. In today’s session, after we’d been through some constructions with a compass and straightedge, we did part of a past paper. The question she struggled most with was what I considered one of the easiest. Sophie uses two-thirds of a litre of milk per day. A bottle of milk contains 2 litres. Show that she’ll need to buy 3 bottles to last her 7 days. Soon there was an opaque soup of fractions and common denominators and who knows what else on her page.

That’s a lot of time spent with one person in a week. Her parents clearly have no problem affording that many lessons, and it may well be more of the same next week. She turns up in a car that cost more than mine did, wearing clothes that cost more than mine, with a phone that cost much more than mine, and so on. I think she’ll do fine in her IGCSE next year. And in life. She’s fine, but she’s just the sort of person who becomes the kind of manager that I’d prefer not to have. I mentioned her car – well, in Romania you’re allowed to drive an underpowered “toy” car at 16, which is what she has. Only at 18 can you drive a standard car.

I’ve done a bit better with my Romanian of late. The odd extra YouTube video or phone call or chat at the market. Visiting the market in the evening, when it’s quieter, is better for that. Some of the stallholders are intrigued. I mean, us non-native speakers of Romanian are thin on the ground, so they want to know the story. The nice ones do, anyway. One or two take my imperfect Romanian as an affront to their ears.

Mum and Dad are suffering a bit from jet lag. More than they did when they arrived in Romania, and that’s despite them breaking up the journey. At least Dad had decent compression stockings this time, so his feet didn’t swell up alarmingly. He’d just been to see the doctor who complimented him on keeping his warfarin levels well within the safe range. If only Mum could see the doctor too. When I asked her about her regularity, she succinctly said, “my irregularity, you mean”.

I recently unearthed this blog post from February 2021 in which I said I was “all for” my parents’ move. Yikes. I really had no idea, did I? I seriously thought they’d be simplifying their lives by moving into somewhere smaller. I trusted them fully – they knew about houses and stuff, I didn’t. And I didn’t quite appreciate how good their old place was. And was it really 4½ years ago?

Some problems from the linguistics competition:

This was a fun one. I managed to nut it out without too many problems.

This family-based one was a bit trickier, but I got there in the end.

As for this one with the fish, not a chance!

Books - Cat - Family - Language learning - Other sports - Politics

The too-hard basket

July 20, 2025 by 0 Comments

I just took Kitty out for a drive. She spent one hour in a large cardboard box, 70 by 50 by 30 cm, with holes cut out of it (obviously) and an absorbent blanket at the bottom. (Lately I’ve put her food in the box to get her used to it.) She clearly didn’t love the experience, but she wasn’t traumatised by it either, so I’ll try it again in a few days. When I was little, our cat would be let loose in the Allegro or the Mazda on our five-hour-plus trips to and from Wales. With Kitty, that would be beyond dangerous.

Three weeks since I left my brother’s place, I’ve still got the cold I picked up from (probably) my nephew. He picks up a bug from nursery, infects his mum and dad and anyone else he comes into contact within, then three days later he’s as happy as Larry while everyone else is suffering for weeks. Mum and Dad have still got it too. Mum didn’t look great at all when I saw her on WhatsApp yesterday. They leave in only five days. I hope their trip back goes smoothly, or as smoothly as something like that ever can. At least this time they’ll break up their journey with a stopover in Singapore. I never want them to go direct again. Despite none of us being 100%, we had a really nice chat which made me feel good. Mum had been to meet up a few of the teachers from her school in St Ives, for the first time in about a decade. She was struck by how hard they had found the Covid period. We were pretty lucky in NZ, weren’t we? No Matt Hancock, who really should be behind bars. I was lucky too. Romania was at times riddled with virus, but my personal circumstances allowed me to dodge the worst of it.

The night before last I slept terribly. Yesterday I just had one lesson – maths in Dumbrăvița in the morning – and when I came back I lay on the sofa, washed out, where I finished Ella Minnow Pea (a fun read) and watched round three of the Open golf. My yearly golf watching. I like the Open visually: the dunes, the crags, the ever-changing skies, the squalls that come out of nowhere. I enjoy seeing top golfers battle near-horizontal rain and brutal rough. I particularly enjoy it when there’s a packed leaderboard on the final day and half a dozen potential winners as they turn for home, and a previously unheralded player keeps it together through all the mayhem to win – to make history – with a score of maybe three under par. This year’s tournament is taking place at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. Barring the heavy shower I saw on day two which added to the drama, the conditions have mostly been benign. Scottie Scheffler – number one in the world and a brilliant player – has taken a four-shot lead going into the last round, which might be a procession. A shame if so. World number ones haven’t won many Opens in recent times. Tiger Woods was the last to do it, I think. Rory McIlroy is six shots off the lead. He’s from Northern Ireland and a huge star in the game, so it’s no surprise that the crowd went nuts throughout his round of 66 yesterday.

