I was going to say it’s been a warm day, but no, it’s been positively hot. Nudging 30 degrees, and people were taking advantage of it. A far cry from six weeks ago when people were clearly scared to leave the house.
This afternoon’s lesson went well. My student showed his appreciation at the end. I spent some time yesterday and today translating The Magic Finger from English to Romanian, so I won’t sound quite so clueless when I we go through the last twenty-odd pages tomorrow. With intermediate students this isn’t a problem, because with them I only ever need to translate individual words or explain the gist of a sentence in English; I never have to translate whole texts into Romanian. It’s good practice though.
Little Richard has died. I didn’t know that much about him, but what an entertainer he was. (Isn’t Youtube great?) In his day he must have been a sensation. Right now, in a different dimension, I’m watching a traditional Romanian music show on TV. Dili-dili-dili-dili-dum, with violins going at a hundred miles an hour. The last song was all about the pride of being from Botoșani, which I always think of as șobolani (meaning “rats”).
I watched Boris Johnson’s speech. Lots of talk about the R (reproductive) rate, which they now say is between 0.5 and 0.9 (why such a range?), but no talk of masks. Madness.
My brother is fine. He went back to work last week. For some reason we ended up talking about the stock market before running out of things to say.
This is central Sarajevo, and here’s the ćevabdžinica I mentioned in the previous post in this series. The mici-like pieces of barbecued meat, called ćevapi or ćevapčići, are everywhere in Serbia and Bosnia. They normally come with pita bread (as you can see in the picture), smântână, and kajmak (a kind of cream). As I said in the previous post, in the word ćevabdžinica the unvoiced p has changed to a voiced b, matching the voiced dž. Further above, you can see Izdaje se (For rent). This comes from the verb izdavati, and is an example of a reflexive verb. The se indicates that the property is “making itself available”. Reflexive verbs seem to be common in Serbian, just like in Romanian. To ask in Serbian what someone’s name is, you say Kako se zoveš?, literally “How do you call yourself?” You reply with Zovem se Robert, or whatever your name happens to be.
This is a fairly rare example of Cyrillic from Sarajevo. It’s a plaque on the Serbian Orthodox Church; Cyrillic is often used in Serbian. Without Google Translate I was pretty clueless. In Latin, the text reads: U slavu božiju Ovu kapiju podigoše i podariše sabornoj crkvi i gradu Sarajevu, Olivera i Milinko Mlađen. Za blagoslov i napredak svoje porodice, a na ponos naroda srpskog. Slava bogu za sve!
Google Translate gives me: In the glory of God This gate was erected and donated by the Cathedral Church and the city of Sarajevo, Oliver and Milinko Mlađen. For the blessing and progress of his family, and for the pride of the Serbian people. Thank God for all!
There are some things I can pick up. Slava means glory: this word also exists in Romanian. Napredak comes from napred meaning “forward”, which appeared in my first post in the series. The surname Mlađen means “Young”. Porodice is the genitive of porodica, “family”. (Familija also exists.) Porodica comes from the verb poroditi, to give birth. This word has the po-prefix, which is very common. Po- signifies completion. The roditi part comes from rod, which means fruit, crop, family relation, or even gender. Rod, with a similar set of meanings (but mostly used for crops and fruit) also exists in Romanian.
There are two words for God used on the plaque, a formal, ceremonial božiji and a more general (bog-standard?) bog. Interestingly, the word bogat, which means “rich” in both Serbo-Croat and Romanian, comes from bog.
This says “Bosnia & Herzegovina public spending counter”, and is a good example of why Serbo-Croat is a notch up in difficulty from other, better-known European languages. You simply don’t get as many words for free. Counter is brojač; this comes from broj (“number”). Number is not numero or număr or nummer, it’s broj, something totally different. Javne is “public” in the feminine genitive. No, it isn’t anything nice like publico. Potrošnje is spending, again in the feminine genitive. And BiH is short for Bosna i Hercegovina. Without having some idea of Serbo-Croat, this sign could be telling you practically anything.
