Language learning

Language learning

Weird end to the week (part 1)

May 28, 2017 by 0 Comments

It’s been a weird end to the week. On Thursday morning my Skype student cancelled 15 minutes before our lesson because she was about to go swimming “with the girls”, as she put it. I texted her to say that she should pay me for the lesson regardless, and she replied with a long rant, basically saying that I was a terrible teacher and she wanted nothing more to do with me. I then asked her how I could improve, saying that I’m still learning myself, but she said, “You’re the teacher! How can I show you how to teach!” Doamne. I hope I get the 200 euros she owes me, but other than that, I certainly want nothing more to do with her. I’d felt I’d done my best with her, so that exchange left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Yesterday Dad called me. Mum had gone to a funeral in Mosgiel; one of her many cousins had died from a slow-growing brain tumour at the age of 60. Apparently she held me as a toddler when we came to New Zealand the first time in 1982. This gave me a rare opportunity for me to ask Dad about life with Mum. Not much had changed. Dad said that one of these days, heaven forbid, Mum could find she has a tumour, and whatever Maureen from the golf club says or does would become irrelevant very quickly. As for me, I’d say my relationship with Mum has improved as a result of being 11,000 miles away. They’ll be here in just two weeks and I’m looking forward to that.

I played tennis today for the first time since December and I want to write about that but I’m going have to end this for now because my sinuses are killing me.

Language learning - Romania

Romanian commentary 11 – how many?

December 20, 2016 by 0 Comments

Numbers. When you move to a new country, you really need to have numbers down pat in whatever language they speak. And it’s no good just learning them up to 10 or 20 or 100 or whatever your book or YouTube video goes up to. When you’re living in a new country, your accommodation costs are bound to run into the thousands, no matter what currency you’re dealing with. In some places even a chocolate bar will set you back a few grand. (I’ve figured out a way to help people remember the difference between hundred and thousand in English, by the way, even if they don’t have different-sized cats. Thousand, thanks to the long “ou” sound, is more drawn out when you say it.)

In French, you say four-twenties-ten-seven for 97. In German, you say seven-and-ninety. Romanian doesn’t have anything that off-the-wall, but it has its quirks nonetheless. Up to ten, Romanian numbers look pretty similar to those of other Romance languages. Of note (to me) are patru (4) and opt (8). The ‘c’ or ‘qu’ of Latin has morphed into, of all things, a ‘p’. Heaven knows why. You see the same phenomenon in other common words such as apă (water) and lapte (milk). Beyond ten, Romanian numbers diverge from their French and Italian counterparts, and they get long. The word for 15 is cincisprezece; 17 is șaptesprezece. They’re a mouthful to me, and clearly to many Romanians too – in informal speech the –sprezece ending becomes –șpe, hence cinșpe and șapteșpe.

Between twenty and one hundred, numbers are easy enough to form: 39 is treizeci și nouă, literally “three tens and nine”. But again, Romanians often get lazy, and treizeci și nouă is mashed together to become something like treișnouă. You will hear, and have to recognise, both the formal (long) and informal (short) forms, in just about every environment. When I’m speaking, I feel most comfortable using the short forms up to 20 and the long forms beyond that. These formal and informal numbers are the first real oddity.

Hundred is sută (plural sute); thousand is mie (plural mii). Both sută and mie are feminine, so for 1100 you say “o mie o sută” (one thousand one hundred; unlike in English you never say eleven hundred). Nothing too complicated there.

But here comes the second quirk. Gender. Romanian has different forms for ‘one’ and ‘two’ depending on whether the thing you’re talking about is masculine or feminine (and if it’s neuter, Romanian’s third gender, you use the masculine form for ‘one’ but the feminine for ‘two’). This can become a problem, especially when ordering food. Are langoși (deep-fried flatbread thingies) masculine or feminine? How about gogoși (which are a bit like doughnuts)? Part of the issue is that when you see a sign for these mysterious food items, they’re shown in the plural and you can’t necessarily tell what the singular is. As it happens, the singular form of langoși is simply langoș, which is masculine, but the singular of gogoși is gogoasă, which is feminine. One way of avoiding the gender problem is to order at least three of everything (but don’t go too crazy – if you order twelve of something, or a higher number ending in 1 or 2, you’ll run into the same difficulty). If you’re just talking about a number (e.g. platform two), rather than a quantity, you always use the masculine form.

