Language learning

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Panic stations

March 12, 2024 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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.

Books - Family - Language learning - Music - Other sports

Out of the dimness (and into the light?) as we enter winter time

October 29, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s the last day before the clocks go back, and the last vestiges of not-winter.

I played singles tennis tonight with the “good” Florin. After this morning’s rain the court was slippery – dangerously so – and I didn’t enjoy it one bit. The wet patches made it worse than if it was fully wet. I started out at the greasier end. Florin made a fair few unforced errors and I led for large parts of the set, but we landed in a tie-break which I lost 7-3. When that was over I told Florin what I thought – that playing singles on a slippery court and risking a broken ankle is bloody stupid – but he didn’t seem bothered. After the changeover (we only switch sides after each set) I moved to the less horrible end, but still slid in the tramlines and almost fell twice. I won the second set 6-2 and led 2-1 in the third when our time ran out, but amazingly Florin moved around the court at the (to me) lethal end as if nothing was amiss, at one stage even retrieving a deep lob. I was handicapped down there. I asked him how he managed it (was it the shoes?), and he said the secret was being brought up in north-eastern Romania, close to the border with Ukraine. Harsh winters back then, so he soon learnt how to move in the snow and ice. I can see that two years ago I had the same problem.

I’ve been reading Wild Wales, George Borrow’s account of his trek on foot through Wales in the middle of the 19th century. Back then, Wales really was wild and outsiders rarely ventured there. Unusually, Borrow could speak Welsh at a decent level. He liked to show off his intellect (this grates after a while) in his conversations with the locals he met along the way, which were surely embellished. My grandmother had a cottage in mid-Wales which we often stayed in when I was a kid, and necessitated a long car journey which I’ve talked about previously on this blog. In my teens I viewed that part of the country as dull and grey and remote, but really it was beautiful. I haven’t been there since 2001, and I’d like to go back.

I’ve picked up a few words of Welsh while reading Borrow’s book. My grandmother’s cottage was in the small town of Rhayader, a semi-Anglicised version of rhaiadr, meaning waterfall, though in fact there hasn’t been a waterfall there for centuries. The word for “not” or “without” is dim, which has a certain logic to it. People in Borrow’s book are always saying “Dim Saesneg”, meaning “no English (language)”, the word Saesneg literally meaning Saxon. For a while I was dim dŵr poeth (without hot water) and dim arian (without money – arian is literally silver) from Barclays, but those dim days are hopefully over now. Last week I called the complaints team to accept the £200 compensation they offered me, derisory though it was. Getting it all over with has a value.

Dad’s sister has bounced back better than he or anyone else (including her) imagined. He’s been seeing her almost every day. Her children, realising she’ll hang on a while longer, have stopped bothering to see her. Of course, her prognosis is still poor. Tomorrow is her 76th birthday and I will make the effort to give her a call, difficult though that will be.

Yesterday Dad caught up with his friends (and mine too – they visited me in Romania six years ago). The couple are in their mid-70s, similar to my parents, and although he was at death’s door in early 2022 before staging a recovery, they’ve managed to cut out most of the stress from their lives while still travelling and pursuing interests. I wish my parents could do likewise.

The Rugby World Cup final is about to get under way between the All Blacks and South Africa, the historical heavyweights of the competition with three wins apiece. (Two wins for Australia and one for England, so the Southern Hemisphere is going to make it 90% whatever happens tonight.) I vividly remember the 1995 final between the two nations – one of the most famous rugby matches ever because of what the occasion meant. There have been some good matches in the knockout stages but I haven’t watched any of them. My mind has been elsewhere. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was the Irish fans’ use of the immensely powerful Cranberries song Zombie as an unofficial anthem. Not long till kick-off, and I guess I might actually watch it.

Language learning

Travel and language — part 3 of 3

October 13, 2023 by 0 Comments

Travelling was fun while it lasted, but I’ve now been back for as long as I was away.

