Language learning

I’ve made reasonably good progress with Romanian so far, I think. Off the top of my head I know how to say I’m happy or sad or bored or tired or proud or ashamed or tall or short. I don’t remember knowing any of that after the same length of time learning French. I’ve spent a good number of hours in the last ten weeks reading and listening to Romanian, and a smaller but still significant amount of time writing it. What I haven’t done yet, and what I really need to do, is speak it. (OK, I have spoken it a bit, to myself, but I’ll soon be getting a flatmate and he might think I’m nuts.) So far what I’ve done is the equivalent of learning how to play tennis by hitting against a wall. I can now hit a half-decent forehand, backhand and volley, but I’m buggered if I have to react to someone else’s forehands, backhands and volleys. Problem number one: how do I find someone in Wellington to speak Romanian with? My best bet was the Romanian lady who turns up to the tennis club every six months or so, but she never replied to my email. It looks like I’ll have to go online, and for me that will take cojones or whatever the Romanian word is. I haven’t got that far yet.

Problem number two: as a native English speaker, the bar is constantly being raised. By that, I mean that the standard of Romanian I’d need to reach before it becomes really useful gets higher by the day. That’s because the average Romanian’s English gets better by the day, and unless I get fairly good at Romanian, people are likely to just respond to me in English if and when I get over there. Interestingly when I last went to Italy in 2010 I didn’t have this problem, even though my Italian was only at a high basic (or low intermediate) level; if you speak German at that sort of level you don’t stand a chance. I expect Romanian to be somewhere in between. A day will probably come when it is no longer worth an English speaker’s while to learn any foreign language; that will be a sad day.

Problem number three: there aren’t a ton of textbooks, phrase books, CDs or websites to help me learn the language. This isn’t French or Spanish or German or even Mandarin. It just isn’t very popular. But there is a lot of real-life material out there like YouTube videos and online articles. After all, over 20 million people speak Romanian and a great many of them have large digital footprints. In a way, having to use “proper” material makes the learning experience more fun. It reminds me of the time I tried to figure out badugi, a relatively obscure poker game, with the aid of a spreadsheet. I made enough money from that game to pay for a month-long trip to America. I hope Romanian treats me as well as badugi did.

I’ll talk about exactly what real-life material I have been using in my next post.

Romanian is the coolest language I’ve ever tried to learn (for me anyway – we’re all different) but there just is so much to learn. I’m working my way through the excellent Learn Romanian with Nico lessons on YouTube (and she’s still in the process of creating more lessons; she’s so far up to number 34). Nico makes it fun and that helps a lot. It looks like she can speak at least four languages herself. A lot of Romanians seem to be tri- or quadrilingual, while we English speakers are proudly monolingual and miss out on so much as a result. In English classes at school I learned virtually nothing about how language is structured; I was told that an adjective was a “describing word” and a verb was a “doing word” and that every sentence must have one of those doing words in it or else it’s not doing anything and isn’t a real sentence. And that was about it. I learned much more about the English language when I started to learn French.

Other than YouTube videos I’ve mainly been relying on a notebook and flash cards (hundreds of old unused business cards). One of the biggest challenges I explained here: every noun has a plural form, an articulated form, and a plural articulated form, and that’s before you get into cases. So every time you come across a new noun, you don’t have to learn one word but several. As for verbs, there are four categories of verb conjugations but there’s a ton of variation between each category, and sound changes abound. Adjectives at this stage seem a little simpler. Once you’ve learned the words you then have to put them together, and that’s no easy task. Romanian doesn’t seem to work like French where you can learn a bunch of really useful stock-standard phrases before you even know what each word means.

Wordplay can be useful in committing new words and phrases to memory. Occasionally the word will be an anagram of English word, such as ieftin which means cheap (something I can afford given my finite resources) or galben which means yellow (I can think of a yellow bangle). Sometimes it will be an English word, such as drum (= road) or slab (= weak). Other times the letter combination just makes me happy, as in a zbura (to fly) or zgomot (noise). Seriously? Romanian has words beginning with “zb” and “zg”? This language just gets better.

I mentioned before that Romanian uses five accented letters: ă, â, î, ș and ț, but there are also four “normal” letters that it doesn’t use, namely k, q, w and y. (There are however loanwords, such as “whisky”, that do make use of these letters.) Lack of Q was a bit of a surprise to me: you can’t count to twenty in French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese without coming across Q, and it’s also used in a lot of question words in those languages. Where “qu” might have come into play, “cv” is used instead, as in acvatic. Lack of Y is less of a surprise, because I often takes its place just like it does in Italian (an example being the first i in ieftin above).

