Language learning

Language learning - Language teaching

Hungarian: the GOAT, and more language musings

September 18, 2024 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 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 ship’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 plutomanby 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:

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Music - Other sports - Tennis

Panic stations

March 12, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I didn’t sleep well last night and got up at 7:30, half an hour after I meant to. After breakfast I reviewed some Romanian words – there’s a few I can never bloody remember – before our lesson that started at nine. It was an enjoyable lesson – probably the highlight of the day. Then I called Mum and Dad. During the pandemic (it’s now four years since everything went mad) we became closer, but now our lives and experiences have drifted apart again. I have to feign interest in their building project, while the novelty of their son teaching English in Romania has long since worn off. During our chat, they said they might come to Europe in 2025. Might. Jeez.

After the chat with my parents I felt on edge. Can I face another online lesson with that damn woman? Following a surprisingly normal chat, she read screeds of corporate shite from Harvard Business Review. Doubling down on robust penetration capability to achieve superior resilience in a crowded landscape. The more I stare at that sentence the more lewd it gets. She read at 100 miles an hour – her typical Romanian monotone (and the subject matter) made it seem even faster. Slow the eff down. Please. Then it was the 17-year-old girl. We talked about music festivals. I’ve never been to one; she’s already been to three. Have I missed out? Yes, she said. I’m not convinced.

Then it was off to the twins. A quick turnaround. They wanted to talk about their diarrhoea travel experiences and Adolf Hitler. Then a third of the way through our 90-minute session it happened. A panic attack, just like I had regularly in 2001. Or at least that’s what I think it was. A sudden jolt, my heart seemingly skipping a beat, and I felt as if my lower body was giving way from under me. The twins wondered what was happening. Shaken, I recovered and made it through to the end, then did some breathing exercises on my bike trip back. My final lesson of the day was with the extremely pleasant guy in his late forties. He read from Michelle Obama’s autobiography – a fascinating window into her early life, with no end of words and expressions to challenge even an accomplished English speaker such as my student. At one point she mentioned the Muppets. I asked him if they got the Muppets here in Romania. Yes, he said, but only right here because being close to the border meant they could access Serbian TV. He was lucky to live in Muppetland, he said.

Last week I felt terribly demotivated. Heck, I’ve got to do something. Two things. Sort out a car for myself and write that damn book. I had 32 hours of lessons despite a number of cancellations. I doubt I’ll ever get the money from Marco, the bugger. Two and a half hours, then I don’t hear from him. The smoking in bed and his unwavering religious devotion rang alarm bells, though this is Romania, a country of many false alarms. On Saturday I had the most incredible lesson with the girl who has just turned seven. Two hours. How will I cope? Or more to the point, how will she cope? She managed phenomenally well. Several worksheets and colouring exercises on clothes, then a bingo game (she knows her numbers up to 60 upside down and backwards), then I read her a few tactile books before we played a 20-minute game of Kiwi-style Last Card which incredibly we didn’t even finish. She sat there the whole time in rapt attention.

Yesterday I met Mark at Scârț, the place where they have the museum of communism. It was packed there because there was a vinyl sale that I wasn’t even aware of. Then I found both Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Cosmo’s Factory and David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, both of which I’d been looking at online just an hour earlier. At 220 lei between them, they weren’t cheap, but I snapped them up. As Mark said, you’ve got to have a hobby. I’ve now got 18 records, most of them older than me. The texture of the sleeves, the artwork, the smells, it’s all pure happiness and that’s before I even start playing them. Mark and I had a good chat as always, though 14 lei for a lukewarm coffee was a rip-off. I love that area of town so I then hung around in the park on Romulus and Remus Streets with all the blossom out and hardly anyone else around. My next trick was carrying the records home on my bike (I was unprepared, obviously) without falling off it again. Then in the evening I met Dorothy in Piața Unirii. She’d just got back from a trip to the UK where she slept in six different beds and then got bumped off her flight home but got put up in Luton and received $400 in compensation.

