Language learning

Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Tennis

A few tips

April 3, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching a YouTube video on tipping in the US. It was already way out of hand when I visited in 2015. Waiters, who for some bizarre reason are exempt from minimum-wage laws in states that have a minimum wage, behaving like performing seals, and all that unnecessary time-consuming awkwardness. But at least then I paid cash for virtually everything and didn’t have to cope with the guilt-inducing touch screens that have proliferated since then, often at places where people aren’t providing a service at all – they’re just doing their jobs. My cousin who lives in the US said he was once so appalled by the service at a restaurant that he manually entered a $0.01 tip on one of those screens. The solution to all this “tipflation” is obvious – stop tipping entirely, pay staff what they deserve, and incorporate that into the price of the food or whatever else you’re providing. In an otherwise good video, they got one thing badly wrong: they said the word “tip” stands for “to insure promptness”. No it doesn’t. It doesn’t stand for anything; it’s just a word. Not every short word has to be an acronym. Incidentally, I often use “tip” in my lessons as an example of an English word with several meanings.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open during last night’s snooker, where commentators gave their tips as to whose cue tip would be the steadier and who would be tipped out of the tournament, his career perhaps headed for the tip. The semi-final between Shaun Murphy and Mark Selby went to a deciding 19th frame; I only found out the result (Murphy won) when I got up this morning. After reading and grocery shopping, I met the English lady in town. After a lesson on Tuesday in which I struggled to teach pronouns to a beginner student, because they work differently in his native Romanian, I suggested that we sit down together and get a handle on these damn Romanian pronouns once and for all. Every solo attempt I’ve made so far to properly learn them has ended in failure. So we had coffee in Piața Unirii and we went through the accusative and dative pronouns. The third-person accusative pronouns are gender-dependent but the third-person dative ones aren’t, and that’s just the start of it.

We had mild weather today and it was busy in town. Some tourists are now making their way to Timișoara, perhaps to see what the “Capital of Culture” fuss is about. I was struck by a young couple carrying backpacks and dressed in clothes of every colour of the rainbow; not so long ago that was commonplace, but now there’s a certain drab conformity in what young people wear.

I had a good session of tennis this evening. Domnul Sfâra, now 88, was there. My partner commented on how good his reflexes were for a man of his age. The diminutive Domnul Sfâra was on the other side of the net, and we won 6-2 6-2.

After 32½ hours last week, I’m expecting something lighter this week.

Autism - Language learning - Life :)

On shaky ground

February 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

A 5.7-magnitude earthquake struck yesterday at 3:15, during a face-to-face lesson. My 16-year-old student, the girl whom I also teach maths, felt it before I did. Its epicentre was in roughly the same place as the day before; in the vicinity it cracked the odd wall and removed a few roof tiles. The whole thing only lasted a few seconds, but enough to give me pretty severe feelings of déjà vu.

Last night there was a documentary about autism on the BBC. I couldn’t watch it here, unfortunately. Before it aired there was a comments section open where people talked about their experiences of autism and tried to second-guess the angle that the programme might take. A frustrated parent said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I bet it’ll be slightly awkward kids who wear funny hats, unlike my son who drinks the water in the toilet bowl and throws faeces around. They never focus on the people who are really disabled, because that isn’t sexy.” It’s heartbreaking to hear a parent describe his or her experiences in those terms, but life is often an immense struggle for so-called high-functioning autistic people too. As another commenter said, it’s actually harder for them, because of their profound awareness that they don’t conform to societal norms. If you’re high-functioning, you know why you don’t have many friends, why you don’t have kids, why you can’t hold down a job. None of that is sexy in the slightest.

Yesterday I called Barclays again. If there’s anything that’ll send me into a steep nosedive, it’s calling Barclays. I feel I need to take a whole damn box of my antidepressants before I call them. My god. A company that makes billions each year in profit has no customer-facing team to deal with people like me whose accounts have been closed. I’m left with no option but to guess what documents I need to send, and who if anybody should stamp them, so that I can confirm my identity. The whole situation is appalling.