In a recent lesson with a man in his late forties, I discussed the phenomenon of shifting stress patterns as suffixes are added to certain English words. By stress here, I mean accent, or emphasis. For instance, photograph has stress on the first syllable, photographer on the second, and photographic on the third. The trio of politics/political/politician behaves in the same way. I then mentioned that there are sets of Romanian words that do the same thing, citing barbă (beard), bărbat (man), and bărbăție (manliness). He then said, hang on, barbă and bărbat have nothing to do with each other. He was wrong – even though he’d never made the connection in over 45 years of speaking Romanian, they absolutely are related. The interesting thing though is that as a native speaker he had no need to ever make the connection, whereas the link was handy for me as a learner: barbă is beard, bărbat is a bearded person, in other words a man. It’s just like how native French speakers don’t think “earth apple” when they hear pomme de terre (potato), or “small lunch” for petit déjeuner (breakfast), or “sixty-thirteen” for soixante-treize (seventy-three). (As an aside, the name Barbados means “bearded ones”, although people are unsure whether that refers to actual people or a species of bearded fig tree.)

One thing I love about long-haul travel (on the rare occasions I do it) is that I get to see other languages. I dealt with Māori in the first two posts in this series. Indonesian (at Singapore Airport) was a fun one. Air minuman, which sounds like an airline for Hobbits, just means drinking water. But two languages that became friends of sorts were Hungarian and Turkish.

Hungarian is a deceptive beast. It’s part of the Uralic language family that includes Finnish and Estonian, but it went off at a pretty steep tangent many centuries ago, and now bears little resemblance to anything else. It’s written in the familiar Roman alphabet but no matter how hard I stare at it, I can’t get a reading. Even words that you expect to be almost the same everywhere, like restaurant, are completely different. The spelling is phonetic but it has some unusual traits. The letter s on its own represents the English sh sound, while sz denotes the s in silly. Weird, right? (Hungarian zs represents the final sound of massage, while cs denotes the ch in chips.)

Hungarian has a feature called vowel harmony whereby front vowels (vowel sounds created with your tongue near the front of your mouth) go together in the same word, and likewise back vowels. You can’t mix them. (More or less. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.) Hungarian has no grammatical gender, just like English, but it seems to have pretty much everything else, such as a whole bunch of case endings. Plurals work in an interesting way. Both singular and plural nouns exist, but when you mention a number you always use the singular: “look at the horses” but “five horse”. In a way, this makes sense: as soon as you say five you know it’s plural, so you don’t repeat that fact. On that arduous journey to Budapest I had rather too much opportunity to try and pronounce the names of stations my train pulled in at: Tápiószentmárton. Sülysáp. That last one – s is pronounced sh, remember – is something like shooey-shap.

Turkish was roughly as difficult as Hungarian to make head or tail of. Interestingly, although it is from a different family to Hungarian, both languages happen to share both vowel harmony and lack of grammatical gender. For over 600 years under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish was written using a form of Arabic. In 1928 under Atatürk – the great reformer – Arabic was replaced by a version of the Roman alphabet with a few extra dots and squiggles to accommodate Turkish phonology. This was a great success: literacy rates shot up and the economy grew. It’s hard to criticise a reform that paid such dividends, but after staring at a few Turkish signs I felt they could have done a better job.

In the last year or two there has been a push by the Turkish government for the country to be called Türkiye in English, not Turkey. No more birds. I’m not a fan, to put it mildly. Who are they to dictate what we call it in English? I don’t see the German government telling us to call Germany Deutschland. Then there’s the question of pronunciation. Turkey-yay? Turkey-yeah? Then there’s the spelling. Think Türkiye has just one awkward letter, the u with an umlaut? Think again. That innocuous-looking i causes all kinds of headaches. You see, Turkish has both a dotted and a dotless i (ı). The dotted one is the standard i sound you find everywhere, as in the Italian vino. The dotless one is a less common sound, similar to the vowel in Romanian în but with the tongue further back. So that the distinction is always maintained, the dotless i stays dotless in both upper and lower case, and the dotted one retains its dot even in upper case. I realised this when I saw a sign at Istanbul that read VISIT TÜRKİYE. (Istanbul, by the way, is İstanbul in Turkish.) This whole business of dotted and dotless i could have been avoided with one or two different choices a century ago. I for one will avoid all this hassle and keep calling Turkey Turkey.

International travel - Language learning

Travel and language — part 2 of 3

September 30, 2023 by 0 Comments

I was already going to talk about this topic – Why is it that most people can’t write anymore? – but ten minutes ago I got this automated out-of-office email from a Barclays employee:

I am now out of the office untill 2/10/23 and your email may not be responded to.