The sign on the shop above comes with a handy English translation, although the Serbo-Croat actually means “House of Healthy Food”. Both zdrave (healthy) and hrane (food) are in the feminine genitive. Variants of these two words also exist in Romanian: hrană means food, but I hear the word more for animal food than human food, and zdravăn describes somebody who is big and strong. The word zdravo, by the way, is used all the time in Serbo-Croat as a greeting, either “hi” or “bye”.
The name of the restaurant above, Dva Ribara, means “two fishermen”. Ribar is fisherman (this comes from riba, fish), and to talk about two fishermen you need the genitive singular, which gets an extra a in this case. It’s hard to see, but they serve Sarajevsko beer. There’s an -o ending because beer (pivo) is neuter; if it were masculine it be Sarajevski; feminine would be Sarajevska. It’s really common in this part of the world to simply name beers after the city they come from. In Montenegro I seemed to drink Nikšićko (named after Nikšić, the country’s second city, or town) most of the time. The local Timișoara beer is Timișoreana (beer is feminine in Romanian).
I had a pretty shitty 48 hours from Tuesday afternoon to yesterday afternoon. Almost no energy. Fatigue. Extreme weakness. Clumsiness. Just how I often feel for a few hours after one of my sinus episodes (or maybe migraines), but worse and longer. I managed to work, but everything else was a write-off. Obviously my thoughts quickly turned to coronavirus, and Dad was scared witless when I told him my symptoms, but I could still smell and taste everything and had no sign of a fever. I’m still kind of mneh, but that’s a massive step up from yesterday.
This morning I went through Roald Dahl’s The Magic Finger with my latest (adult) student. I realised my Romanian is nowhere near good enough to instantly translate something like that into her native language, even if I know maybe 97% of the words. You can’t duck and dive like you sort of can with speaking, and my grammar and syntax just aren’t up to it.
In the UK they’re celebrating the 75th anniversary of VE Day, while many who remember that day are dying in nursing homes. In Romania we’re gearing up to come out of lockdown – this will be our last weekend. I’m a bit concerned – the cases and deaths haven’t skyrocketed as I feared, but this menace is hardly going away either.
Now we’re in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I knew that Crvena Armija (which you can see in the shadow) meant Red Army, and I thought the mural had some sort of military significance, but it’s for the local football team, Velež Mostar, which was founded in 1922.
The picture above was taken on Braće Fejića (Fejić Brothers) Street. The noun brat (brother) does not have a plural; instead you use the collective noun braća (think of the word “brethren” in English). There are dozens of collective nouns in Serbo-Croat. And guess what, the collective noun for brothers is feminine! Mad or what? Because it’s the street of the brothers, you need the genitive case, where the final a changes to e. The slogan on the mural means “Never forget, never forgive”, and it references the 1995 massacre of Srebrenica, where many thousands of Bosniaks were killed. Here we are on the east (Bosniak) side of Mostar. As the guide told us, the dividing line separating the Bosniaks and the Croats is the Boulevard that runs north–south, to the west of the river, not the river itself as some people mistakenly believe.
We’re hiring. But only females. Radnica is a female worker (a male worker is radnik). Potrebna is the feminine form of potreban (“necessary”). Once again, when you add the ending, you also remove the a before the final consonant. This gender-specific job advert is familiar from my time in Romania. Vânzătoare.Barmăniță.
This was my train from Mostar to Sarajevo. The text means “Railway Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina”. Now we see a difference between the Serbian variety of the language and the version spoken elsewhere. In Serbia, the j in željeznice wouldn’t be there. There are many, many words where an e in the Serbian dialect is replaced by je, or sometimes ije, in the variety used elsewhere. In Serbia and Bosnia, the same word is used for both “Sunday” and “week”; in Serbia this word is nedelja, but in Bosnia they say nedjelja with an extra j. “You are beautiful”, if talking to a woman, is Ti si lepa in Serbia, but Ti si lijepa (with ij added) in Bosnia.