Football. Following any kind of sport can be a heck of a time sink. After work on Saturday I watched Birmingham’s game at Millwall, direct rivals in the battle to avoid relegation. It wasn’t easy on the eye. Blues were shocking in the first half but improved somewhat in the second. The game was petering out to a goalless draw, but then Millwall scored from a corner in the 90th minute – a real sucker punch – and that was that. With ten games to go Blues are teetering, there’s no doubt about it. Since their manager was forced to take a back seat, they’ve taken just one point in four games and sit a single point above the drop zone. The good news is that five of Blues’ next seven matches are at home, including tomorrow night’s catch-up game with Middlesbrough. Straight after that run, they travel to Rotherham who were long ago cut adrift at the bottom of the table. If they can garner four wins in those eight matches, they’ll very likely stay up. Even three with the odd draw would give them a good chance. Less than that though and they’re in deep doo-doo.

Dorothy and I even talked briefly about football last night. Mostly we discussed the evocative names of the clubs. Um, OK, not Birmingham City, but rather those named after a girl or a weekday or the Far East or three successive letters of the alphabet. We didn’t talk about the names of the grounds, but those can be quite lovely too. I used to love Burnden Park and Upton Park and Roker Park and the Baseball Ground, none of which exist today. I remember a game from the 1995-96 season in which West Bromwich Albion drew 4-4 with Watford having been way out in front. West Brom’s ground was, and still is, called the Hawthorns. As Watford equalised, a reporter said “it’s four-four at the Hawthorns!” and I remember thinking how poetic that sounded.

In tennis news, Simona Halep’s doping ban has been greatly reduced and she’ll be back on the court later this month. Great news. It’ll be interesting to see how well she does after such a long time away. And this morning on TV they showed the most extraordinary rally between 37-year-old Gaël Monfils and eighth-ranked Hubert Hurkacz. Monfils won the point, and eventually the match. As for my tennis, our season is about to resume but the cost has risen from 40 lei an hour to 70 – why such a huge increase I don’t know – so my court time is bound to come down. That’s a real shame.

Tomorrow morning I’ll have a look at a blue Peugeot 307. I’ve got to get this sorted, as scary as driving again might be.

That was a very long one, I’m sorry.

Books - Language learning - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports

Beating the drop

March 4, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I spent some time in the park near the cathedral, reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. Someone once recommended it to me. Whenever I go there I get a twinge of sadness as the trams and trolleybuses clatter by and the cathedral bells chime four times an hour. Now I just feel the occasional mini-earthquake when a large truck goes past. As for the book, my initial reaction was, I don’t think I can stick this, but now I’ve reached chapter four I think I’ll persevere. I went back via Parcul Regina Maria and sat in the gazebo there. A girl of about 14 was with her parents. Her mother kept quizzing her, presumably for an upcoming history test as school. What happened in Philadelphia in 1774? Poor girl. I found this distracting and went home.

Kaufland has become my go-to supermarket of late. As the name suggests, it’s German-owned, so I get to pick up odd snippets of German there, like erbsen for peas. The signage in the shop (and outside it) is sensibly all in Romanian though.

On the sign above you can see both plural forms of monedă, which means coin. (It’s quite obviously related to the English money.) Should the plural be monede or monezi? From what I gather (and the Romanian academy would agree) the plural should be monede, but people often plump for monezi because most Romanian nouns ending in -dă form plurals in -zi (oglindă – mirror – becomes oglinzi; ladă – crate – becomes lăzi; livadă – orchard – becomes livezi, and so on). Debates about plurals of nouns abound in Romanian. I’ve found an excellent YouTube channel on languages, hosted by somebody called K Klein. Imagine being as clever as him.

On the way back from Kaufland I passed a small market where people (often gypsies) sell old jewellery and other mostly low-value bits and bobs. Two of the stallholders (men) were having a fight. One threw something at the other and hit him in the face. Great.