Since the bit I wrote last time about council tax, I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to get these kinds of things right. Coming up with a fair and workable system is oh so complicated. Countries like New Zealand benefit here from being small, with relatively few working parts. What you don’t do though is hold your hands up and say it’s too hard. That’s exactly what the UK government is doing. We know this is unfair and absurd, but we’ll keep it the same (which in reality means making it worse: it will only become more unfair and absurd over time) because it’s too politically hard to change anything. And that’s just one aspect of tax policy. It’s the same thing with immigration, healthcare, housing, energy, infrastructure, the lot. Education isn’t too bad in the UK and they’ve made some progress on the environment. But everything else is going backwards because of a lack of political will to do anything. It’s the same all over the western world. The only people who do have the balls to change anything are those who aren’t interested in a fairer world and just want to make their mark. So they make things more shit. As I keep saying, how did we get here? When I was over in the UK recently, I watched an episode of Newsnight. They had ex-policitians (with opposing views) on the programme to discuss Labour’s climbdown on benefits. Adults, talking about a serious topic in a civil manner. This would no longer happen in America, I kept thinking. For the UK at least, there is still hope.

Next week’s challenge: for seven days, everything I read or listen to must be in Romanian where at all possible. I will also write something in Romanian every day. My Romanian has stalled and I can’t not do anything about it because it’s too hard.

Family - Language learning - Tennis

Cuscri and tennis

June 10, 2025 by 0 Comments

Words for family relations vary wildly between languages. Sometimes there are different words for older and younger brother or sister, or maternal and paternal grandparents, and so on. Some languages have a an impressively vast array of family words compared with, say, English.

Romanian, like Italian, doesn’t distinguish between grandson/granddaughter and nephew/niece. Nepot can mean either grandson or nephew; nepoată can be either a granddaughter or a niece. That’s something I always have to point out in my lessons on families, which happen quite regularly.

On the other hand, the words for in-laws are more varied in Romanian than in English – there’s no equivalent of just sticking -in-law on the end. Here are the Romanian words:

socru – father-in-law
soacră – mother-in-law
ginere – son-in-law
noră – daughter-in-law
cumnat – brother-in-law
cumnată – sister-in-law

As you can see, there are two pairs here, but son-in-law and daughter-in-law are completely different from each other. By the way, all six words are totally different from the “-in-law-less” versions; brother (for instance) is frate, which is nothing at all like the word for brother-in-law.

Another oddity, from a native English speaker’s perspective, is that Romanian has a specific word for your son-in-law’s (or daughter-in-law’s) parents. That word is cuscri. I mention this because my parents just got a message from their cuscri inviting them to go on a Mediterranean cruise with them next year. Mum and Dad said it was the last thing they wanted to do, even assuming they come out this way again in 2026. They really wouldn’t want to go on that sort of cruise. I wouldn’t want to go on that kind of cruise. I wouldn’t want them to go on that kind of cruise. They’d hate it. When Covid hit, I hoped the cruise ship industry would be killed off for good – it does considerable harm to the environment and to people who live in places where they dock – but alas it’s come back with a vengeance. The ships are bigger than ever. If it was up to me, I’d simply ban cruise ships with more than 500 passengers, along with ambient music and ranges of paint with more than ten shades.

I thought I wouldn’t see much of yesterday’s tennis final because of my lesson. But not to worry – there was loads of it left once my lesson had finished. When I turned it back on, Alcaraz was about to break Sinner for the third set to trail just 2-1, but really the match (which lasted 5½ hours) was just getting started. The fourth set was where things got really mental. Alcaraz stood on the precipice, serving at 3-5, 0-40. He was almost gone. And Sinner certainly had his chance on at least one of the match points. Having missed his opportunity, he then dropped his serve easily and it was 5-5. After Alcaraz had Houdinied his way out of that huge hole, he dominated Sinner physically. He won the set on a tie-break and then grabbed an early break in the fifth. He started drop-shotting to good effect. Still there was another twist – Alcaraz was broken when serving for the match and Sinner came close to breaking again and avoiding the deciding tie-break. Sadly for him he failed to do that, and a few minutes later he was 7-0 down in the first-to-ten shoot-out which turned into a procession. The extremely popular Alcaraz won it 10-2.