I will endevour to response to your email upon my return

Bugger me. Even “your email may not be responded to”, while correct if you allow “may not” to include probabilities of 0%, sounds pretty terrible. I’ve had a few emails from this lady now. She’s one of the more helpful members of Barclays’ staff, but she doesn’t have the faintest scooby when it comes to the English language. Even activating spellcheck, which she does sometimes, doesn’t come close to hiding that fact. You see this crap every day and everywhere, even from – especially from – people who handle really important matters, such as your money. For instance, the woman who runs Dad’s gallery in Geraldine – bringing in a tidy 48% commission – sends him emails that are beyond abysmal. Being utterly shite at using your own language used to be at least some kind of barrier to attaining money, status and power. Not any more. Social media must be partly to blame, as it is for most things. Barf out a couple of lines that you don’t even look at, then press “send”. Voilà.

Many of the people I worked with at the insurance company in Wellington were dreadful writers. They had all the fancy phrases down pat – furthermore, in the interim, core deliverables – but they could never get the basics right and couldn’t properly express themselves. Then I moved to the council and the water company and something extraordinary happened. People there could write. I could logically see why. The sort of person who works with drainage systems, and maybe even enjoys going down the odd manhole occasionally, might also be the sort of person who reads Terry Pratchett. Or, for that matter, reads at all. A career-obsessed, KPI-focused middle manager at an insurance firm, maybe not so much.

I’m still watching those MIT linguistics lectures. Such bright minds, and such good humour too. If the students are any barometer of America’s future, the country should be in safe hands for the next couple of generations. If only that were the case. (Also, it’s Boston. I was lucky enough to spend over a week in that amazing city in 2015. When the professor makes references to the T – the city’s subway system – or other Bostonia, he brings back happy memories for me.)

I wasn’t going to mention Māori again, but I stumbled upon this photo I must have taken at Tekapo. The quality isn’t what it could be.

If you look closely you can see some Māori words. Glass is karāhe, recycle is hakurua, and rubbish is rāpihi. What’s going on here? Well, two of the three words (karāhe and rāpihi) have been taken from English and then transmogrified into something acceptable in Māori. By acceptable, I mean adhering to the rules of how Māori words are formed. Māori has only ten consonant sounds (h, k, m, n, ng, p, r, t, w and wh) and five vowel sounds (a, e, i, o and u), while English has way more than that (about 12 pure vowels, 7 or 8 diphthongs, and 24 or so consonants). Then there’s the question of phonotactics, which means what sounds can go where in a syllable or a word. For example, swift is a word in English. Twift and slift and swipt aren’t words, but they could be, because they follow the rules of how English sounds fit together. But srift and swifk can’t possibly be words, because even though you could pronounce them without too much difficulty, you just can’t have sr or fk together, except in compound words like classroom. Swifl can’t be a word either, because although the fl combination is fine in lots of places, is isn’t OK at the end of a word. English therefore has various restrictions, like all languages do, and that’s phonotactics. Māori has much stricter phonotactics than English – all clusters of two or more consonants are banned, and all words must end in a vowel – as well as a much more conservative inventory of sounds in the first place, and that all means that if you want to Māorify an English word, you’ll have to do a lot of messing around with it.

Take rubbish (rāpihi). It’s interesting they had to resort to an English loan word. Doesn’t Māori have a way of expressing “unwanted thing”? Whatever, that’s what they did. There are no voiced consonants in Māori (except the nasals and w), so b is replaced by p, its unvoiced counterpart. Sh is a sibilant – none of them in Māori – so that gets replaced by h. The short u vowel in English is converted to a, which isn’t far off, and made long probably because it’s stressed in English. Then the vowel i is added so as not to break the no-final-consonants rule. For glass (karāhe) the change is even more dramatic. Two extra vowels need to be added. The puzzling thing for me is why karāhe gets a final e while rāpihi gets a final i. Does the difference come from the fact that the h in karāhe originates from an English s, while the h in rāpihi comes from an English sh? (If they’d gone for the American English trash instead of the British rubbish, what would the Māori version have been? Tarāhi?) Then there are names. Rōpata (the Māori version of Robert) gets an a at the end. Wiremu (William) gets a u. Who decides this stuff? Finally there’s hakurua. Recycle. It looks like a real Māori word, unloaned from anywhere. But what does it actually mean? I’ve googled it and keep coming up blank. A mystery.

That was supposed to be the end of me talking about language, but it definitely isn’t I’m afraid.