Saturday was my usual busy day. My final lesson was a two-hour maths session with the 15-year-old girl. After a calculation involving a flight from Bangkok to Melbourne, she told me how much she loved travelling and that she goes on a family holiday to Dubai every year. Dubai. Please make it stop. After our session I checked the football scores. Birmingham were 3-2 down, and a man down, against Southampton. The situation sounded hopeless. But then Blues equalised. A miracle. With ten minutes of normal time left I found a stream for the match. There was wave upon wave of pressure from Southampton. Blues hardly saw the ball. Could they hold out? Nine minutes of added time. Oh lord. After five additional minutes Southampton fired in the winner, and Blues are now in relegation peril. This is what the table looks like from 12th place down:

Rotherham are done. Two of the twelve other teams on the list will join them in the league below, unless something very weird happens to one of the teams above this truncated table. (Blues could well be one of them; they have an extra game to play relative to the teams around them, but their manager being out of commission is a massive blow.) Calling this a relegation dogfight doesn’t do justice to how tight it is. And that’s why the system of promotion and relegation is the best thing about club football. (Much of the rest of it leaves me cold.) Ten years ago Blues avoided the drop by scoring with just moments remaining; a 2-2 draw at Bolton kept them up on goal difference over Doncaster. Most dramatically of all, in 1999 Carlisle (sponsored by Eddie Stobart, a haulage company who had a cult following) were seconds from dropping out of the football league entirely when their goalkeeper scored the winning goal deep into injury time, relegating Scarborough instead. Part of the drama on the last day comes from following scores of other games. In the pre-smartphone age this was quite something: news of goals would filter through the crowd Chinese-whispers-like and you’d see players crowding around radios, agonisingly in some cases, at the end of the game.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Writing a book

Putting a jetpack up my back-end

February 27, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

A miracle has just occurred. This site had locked me out of making new posts. A critical error has occurred. At work I remember getting both fatal and catastrophic errors. Though this sounded like a notch down from them, it didn’t exactly fill me with optimism. I had visions of being stuck on a help chatline for hours, not getting anywhere, and maybe being locked out for good. Then I read something about a Jetpack, whatever that is exactly. I hit the update button next to Jetpack on my back-end (this might sound like I have an inkling of what I’m doing; believe me, I don’t) and hey presto, it worked.

There’s very little to report since I last wrote. The greatest excitement came on Saturday when I fell off my bike. I’d just bought some speakers for my record player and tried to carry them on the handlebars. Bad idea. The rain didn’t help matters either. There was a fair bit of traffic on the road, so I was lucky to escape with only a few bruises.

This morning I had the Romanian lesson which cleared up one or two things. Most interestingly for me, our teacher said that -iă isn’t an allowable combination in Romanian, after I tried to create a word with that ending. It’s amazing what you miss. After that I had (just) three English lessons, the first of which was with an extremely shallow young woman of 17. We’re talking puddle-deep here. I still think she’s less superficial than the girl of the same age who started with me last autumn and – thank God – didn’t get back to me after visiting Bali over Christmas. It was a relief to get my session with the hyper-competitive mall rat over with, and see the twins before coming home for an online lesson with Alin who is currently reading Michelle Obama’s autobiography. The twins worked through a textbook before I played a game with them called Bedlam which I’d picked up from a car boot sale near my brother’s place. The name of the game tells you all you need to know.

Talking of my brother, his degree results are imminent. I don’t quite get how he’s completed a degree in a little over a year while also holding down a job (will the qualification carry the same weight as a standard three- or four-year degree?) but the way he’s applied himself is very impressive indeed. This is my brother, who could hardly have been less academic as a kid. He made a concerted effort not to learn anything. Lately he’s been going on about assignments and dissertations and bibliographies – is this him I’m talking to? I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets a first-class degree. I got an upper second, by the way, and was delighted with it. In my day, firsts were hard to come by, the preserve of the real high-flyer which I certainly wasn’t. I thought I was destined for a lower second, or 2:2, sometimes known as a Desmond (ha ha), but I was very focused towards the end of my final year and scraped into the level above by a couple of percentage points.