The match had pretty much everything. Shotmaking, athleticism, determination on both sides, and sheer drama including an incredible comeback. It also made it pretty clear who the current big two in the game are; their rivalry at the very top of tennis could last another decade or more. In terms of all-time great matches, it’s got to be right up there. Maybe not quite at the level of Borg v McEnroe in 1980 or Nadal v Federer in 2008 because (1) the rivalry between the two players was less established than between those two pairs and (2) that final tie-break was a bit of a damp squib after a match of such brilliance. (Why did they have to tinker with the fifth-set rule?) I’d put it on a par with Djokovic v Nadal in the 2012 Australian Open, and that’s some pretty esteemed company.

Jannik Sinner was oh so gracious in defeat. I mean look, you were up two sets, three match points, you let them slip, you serve for the match, you get broken, suddenly all looks lost, then to top it off you come back right at the end in spectacular fashion but still fall short. How he handled the loss bodes well for the rest of his career. It’s interesting how many big comebacks in finals there have been at Roland-Garros compared to the other three grand slams. It could just be random chance, but playing on clay makes fatigue a greater factor. You can’t just rely on your serve on clay, so if you start to flag physically just a little, your opponent can really capitalise, even from two sets down. Plus, because serve is less dominant, any particular lead you may have within a set (a single break, say) is less safe.

There was some fallout from the women’s final following Aryna Sabalenka’s interview. Though it wasn’t as bad as some made out, she should have been more complimentary towards Coco Gauff who actually played pretty damn well.

After our Romanian lesson this morning, I met up with Dorothy for coffee in Piața Victoriei. I gave her half a pizza I made yesterday. It’s been cooler today, with a high of “just” 24. There has been a pleasant breeze all day. Dorothy said that she wishes it were windier in Timișoara. I feel the same.

Things have kicked off in Los Angeles. Who knows where this will lead. Possibly to civil war.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

At least there’s a this time (touch wood)

April 29, 2025 by 0 Comments

Just been checking all my payments for lessons. A horrible job because of all the different methods – pre-Covid when almost everyone paid cash was way easier – and I only get round to it every two months or so. But I’ve done it, so I can cross that off. Phew.

Yesterday I went back to the immigration office. It seemed I had everything in order – or pus la punct as they say here – and the guy (with a star on his epaulettes rather than a stripe this time) told me to come back at the end of May to pick up my new residence card which will be valid for ten years (not five, like my current one). I might then need to get a new ID card for my car so that its address matches what’s on the ID card for me; as always I’ll need to ask a Romanian who’s used to all this bureaucracy.

On a side street near me

It’s a shame Mum and Dad couldn’t have come over Easter. I did suggest that before they booked, but as always, Mum had made up her mind (something to do with the garden, probably) and that was that. I had a lot less work over Easter; now I’m having days jam-packed with lessons again. So while they’re here I’ll have to cancel a load of work, or else have my lessons and see less of them. When we go away for a few days, I’ll clearly have no choice and that’s fine. Obviously I’m very thankful that I’ll be seeing them at all, but, y’know, it would have been way more convenient if they’d come just two weeks earlier. I did put this to them when I spoke to them on Sunday. “We can spend more time with you next time we come over.” My brother and I think we’ll be lucky if there’s a next time. There nearly wasn’t a this time. (I’m still not counting any chickens until I see them in the arrivals lounge.)

Mark Carney’s Liberals have won the Canadian election. It looks like being a narrow win involving a confidence-and-supply type deal that often occurs in New Zealand, but it was a heck of a comeback when it looked like Pierre Polievre (the Conservative) would win. Trump changed all of that. He put the very existence of Canada in jeopardy. I really liked Carney’s victory speech. All that talk of humility and unity and being a leader also of those who voted against his party. What a contrast from Trump who basically says, to the half of voters who didn’t back me, fuck you. They said this morning that Trump had been in power for 100 days. Is that all?! Less time than I’ve had Kitty. It already feels like an age.

Round one of Romania’s presidential election takes place this Sunday. The second round is two weeks later, when my parents will be here. The president’s power is limited in Romania but the stakes are high all the same. What sort of country does Romania want to be? Electing George Simion (or somebody like him – there could be someone practically unheard of like last time) will make that very obvious.