Last night I had an English lesson with someone at a beginner level. This meant I ended up speaking a lot of Romanian, but what we worked on had pronouns popping up all over the place, and I still struggle badly with them. Part of the problem is that I live and work by myself, so my life doesn’t involve the sort of interdependency that means I use lots of pronouns in my everyday life. I rarely have a need to say “She told me to give this to him before I talk to them”. I wouldn’t even know where to start with that. Hmmm, let me think. Mi-a spus ea să-i dau lui asta înainte să vorbesc cu ei. That might be close, but it took me a couple of minutes of thinking time, and in speaking I’ve got no chance.

Language learning - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - Tennis - The UK

What do you really do?

August 21, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My 14-year-old student has just resumed maths lessons with me, and after this morning’s algebra session in Dumbrăvița I met my English friend for lunch at Casa Bunicii, a restaurant just down the road. He and his girlfriend had just got back from a six-week road trip around central and eastern Europe. A storm had been brewing for a while, and as I cycled back home I got soaked to the bone but happily avoided being struck by lightning. I’m glad that the temperature has dropped after another sweltering few days.

The day I got back from my trip, I called Barclays because my bank card didn’t work in the UK. After an interminable wait, the call centre woman told me that my account had been closed because of Brexit. As a non-resident I can no longer have an account over there. “Are there any funds in your account?” Yes! I have, or had, five figures in there. She was looking at a blank screen. How can they do this? In 2022, in a supposedly civilised country, they can just disappear your account. (Bad grammar, I know.) I now have to go through a laborious process, lasting possibly three months, to hopefully get my money back.

I started with a new student on Tuesday. He wanted to start from scratch, in other words learn English in Romanian. Explaining English concepts in Romanian is no easy task for me. He seems to have a decent brain on him, and at least it was face-to-face and not online. He asked one question though that I get a lot. “What to you do for a job?” I do this. I teach English. “No, what to you really do, other than teach English?” People have a hard time believing that don’t also work for Bosch or something. A real job.

I’ve been trying to learn some Italian, in the hope that I’ll one day travel to a part of Italy where the locals are at the English level of my latest student. The good news is the internet is brimming with Italian resources, and I’ve even got a pretty handy grammar book. And it’s one notch down from Romanian in terms of complexity. The bad news is that it’s so easy to mix up Italian with Romanian, especially the simple stuff. Mai for instance means “never” in Italian, while in Romanian it means “more”. Many words end in i in both languages, but while in Italian the final i gets its full value, in Romanian it’s often a very short sound that can be close to inaudible. And so on.

Thinking about a hypothetical Birmingham-based heavy metal museum (I discussed this with my friend over there), in 2015 I visited the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, one of many highlights of the city. At the Hall of Fame I clearly remember a woman in her twenties, who might have been autistic but it’s hard to tell, in her element and almost overcome by joy at being there. Seeing her living that dream gave me considerable pleasure.

No tennis today. The courts are waterlogged. I got two sessions in – both singles again – last weekend. After Saturday’s session I led 6-0, 2-2; the first set score flattered me as four of the games went to deuce. Sunday was a different story as I struggled to win the big points. I did hold on to win the first set 6-4, but then I fell 4-0 behind in the second. That’s a big hole to climb out of. I won the next two games, then the game after – which ended up being our last – was truly brutal. It must have gone eight deuces at least. It’s rare that I remember a specific shot in tennis – the game is nothing like golf in that respect – but as I held break point he came to the net and I put up a lob that landed in his backhand corner. Not only did my 60-year-old opponent retrieve it, which was impressive enough, but he hit a clean winner from it. It bounced so high that there simply wasn’t room between the baseline and the fence. I’ll remember that one for a while. On the last point, another break point, I lobbed him once again and he got that back too, but several shots later I was able to win the point. It’s a shame time ran out on us; 6-4, 3-4 is an interesting scenario to be in.