Football. Birmingham lost 3-1 at Ipswich. I’ve always liked Ipswich – they’re fairly local to where I grew up. They’ve got a good shot at automatic promotion now. As for Birmingham, that loss to a better side puts them back in the relegation picture again after other struggling teams surprisingly won. I also watched a few frames of snooker – it’s getting to that time of year again.

Tomorrow I’ll get back to the book once more. I really need to put a jetpack up my back-end as far as that is concerned.

Language learning - Life :) - Other sports

Strange games

December 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night I met Mark at the Christmas market. It wasn’t as busy as we expected. Whether it was the prices or the too-loud music or something else, we couldn’t tell. Mark wanted to buy his girlfriend a present, so we visited one of the souvenir shops. An ie – a traditional tunic, embroidered in red and black – caught his eye. It was 550 lei (nearly £100 or NZ$200), so not cheap. Unlike other cheaper versions made in India, this one was handmade in Romania. A ton of work. He got me to ask the sales assistant about washing and the like, and when he was satisfied he made the purchase. We had langoși (deep-fried flatbread) and mulled wine, and talked about how lucky we are to be living in a city as nice as Timișoara. You really can’t beat the three beautiful squares in the city centre, and while it isn’t quite as developed as somewhere like Cluj, that actually adds to the experience. I don’t think I could be me in a city that was all perfect and pristine.

In English, two-letter words are almost entirely restricted to function words: prepositions (at, by, in, of, on, to), conjunctions (as, if), pronouns (me, he, it, we, us), and forms of very common verbs (do, go, am, is). Two-letter content words are very thin on the ground: there’s only really ox and (if you’re American) ax. In Romanian, that isn’t the case at all. Of the top of my head, as well as ie (plural ii), there’s iz (a whiff), ac (needle), șa (saddle), as (ace), in (linen), os (bone), om (person), ud (wet) and uz (use, noun), in addition to a whole bunch of function words. You could imagine a simple Romanian conversation in a shop consisting of only two-letter words.

Having a lighter work week has given me a chance to brush up my Romanian a bit. I’ve added hundreds of words to my Anki deck (a spaced repetition tool), and several cards that aren’t words as such but instructions: conjugate this or that verb, think of all the ways to say this or that, find four words that begin with zg-, and so on. On Monday in our Romanian lesson, the teacher gave us a story to read entitled Puiul, or the chick. It’s a sad story. Although I got the meaning, there were a number of new words for me, and they all went in the Anki deck. I need to start reading properly in Romanian again.

Today at the darts there was a match that went all the way to a sudden-death leg, but the big story so far has been 16-year-old Luke Littler who was out of this world in his first-round victory and won again in round two. He looks considerably older than 16 and has already developed a good paunch; he’s got “darts champion” written all over him. Watching not-so-young members of the crowd swaying and braying to a version of annoying nineties hit There’s No Limit made me think, some of these people must have kids. Imagine if I’d been “blessed” with a dad like that. Just imagine. Watching that, and visiting the mall today to grab some simple presents, made me consider the idea of some super-intelligent species watching humans in intrigue or perhaps horror at their behaviour, and making documentaries on them. “Once a year, they practically fall over each other to buy so-called knick-knacks made in China, without ever wondering why. Look at how this female extends her arm. You can see she is practised in the art.”

Update: Sheer madness in the darts tonight. Florian Hempel, the big German ex-handball goalkeeper, came back from the dead to beat seeded Dimitri van den Bergh. He hit a massive 151 checkout to keep himself alive, then he went ballistic. Two ten-dart legs back to back. Madman mode. It was quite something to witness it. And such great sportsmanship from his much smaller opponent after the match.