At the end of last night’s online session, my student said “S-a mărit ziua” which means “the days are getting longer”. I took me a while to figure out what she’d said because she talks so fast. That simple phrase which is not so simple made me realise what a devil of a language Romanian is gramatically. I’m not improving; if anything I’m getting worse. Chances to speak Romanian for any length of time are getting fewer and farther between. For a short time, when Dorothy dropped out, my Romanian lessons were useful, but now that Dorothy is back (she’s much better than me) I’m not able to learn much.

Snooker. The quarter-finals are about to start. Six real contenders, I’d say, plus a couple of surprises. I’d put Luca Brecel clearly in the “contender” category after his ludicrous performance against Si Jiahui. It was just mental. The two matches I’m most excited about are Williams versus Higgins (the old guys; a century between them) and Brecel against Judd Trump. Yes, another Trump. Ronnie O’Sullivan I suppose is the favourite because, well, it’s him, and he’s playing Si Jiahui who didn’t look that great in his last match. The other match is Zhao Xintong (a huge talent) against Chris Wakelin who has already produced two upsets. The matches take place on two tables still. It’ll be a fun two days – this round tends to produce more mayhem than any other.

Football. Birmingham totally dominated Mansfield 4-0 on Sunday. If they win their final two matches (both away, so it won’t be easy) they’ll finish on a whopping 111 points, which will be a very memorable number and will blow all other professional teams’ totals out of the water. The record is 106 which Reading achieved 20-odd years ago. But mostly I was interested in the presentation of the league trophy after the match. A big delay, then finally the champagne. Yes, a few hundred fans got onto the pitch. Some people think they should be hung, drawn and quartered. For me it’s no big deal.

Finally, it looks like Spain and Portugal are back in business after their massive outage; 60% of Spain was plunged into darkness in five seconds. You wonder how something that could even happen, but our systems are now hyperconnected like never before.

Driving - Family - Language learning - Life :)

If we come over

March 19, 2025 by 0 Comments

Mum’s scan was all clear. A relief: it isn’t colon cancer. But what now? She’s already seen the doctor since then (great that it was so quick) and she’ll now have a colonoscopy. Dad has been more insistent of late – it won’t just magically go away if you ignore it – without bugging her to the point where she gets angry. On Monday Dad said “If we come over…”. If. Yikes. It’s seven weeks until they’re due to arrive. I told my brother that they’ll still probably make the trip – I said an 80% chance – but he thinks I’m being optimistic. If they do cancel, the first thing I’ll do is book a trip to New Zealand. For my brother, who can’t simply do that, it would be pretty devastating. (My parents know this, you would hope, which is why I’m saying 80%. Also, Mum’s pain hasn’t got any worse.)

Last week I got a reminder to renew my car insurance. Seriously? It’s been a year? I clearly remember the day I picked up the car. All that gubbins at the town hall in Sânandrei, then actually having to drive the thing. It was fine to begin with, but then I hit the city traffic and am I even going to survive?! It’s been seven years. When I finally parked it after a hair-raising 20-odd minutes, I was distinctly clammy. I remember my drive to Recaș the following week – on a sunny day – and how exciting it was to visit another town at the drop of a hat like that. Then there were those trips to the mall to get all the paperwork done. These state-controlled offices are always so forbidding, and the vehicle registration office was no exception. I did end up with a comedy number plate, so there was that, and it was worth paying for a broker to sort me out. Without her, I’d have been sent from pillar to post without having a clue what was happening. I’ve been really happy with the car and the added freedom it’s given me, but at times on my various trips last summer I thought, you know what, it would be quite nice now chugging along on a train and looking out the window or reading a book. As for driving in Romania itself, well that all seems pretty normal now, though roundabouts (there are so many of them) still feel kind of weird here, and I’m not the world’s best parallel parker. I suppose I very rarely park in the city, parallel or otherwise, so I don’t get much practice.

Last weekend there was a fire at a nightclub in North Macedonia which killed at least 59 people. It happened at a club called Pulse in the town of Kočani, which only has around 25,000 people. The fire was caused by a pyrotechnic display, but a raft of safety violations contributed to the terrible death toll. It’s all very reminiscent of the Colectiv fire in Bucharest, not long before I came to Romania, which killed 64. Just like the one in North Macedonia, Colectiv only had one exit. Of those 64 deaths, most of them didn’t occur at the club but later, in hospital. The hospitals had diluted disinfectant which was a dreadful scandal in itself. (When I was a student in Birmingham, there was a popular club called Pulse. I only went there once. That was enough for me.)