Environment - Language learning - Life :)

Stay cool, everybody

July 18, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

When I had a short interview for my high school at age eleven, I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. A weatherman, I said. “You’re the first person to say that.” My grandmother worked in the Met Office for the RAF, and she told me about weather balloons and anemometers and such like. I always liked the weather maps and fronts and isobars that appeared on TV and in the newspapers. The BBC forecasts always highlighted freezing temperatures (zero or below) in blue, while 25 degrees or above was coloured orange. That was where hot started. Anything much above that – which was rare – and the whole country would descend into a collective madness of buckling train tracks and heatstroke. So here’s this week’s forecast for Cambridge, where I was born:

Cambridge actually holds the UK’s current record (39), set just three years ago.

Today and tomorrow, the southern part of the UK (i.e. where most of the people are) will get extreme, and in some cases lethal, temperatures. The UK is hopelessly unprepared for this. They’ve got politicians telling people to wear sun cream and enjoy the sunshine. Oh yes, what fun. Others are saying, “I survived 1976, so I’ll be fine.” Well, this will be a much sharper, more intense heat than the neverending summer of ’76 which my mother often talks about, and if you remember ’76 (as Damon Albarn does in this song), you’re no spring chicken. This hellish heat will become more and more commonplace in the UK. Of the five who remain in the race to be the next prime minister, only one of them gives half a shit about climate change and the environment, and he’ll probably be eliminated today.

I played tennis twice – singles with the older guy – at the weekend. Not so hot, in more ways than one. On Saturday I won the first set 6-2, but even at the end of that set I was starting to tire. I really had to dig deep to win the second 7-5. In the third I was 5-1 down, and struggling physically, when time ran out. A similar story last night when I won the opening set 6-3. Then Domnul Sfâra, aged 87, made a guest appearance. We hit with him for a while; I was mostly in awe of him being on the court at all. He shuffled off and left us to it. I won the second set 6-1, but then he attacked relentlessly in the third, which he won 6-3.

I’m trying to learn some Italian before I go away. I won’t have many opportunities to use it immediately, but I hope I can go back to Italy for a longer time next year.

Coronavirus - Films - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker - Tennis

Keeping my distance and some old Romanian

October 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

This afternoon’s lesson with the young couple was a no-go after their son got sick, then tennis got washed out, so I finally got round to watching the 2011 film Contagion on Netflix. It wasn’t in the same league as Station Eleven, the brilliant pandemic-based book that I read 18 months before Covid, but it would have been instructive had I seen it in the early days of our real-life pandemic. Some things were strikingly similar. In the film, Forsythia was touted as a miracle cure on social media, just like ivermectin is right now, at the expense of vaccines that really do save lives. There were bats and what looked like wet markets. There was much talk of R-rates. There was someone complaining that spring and summer had been stolen from her, just like people have done in real life. (I found spring 2020 to be blissful.) An interesting idea in the film was a Vietnam War-style vaccine lottery where people get the jab earlier or later depending on what day of the year they’re born. Actually, it would be an utterly crazy idea when you think about it for five seconds, but it does make the assumption that the population would be desperate to get their hands on the stuff.

Daily Covid deaths in Romania are hovering around 300. This morning on the news I heard the L-word (in English, while everything else was in Romanian) for the first time during this dreadful third or fourth wave, however you prefer to count these things. I’d be all for a lockdown. The mess we’re in is due to the unvaccinated people, but the rest of us (the minority!) are massively impacted by this too. When hospitals are stretched to this extent, it’s not just Covid that could kill us.

Even though I’m fully jabbed, I’m still keeping the hell away from people. Luckily I can in a way most people can’t. Last night one of my students said he’d been to the gym. It seems utter madness that gyms should be open right now, even if you’ve got your green thingy. This morning I went to an open-air market; mask wearing was universal among shoppers although not among stallholders. I was in and out in 15 minutes. That’s the limit to how exposed I choose to be right now. But most people seem to have a higher bar, even if they’re unjabbed. It’s a far cry from the panic you saw in the early days, when people were elbowing revolving doors and disinfecting surfaces, even though we faced a less contagious variant back then. Of course, 18 months ago we thought that surfaces (or fomites, as they explained in the film) were a major mode of transmission.