I had a strange dream last night about a fictitious sport played in Britain. I visited a centre where this traditional rough-and-tumble sport was played, and talked to a player. The name of the sport began with B and had another B in the middle. Something like burbank but not that. From there I went to a place nearby, where a version of cross-country lacrosse, that also seemed to have elements of golf, was played. I talked to a woman about the game.

Four lessons tomorrow, then a very barren patch until the second week of January. I won’t mind that.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Music - Other sports - Romania

The start of my collection, with nothing to play it on (yet)

December 19, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum and Dad called me again from Hampden yesterday. It was a relief to see a smile back on Mum’s dial. She’s always more relaxed down there, away from what is now (let’s not mince words) a shithole. Mum seems strangely magnetised to that dreadful place which they should stay away from as far as humanly possible until the building work is completed.

Yesterday Dorothy messaged me to say there was a vinyl and book sale on at Scârț. Sounded good. Sale wasn’t quite the right word though – some of the LPs were really quite pricey. I picked up five second-hand records for a total of 300 lei (just over NZ$100 or £50): Selling England By the Pound by Genesis, Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel, 18 by Chicago, Oxygène by Jean-Michel Jarre, and Leonard Cohen’s greatest hits album. That’s a start; I just need an actual record player now. Oh, and I bought one book for 5 lei: H. W. Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, in Romanian.

Four English lessons today. I started at 8am with my Bucharest-based online student – I found out today that he’s only two months older than me – who wanted help with adverbs of manner and uncountable nouns, among other things. I was in contact with the east of Romania again for my second session, this time with a 35-year-old woman. She said that if her six-year-old son (her only child) doesn’t get what he wants for Christmas, he’ll make his disappointment very obvious. He’s still very little, I said, but by twelve he’ll have learnt to hide it. You can’t always get what you want. She said, no, he won’t do that when he’s twelve because I’ll have told him to fight for what he wants. If he doesn’t like something, even a glass of juice, I want him to make his feelings clear. I still remember at seven or eight telling a family friend that I didn’t like some juice – probably something Ribena-like – and wouldn’t drink it. My grandmother told me I was already too big to act in that way, and I think she was right. Little Vlad (I don’t think that’s his name) has the pleasure of going to intensive after-school classes, which include nine hours of English lessons a week. Right Vlad, I’m going to make you work stupidly hard, and in return you get to be total dick. That’s the modern way, it seems. She earns well by working extremely hard at an investment bank, doing something that I would find utterly pointless.

In between my first two English sessions was the Romanian lesson, which was mostly spent discussing the downfall of Ceaușescu during an unseasonably warm few days in the lead-up to Christmas 1989. Our teacher was 20 at the time; I would have guessed several years younger. Yesterday the song Timișoara, produced by Pro-Musica in the wake of the Revolution, came on the local radio. It starts with a few bars from the Romanian national anthem and turns into something spine-tinglingly powerful. I recommend that you watch the video. My third English lesson was with a 17-year-old girl who came to my place. We went through some B2 Cambridge papers. I struggled to get her to write anything. In the end she wrote about her “happy place”, the mall, but didn’t even say much about that. My final lesson was the twins who live near Piața Verde. Because it was our last meeting of the year we had an extended Bananagrams session, which is always fun.

The World Championship darts. It’s back on again. Though the game is skin-deep compared to the multi-layered wonders of snooker, this tournament can be worth a watch because it’s the pinnacle of the sport. If you can get past the tedious football-style chants, you find an event filled with personality and drama. I’m a big fan of the format which, like in snooker, is a straight knockout and calls for matches of increasing length as the rounds progress. In the pre-Christmas phase, matches are best of five sets. The top players only need one win, and anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, to book their place in the post-turkey stages. Yesterday I saw a great game involving the Canadian player Matt Campbell. He was two sets up and had multiple opportunities to win the match in three. His Filipino opponent Lourence Ilagan took advantage of his reprieve to tie the match at 2-2, only for Campbell to storm through the fifth in some style. After Christmas the matches are best of seven, and in the new year they get longer still, culminating in a best-of-13-set final.
Update: I’ve just seen Man-Lok Leung of Hong Kong (he goes by Hugo) win an absolute belter of a game against Dutchman Gian van Veen, coming from two sets down – and missing no end of chances – to win 3-2 in a joyous finale. He fired a whopping eleven 180s and was a very popular winner. A Kiwi by the name of Haupai Puha – he lives in Wellington – is on next, but it’s bedtime for me.