I had my weekly Romanian session on Monday morning. The truth is I’m not learning anything anymore. If anything I’m going backwards, and I’m at a loss to know what to do about that. (One-on-one sessions, which I had for a short time in the autumn, would certainly help. Dorothy is at a higher level than me, and her involvement doesn’t help.)

Cat - Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Photos - The UK

Keeping it real

February 3, 2025 by 0 Comments

When I spoke to Dad on Friday he said he’d had headaches (or maybe just one long headache) for two weeks straight. I couldn’t tell from our Skype calls – he’s had 60-plus years of practice at hiding just how bad it is. It must take a terrible toll on him.

Also on Friday I took Kitty to the vet for a pre-spay check-up. She was fine. They swabbed her ears to see if she had mites but she was clear. I marvelled once again at how much vets enjoy their jobs. I never saw a fraction of that level of passion from an actuary. As long as I prevent Kitty from eating or drinking overnight, she’ll have her bits taken out on Wednesday morning. Then she’ll need to wear one of those plastic cone thingies over her head for twelve days so she doesn’t lick or bite the wound. Kitty has been great of late. Three weeks ago I despaired as she darted all over the place when I’d had almost no sleep; I wanted to take her batteries out. Now it seems she’s got used to me. She shows more affection and no longer attempts to escape. Maybe she’s lulling me into a false sense of security, though somehow I doubt cats think on that level.

A recurring theme of my last few posts has been a dislike of fakeness. I’m fine with things being rough around the edges as long as they’re real. I’m clearly not alone in this, and I think my manual teaching style with all my handmade cards appeals to certain people. I even like my experiences to be “real”; getting my car stuck last Sunday wasn’t exactly in the plan, but meeting those helpful locals almost made it worth it. In 2025 there’s more fakeness in our lives than ever before. I hear Keir Starmer and the UK Labour government banging on about AI and I get their concerns about GDP growth and not wanting to be left behind, but I’m not convinced that any of this stuff will make many people feel an improvement in their lives.

Seven months on from their UK election win, Labour have been a massive disappointment. After the pure callousless of the last lot (the Covid inquiry made me upset and angry), I really thought Labour would be much better. Yes, they’ve been dealt a rotten economic hand, but they’ve shown no will to damn well use the thumping majority afforded to them by the electoral system and build a society and an environment that works for British people. Reform the council tax system that is (wholly unfairly) based on 1991 property prices. Nationalise the railways. Stuff that’s eminently doable and would be popular. There’s still time, but if they don’t get their act together pretty sharpish we could be looking at Reform grabbing power next time – a terrifying prospect.

When I spoke to Dad, I suggested that I lack ambition. He said, oh no, quite the opposite. That was very nice of him, but I do sometimes feel I should be trying to achieve more. When I met Dorothy for lunch on Friday, I mentioned my master’s degree idea. She thought it was a good one in spite of the cost. People blow much more than that on a car which quickly depreciates, she said. Talking of degrees, my Wellington-based cousin’s eldest son has finished his degree at Canterbury and is now embarking on a PhD in Sydney. It’ll all be paid for. Not fair, honestly. My cousin is loaded and could pay for his PhD many times over, but she did a PhD herself and knows what buttons to press and what strings to pull.

Book news. There’s no news, which is a concern. I’ll get on to the publisher in the morning.

The highlight of my busy work day yesterday was my two-hour online lesson with the English teacher in Slobozia. I asked her to write an essay, which she agreed to do, but only if I also wrote one in Romanian. So I wrote 460 words about my grandmother. A useful exercise. I’ve still got big gaps which, try as I might, I’ve never been able to fill. Sentence structure, mainly. Though my nouns and verbs and adjectives are mostly perfectly fine, I often fail to make my sentences sound properly Romanian.

Conveniently, a break in yesterday’s schedule allowed me to watch some football. Birmingham overcame a slow start to beat Rotherham 2-1 at home. Blues are in a very strong position at the top of the table now. At the same time (following what I said a couple of posts ago) I followed Portsmouth’s home game against Burnley. The atmosphere was just like it was all those years ago. Absolutely mental. The game finished goalless, but it was packed with incident all the same.