The third quirk is that if you’re talking about a quantity, you sometimes have to put de (of) between the number and the noun. The rule is that you don’t use de for numbers up to 19, or for larger numbers that end in anything from 01 to 19. Otherwise you have to use de.

7 oaks – 7 stejari

39 steps – 39 de pași

76 trombones – 76 de tromboane

101 Dalmatians – 101 dalmațieni

10,000 maniacs – 10,000 de maniaci

A new apartment block, containing 108 apartamente (note, no de) according to the sign, is being built almost next door to this hotel.

In Cluj I saw this sign, promoting Walking Month (English – aaarghh!) which showed the number of steps to various landmarks in the city:

Note the de (or lack of de) in the above sign depending on the last two digits.

Staying in the beautiful city of Cluj, but changing tack slightly, I saw this Latin inscription on a church. Why are some of the letters tall? Hmmm. It looks like some kind of puzzle. Well, the tall letters are all Roman numerals, aren’t they? And if I add the M and D and L and various C’s and V’s and I’s, I get, let me see, 1782. I think. That would seem to be when the church was built (or finished; they take a while).

Just around the corner I saw this one. It’s a bit harder to read:

1744? Note that in both of these inscriptions, the letter V (conveniently) represents both U and V. I couldn’t find any other Roman numeral puzzles besides these two. These puzzles are known as chronograms and are quite common in Central and Eastern Europe, including Transylvania.

Language learning - Life :) - Politics

We’re living in seismic times

November 16, 2016 by 0 Comments

The upper South Island of New Zealand was rocked by a large earthquake on Sunday night at around midnight. Two people were killed and several more injured. Kaikoura is a mess, and unless you’ve got a boat or a chopper it’s completely isolated, especially if you’re a cow. The quake was felt very strongly in Wellington, where they’re being pummelled by regular aftershocks. I’m glad to be away from it all. Some buildings have been condemned. I think mine is OK apart from some superficial cracks, similar to what we experienced in 2013, but I haven’t heard any confirmation of that.

Today I popped into that “promising” language school, so promising that they hadn’t communicated with me since then, apart from the occasional thumbs-up on Facebook which I only joined because of them. But there’s good news. They want me to run my first “conversation club” on 9th December. The marketing manager phoned me later in the day to invite me over to his flat on the seventh floor of a sixties tower block near the train station. By his own admission the building is an eyesore with barely tolerable noise levels thanks to trains, trams and cars. I met his wife, Simona, and for once I was able to speak a fair bit of Romanian. I probably surprised him with how much of the language I knew. When he corrected me I was grateful. I accepted Simona’s offer of food, expecting a biscuit but getting a meal of meat patties, pickled cabbage and bread. Seriously yum! I’d already had lunch at the market but I didn’t care. Days like today make me feel that it’s all worthwhile.

I’m getting better at picking elections. I spoke to Dad on FaceTime soon after the result became apparent. He called my just-out-of-bed hairstyle presidential (ha!). It had been a long, dark night. I didn’t want Trump to win. In a fellow human being I like to see humility, compassion and respect. He showed virtually none of those qualities throughout the whole campaign. I get why people voted for him. They’d had enough of being neglected by career politicians, people like Hillary Clinton. But they didn’t just get Donald Trump (if it was just him I wouldn’t be that bothered). America is so depressingly partisan now that the vast majority of voters no longer think. They don’t split their ticket; instead they support their team, red or blue, all the way. So by pulling the lever for Trump, they also got the rest of the Republican Party, people who don’t believe in evolution or man-made climate change, people who don’t believe in universal healthcare, paid maternity leave or a minimum wage.

For all the talk of the white working class voting against the so-called elite (and Donald Trump isn’t part of the elite?), and the Democrats neglecting their support base (if you follow British politics, that might sound familiar), one factor played an enormous part in this election and it’s hardly got a mention. Five years ago I wrote that geography would eventually become irrelevant in elections: why do you have to live next door to someone who shares your interests when you can insta-whatsit them online? But in those five years the opposite has happened. People are living closer to like-minded people. For those who lean left, that tends to mean clustering more and more tightly in urban environments. And it’s very electorally inefficient for parties on that side of the political spectrum in countries with FPTP systems, in particular the US. When it comes to the presidency, the Republicans win all the small states which have more electoral votes per capita than the large states. They also win a majority of the states (even when they lose the popular vote as they did this time), and now that most people just vote straight-ticket red or blue, they then pick up a majority in the Senate too. As for the House, well the Republicans, who control most states, can gerrymander the hell out of them because it’s so much easier to draw an advantageous map when your opponents live in such tightly-packed zones. That’s part of why, even though the Democrats have at least as much support as the Republicans, and Clinton will wind up with a near-two-point popular vote margin once all the votes are counted, they’re triply screwed right now. Of course if the US had a 21st-century electoral system instead of an 18th-century one, none of this would matter.

I should point out that I was never a Clinton fan. I was supporting Bernie Sanders during the primaries.

International travel - Language learning - Romania

I’m sorry I haven’t a Cluj

October 24, 2016 by 0 Comments

This is my last evening in Cluj, or to give it its full name, Cluj-Napoca. Cluj rhymes with “luge”. My hotel is on Strada Căii Ferate, or Railway Street. But what’s up with that name? Railway in Romanian is cale ferată, literally “iron road”. (The French term, chemin de fer, means the same thing.) But we want to say “Street of the Iron Road”, so we need to articulate the noun cale (“road”) and put it in the genitive case which indicates belonging. Cale is irregular, and it turns out the articulated genitive form is căii. As for the ferată (iron) bit, well that’s an adjective, and because cale is a feminine noun that we’ve just put in the genitive case, we need the plural form of that adjective, and that’s ferate. Got that? Good.

Yes, Railway Street. So I’m very close to the station, and that means it gets a bit noisy. It’s also rather warm in here, but less so than when I walked in and the heater was fully on. The fridge was switched off when I arrived and I haven’t tried turning it on because the wiring at the back looks potentially lethal. I’m enjoying the breakfasts here: lots of salamis and other cold meats, cheeses such as feta, eggs (either boiled or scrambled), and vegetables such as tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Yeah, I know tomato is a fruit. Not an English breakfast, not a Continental breakfast, but a Romanian breakfast. I’ve had much the same everywhere else, but it’s tastier and better presented here.

I like Cluj, and wish I’d come here straight from Sibiu instead of going to the capital. In some ways it’s better than Timișoara, a similar-sized city. The clock has been advanced ten years. The trams are more modern (Timișoara, I think, had cast-offs from Germany), the buildings in better condition, the main park that little bit tidier. I read that Cluj is the coolest town you’ve never heard of, and while it’s got a cool name that makes the awful title for this post possible, I’d still say Timișoara is cooler. It’s got all that street art that Cluj doesn’t appear to have, it’s more random, it’s more raw. But if you want to know whether something is cool or not, I’m probably not the man to ask.

Cluj is the capital of Transylvania and possibly the cultural capital of Romania. So you get lots of theatre, opera, and all that stuff. Today (Sunday) there was an interesting craft market, aimed in part at tourists.

I wish I could spend longer here, but I feel I want to get down to business fairly soon. Tomorrow I’m taking a three-hour train trip to Oradea where I’ve booked three nights. From there I intend to spend two nights in Arad before settling in Timișoara.

I emailed the woman at my hotel in Timișoara, the one who said she was impressed with my Romanian, chatted to me for ages about language schools and a property boom in the city, then gave me her business card. I wrote my email partly in Romanian. It wasn’t a five-minute job. Neither was her reply. It must have taken her all of 15 seconds. She just said she’d pass my details on to one of her contacts. She hit the ball to me, I returned it, and then she just whacked it over the fence for the neighbour’s dog to chew on. Game over. I don’t have all that much human contact, and while that might have been the most important chat I’d had all month, she might have had half a dozen just as important (if not more so) that same day. Or she might just have been busy. Making human contact.

Our bus got stuck in traffic and the journey from the capital took a few minutes under ten hours.

Language learning - Life :)

Romanian commentary 10: some seismic vocab

September 3, 2016 by 0 Comments

I was woken at 4:40 this morning by the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck off East Cape. I felt a rolling motion that lasted a good 20 to 25 seconds. I didn’t get a lot of sleep after that. My carpool mate didn’t feel a thing and didn’t even know there had been a thing to feel. Gah!

Talking of things, Father’s Day is actually a thing that some people make a thing of. Who would have thought? There was me thinking it was just commercialised crap. If I gave my dad a Father’s Day present he’d think I was taking the piss. And he’d be right.

Brexit is back on the agenda after the parliamentary summer recess. I think the process was (and is still being) appallingly handled. The issue of Britain’s EU membership was too complex to be put to a referendum in the first place, both sides lied (though the Leave side did so more blatantly), and I can’t believe they never had a plan or timetable for leaving the EU.

This morning’s earthquake was the same magnitude as the one that hit Canterbury almost six years ago to the day, and at almost the same time. It generated a mini-tsunami, and came hot on the heels of Wednesday’s pretend “exercise” tsunami. Eastern Romania experiences earthquakes fairly regularly. Thirty years ago on Wednesday 150 lives were lost in a 7.1 quake, and in 1977 almost 1600 were killed in a 7.2 quake, mostly in Bucharest. Here is some earthquake vocabulary that I hope I won’t need:

Earthquake: cutremur
To shake: a zgudui
Shock wave: undă de șoc
Aftershock: replică
Fault line: linie de falie
Depth: adâncime
Damage (noun): pagubă
Destruction: distrugere
Struck: lovit
Earth or land: pământ
Crack (noun): crăpătură
Collapsed: prăbușit

Language learning - Life :) - Politics

In other news…

June 26, 2016 by 0 Comments

Yesterday was a relatively normal Saturday. In the morning I watched my cousin’s youngest boy play football and dropped him off after his four mini-games. “I’m a defender,” he said with pride and excitement just before the games started. He defended resolutely and was awarded joint player of the day for the second week in a row. I had lunch with my cousin, then went for a drink in Petone with probably my best friend, or at least the person I have most in common with here in Wellington. We talked about Brexit, work, the Spanish election (go Podemos!), travel, and more Brexit. Later I saw Independence Day 2 with my friend from the tennis club. The rest of the world doesn’t accept “America saves the world” as it did in 1996, and there was more laughter from the audience than I can ever remember from a non-comedy film.

Today I haven’t been in contact with anybody and I’m fine with that. I’ve got my English teaching tomorrow; it’s time I concentrated on that and my exit plans. Kiwexit? Kexit? Plenty of portmanteaux have been bandied about for the possibility of other countries leaving the EU: Czech-out, Italeave, Finnish and so on. How about, off the top of my head, a Frog-off?

Here’s an article in the Guardian about Ebbw Vale, a Welsh town that once had a thriving steelworks but has in recent times relied on EU money (a lot of it) to stay afloat. It has very little immigration. Ebbw Vale voted decisively (62%) to leave the EU. The number of people who voted against their interests is quite remarkable.

EU-funded road in Wales

The road sign above is interesting to me. The word for Wales in Welsh is Cymru but, like other Welsh words, it undergoes mutation in some circumstances, meaning the initial letter changes depending on (I think) the last letter of the previous word. In some cases Cymru becomes Gymru, and in other cases it turns into the weird-looking (to my eyes) Nghymru. Another example: maes (which means field) turns into faes after certain letters such as n. Apparently Welsh speakers make the mutations when they speak without really thinking about it. This changing of the initial letter is just one reason why using a dictionary in Welsh can be quite challenging. Another is that some digraphs such as ff, th and ng act as single letters. (Imagine for a minute that th, when it makes a single sound, counts as a single letter in English that comes between t and u in the alphabet. This isn’t as silly as it sounds: th was once written as a single very-different-looking letter in English. The word think would then come after time in the dictionary, and athlete would come after attempt. But pothole, which just contains t followed by h and not the th letter (because there’s no th sound), would come before potion, not after it. I’ve lost you now, haven’t I? But these sorts of things crop up all the time when using dictionaries or other alphabetical lists in Welsh.) Welsh is fascinating but I need to be concentrating on Romanian. I also need to be getting into linguistics properly but have no idea how. It’s frustrating as hell.

Language learning

Romanian commentary 9

June 6, 2016 by 0 Comments

I learnt a new word at the weekend: dușman, meaning “enemy”. It’s Turkish in origin and pronounced “douche man”. Duș means “shower”, just as the similar-sounding word does in French and German, and puns abound on Romanian websites. That guy who fixes your shower is hostile! In English you could say “don’t be a dușman, you’re my friend” or something. I’m not very good at this: douche(bag) isn’t in my normal lexicon. If you like puns and word games, learning a new language is great; it opens up a whole new world of words, of anagrams and permutations.

I’ve spent some time on words for “this” and “that”, “these” and “those”. In English we have just those four words. In Romanian there are sixteen. Here goes:

acest băiat or băiatul acesta – this boy
acel băiat or băiatul acela – that boy

această pictură or pictura aceasta – this painting
acea pictură or pictura aceea – that painting

acești tigri or tigrii aceștia – these tigers
acei tigri or tigrii aceia – those tigers

aceste cafele or cafelele acestea – these coffees
acele cafele or cafelele acelea – those coffees

So there are different words for masculine and feminine, and you mustn’t forget that neuter nouns are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. This takes us from four words to eight. But you can either put this/that/these/those before the noun, which is more emphatic, or after the noun. If you go for the latter option you need to articulate the noun, while the this/that/these/those word changes slightly, normally getting an extra “a”, and so the word count doubles again. And even that isn’t all (I lied when I said sixteen). Even words like “this” and “that” suffer case changes, so while “this boy” is acest băiat, “this boy’s life” requires the genitive case: viața acestui băiat. Yet another word, and there are plenty of these other words. Doamne, this is hard! I don’t expect to remember much of this.

A word about cafelele above. Coffee is cafea, which becomes cafele in the plural and the nice soothing cafelele when you want to say “the coffees”. But if that sounds soothing, how about lalea, meaning tulip. For tulips you say lalele, and for “the tulips”, yep, you guessed it, lalelele. It’s hard to stop saying (or typing) that word.

Lalelele sunt frumoase!
Lalelele sunt frumoase!
Language learning - Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

Humming

May 21, 2016 by 0 Comments

The last few days I’ve been humming. During the day everything has been beautiful, amazing, wonderful, and at night I’ve hardly slept. On Thursday, after my fifth night in a row of sleeping for a couple of hours max, I decided to take a sick day, only my second in over two years there. It was the perfect day for it, the sun was shining and my flatmate had moved out the day before. I walked around my local area for two hours or so, wide-eyed, taking photos of beautiful trees and houses that were now so much more colourful than I remembered. Other than that I gave the bathroom a good clean (it needed it – my flatmate was a rather aggressive user of the toilet) and studied some Romanian.

I’ve now got my Google set to Romanian: the “I’m feeling lucky” button is now “Mă simt norocos” and if I search for Sibiu I get aproximativ 32.100.000 (de) rezultate in just 0,57 secunde. The same goes for Google Maps, Google News and Google You Name It, everything is in Romanian including all the suggested search terms and my supposedly tailored results. As anti-Google as I can be at times (they are so pervasive), that’s pretty cool. There’s also a social network, Google Plus, which I’ve joined. It’s much smaller than Facebook or Twitter, with “only” a few million active members. I find the network part of Google Plus as confusing as hell (and of course all the terminology and help pages are in Romanian for me), but what I like about it is that it’s great for viewing and sharing photos, and I’ve spent hours staring at colourful photos of Sibiu and elsewhere. I might even post some photos of Wellington at some stage, and I’ll post the link here if that happens. I’ve even got an animated Romanian flag as my mascot or avatar or whatever you’re supposed to call it. I had to find one that wasn’t so fast as to drive everyone batty and to re-order the frames so that the first one looked nice (sometimes you only get to see a still photo and it defaults to the first frame). Yeah, working with animated images, or GIFs, is fun.

romania_done

 

I think what’s made me hum is the realisation that I’ve got so much freedom. I can be who I want and for years I didn’t even know it. Isn’t that something? Billions of people around the world don’t have that. In my own country we do pretty well in the freedom stakes, but so many of us are constrained by the situations we end up in. Take my boss. He plans to move house soon, but can’t move more than a mile or two because his three kids would have to move to a different school otherwise. He works extremely hard and his mind works extremely quickly but to me, as I watch him shove TV food down his throat while he rushes from one bullshit meeting to the next, none of it seems worth it. I used “TV food” there because of something I saw on a train in America. The guy in front of me in the food car dropped an armful of processed crap on the counter, and the bloke behind the desk tried to stop him from buying it: “You don’t want to be spending eighteen dollars on all that TV food.”

It would be criminal for me to waste this freedom I have. I haven’t got a two-mile radius dammit, I’ve got a great big map. My train itinerary which will cover some of that map is likely to be:

  1. London to Paris via the Eurostar, 2½ hours;
  2. Paris to Munich, humming along at 200mph on a double-decker train (Seat61.com tells me to get a top-deck seat for the best views), 5¾ hours;
  3. Munich to Budapest overnight, 9¾ hours, and I’ll have a few hours to look around Budapest when I arrive;
  4. Either Budapest to Timișoara, 5 hours, arriving in the evening of day two, or Budapest to Sibiu, 10 hours (why so much longer I have no idea), arriving in the early morning of day three.

Without Seat61.com I don’t know where I’d be.

A week ago yesterday I had my performance review, the last one that will matter in my current job (and I’d prefer not to ever have another job where they’ll matter). I got through it OK, and that felt pretty good. The same evening I went to a regional tennis awards presentation. Someone at the club nominated me for an award for those nine consecutive singles wins I had, but there wasn’t much chance I’d ever win it. Most of the prizes went to the elite players who already win heaps of awards anyway. The best moment of the evening was when a bloke of about eighty, who had done so much work organising competitions over decades, was recognised with the volunteer of the year award; it brought a tear to his eye.

Talking of freedom, having this apartment to myself again, and the freedom that gives me, feels incredible.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan

Romanian commentary 8 (it’s happening!)

April 24, 2016 by 0 Comments

The timing of all these long weekends has been bloody terrible. I wish I could have saved the days up until my flatmate moves out. He should be out before the next three-day weekend, Queen’s Birthday, but I’ve a horrible feeling he’ll try to extend his time with me. That will be the last long weekend before I go away on 27th September. Yes, I’ve now booked my flight (a one-way ticket, how exciting is that?) so it’s happening! I plan to spend a few days in the UK before heading to Romania.

Yesterday I met up in town with the Romanian lady who my cousin knows through work. This was awkward, first because I didn’t know what time she wanted to meet so I had to hang around for hours, and also because she had somebody with her. Still, we got a chat a fair bit. She was very nice but she gave such a glowing description of Romania, especially the part of Transylvania that she hails from, that I didn’t know what to believe. She even spoke longingly of her childhood under the Ceaușescu regime.

I did get to speak some Romanian. She tried to get me to improve my pronunciation of the â or î vowel, which I mentioned before on this blog as being difficult because we don’t have even a near equivalent in English. It’s especially difficult when followed by i such as in pâine and câine, or in words that also contain the ă vowel such as sâmbătă, săptămână and smântână. I’d better make sure I try smântână. I was also struggling with rău, său and tău.

Another major sticking point for me was possessive pronouns. I wanted to say “my brother’s cell phone” which is celularul fratelui meu. Needless to say, that isn’t what I said. When you want to talk about an item that belongs to someone, you have to articulate it, i.e. say “the phone” rather than just “phone”. In this instance you do that by tacking ul on the end of celular. As for “brother”, which is frate, you need to articulate that and change it to the genitive case, because something belongs to my brother, and that gives you fratelui. Without the case change it would just be fratele, obviously. You finish with the masculine singular version of “my”, which is meu. Simple, right? If it was my sister’s cell phone instead, it would be celularul sorei mele. The last word, mele, is the feminine plural version of “my”, even though I’m only talking about one sister, because you always use the plural when dealing with feminine nouns in the genitive case. I mean, c’mon, everyone knows that. So, yeah. All this articulation and case changing on the fly, when you’re also trying to process what someone has just said to you, is a feat of mental gymnastics, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to master it.

She compared my attempt to learn Romanian with her experience of learning English. She said she was struck by how much “fill” English speakers use in speech compared to Romanians, and how she struggle to distinguish the fill from the content. I can believe that. I use “I mean”, “y’know”, “like”, “basically” and “I reckon” and numerous other fillers all the time. And they serve a really important purpose. Contrast “Don’t park here!” with “Y’know, it’s probably best if you don’t park here, yeah, [points] somewhere over there would be just fine.” In English, not using those fillers gives one’s speech a sharp, icy quality. A few times my flatmate has said things to me in a way that comes across as rather twattish, and it was only yesterday that I figured out why. He uses very few fillers; he’s a “Don’t park here!” kind of guy. He spends a lot of time during the day editing Wikipedia articles about armies and battalions, and it’s as if he doesn’t switch off from that mode when he’s talking. And he talks a lot. He also makes jokes, that I don’t think are nearly as funny as he thinks they are. So I find interacting with him more exhausting than with the average person, and believe me, I find average tiring enough.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople was simply brilliant. To call it a classic Kiwi film doesn’t praise it enough. It made me laugh, it made me emotional, it made me feel good inside.  I loved the scenery, I loved all the main characters, even the CYFS lady who I loved to hate. I really hope this film makes a splash internationally as it surely deserves to.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

It’s a fix

January 21, 2016 by 0 Comments

On Saturday I played Risk with a bunch of people from a Meetup group, including my soon-to-be flatmate. We played at my place. Having all these relatively unknown people over caused me some anxiety which didn’t entirely disappear when we started playing. I was playing with some clever people who knew their war history inside out and backwards and could spell and pronounce “hegemony” and even use it in a sentence. Two people brought along far newer copies of the game than mine, which was quickly deemed to be old hat. We played a version I’d never played before where the objective was to complete missions instead of dominating the world. I had the chance to eliminate somebody but decided against it in order to complete a mission. Half an hour later this decision backfired spectacularly as the bloke I could have knocked out knocked me out in last place. I then just wanted to go home, but I already was home. Bugger.

I’m experiencing a lot of anxiety at the moment. The imminent arrival of my new flatmate isn’t helping.

On Tuesday night I watched the second set of Simona Halep’s shock defeat to the 133rd-ranked Chinese qualifier Zhang Shuai in the first round of the Australian Open, with commentary in Romanian. I understood a few words here and there. It was a stunning performance by Zhang who completely overpowered Halep in the last five games. She was in the zone, hardly missing at all, and Halep seemed unwilling to change her game. I think she was just hoping – not unreasonably – that Zhang’s level would drop. This was Zhang’s first win a grand slam in 15 attempts; she was on the verge of quitting the sport. She has since followed that up with a convincing win over Alizé Cornet, ranked exactly 100 places above her.

There has been a lot of talk about match fixing in tennis in the last few days. This should come as no surprise. It’s an extremely easy sport to fix (much easier even than other individual sports like boxing), and with the array of bets available on sites like Bet365 that go right down to point-by-point level, you don’t even need to fix the whole match. It’s also a ridiculously top-heavy sport. The top ten amass vast fortunes, while those ranked in the 150 to 200 range struggle to make ends meet. If you’re ranked 200th in the world, you’re an incredible player. If I played the 200th best player in my country of just two million blokes, I’d probably win six or eight points in the entire (two-set, twelve-game) match. Now extend that to the whole world, and you get a player who eats, sleeps and breathes tennis, someone who spends many hours at the gym, on the practice courts, travelling to play tournaments in tinpot towns like Timișoara that nobody has heard of, and he can’t make a living from it. But you’re able to bet on his matches, and you can understand why the temptation to tip the very unbalanced tennis scales a little would be so strong for him.

I’ve got friend, of sorts, in Auckland who if I’m honest does my head in. But we had a chat last night on the phone and he was genuinely interested in my plans to go overseas, dropping the little man in Google Maps and telling me what he saw at his end. It was nice that someone was taking an interest.