Now I’m in Sarajevo. What’s a buregdžinica? It’s a place where you get burek, a kind of meat-filled pastry. The word burek comes from Turkish. This particular place had a huge variety of bureks, of which I ate several (and a yoghurt). I was amazed how cheap it all was, and I’m not someone to splash the cash. If the word for the pastry is burek, why is there a g in buregdžinica and not a k? This is due to something called “assimilation by voice”. Some consonant sounds (like g, b, d, v and z) are voiced – they employ your vocal cords – while others (like k, p, t, f and s) are unvoiced. If you say the g in “goat” with your finger on your Adam’s apple, you can feel the vibration, but if you say a k sound you can’t. In fact, g and k are a voiced–unvoiced pair; voice (or lack of it) is the only difference between the sounds. The same is true of b and p, d and t, and so on. The dž in buregdžinica is pronounced like the j in English “jump”, and is a voiced sound. It is much easier to pronounce two voiced consonants (or two unvoiced) side-by-side than a combination of both, and so the unvoiced k converts to voiced g, to match the “voicedness” of the following dž. There are lots of examples of these assimilations in Serbo-Croat. A ćevap is a piece of minced meat, much like mici in Romania, but a ćevap-seller is a ćevabdžinica, with the unvoiced p changed to voiced b.
And guess what – we do these assimilations in English too. The s in dogs is pronounced as a voiced z, to match the voiced g, but the s in ducks remains unvoiced, because the k is unvoiced. Of course, these sound changes aren’t reflected in the spelling, but that’s only because English isn’t a phonetic language, unlike Serbo-Croat. If it were completely phonetic, we would indeed write dogz. One example I can think of in English where the spelling does change is in the pair absorb–absorption. The -tion suffix begins with an unvoiced sh sound, so the voiced b changes to unvoiced p to match it.
Back to the picture above. On the window you can see the word mliječni, which means “dairy”. It’s an adjective that comes from mlijeko, “milk”. In Serbia, these words would be mlečni and mleko.
And finally, if you’re ever travelling to Sarajevo and want to visit Olimpik Buregdžinica, it’s in a square called Gajev Trg, off a main street named Ferhadija in the middle of town.
It’s a long time since I wrote about the Serbian language (summer of 2018, here and here), but I’ve had a bit of extra time on my hands, so here I’ve decided to post some signs from last summer’s trip to Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia. (Montenegrin and Bosnian are basically the same as Serbian, as is Croatian.) Most of the signs presented some kind of puzzle, which I’ve attempted to solve, so here goes:
The main text on the plaque above would read SAVEZ ENERGETIČARA SRBIJE in Latin. This means Serbian Association of Energy Workers. The G is pronounced hard, as in goat. Serbia is Srbija in Serbian, but here it’s in the genitive case (“of Serbia”), where the a changes to e. At the bottom it says Beograd (Belgrade), Zetska 11, which is the address.
The buskers above have a sign that says NISMO NA BUDžETU, meaning We’re not on a budget. “We are not” is a single word, nismo. They’ve taken budžet directly from English (dž counts as a single letter in Serbian and is pronounced just like the j in just—sometimes the ž part remains in lower case even if the rest of the text is in caps, as in here). The word budžet gets an extra u because it’s in the locative case. Cases tell you what the word is doing in the sentence—they’re an essential part of Serbian, which has seven of them.
The billboard above is printed in italic Cyrillic, and that opens up a whole nother can of worms. Some of the letters look quite different from upright Cyrillic. What looks like a g is in fact a д, equivalent to latin d. The barred u is actually a п, equivalent to p. The barred upside-down m is a т.
In non-italic Cyrillic, the slogan above would read “Ко сме, тај може. Ко не зна за страх, тај иде напред.” In Latin, that would be: “Ko sme, taj može. Ko ne zna za strah, taj ide napred.” This means “Who dares can. Who knows no fear goes forward,” and is a quote from Vojvoda Živojin Mišić (1855-1921), a commander in Serbia’s wars. You can partly see his name at the bottom.