Below is a picture from Karlsruhe Park, which is close to the guest house I stayed at when I arrived here in 2016. The German city of Karlsruhe is twinned with Timișoara. This city has many other “twins” including Nottingham in England, but not all of those twins are twinned with each other. That makes me think of equivalence relations that I studied in my first year of uni. Our lecturer called the tilde symbol, which represents an equivalence relation, “twiddles”. This amused me.

A back view of the old abattoir

Language learning - Language teaching

Hungarian: the GOAT, and more language musings

September 18, 2024 by 0 Comments

This afternoon I had a session with two new girls aged 15 and 16. One of them is the daughter of my first-ever student and is clearly a voracious reader in English. Her vocabulary was unusually good. They both have Hungarian, not Romanian, as their first language, so when they spoke to each other I didn’t have a clue what they were saying. That felt weird. And weird is probably the best word to describe Hungarian. It’s almost what is called a language isolate: a language that shares no ancestors with any other. It doesn’t quite qualify because it shares roots with Finnish and Estonian, but it took a sharp left turn many centuries ago and is now firmly on its own. If Romanian, French, German, and even Serbo-Croat are animals of one species or another, Hungarian is a fungus. Because Hungarian is written using the Latin alphabet, I expect to get some kind of read on it, but it’s worse than Greek to me.

On the way back from Vienna, we stopped in the city of Kecskemét. It’s pronounced “ketch-keh-met”, but with a lengthened final syllable. That’s what the acute accent does. Just like in almost all Hungarian words, the stress goes on the first syllable. For us English speakers, we’ve already got a problem here. In English, long vowels tend to be stressed too. Take the word believe. The vowel in the second syllable is long, and happily the second syllable is also where the stress falls. It would be quite hard to say be-lieve while keeping the vowel lengths the same, but that’s exactly what Hungarian requires you to do.

Three signs on a loo in the Kecskemét bistro. Good luck!

Kecskemét means “goat pass” (simply, kescke means “goat” and mét means “pass”). So let’s look up kecske in Wiktionary, an extremely handy multilingual dictionary. It says goat, with some stuff about an uncertain etymology. It even gives me a picture of a goat. Great.

But when I click on the “inflection” arrow, I get this, a veritable explosion of word forms in both singular and plural:

All those endings tell you whether you’re doing something to the goat, with the goat, on the goat, near the goat, or whether something is being put inside the goat or falling off the goat or the goat is transforming into something else. It’s mindblowing that a noun can even have this many inflections. By the way, all the things in blue in the first column – dative, instrumental, adessive, and so on – are cases. English and French ditched cases, which were part of Latin, a long time ago. Romanian still has them – five, unlike the crazy number Hungarian has, and because two pairs of them share the same form, you can think of Romanian as having just three, of which one isn’t used all that much. Serbian has seven, and they’re all distinct.

It’s not just nouns. Hungarian verbs are fiendishly complex, too. There’s the whole concept of definite and indefinite conjugations. Definite would be eating a pizza, say, while indefinite would be just eating. At least I think that’s what the difference is.

When I got back from Vienna I fired up Duolingo in Hungarian. By the fourth lesson I realised it was hopeless and gave up. I can’t hope to even scratch the surface of such a language by playing a game, which is what Duolingo is. It doesn’t help with pattern recognition, which is vital when the language is so complex and alien to anything I’ve seen before.

Before Hungarian there was German. I felt almost ashamed at how little I knew of such a well-known language. While clearly much easier than Hungarian, German seems full of traps. Langsam, meaning slow, sounds slow. But then so does schnell (snail?), meaning fast. Then there are the crazy-looking space-bar-free words. Even some sensible-length words like Borschtsch, a kind of soup, look completely ridiculous. I saw a sign for Schifffahrt – a water taxi on the Danube – which looked pretty damn silly too.

Then on my trip to Maribor I was confronted with Slovenian. Just like Serbian and the other Slavic languages, it’s highly inflected, though nowhere near as extreme as Hungarian. Slovenian has six cases, one fewer than Serbian which also has the vocative. (The vocative is used when a person or thing is addressed directly; Romanian also has this case to a limited extent.) One major phonetic difference between Slovenian and Serbian is that Slovenian has final devoicing. This means that voiced consonant sounds at the end of the word, such as b, d or g, are replaced by their unvoiced counterparts, p, t and k respectively, even though their spellings may remain the same. Most Slavic languages and many others like German have this feature, and I can’t say I’m a fan. I like a nice strong b or g at the end of a word.

