Language learning

Language learning - New Zealand

Travel and language — part 1 of 3

September 23, 2023 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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.

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

A life cut short

April 23, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. They were pretty upbeat considering the stressful week they’d had. Mum told me that her cousin, who came to visit us in the UK in 1990, had tragically lost her 25-year-old son. He lived in Christchurch but last Wednesday he was in Wellington to see a concert at the TSB Arena. He fell in the water after the concert, and two days later his body was found. He was a primary school teacher and extremely well regarded. The kids go back tomorrow after their Easter break. Just truly terrible. When I lived and worked in Wellington, people fell in the harbour remarkably often, including someone I worked with, although he clambered safely to the shore. There are no railings or anything of the sort in the area. I guess they would damage the look of the place, or something. Now this teacher, a distant relative of mine, has had his life cut short by half a century or more.

I did have those five lessons with that young woman – a pretty handy English speaker already. In one of our sessions she told me about her stay in France a few years ago. “But there’s one place I’d really like to visit.” You’re 22, so I think I already know, but please please please let it be something else. “Dubai.” Jeez. I told her that it would be right at the bottom of my bucket list if you exclude places currently at war. I thought I had a particularly good face-to-face lesson yesterday with two women who are absolute beginners. In a 90-minute session we did numbers, colours, the verb to be, and simple sentences. I like X, I don’t like X, Do you like X? The cup is green, the pens are blue. It’s vital to keep things as simple as possible. You need to eliminate irregularities as much as you can to begin with, and introduce them step-by-step. So many teaching tools get this wrong and hit students with oxen and thieves on day one, which is frankly ridiculous.

Snooker. A crazy frame last night in the attritional second-round match between Mark Selby and Gary Wilson. At two frames all in a best-of-25, just two reds remained on the table, both surrounding the pink that was millimetres from dropping in. Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. The referee gave them three shots each to resolve the stalemate, otherwise there would be a re-rack (50 minutes after the frame had originally started!). They did somehow get one red away from the pocket without sinking the pink, then Selby had an uncharacteristic loss of patience that allowed Wilson to clear up and take the lead. I fell asleep at that point. Selby, however, won the last three frames of the session to take a 5-3 lead into this afternoon’s session.

There were only three of us at tennis last night. Almost the whole time I played on my own against the other two, so I got plenty of exercise. I’ll be back on the court tonight.

Tomorrow I’ll have my first proper Romanian lesson. It should be very useful.

Language learning - Life :) - Other sports

Crappiness guaranteed

April 19, 2023 by 0 Comments

Yesterday was a Barclays day, so crappiness was guaranteed. I hadn’t slept well, my 8am student had slept in – she’d got back from Lisbon (nice) the night before – and it all got crappier from there. I called the Embassy about the authorisation business but the human I got through to at the third time of asking said they couldn’t help me and I should call a lawyer. Not a notary, the likes of which I’ve already dealt with, but an actual lawyer. I phoned some actual lawyers and they all said to call notaries instead. Great. I had quite a long chat with a notary who was pleasant and helpful but said in no uncertain terms that no notary or other legal person in Romania can legally certify a utility bill or bank statement. Simply put, Barclays will only release my funds if a legal person in Romania is happy to break Romanian law. Isn’t this bloody fantastic?

I felt shattered all day yesterday, a day that was low on lessons. Before getting on the phone, I went into town to visit some lawyers and notaries, including the one who dealt with my flat purchase, but they’d to make their long Easter weekend a bit longer. It was all a giant waste of time. I did grab two small pots of red paint on the way back so I could paint my bookcase before people start coming for lessons at the end of the week. I thought about what else I could paint. My bedroom? The sheer amount of white in that room was starting to get to me.

I’ve been buying some clothes and accessories on a second-hand site based in France. That’s meant communicating with people in French, especially the woman who sold me some cufflinks. (I didn’t have any, but I have a shirt that needs them.) So that’s been good practice. I’ve bought jeans, shorts, shirts, a bag, a jumper, the shirt that Marat Safin wore when he won the Aussie Open in 2005 (well not the exact shirt, but you know what I mean), and more besides. I’ve had to get them delivered to a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris, and with a bit of luck they’ll get forwarded to me as a job lot. I rarely buy clothes these days, so this has been something of an adventure.

On Monday I met the English lady at her place, and we chatted and tried to figure out some more tricky Romanian grammar. She has a Rolls-Royce brain, while mine is more like an old Peugeot. The great news is that from next Monday we’ll be having Romanian lessons with a teacher she knows. I mentioned that I’d been watching the snooker and she said that she found it terribly boring. Lots of people do, and that’s fine. In fact I often have it on in the background while preparing lessons or doing some other task; I’m not always totally engaged in it. That changed though on Monday when this happened:

A woman tried to glue herself to the table I was watching, but the referee manhandled her off it. Then a man jumped on the other table (above) and dumped a bag of orange powder all over it. They were protesters from Just Stop Oil, the same group who threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers last year. Why they targeted snooker for their protest beats me. Play resumed a little while later on the non-orange table, but the orange one had to be re-covered. Some excitement, certainly.

The great thing about the snooker is how much it means to the players. Luca Brecel, the Belgian top-ten player, had never won at the Crucible in five attempts. In his first-round match this time he led 9-6 but was pulled back to 9-9. When he potted the ball that got him over the line in the deciding frame, he banged the table with his fist in celebration, or was it relief? Finally. Yesterday I saw Anthony McGill move 6-3 up on a misfiring Judd Trump; that match resumes today. (Update: McGill won 10-6.) The first round is nearly complete; second-round matches are first to 13 over three sessions.

Today is the my last day of being 42. Last night the doctor asked me if I had any travel plans for the summer. I’ll be going quite a long way, I said. What, Japan? This was a joke on his part, and when I said I’d be going further than that he was taken aback a bit.

Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Tennis

A few tips

April 3, 2023 by 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 by 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 by 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.