Still in Belgrade, the billboard above has the word “shake” printed in Serbian phonetics. The milkshake has been reduced to 100 dinars, or about 75 pence.
We’re still in Belgrade, where these handwritten Cyrillic bar signs weren’t easily decipherable. Handwritten Cyrillic is very similar to italic Cyrillic, only harder to read. The large sign in the frame reads: Марина Милорадовић П.Р. Услуге припремања и послуживања пића Лутић Београд – Стари Град
In Latin, that would be: Marina Miloradović P.R. Usluge pripremanja i posluživanja pića Lutić Beograd – Stari Grad
The top line is the name of the woman who owns the place, I guess. I don’t know what P.R. means. The second line means “preparing and serving drinks”. The word for drink is piće which is a neuter noun. The e changes to a in the plural. I think we need the accusative case here, but pića is the same in both nominative (vanilla, if you like) and accusative. I think it’s only masculine nouns whose plurals change between nominative and accusative, but don’t quote me on that (!).
They’ve switched to Latin for small signs on the right; the top one simply says otvoreno with “open” in English, while the bottom right sign says radno vreme (opening hours), which are 4pm till midnight, except Fridays and Saturdays (a subotom i petkom), when the place is open from 5pm till 1am. The words for Friday and Saturday are subota and petak in the nominative, but this sign is using the instrumental case, just in case you haven’t had enough cases yet. Nouns which end with the letter a followed by a consonant (like petak) lose that a when a case ending (the -om here) is added. Note that Serbian has two “and” words: i (a general “in addition” type of “and”) and a (a “but” or “whereas” kind of “and”).
Now it’s my first morning in Bar (Montenegro) after my long train journey. Although the language is substantially the same, there’s virtually no Cyrillic in sight now.
The sign on the right above is a road safety message. It says Ne brže od života: “Not faster than life”.
Brz (one of those no-vowel words) means “fast”, but it has comparative forms (“faster”) which are brži (masculine), brža (feminine) and brže (neuter). The z changes to ž, which is equivalent to the sound at the end of “massage”. I guess you use the neuter version in this general situation. Od can mean “from”, “since”, “of”, or (here) “than”. Od is followed by a noun in the genitive case, which is why the word for life (život, masculine) is written with an a on the end.
This beachside restaurant is built around trees, and that’s why I was confused when I saw the sign. I knew drvo meant tree, so I thought Pizza na drva probably meant “pizza in the trees” or something. It actually means “pizza on wood”, i.e. “wood-fired pizza”. I don’t know what case drva is in – Wiktionary isn’t helping me. Roštilj na ugalj (it should have an accent on the s, making the “sh” sound) means “barbecue on coal”.
I spoke to Mum and Dad again this morning. They’re in New Zealand, one of the few shining beacons in a dark world, where (amazingly) new recoveries outnumbered new infections in the latest figures. They live in a pretty isolated part of an even more isolated country, and they’re coping well with the lockdown. But they’re scared shitless about me.
After talking to my sister-in-law last night, I felt sorry for her. She has to attend two hospitals (in Poole and Bournemouth) and see private patients. Lots of old people, who she could be infecting without knowing it. She can’t get tested unless either she or my brother shows symptoms. For the second day running, around 900 new deaths were recorded in the UK.
Today has been Romania’s deadliest day so far. The numbers have been surprisingly stable to this point, but the coming weeks are scary, in spite of the lockdown which must be helping greatly. I also wonder how many people these official figures might be excluding – Romanians have a habit of avoiding hospital if at all possible, and I imagine many have died at home. One bright spot is a jump in the number of recoveries.
The highlight of today was perhaps the chat I had with the lady who lives next door but one from me. She said my Romanian was “admirable”, then the next minute I said I had barrels of water in my bag. I forgot that big water bottles are bidoane, and said butoaie instead. Too many B-words, in both languages. She expressed a love of British culture, “but I don’t like the French”.