Just like Serbian, Slovenian is full of prefixes and suffixes. The cases give you the suffixes, while the prefixes are attached to verbs to denote completion or direction or a bunch of other things. A common prefix in both languages (I think) is po-, while -om is a common suffix. That meant I kept seeing pom a lot. It caught my eye because I now see that word every time I get in my car.

It was only when I returned from Slovenia, many months after my purchase, that I saw another car with POM on its plate, registered in Timiș. It was a sporty red Fiat with the top down. Then yesterday I saw a rather more prosaic POM – a white van – registered in Bucharest. It’s nice to know I’m not alone after all.

Language learning - Language teaching

Bayes’ berms and innovative scones

August 21, 2024 by 0 Comments

A bit better today, certainly. We topped out at “only” 35, so that helped, but still almost no energy or enthusiasm. Most of this flat is a mess. I was struggling in my four hours of lessons with various boys. The mother of two of the boys insists on me sending her sheets which she prints out and they fill in. This does not work, unless her goal is to make my life five times harder in which case it works perfectly. I can’t see what they’re doing.

Before my lessons I picked some plums in Mehala. One woman asked me if I’ve I’d got permission from her neighbour. They didn’t look like they were on her neighbour’s (or anyone else’s) property – the tree was on what I call a berm after living in NZ for 13 years – and anyway her neighbour didn’t seem particularly interested in them. They were fully ripe; three more days and they’d have had it. I said nothing and left. There were plenty more trees down the road.

I’m now going to scale the steep berm of language once again. About 30 hours ago a luxury yacht named Bayesian sank in a storm in Sicily, probably killing seven on board. The boat’s name comes from Bayesian inference and Bayes’ theorem, some nifty statistical stuff that Thomas Bayes came up with in 1763. In fact there’s a whole load of stuff named after the man. As far as I see it, Bayes theory is basically this: you have a “prior” or “gut feeling” about something probabilistic, then you get new information that may cause you to shift that feeling in one direction or another by a certain amount. For example, I have a coin in my pocket. My “prior” is that it’s fair: both heads and tails have a 50% probability. Then I toss it ten times and get nine heads. That probably won’t convince me to shift my prior much. Nine heads out of ten is rare, but not super rare. But then I keep tossing the coin, and after 100 flips I’ve got 85 heads. Now I’m convinced that I’ve got a seriously skewed coin. Getting that many heads from 100 flips of a fair coin is one in a squillion dillion, give or take. But what is the real probability of getting a head on this particular coin? The more flips you do, the less notice you take of your original prior (50% in this case) and the more weight you put on what you actually see (85% or whatever). Bayes’ theory tells you how much to weight your prior as opposed to your observed information, according to how much information you’ve observed. Anyway, it seems this Bayesian stuff is very lucrative for certain people, including the owner of the yacht, Mike Lynch, who is now presumed dead. He has had major court proceedings against him, and weirdly his co-defendant was killed by a car while running on Saturday. The word Bayesian has all of a sudden entered the mainstream.

I watched a video on the sinking, or tried to – I’m finding it hard to take in new information. I was struck by the Italian journalist they interviewed named Alina Trabbatoni. Her English, which she spoke with a standard English accent, was extraordinary. Better than fluent. You’d never know she wasn’t a native. With one exception: her pronunciation of innovative when describing the yacht’s mast. She said i-NOV-uh-tiv, with second-syllable stress, pronouncing the “nov” bit just like in “novel”. My students have come up with this pronunciation too over the years; it isn’t a rare word. But as far as I’m aware, native speakers never say it this way. Brits (like me) go with IN-uh-vuh-tiv, while Americans say IN-uh-vay-tiv, sometimes even shifting the main stress to the “vay” part. I checked Wiktionary just in case, and it told me that in-NOV-uh-tiv was the default pronunciation for Brits! I don’t believe that for one minute. I checked Youglish, a very handy tool where they play short chunks of popular YouTube videos containing a word that you specify, and nobody, not even the Brits, ever said i-NOV-uh-tiv.

Finally, scone. How do you say it? I rhyme it with gone, just like about half of those surveyed in Cambridgeshire where I grew up. But I think Mum being a New Zealander made it a sure thing that I’d say it that way. I remember Mum’s mother joking one time about the rhymes-with-bone pronunciation, as if it was ridiculously upper-class for NZ. Mum, as well as her mother, often made scones, but I had to laugh at the bit about people’s preferences for putting the jam or the cream on first. Mum’s scones, though delicious, came with margarine. The idea of having either jam or cream with them, let alone both in either order, would have been absurdly decadent.