In the absence of tennis I thought I’d talk about Domnul Sfâra, the 86-year-old who plays. He’s tiny – he can’t be more than five foot three. In a game I hit the ball directly to him, preferably to his forehand, and plop my serve over. He used to be a teacher, at a university I think, and spent some years in Moscow. He has a number of catchphrases. After sufficient warming up, he says M-am încâlziiit, meaning “I’m warmed up”. (Încâlzit only has one i. I spelt it with three to show that he draws out that final vowel.) If somebody misses an easy shot, he says siguranță prea mare, which seems to mean that they played it too safe, although in reality it’s usually the opposite. At a score of 15-15, he usually says “fifty-fifty”, in English, presumably thinking that’s actually how we say that score. The -teen and -ty numbers cause Romanians no end of confusion (and me too; I often simply can’t tell whether someone’s saying 13 or 30, say, so I repeat it back to them in Romanian). He usually says 0 as nulă, which I’m guessing is an older term for zero, as is commonly used in Romania today. (Nula is the usual term for zero in Serbian, and it seems that Slavic terms have sometimes been replaced by more Latinate words in recent decades. Prispă, meaning porch, has largely been supplanted by the much more boring terasă, for instance.) He also says the number three as tri, as I sometimes hear from old men on the market, instead of the standard trei.) As for “out”, which Romanians have stolen from us, he pronounces that with two syllables, a short ah before launching into a prolonged ooot.

From next week I’ll be having two lessons a week with the twelve-year-old girl instead of just one. She and her mum think I’m doing a good job. It’s nice to get that kind of feedback. She has come on in leaps and bounds since we started 15 months ago.

I’ll probably play some poker tonight. It’s been a mixed bag of late, although I seem to be improving in Omaha hi-lo, which has been something of a nemesis for me. My bankroll is $997.

Language learning

Romanian Commentary 18 — Pronouns: the peculiar, pernicious ‘pe’

June 22, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is a public holiday in Romania. It’s Rusalii, or Pentecost.

Pe. Two little letters. A mountain of complications. Outside any consideration of pronouns, pe is a preposition, which is usually equivalent to on (pe masă = on the table; although there are exceptions, such as pe cer = in the sky). Pe mâine means until tomorrow or see you tomorrow.

Pe is also used with direct object (accusative) pronouns, for emphasis. To give extra weight, you use both the unstressed accusative pronoun and the emphatic pronoun. In my previous post in the series, I said that te iubesc meant I love you. If you extend this to te iubesc pe tine, it means I love you, only you, and nobody else but you.

Here are the full set of emphatic accusative pronouns, with examples:

(Tu) m-ai sunat pe mine?: Did you call me?
(Eu) te-am chemat pe tine: I called you
(Eu) l-am întrebat pe el: I asked him
(El) a văzut-o pe ea: He saw her
(Voi) ne vedeți pe noi?: Can you see us?
(Noi) nu vă vedem pe voi: We can’t see you
(Eu) îi urăsc pe ei: I hate them (males or a mixture)
(Ea) le-a cerut pe ele: She asked them (to do something; a request) (females only)

This is actually fairly straightforward; the emphatic pronouns are the same as the stressed accusative pronouns, but with the addition of pe. You just have to be careful to never use them with the dative pronouns which I’ll talk about in my next post.

We’ve so far dealt with the case where pe is optional, but often it’s mandatory. When you talk about specific people, you must use the same constructions as in the list above, with the unstressed accusative pronoun and an emphatic-style pronoun with pe, except that instead of pe el or pe ea, you say pe Dan or pe Maria or whatever the case may be. It’s not just named people that you have to do this with. Mum and the policeman and the kids and nobody all trigger pe. Animals and plants and inanimate objects don’t, however. Here are some examples:

Ai văzut-o pe Simona?: Have you seen Simona?
Nu îi am pe copiii mei: I haven’t got my children
L-am cerut pe medic: I asked the doctor
Le-ai sunat pe fete?: Did you call the girls?
Încerc să-i învăț pe băieți: I’m trying to teach the boys

The last example uses the verb a învăța, which can mean both to learn and to teach. Similarly, a împrumuta means both to borrow and to lend. The fact that each of these Romanian verbs maps to two English verbs, one for each direction, causes a headache for my students.

When you want to say somebody, anybody, everybody or nobody, you no longer use the unstressed accusative pronoun, but you still need pe.

Cunoașteți pe cineva care poate să …?: Do you know somebody who can …?
Poți să chemi pe oricine: You can call anybody
Nu poți mulțumi pe toată lumea: You can’t please everybody
Nu am pe nimeni: I don’t have anybody (In Romanian, you say I don’t have nobody)

With non-people, it’s much easier: no pronouns, no pe:

Am văzut câinele: I’ve seen the dog
Citești cartea asta?: Are you reading this book?

Now we come to another important use of pe. To say the book you read or the boy you hit, you need pe care, which is a bit like of which in English, along with the unstressed accusative pronoun. (This is counterintuitive to me; with pe care, it feels like you shouldn’t need that pronoun as well, but you do.) What’s more, pe is used here whether you’re talking about people or not. Some examples:

Cartea pe care ai citit-o: The book (that) you read
Băiatul pe care l-am învățat: The boy (who) I taught
Mășinile pe care le vindem: The cars (that) we sell
Banii pe care îi câștigi: The money (that) you earn (Money is plural in Romanian)

This is all vital stuff for me. So often I find myself drowning. Next time I’ll try and deal with the dative (indirect object) pronouns, which are another ball game entirely.

Language learning

Romanian Commentary 15 — Why Romanian pronouns are so damn hard for me

June 15, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Before I even came to Romania, I had a chat with a friend about the language. What’s it similar to? Is it hard? What makes it hard? I immediately answered that what makes Romanian hard are the pronouns. A pronoun-free sentence like “The church was destroyed in the war” shouldn’t present me too many problems, I thought, whereas “She told me to give this to you” would leave me in a right muddle. Almost five years on, I can get by OK in Romanian, but those damn pronouns are still a jumble in my mind.

Why are they so hard, at least for me? Lots of reasons.

1. They’re mostly short, shapeless words. For the same reason that I struggled to remember the three-letter Scrabble words, much more so than the longer words, these short pronouns are an indistinct blur.

2. Romanian has cases. These are a hold-over from Latin that other Romance languages have ditched but Romanian hasn’t. This means that the words for him in “I called him on the phone” and “I gave him some chocolates” aren’t the same. In “I called him”, calling is what you’re directly doing to him, and this requires the accusative case, while in “I gave him”, you’re not giving him, you’re giving something to him, and that requires the dative case. Although I conceptually get this, it’s hard to get right because of what we do (or don’t do) in English. (If you substitute “the boy” for “him” in the examples above, you again need two different words, but I find those longer nouns, rather than pronouns, a lot easier.)

3. Some verbs that work indirectly in English are direct in Romanian. For instance, you just listen the radio in Romanian, without the equivalent of to. You say “don’t lie me”, again without to.

4. Romanian uses an absolute ton of reflexive, which is like myself or herself in English. Some of my students tell me that they need to “prepare themselves” for job interviews, or that they like to “relax themselves” at weekends, because that’s what you say in Romanian. Reflexives are used in a lot of situations where a possessive is used in English instead. “I broke my leg” and “he needs to improve his English” are expressed with a reflexive pronoun in Romanian, not a possessive. It’s hard to know whether to use a possessive or a reflexive, and to make matters worse, there are both accusative reflexive and dative reflexive pronouns.

5. When you want to express how you or someone else feels — “I’m hungry”, “you’re hot”, “she’s fed up” — you have to resort to dative pronouns instead of the nice simple adjectives we have in English.

6. Romanian pronouns can change their forms when they interact with other words in a sentence.

7. You use lots of pronouns when you have interdependent relationships with lots of people. I don’t, at least not with people I speak Romanian with, so I don’t. If you’re always talking about other people, perhaps this all becomes second nature.

I’m going to write a series of posts on Romanian pronouns, so I can refer to them later for easy reference, and hopefully I can kill this beast once and for all. At the moment they’re really holding me back.

Language learning - Poker - Tennis

Romanian Commentary 14 — Dumneavoastră (and some poker)

May 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Most languages have words that seem too long for what they represent. English, for instance, has understand and disappointment. Today, pedestrian came up in a lesson, and I’ve never liked that word – it’s too long, too cumbersome, and I suppose too pedestrian. French has maintenant, which is far too long for something that means “now”. By the time you’ve said or written the word, now has passed. Romanian also has its fair share. The numbers from 11 to 19 are all stupidly long – 17 is șaptesprezece – and most people shorten them in everyday speech. But the biggest culprit, literally, in almost any language, has to be dumneavoastră, which is the Romanian formal version of “you”, just like vous in French, only (unlike in French) it doesn’t also serve as the general plural “you”. It’s also used for the formal “your”. When I first tried learning the language, I was immediately intimidated by this 13-letter monstrosity, which literally means “your lordship”. Surely they don’t actually use this in conversation? But they sure do, in all its glory. Fortunately, Romanian is a “pro-drop” language, which means you can get away with just using the verb form without the subject, so you can often dispense with dumneavoastră. But you can’t always, and when it serves as the formal “your” (rather than “you”), you’re forced to use it. Yesterday I played tennis, partnering a bloke of a similar age to me. Hmmm, can I use the informal tu with you (I hardly know you), or should I play safe and use the formal version? In doubles, it’s fairly common to shout something to indicate that either you or your partner should take the next shot, but you can hardly say dumneavoastră, can you? That’s practically a whole sentence. By about the third syllable the ball will have whizzed by. So what can I say? Yesterday I decided on the English “go!”. I mean, go is universal, right? I’m pretty sure you pass go in even the Romanian version of Monopoly. My partner unfortunately interpreted my “go!” as eu, which means “me”, and our communication breakdown cost us the point.

Last night I realised how much work I still need to do if I’m ever really going to get good at Romanian. Someone from the police called me, and I was lost. In our five-minute conversation, or should I say monologue, he must have said over a thousand words. Just too damn fast, and of course it was on the phone and that makes it even harder. Plus it’s the sodding police – what have I done? It seemed that I hadn’t done anything, and one of his colleagues wanted me to translate something into English later this week. He gave me the phone number, I called this other policeman (I assume that’s what he is) and that was indeed the case.

It tipped it down yesterday morning. Good weather for poker. I got up early and FaceTimed my parents before the tournaments kicked off just after eight (while I was still eating my porridge). I made a decent start to the PLO8, then while that was going on I fired up a single draw in which I broke the best hand to bust out after 40 minutes. Never mind. I was now in the process of amassing a giant stack in the Omaha hi-lo, which was helped immensely by making quad threes to inflict a very unfortunate bad beat on my opponent. I easily made the seven-man final table, and from there anything could have happened. There was a Romanian who hurled insults at me in his native language for some bizarre reason (he could see I was playing from the same country) and I just blocked his chat, before knocking him out in fourth place. The final three were all pretty evenly stacked, but I had basically zero experience at the game short-handed. After a decent number of hands I was out in third place for a $22 profit after just over five hours. By that point I’d also made the final table of the knockout pot-limit badugi (two final tables simultaneously is a rarity for me) and came back well from being relatively short to make the final three. Then, crucially, I was dealt two pat nines that helped me chip up and eventually knock out a good player and grab his healthy bounty. I had a big chip lead as I got heads-up with an inexplicably passive opponent, and soon I’d won a bounty tournament for the first time, making $62. A lucky day. I made $81 overall, and my bankroll is now $705.

Coronavirus - Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker

Our only way out

March 29, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had no side effects at all from my much-maligned (totally unfairly) Covid jab. A slightly sore arm for a day, and that was it. I know others haven’t been quite so lucky, but c’mon people, get the damn vaccine. It’s our only chance of getting out of this.

My conversations with Mum and Dad revolve around when, where and how we can meet again. It’s already been ages, to the point where I’m struggling to piece together the timeline of what has happened since. I do know the dates, but my whole concept of time has been warped. Dad’s cancer, my trip to Bosnia, a few months which passed for normal, then Covid, the new normal. A little over two calendar years, but what’s that in lockdown years?

Today I felt quite angry. We could have eradicated this virus by now, but modern society – greed, entitlement, selfishness – hasn’t allowed us to. All over the world, apart from New Zealand, Vietnam, South Korea and one or two others, the wrong kinds of politicians have made the wrong kinds of decisions, and they still are.

Last week was my biggest for work in a while, with 36 hours of lessons, plus all the putting together of worksheets and what have you. When I’m locked down, I’m happy to take all the work I can get. Yesterday I had that 90-minute session with the young couple who are learning English from scratch, and it’s quite tiring having to speak a weird mixture of Romanian and English. One of the very nice kids I teach said he’ll be off to Egypt in a few weeks with his parents. Seriously, right now you can shove your pyramids up your arse. The bloke in the UK gave me a one-hour Youtube video of Romanian stand-up comedy to watch. That’s got to be one of the hardest things to understand in a foreign language. Shushushu zhuzhuzhu dududu. Ha ha ha ha ha! Um, I don’t get it, Toma.

Poker. I haven’t had much joy since I last reported. On Thursday I paid the price for my terrible passivity in a pot-limit badugi tournament. I was really kicking myself for failing to shovel chips into the pot. Today I had a similar spot and played much more aggressively. I got knocked out, but did the right thing I’m sure. My biggest problem continues to be how little I can play. My bankroll is $464.

Coronavirus - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker

Face-to-face? Are you kidding? And Romanian Commentary 13

March 22, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Someone’s just called me asking for a lesson on behalf of her husband. I managed to find a space in my diary on Thursday evening, and I was all set to pencil it in, but then she asked for my address. Er, Skype? Zoom? No, your actual physical address. We want face-to-face here. Fa-fa-face-to-face? No! No no no no no. Not until at least mid-April, three weeks after my first jab. I’m guessing these people might not be all that into jabs and stuff.

I’m starting to beef up my work volume again. Last week I got 30½ hours, and this week should easily surpass that (but you never know; sometimes it just rains cancellations). Some of my lessons are dead easy and don’t remotely feel like work, but others are a test of mettle. I recently started with a married couple who have a nine-letter, seven-vowel surname, and they want to learn from scratch. Hello, how are you, my name is, would you like a vowel? I have to speak a lot of Romanian in these lessons, and although I get by, I still make mistakes and get tongue-tied. For instance, last weekend I couldn’t say “he likes to run” correctly in Romanian. Sounds a simple sentence, doesn’t it? The verb to run is a alerga in Romanian (well, there’s also a fugi, but that’s more like “to run away”). Here’s how you conjugate a alerga in the present:

eu alerg – I run
tu alergi – you run
el/ea aleargă – he/she/it runs (notice the extra a before the r)
noi alergăm – we run
voi alergați – you run (more than one person)
ei/ele aleargă – they run

That’s great, but with sentences such as “he likes to run” we need to use the subjunctive, and for the third person (he/she/it or they) this is different from the normal form of the verb. The form I needed was alerge, not aleargă. The full correct sentence is Îi place să alerge. (The first word of that sentence, if you’re wondering, is an i with a hat followed by an i without a hat.)

By contrast, the very common verb a merge means to go, and it’s conjugated like this in the present:

eu merg – I go
tu mergi – you go
el/ea merge – he/she/it goes
noi mergem – we go
voi mergeți – you go (more than one person)
ei/ele merg – they go

If I wanted to say “he likes to go”, I’d once again need the subjunctive, and this time it would be Îi place să meargă. So the subjunctive ending of “to go” is just like the normal ending of “to run”, and vice-versa. I understand this, but I still get tripped up from time to time.

Another problem I have is stress. Not that kind of stress, but the way words are accented. Just like in English, it isn’t always obvious which part of a word gets the emphasis. I managed to confuse a kid this morning when I said “martor” (meaning “witness”) with the stress at the end, when it should be at the beginning. Unless it’s a word I use a lot, I often find myself guessing.

Poker. My biggest problem is how little I’m able to play. I haven’t run very hot since I last posted. In one tournament my laptop crashed five times – hopefully I’ve solved that problem. My bankroll is $470.