Plenty of political news amid all of this. There’s a new Labour leader in the UK (good), the Democratic nominee has been decided (good, but they all need to get behind him), and in more good news, it looks like Boris Johnson will be one of the lucky 50% who survive their stint in ICU with coronavirus.
Tonight I had a quick, see-if-you-like-it session with Gabi, who surprised me by popping up on the screen as a bloke. We’d only exchanged messages, no phone call, and I totally forgot that Gabi was one of those short-version either-or names. We’ll have our first proper lesson tomorrow. Four lessons scheduled for tomorrow – yippee! Last week Dad told me about a game show that appeared on their black-and-white Grundig when he was a boy. It’s very simple – the host asks questions, and the contestant is eliminated from the game as soon as he says ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Trying this game on my younger students has been a lot of fun.
I’m back to learning Serbian, now that I have a good book to study from. Every time I pick it up again, I’ve (at best) half-forgotten everything I’ve done previously. I’m getting more comfortable with the lower-frequency letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, and today I started on hand-written Cyrillic, in which some letters look very different from their printed counterparts.
I’m lucky to live in a city centre and still have so much green space – and a river – around me. We’ve had glorious weather these last few days, and at least I can get out for a quick walk or a bike ride in the sunshine without bumping into people.
Every Sunday and Monday, we see less awful figures from the US, UK and elsewhere, and suddenly everyone says we’re peaking or plateauing (that’s such an awkward word), we’ve turned the corner, we’re flattening the curve. And then Tuesday happens. It’s clear that the numbers from Sunday and Monday reflect cases and deaths reported at weekends, and this reporting is an admin task that sometimes only gets done on weekdays. Still, there is evidence that parts of the US, especially New York, might be nearing their peak.
Wisconsin is holding an in-person election today. That’s so fucked up it beggars belief. I mean, just how? They have far fewer polling stations than usual, so people will have to queue for even longer than they would normally. From the president down, the US is full of very powerful people who are happy for citizens to die as long as they get what they want. It makes me extremely angry.
Romania has sadly just recorded its first death among medical personnel, an ambulance driver from the disaster zone that is Suceava. To give you some idea how awful the situation in Suceava is, I’ve posted the latest chart of Romanian cases by county. The figure of 191 in the west is Timiș, where I am. The 697 is Bucharest – it’s hardly surprising that the capital would have a large number of cases. But the 1322 in the north-east is Suceava, where the main population centre has barely 100,000 people.
As for Romania as a whole, two weeks ago I sketched optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for where we might be today. We’ve followed the optimistic path almost exactly, so let’s celebrate! Umm, no. First, around 200 Romanians have died so far, probably more if people who die at home are n’t being counted. That is already tragic, and the numbers will only go up. Second, testing isn’t keeping up with the spread of the virus, so the number of cases is greatly underestimated, probably by a larger multiple than a fortnight ago. Third, my pessimistic scenario was almost apocalyptically awful. And finally, life isn’t snapping back to normal any time soon. This will be a long, hard slog.
Yesterday we reached a balmy 20 degrees; today we topped out at 8 and the sun hardly poked through the cloud all day. Perfect coronavirus weather, in other words. I popped out to fill up my water bottles from the well, but was rarely in danger of being within fifty metres of another soul, let alone two. High winds and even blizzards are forecast for large swathes of Romania in the next two days. Bring it on.
Romania has now seen its first two fatalities from coronavirus, both of whom already had very serious medical conditions, including a man with terminal cancer. Today’s percentage increase in cases was very similar to yesterday’s, although they did test significantly more people just prior to today’s update. (The 66 new cases is identical to New Zealand’s total number.)
Some good news: Timișoara is rapidly becoming the Romanian epicentre for people getting rid of coronavirus. Of the 64 patients cured of the virus so far, two-thirds have been treated in Timișoara. Nobody is quite sure why. (My guess is just that a lot of the early cases came from this part of the country.)
The Italian death toll rose by another 650 in the most recent daily update. That’s a horrific number, but maybe, just maybe, the lockdown is beginning to have an impact. Spain saw almost 400 additional deaths, a truly awful number.
I’ve been watching Youtube videos from John Campbell, a British doctor. They are extremely informative. He gives daily updates on the global situation, as well as practical advice on how to properly wash your hands, whether to take medicine to reduce a fever, the benefits of vitamin D, why this virus spreads more readily than the SARS virus we saw in 2003, what R0 factors mean and why they’re important, and much, much more. It’s a veritable trove of information.
I didn’t get through to my brother last night. When he rang me back this morning, I asked if he was down the pub. We wondered when (and where) we might see our parents again.
I’ve been working on the first part of my book. I’ve been trying to make it a bit light-hearted to attract the reader’s attention, but as I’ve been writing in Romanian I’m not sure if my humour has worked. I need to arrange a meeting with my Romanian teacher.
After a no-show this afternoon (there’s nothing more annoying than that), I finished my week with 29 hours of teaching. It felt more than that – there was a lot of biking to lessons this week, and maybe that tired me out. I didn’t put an end to my lessons with that slightly weird woman after all. She told me yesterday that she’d kept pages of notes in pencil about me (what?!) and in particular she wanted to know what was going with my face. She asked me if I was a drug addict. What a question. (I’ve had flaking skin on my face for the last three weeks or so. How being a drug addict would cause that I don’t know.) After yesterday’s session I figured she was strange but ultimately (hopefully) harmless.
On Thursday I had my second lesson with the English teacher. She was marginally better this time, but now says she’d like to do two sets of exams, IELTS and Cambridge, both in the spring. She asked me how long it would take to get her up to her desired C1 level. I was honest – I said nine months at a push. This week I had – yet again – somebody who said her dream destination was Dubai. Women seem to really home in on that furnace of flagrant fakeness. I just don’t get it. For me, it would be way down at the bottom of any list that didn’t include war zones.
A popular discussion topic with my older and younger students is something I’ve called What If?, where they have to imagine what they’d do in certain situations. One of these hypothetical scenarios is where they find a package containing a large sum of cash. A majority tell me, unashamedly, that they’d take it. One of them even said, “well, I’d buy a car,” never considering an alternative to taking the money. There’s been a story in recent days of mystery bundles of £2000 turning up at random in a small town in north-eastern England, which was discussed on local radio today. The host was amazed that people were really handing the money in to the police.
Duolingo. I’m beginning to see its limitations now. A lot of intricate grammatical concepts are introduced too early, without any real explanation. In contrast, many very important words and phrases come into play too late, if at all. The Romanian course has fewer resources put into it than more popular languages do, and I don’t think the English sentences have ever been sense-checked. Some of them are worse than bizarre, they’re just meaningless non-English. At the higher levels the sentences often comprise ten or more words, and can be translated in many ways, but only some of the possible answers are marked as correct, so you’re forced to play a frustrating guessing game. The Italian course is better than the Romanian one. I’ll continue with both languages for now; the Romanian exercises have already been useful for drilling pronouns that I struggle so much with.
One of the best resources for learning Romanian I have at my disposal right now is the local radio station, Radio Timișoara. My favourite programme, when I get the chance to listen to it, is between six and seven on weekday evenings, where they play lots of older pop and rock music. This morning I listened to the sport show, even though I hardly follow sport these days. There were slightly amusing regular updates from Timișoara Saracens’ rugby match in Constanța, which the Saracens won 111-0. I heard the surname of their kicker (who must have got lots of practice in today’s match) is Samoa. The Saracens are perhaps the best team in the country, and they often make the European competition, but they’re no match for British and French teams.
Tomorrow is election day in Romania: the second of two rounds which will determine the president for the next five years. Klaus Iohannis is the incumbent, and he is facing off against Viorica Dăncilă, who was prime minister until the government fell last month. My students have quite strong opinions about Dăncilă. They aren’t flattering. They think she’s stupid and she’d be a disaster for Romania if she became president. From what I’ve seen of her, I can hardly disagree. But she came second in the first round, mopping up votes in rural parts of the country where people have lower levels of education on average.
Dad’s stunning sales in Geraldine have given him a shot in the arm. It’s great to see him (and Mum) so positive. Thinking he’s found the winning formula, he’ll be churning out rhododendron paintings like nobody’s business.
In the last week I’ve used Duolingo a fair bit. Italian in the morning, and brushing up my Romanian in the evening. It’s important to keep the two languages separate as much as possible, because they’re fairly similar. It would be very easy to start mixing them up. This week I happen to have earned around 1500 so-called experience points (XP), which to me are meaningless apart from in one aspect: to gauge how long I’ve spent on Duolingo, in the absence of any clock. (The creators wouldn’t want a clock. They want everyone on there as long as possible, collecting gems or chasing promotion to the next gemstone-named league. It’s a great site, but the way it hooks you in is extremely Candy Crush-esque. Or even pokie-machine-esque.) I seem to pick up about 150 points an hour, so I’ve spent ten hours or so on the site this week. That feels like a reasonable amount if you’re splitting the time between two languages. But then I saw this:
MUM?!?!?!?!
I’ve connected with my mother, who is learning French exclusively. I’ll be generous here, and assume she’s doing tasks that yield points faster than the ones I do (because the points motivate her more than me). I’ll give her 200 points an hour instead of my 150, in which case she’s spent 25 hours on the site. Sheesh. I wonder how much she’s really learning, and how much she’s just mining fool’s gold. If her goal is genuinely to learn French, there isn’t much point in putting in so much volume. Little and often works well. Plenty and often (Mum’s strategy) doesn’t get you very much further. But it sure does get you a whole heap more digital diamonds.
I’ve had some interesting lessons, as I always do. In this morning’s productive session, we discussed the words analyse and analysis, two words that my student uses in her job but finds hard to pronounce, because of the changing stress pattern. After the lesson I sent her a video clip of me saying the pair of words repeatedly. On Thursday evening I had a particularly awkward situation in my lesson with two women in their twenties. They’re both at around a 4 on my 0-to-10 scale. One of them started to get angry with the other woman when they discussed learning styles (What works for you doesn’t work for me!) and out of the blue she burst into tears. I think she’d had a stressful time at work, and I realised that (unusually) we hadn’t discussed their work day at the start of the session. Perhaps, ultimately, it was my fault. The one who cried has always seemed a really nice person, and my biggest worry is that she’ll be embarrassed about her outburst and they won’t come again. I hope that doesn’t happen.
The week before last I had one of my (sadly rare) half-English, half-Romanian sessions. I asked the teacher how I would say “My living-room window faces west” (which it does) in Romanian. She simply said that Romanians don’t say that, and instead I should just say that my room gets the sun in the afternoon. But it doesn’t always, and certainly not today it doesn’t! She told me that compass directions are used fairly infrequently, apart from sometimes to talk about parts of the country. One thing I really noticed when I moved to New Zealand was that compass directions are used all the time there, much more than in the UK (and, as I now know, considerably more than in Romania). Especially where my parents live, there’s always a nor’wester springing up, or perhaps a cold southerly about to hit. The mountains tell you precisely where west is. There’s Northland, Southland, Westland (but no Eastland). Even the two main islands are simply called North and South. I remember when I lived in Wellington and I’d sometimes go on day tramps, the trip leader might say “if you just look to the east…” and I’d be thinking, where’s east?! It’s as if all Kiwis are born with an internal compass. Quite a lot of New Zealanders sail, some of them still build their own homes, and there’s still some of that pioneering spirit.
This morning I went to the chemist to pick up two medications (an antidepressant and something for my hair) but they were out of the hair lotion. That meant I had to go to their other branch at Piața Unirii. It’s in Casa Brück, one of the most wonderful buildings I ever have the pleasure to enter. After that, and just before my lesson, I had a Skype chat with my cousin in Wellington. I also caught up with her husband and all three of their boys. The eldest is now 17. All of a sudden, he’s a man. Time is shooting by.
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