Coronavirus - Language learning - Life :)

The good, the bad and the mad

December 5, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

So I watched the interview about Covid vaccines (an hour and a quarter long) that Dad sent me. It’s on John Campbell’s YouTube channel. Angus Dalgleish, the professor of oncology whom Campbell interviewed, started off by raising what sounded like some good points about T-cell activation and boosters, but then he said this: “Covid only killed old people who would have died three months later anyway.” Ye gods. He’s one of those people. Lockdowns were “lunacy”. Anthony Fauci was “not very bright”; Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance were “idiotic”. And so it went on. Supremely confident in his own views (never a “maybe” or an “I think”), but quick to criticise everyone else. I knew people like that back in my office days, and they were invariably nasty pieces of work whom I tried to have as little to do with as possible. I note that Dalgleish is an ardent Brexiter who stood as a UKIP candidate in the 2015 election. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it’s interesting how often anti-vax overlaps with that political outlook. Dalgleish did talk some sense about vitamin D at the end of the interview, even if he quoted an implausible statistic. Vitamin D is well known to boost your immunity against a lot more than just Covid, so in winter when we get little sun I take a tablet (2000 international units) every morning.

In the early days of the pandemic, when we were fumbling around in the dark, I watched Campbell’s channel religiously. While we were running around like headless chickens, his daily reports were a beacon of sanity. They were all the better for their lack of slickness. Then around the end of 2021 when the Covid situation had markedly improved, I stopped tuning in. Since then, his viewership has only grown, and his channel has become a haven for anti-vaxers judging by the comments. Campbell is doing rather nicely from his channel, and though he seems to be a principled man, he’s incentivised to feed his viewers red meat every other day rather than accurate information. On the BBC’s More or Less – a radio programme about statistics – they debunked a dangerously (and laughably) wrong statistic that Campbell gave about excess deaths caused by vaccines. Campbell took the video down, but the damage had been done by then. I often wish we could nuke YouTube and social media out of existence.

I’ve written before about people being criticised for being “mad” (Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, for example) when it’s not the madness that’s the problem. That’s always annoyed me; some of the most creative and most interesting people are a little bit mad, and it’s entirely possible to be mad without being a dangerous arsehole. Tom Crawford, the exceptional Oxford and Cambridge mathematician whose tattoos grow near-exponentially, is clearly a bit mad, but he’s a good guy with it. The world needs more people like him. Siouxsie Wiles, the UK-born, New Zealand-based microbiologist who was instrumental in handling the Covid pandemic, is another one. We need more people like her. Norvin Richards, the professor in the MIT linguistics lectures I watched, comes into that category too. You could even include Charlie Ottley, the guy who does the brilliant Flavours of Romania series on Netflix. Good mad people abound.

Last week I called up Elena, the lady who lives above me, on her 80th birthday. She’s still with her family in Canada – she’ll be back in mid-January. I can speak freely in Romanian with her; I wish I had more opportunities to do that. (Getting a car and visiting remote villages might help.) I’m still having Romanian lessons every Monday morning. In yesterday’s session we covered a ton of verbs, some of which are always used reflexively while others can be used either reflexively or non-reflexively with different meanings. The trick will be getting the chance to use them.

Family - Language learning - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports

Why is English so dominant? (And can I face a British Christmas?)