Three lessons tomorrow, leaving time for packing. Then a seven-hour drive (but I bet it’s more) to Maribor.

Language learning

Some language stuff

August 17, 2024 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I mentioned Lake Balaton, which I flew over the day before. Well, I’ll probably pass by it (it depends which way I go) on the way to Maribor next Thursday. It has an area of 600 km2, compared to Lake Geneva’s 580. I thought I’d check Taupo, and that turns out to be a fraction bigger, at 616 km2.

This is one of those occasional posts where I focus on language. I’m more likely to do that if I’ve just been away or I’m about to go away or, as is the case right now, both.

On the plane back from Luton I took this picture of an ad by Babbel, a language learning app. You get six months free but only if you pay for the first six months. If you have to buy A to get B free, B is not bloody free!

There’s plenty to unpack in these translations, which aren’t always exact. Something that monolingual English speakers don’t appreciate is that, more often that not, English is just weird. Look at the translations for “There’s sand in my mouth”. They all say “I have sand in (the) mouth.” The verb have is always there, and there’s no sign of the possessive that we use in English. You could say “I’ve got sand in my mouth” in English if you wanted to, but in all the other languages “have” is the default option. English is the odd one out, as it is so often. In fact, other languages (including Romanian) use “have” in all sorts of ways that we just don’t. This morning at the market, a lady asked for the price of some flowers. She asked “Ce preț au?” or “What price do they have?” In Romanian, as in many other languages, you say “You have right”, “This doesn’t have sense” or “I have 44 years”. Another thing to note here is that the Spanish for sand is “arena”; that comes from Latin and is the source of “arena” in English – ancient amphitheatres were covered in sand.

Now look at all the words for shark. It’s one of those weird words, like “butterfly” and “left” (the direction), which translate completely differently even in similar languages. Butterfly is papillon in French, mariposa in Spanish, farfalla in Italian, Schmetterling in German, and fluture in Romanian. (At least the Romanian for shark, rechin, is basically the same as the French.)

Another thing is punctuation. Here English is in the majority, for a change. We put our question marks and exclamation marks directly after the last word in the sentence. Spanish does too, but they also write an inverted question (or exclamation) mark at the start. ¿Flamboyant, isn’t it? ¡Olé! French differs in a more subtle way from the norm: they make do with just the one mark, but put a space before it.

Now Slovenian. At first glance it seems less interesting than Serbian, the last language I took a keen(ish) interest in. Both languages are Slavic and therefore related. However, Slovenian is always written using the Latin alphabet, whereas Serbian can be written in either Latin or Cyrillic. Slovenian also lacks one or two letters that Serbian has. (For instance, there aren’t both hard and soft equivalents of the English ch and sh sounds.) A very funky feature of Slovenian, present in Maori (I think) and very few other languages, is dual number, in addition to singular and plural. Just like Serbian, nouns can be masculine, feminine and plural, and masculine nouns are also grammatically dependent on their animacy or inanimacy. The Slovenian numbers are similar to Serbian and most other Slavic languages, with one big exception: in numbers above 20, the tens and units are reversed, so for 24 you say “four and twenty” just like German and Dutch do and English used to do (sometimes at least), as in the nursery rhyme in which four and twenty blackbirds are baked in a pie. Perhaps the most interesting feature of all is the number of dialects Slovenian has, considering how geographically small its catchment area is.

How should you pronounce Kamala? Americans say, look it’s easy, it’s just “comma” + “la”. But that does not work for British English speakers like me, nor for Kiwis and Aussies for that matter. This video explains all. (Geoff Lindsey, who made the video, is brilliant by the way.) I dearly hope we hear a lot of that name between now and (at least) 2029.

Finally, a word I’ve been hearing a lot lately: performative. I can’t remember hearing it ten or even five years ago, but now I can’t get through a news article without seeing it. If I look at the definition on Wiktionary, I see it does have an original meaning: “being enacted as it is said”, such as when you say “I do” in a wedding ceremony. But the modern meaning is rather different: “being done as a performance in order to create an impression”. I’ve sometimes seen the word in the context of “performative work”: work done not to achieve anything important but purely as part of a game. In my experience of the corporate world, a lot of performative work went on and it was exhausting. Here’s a Google ngram showing the frequency of performative over time; my instinct that it has greatly increased in frequency was correct: