Language learning

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.

Books - Family - Language learning - Music - Other sports

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

October 29, 2023 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 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.

Language learning - New Zealand

Travel and language — part 1 of 3

September 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been watching – with a tinge of sadness – a series of lectures from an MIT linguistics course, which are available on YouTube. I say a tinge of sadness because 25 years ago it could have been me attending those lectures, if not at MIT then somewhere, but alas that’s not the path I went down. Now I know enough bits and bobs about linguistics to sound semi-knowledgeable in my lessons, but there’s so much I don’t know, having never formally studied it. At one point the impressively bearded professor apologises for being old: “You can tell I was born last century.” He taught the course last year, so I suppose all his students, or almost all of them, really were born this century. Yeesh. You can tell he’s in love with the subject in all its guises, and he can actually speak several relatively obscure languages. He interacts very well with the students, who are clearly much smarter than our bunch in Birmingham a quarter-century ago.

Long-haul travel, and spending a whole month in another country, gives you an almighty hit of linguistic phenomena. Ten years ago on my old blog, I wrote quite extensively about Kiwi pronunciation. I’m happy to report that all the traits I mentioned are still present, some of them in an even more exaggerated form. John Key’s “shtrong and stable” is now quite common; for people with this tendency, it affects words containing either of the strings /str/ or /stj/, for instance shtreet, shtupid, shtew, Aushtralia, or ashtute. If you quit smoking but then relapse, you might say that you’ve gone ashtray. I also noticed that a divide – young versus old, city versus country, sophisticated versus somewhat less cultivated – has opened up in the way Kiwis pronounce certain words, mostly those ending in the /ri/ combination.

How many syllables do these words have for you?

battery
broccoli
mandatory
necessary
pottery

For me they have 2, 3, 3, 4 and 3, respectively. But I betcha a hyper-online (and perhaps slightly woke, though I hate that term) 22-year-old student might want to replace his or her (or their?!) laptop bad-der-y, where I’d replace my batch-ree.

But the biggest linguistic phenomenon by far affecting New Zealand is the rise of Māori. If I went back there to live, I’d need to enrol on a Māori course toot-sweet, because my pronunciation would be hopelessly dated. (Dated is a word my parents love to use when browsing House & Garden.) Māori seems simple – it has a small inventory of only five vowel and ten consonant sounds – but what’s going on with combinations like ea or oa, as in Aotearoa? What do they morph into exactly, and why? (Those particular digraphs are a distinctive feature of Romanian, by the way.) Then what about au? Why is it Lake Toe-paw all of a sudden? I wonder if some of these “new” sounds are the result of phonetic changes – a vowel shift, if you will – just like what has happened with the consonant wh. The wh, as far as I can tell, is spelt that way because it was actually pronounced like the wh in wheat when it was first transcribed, but since then it has turned into an f sound. (Interestingly, the English wh has, at the same time, turned into a simple w sound for most speakers, though in some places like Scotland the old sound still proliferates. Mum’s mother used the old wh in words like white, but Mum uses the simple w.)

The increased use of the Māori language rubs a lot of people – especially older people like my parents – up the wrong way. They do have a bit of a point. At times it can actually impede communication. Writing Keep Left in Māori is downright dangerous for foreign tourists. (That raises an interesting question. Did the Māori have the concept of left and right? Not all cultures and languages do. Some don’t have the concept of relative direction at all, and you’d have to say Keep East if east happened to be on the left in that instance.) Sometimes it’s just older people not liking change, and I perfectly understand that, but often it’s part of a more general anti-Māori sentiment, which again I understand, and is starting to create a very unhelpful us-versus-them in New Zealand society.

I’ve often wondered why someone hasn’t invented a nice efficient Māori syllabary, a bit like hiragana in Japanese, in which each symbol represents a syllable. (Maybe somebody has.) You’d need 55 symbols: one for each of the 50 consonant+vowel combinations, plus one for each of the five vowels on their own. That’s just over twice what the English alphabet has, and a handful more than hiragana itself has, so it should be doable. I also think it would be quite cool. You could still use macrons (horizontal bars) to show long vowels, as you (increasingly) see in the standard Roman-alphabet version of Māori. Here’s my attempt at a start:

My choice of more angular shapes for ri and especially ki is deliberate. The i sound is a close vowel, and feels more angular than a, an open vowel.

Next time I’ll talk about some of the language phenomena I saw on the way to and from New Zealand, rather than when I was there.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Life :)

You can’t win ’em all

June 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a longer walk than I planned this evening, making it to (and beyond) a cemetery I didn’t know existed. The cemetery is called Mătăsarilor; it’s on a street with the same name, which means “silk workers”. (There are a lot of streets in the city named after industries or workers, and there used to be even more before their names were changed to those of local figures.)

My hours are down as people start to go on holiday. I don’t mind that too much. I can work on the book I’ve neglected for months and brush up on my Romanian. Our last session on Tuesday was pretty good, although both Dorothy and I said that the game our teacher devised for us – guessing things you find in a city, based on clues – was a bit easy. The information about the imperfect tense was extremely useful though. Also on Tuesday, I had my first (and almost certainly last) lesson with a nine-year-old girl. Her elder brother has been coming since last autumn, but this week he was away on a camp, so his mother suggested his sister have a lesson with me instead. Fine. I chatted with the girl and tried to make her feel at ease, then gave her some sheets to colour in, as well as a few exercises where she had to count coloured stars and match farm animals. She smiled the whole time and did pretty well with all the exercises, so I thought the session had been a success. “Did you like it?” No. “You don’t want to come again, then?” No. “Was it boring?” Yes. But don’t worry, Mum does English with me sometimes too, and it’s boring with her as well. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

Dad turned 73 yesterday, and is now back to just one year behind Mum again – her birthday was two weeks earlier. I can’t get my head around them being that old. They certainly don’t seem it or feel it, even if all their stuff has been dragging them down in recent months. As I’ve said so many times on this blog, they’ve got to extricate themselves from their life admin mire, and that means selling their UK properties as a first step. At this point, who cares if it’s the “wrong time” to sell? If I’m still hearing about meter readings and property managers as they approach 80, my sympathy will start to wear thin. (Earlier this week they got an estimated monthly power bill of £3300 for one of their UK properties.)

Books - Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Life :)

What the hell is it this time?

May 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today started off with a Romanian lesson. I made my fair share of mistakes, and only got into the swing of things when (alas) the 90 minutes were almost up. If I somehow had whole days of making conversation in nothing but Romanian – something approaching proper immersion – I could make great strides, but in the absence of that I keep hitting an unbreakable ceiling.

After Romanian it was back to English, with four lessons. My 16-year-old student is going to Bucharest tomorrow – a 12-hour journey – to get her hair dyed. As you do. The single pair of twins who live in the dark apartment near Piața Verde wanted to know about Mrs and Miss and Ms. This topic comes up surprisingly often. They were in fits of hysterics every time I said Ms, so of course I kept saying it, and in an increasingly exaggerated way. “So it was really as a result of discrimination that Mmmzzzzzz came about.” The girl said that Ms might even be her new favourite English word, supplanting her previous favourite, queue. One of my adult students says that her favourite English word is the rather banal although, because it sounds so delightfully English. An ex-student of mine, a man of about fifty, said his favourite was foreshadow. When I got home I had two online lessons, one with a man a little older than me and another with Octavian, the teenager who started at British School two months ago and says his classmates are hopelessly spoilt.

I spoke to my parents three times last week. Mum seems tired so often these days, as if she’s collapsing under the weight of life admin. I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish they could simplify everything, financially extricate themselves from the UK forever, and enjoy their remaining years. Their capacity to enjoy anything is hugely reduced by all this crap. I sympathise with them because it’s happening to me too. (I mean, international travel just to sort out a problem with my bank – and there’s no guarantee even of that – is crazy.) We’re all being bombarded by crap from all angles. I don’t do social media, I’m not in any active WhatsApp groups, and even I just want to punch a permanent mute button. I get yet another anxiety-provoking instant message and I’m thinking, what the hell is it this time?

Of course there’s always new tech that forces you to act in a way you’d prefer not to. On Friday, when picking up some overpriced ink cartridges, I was faced with the latest trick – a jumbled-up PIN keypad. Yeesh. For the previous ten years I’d been typing in my PIN instinctively as a series of finger movements without ever thinking what the numbers actually were. But this time the digits were arranged 562 904 317 8 or whatever. What actually is my PIN? I was relieved to get it on my second go.

We’ve had atrocious weather – bad enough to hit the orange alert level and make my phone emit ear-splitting noises. Tennis was a washout on both days at the weekend. This evening I was seriously worried about being struck by lightning on my bike. And there’s no respite in sight.

I’ve been reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. For some reason the previous owner of this flat had left a copy of the novel, printed in 1981, several years before she was born. (She left many other books behind and even – weirdly – a load of old photos of her as a child.) Not my thing really, but I’ve been enjoying (in a way) the depiction of Oxford University with all its obscure terminology that, as far as I know, still persists. The vernacular is similar at Eton and some other prestigious public schools. Given that so many senior British politicians took the Eton-and-Oxford route (or something close to it), it’s no wonder the political class over there is so hopelessly out of touch.

At the weekend I read an article about Nick Drake, a folk singer-songwriter who was underappreciated in his lifetime but has found considerable posthumous fame. He suffered badly from depression, and I sometimes listened to him (perhaps unwisely) during my own depressive spells before coming to Romania. He studied at Cambridge. I read an extraordinary letter that his (obviously highly educated and intelligent) father wrote, imploring him not to drop out of university. Nick Drake died of an overdose at the age of just 26.

I said I’d give up looking at cars until I got back from New Zealand, but tomorrow morning I’m going to have a look at a black 1.6-litre Dacia Logan. After that I’ve got my appointment with the neurologist. I wonder if anything will come of that.

Language learning - Life :) - Maths teaching - Photos - Romania

Still learning the lingo, why I came here, and some car stuff

May 8, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s 24 degrees as I write this – a perfect temperature. Soon we’ll have the strawberries and cherries and big juicy tomatoes and I’ll hardly have to visit the supermarket. Can’t wait.

First thing yesterday morning I worked on my Romanian. I must do this regularly. We’ve had two lessons so far using an intermediate textbook and they’ve been great, but as I tell my English students, it’s what you do outside your lessons that really counts. Learning all the little fiddly bits that you have to weave into your expressions to say who did what to whom is a real challenge to me, probably because of how my brain works. I can remember actual words because they have a shape to them. For instance the word morman came up in our last session. It means a big physical heap of something, and was a new word for me. There are many ways of making a visual or sound-based connection between the word and its meaning: mormânt means “grave” (as in a burial place) in Romanian, there’s Mormon, there’s mammon, there’s marmot, there’s moșmoană (a brown Romanian fruit that you see here in December) and so on. The possibilities are just about endless. But with these little bitty bits, there’s nothing to grab hold of. It’s a bit like the time I tried to learn Chinese – everything there is shapeless utterances – or the 1300-odd three-letter Scrabble words which turned my brain into mush, even though I had an easier time with the longer words. When it comes to Romanian, I’ve just got to keep at it, not shy away from using the fiddly stuff in speaking, and accept that I’ll make mistakes.

After making up a bunch of Romanian sentences, I had my maths lesson with Matei in Dumbrăvița. He got 81% on the homework I set him the previous week, and that made me happy because I don’t exactly make it easy for him. At one point I explained the different sets of numbers – natural numbers, integers, rationals, and reals – and he wanted to know if pi being irrational meant that you’d eventually get a million ones in a row or, if you convert numbers into colours, the Mona Lisa. I love those questions. I told him that no, pi being irrational doesn’t necessarily imply that, but most people think you will indeed get what he suggests, though there’s no proof as yet.

When the maths was over I had a bite to eat, then a more nondescript two-hour English lesson. Then I met up with Mark, and his two dogs, on the edge of the wood near his home. It’s amazing how much the wood teems with life considering its closeness to a main road. We saw two hawks swooping, you could hear a cuckoo in the distance (you could almost never do that in the UK), and there was the constant satisfying croak of frogs. We stopped for a beer at the nearby bar where we chatted about how cool Romania is, and then I cycled home.

I’ve been thinking about why I chose Romania to live. Some of it was the language. Băieții? What madness is that? I need to immerse myself in it. Now! But a lot of it was the undeveloped nature of Romania relative to other options I might have had, for instance Poland. I knew that Romania would be more raw, it would be rustier and flakier, the markets would be more pungent, the cobblestones would be super cobbley, my bike trips would be bouncy. Romania would engage my senses more than other countries I might have settled in; it would much better for my mental health than somewhere all done up and pristine. And precisely because it was less developed, I’d be almost the only native English teacher here so I could teach how I wanted. I could be totally in charge. My only real disappointment has been how little I’ve managed to travel around the country, and that’s why I’m looking at ads for 15-year-old (or more) Skodas and Golfs and Dacias. To see the country and engage my senses further.

If I do get a car, I’ll have to go through the registration process which means a shedload of paperwork and a new set of number plates. For a small fee you can choose the three-letter combination at the end of your plate; there are 99 plates for each combination in each county, except in Bucharest where there are 999. I often find myself weaving through such delights as FUK, ASS, HIV, and DIE, sometimes all in a row. It seems anything goes here, as indeed it should. I think there are banned combinations, but if you’re willing to pay enough for, say, SEX, you can probably get it. (I did see it one time on the road.) I’ll have to think what I should get, if I don’t decide to just get a random plate. There’s no way I’ll get anything based on my name, even though I like my initials. Yesterday I saw parked car with a local plate that I hadn’t seen before: ROM. I’m sure it’s on the dodgy list because “rom” means gypsy in a load of languages. Some years ago, Romania even changed their official country code (used in the Olympics, for example) from ROM to the nonsensical French-based ROU, because they were fed up with the association with gypsies. “Rom” is still used in a lot of company names, however, and all ROM means to me is Romania, the country that has already given me so much. Heaven knows where I’d be if I hadn’t come here. If I do get a custom combination, it’s certainly on my shortlist.

When I browse cars online, I narrow my search quite substantially, but it’s amazing what comes up that fits my criteria, like a 1986 “Mr Bean” mini, advertised as such. (Mr Bean has a kind of cult following here.) The big surprise was seeing this 1962 beauty, which my brother, an off-road vehicle recognition guru, identified as a Soviet GAZ. (Apparently it’s not a GAZ – it’s Romanian-built, but based on the GAZ.) He said he’d love one. I suggested I buy it and drive it to the UK, and he could pay me back. It’s asking price is €4500, or about £4000. Honestly with how tricky it has become to fly there, that might be my best bet if I want to see my brother and his family.

Update: Some more thoughts about Romania. When I arrived, there was political turmoil: fallout from the Colectiv tragedy and all the business with Liviu Dragnea and the prison pardons which prompted huge numbers of Romanians to take to the streets during my first winter here. Some of what I’ve seen here since then is maddening. I’ll never get used to the indiscriminate dumping of rubbish everywhere. Just ugh. The low vaccine take-up cost thousands of lives and nobody seemed to care. But – touch wood – Romania is extremely safe, especially my city, and mostly the country just goes about its merry way, unlike (obviously) some of its near neighbours.

The word rom in Romanian also means rum, and they’ve taken advantage of the double meaning to name a popular patriotic rum-flavoured chocolate bar:

Here’s the petrol station near me that also has rom in its name:

To illustrate what I was saying about those number plates, this was outside the tennis courts this evening:

And here’s a much nicer picture of the Bega this evening:

I look forward to posting more pictures when I get this car and start travelling around. Sorry this ended up being such a long post.

Family - Language learning - Life :) - Other sports

Losing my aspiration

April 27, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a sunny morning as I write this. That helps enormously. In the old place, my mood wasn’t so weather-dependent. On Monday I had my usual lesson with the single set of twins in their ground-floor flat. No light ever penetrates the place. That would drive me to despair.

Earlier on Monday I had my Romanian lesson with Dorothy, the English lady, and Coco, our teacher. Coco has a good command of English but we all spoke Romanian throughout. She told me I needed to watch my pronunciation of the Romanian t. In English it’s aspirated – put your hand over your mouth as you say an English t, and you’ll feel a breath of air, but in Romanian it isn’t. To Romanian ears, an aspirated t can come across almost as a ch sound. There was so much else to unpack, such as when to use articulated nouns and when not to. Romanians have great trouble with this dilemma in English, and I still have fun and games with this in Romanian too. For instance, I started the previous sentence with Romanians, but in Romanian that would be Românii, which is the equivalent of the Romanians. Another quirk here is that nationalities and names of languages aren’t capitalised in romanian – I prefer that to what we do in english – but obviously Românii needs a capital R in my example because it’s the first word of the sentence. Coco is hot on all this stuff – she doesn’t gloss over it as some (often bad) teachers do – and she recognises that both Dorothy and I actually care.

Mum and Dad desperately need to simplify their financial lives. They recently committed to a three-year rental contract on one of their flats in St Ives, and they’ve had to open a new account with a different British bank so they can receive rent payments because their other account is about to be closed. All of this means being on hold at 11pm and pressing one and pressing two and getting nowhere. It’s all getting both of them down mentally, and in Mum’s case it’s affecting her physically too. I was happy yesterday when Mum said she’d been gardening, which is something she enjoys.

Snooker. Other than Luca Brecel’s 13-11 win over Mark Williams, the lack of close matches made the second round something of a disappointment, but the quarter-finals – four super-high-stakes matches played over just two days – definitely made up for that. Last night I had to pull the plug as Si Jiahui made it 11-11 against Anthony McGill. Ronnie O’Sullivan’s earlier exit ramped up the pressure in that final session to a near-unbearable level. Si won in the end, 13-12, to make the semis. What a tournament he’s had on his debut, having also come through three qualifying matches. McGill, who also had to qualify and had been playing so well, will be licking his wounds for sure. The real shock though was Ronnie. He’d built up a 10-6 lead against Brecel despite being nowhere near his best, and then from the snippets I saw of yesterday’s session he didn’t even want to be there. Brecel went for everything, got just about the lot, and rattled off seven straight frames in no time. The semis are Brecel against Si, and Mark Allen against Mark Selby. To my mind, Selby is the clear favourite because he’s so difficult to break down and he thrives in long matches. The semis, which start later today, are a marathon over the best of 33 frames.