November 20, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I managed 32 hours of lessons last week. I was my first time over 30 for a while. I always think of 30 as a good benchmark for a full, productive week, but cancellations had kept me below that level. After I got home from Dumbrăvița on Saturday I emailed Mum a logic problem about odd and even numbers that I’d given to Matei. She replied with the right answer. (It wasn’t immediately obvious to Matei that if you multiply two whole numbers and you get an odd number, both the numbers must be odd.) I thought about the night classes in maths she took when I was little, half her lifetime ago. She’d show me her book full of xs and ys. It would be nice if she could do something similar now.

At the weekend I read an article about the rise of English. It is undoubtedly the dominant language in the world, and is likely to remain so for some time. Most of this is down to American culture. Just look at Romania. As the country develops, slices of America keep popping up everywhere, with “Drive-Thru” and “Wash & Go” spelled out in English. Twenty-year-olds grew up on Cartoon Network. Teens (and even pre-teens) are all over TikTok – Chinese-owned but loaded with American popular culture. There were plenty of comments on the article, and some people said that the dominance of English isn’t only due to America, but also because it’s simply easier to communicate in than most other languages. “Me no like the cats” is very wrong but perfectly understandable to a native speaker. They’re partly right – English has few inflections, it lacks grammatical gender, and English text takes up less space than most other languages that use the Latin alphabet. But that’s only a small part of the story. Bad English is easy for us to understand precisely because we’re used to non-natives speaking English, or attempting to. We even simplify our language in return. I remember in Bali 30-plus years ago, where the locals often knew English but at a very basic level, Dad would say things like “Many motorbikes here” or “Takes long time?” It’s not the same with less widespread languages. If I utter a very bad Romanian version of “I don’t like cats”, my Romanian listener won’t have heard anything like that before in his life. He’ll be thinking WTF? So that puts a barrier in place to anyone trying to learn Romanian – you have to get to some kind of reasonable level before you can even start using the language. Its very pervasiveness is what makes English one of the easier languages to learn; in 2023 you’d have to be living under a rock to not know like or love or stop or OK. You get a lot of English for free, and that gives you a heck of a head start.

I don’t often watch football these days, but on Saturday I watched Romania’s Euro 2024 football qualifier against Israel, played in Budapest. It was originally meant to be played in Israel, but got moved for obvious reasons. If Romania avoided defeat, they’d qualify for next summer’s competition in Germany. Israel took the lead in only the second minute, then Romania equalised in the tenth. That dramatic start set up a very watchable game. Romania took the lead midway through the second half and held their advantage until the end. They probably should have won by more – a player by the name of Mihăilă missed a sitter and then got himself sent off just before the end. Romanian football, and sport in general, has been in the doldrums for a while, so it’s nice that they qualified. Beneficiaries of a pretty easy group it must be said, they’re unbeaten in nine games (five wins, four draws) and if they can get at least a draw against Switzerland in Bucharest tomorrow night they’ll top the group and in theory have an easier ride in the final tournament.

This song popped up on YouTube – Sleeping Satellite, Tasmin Archer’s one-hit wonder. It came out in 1992 and was the very first song on Now 23, one of the first tapes I ever had. A complex song, unique in many ways, with levels of rhyme adeptly woven into the lyrics. It brings back memories of a more optimistic time.

Last night I watched the first episode of the new series of Charlie Ottley’s Flavours of Romania. It’s on Netflix; I thoroughly recommend it. I hope to get a few ideas for road trips, for when I finally do own a car. I also watched Noel Philips’ trip from Amsterdam to Paramaribo (the capital of Suriname) – a nine-hour flight on an Airbus A340.

My brother called me on Saturday. My nephew was bouncing around, on the verge of walking. A very happy chappy. He’s fascinated by the cat, though the cat seems less fascinated by him. I’m thinking of going over there for Christmas, but can I face it? What I’ll really want are about four days with little risk of having to see or communicate with anyone.