Talking of loanwords, a surprising number come from French. e.g. trotuar (trottoir = pavement), șofer (chauffeur/driver), șosete (chaussettes = socks), birou (bureau), tricou (tricot = T-shirt), and many more.

There’s a Romanian lady at the tennis club whom I hadn’t seen in months… until last weekend. Unfortunately with so many other people around, and me being me, I didn’t get the chance to speak to her in any language, but I’ve managed to get in contact with her since and hopefully we can have a chat. She could be an extremely useful contact for me, as well as a potential friend.

As I’ve said before, Romanian has some complex sound changes. When you go from one person of a verb to another, it’s often not as simple as changing the ending. You’ll quite often get changes, or mutations, in the stem as well. This sounds a bit like genetics, doesn’t it? To show you what I mean, here’s the present tense of the verb a juca (to play):

eu joc – I play
tu joci – you play (singular)
el/ea joacă – he/she plays
noi jucăm – we play
voi jucați – you play (plural)
ei/ele joacă – they play

The vowel in the stem bounces around between o, oa and u, with the added bonus that because the stem ends in a c, you also get a consonant sound change in the second person singular (c before e or i is the English ch sound). This doesn’t just happen with verbs; you see it with the different forms of nouns and adjectives too.

You also come across sound changes when you form a longer word from a shorter one. When you lengthen the word, one of the vowels from the original word will often change, and a syllable that was originally stressed will become unstressed.

Examples:
țară (country) → țăran (peasant)
casă (house) → căsătorie (marriage)

Yep, the Romanian word for “marriage” comes from the word for “house”, and why shouldn’t it? What you see in both cases is the a sound being reduced to ă, which is a schwa. A side-effect of this vowel reduction is that the stress moves from the first syllable to later in the word. In țăran it shifts to the second syllable (there isn’t anywhere else for it to go) whereas in căsătorie it moves all the way down to the fourth syllable.

On the face of it, this seems crazy. What’s going on in Romania that makes their language so unnecessarily complicated? And then I thought about it for a minute…

In English this happens, and worse, all the time. Take the noun equator. It’s got three syllables, and therefore three vowel sounds. Some small points before I go further:
(a) yes it’s got four vowel letters, but that’s not what I’m talking about;
(b) the second of these vowel sounds, represented by the a, is what’s known as a diphthong;
(c) there exist such things as syllabic consonants which mean that not every syllable has to contain a vowel sound, although the vast majority do.

Anyway, equator is a noun which has three syllables and three vowel sounds. The stress is clearly on the second syllable. Simple. But look what happens when you form the five-syllable adjective equatorial. Precisely none of the original vowel sounds in equator remains the same. All three of them change! And what’s more, the stress shifts to the third syllable, with a hint of stress also on the first. The second syllable, which previously had the stress, is now entirely stressless.

While I’d be all for simplifying English spelling in principle, this shows one of the problems with fully phonetic spelling, in English at least. It’s quite handy that the word equatorial is just equator with some letters tacked on the end, even though the two words are pronounced quite differently. Under fully phonetic spelling, the words would be spelt something like ikwáytuhr and ekwuhtóriuhl, which look nothing like each other. One would be listed under I, the other under E! Another problem is that people pronounce things differently: do you go for skédyool or shédyool? Who would decide? The question is academic I suppose: English isn’t a geographically contained language like Romanian, which last went through a formal spelling reform in 1993, not long after the downfall of Communism. I couldn’t see any proposal to formally change English spelling ever getting off the ground.

With English pronunciation being all over the place, it’s a wonder anyone learns to speak it as a second language at all. That so many people do learn to speak English is, of course, because it’s all over the place. All over the TV, film, the radio, music, billboards, the internet, social media, and so on. You can’t avoid it. It makes me wonder what the future holds for less widely spoken languages, even languages like Romanian which currently has 20-odd million speakers.

I’ve strayed a bit lately from the whole point of this blog, and for that I apologise. I don’t want to be criticising my own mother, who is fundamentally a good person, or anybody else on here. This blog is supposed to have an optimistic slant to it (which I know is hard to achieve sometimes; after the Paris attacks it feels like the world is going to the dogs). From now on I’ll be talking about things I’ve done and dream of doing, places I’ve been to and dream of going to, and stuff that interests me. Like language.

When you learn a new language, you learn more about your own language, and I’m certainly learning more about English as I try to get a handle on Romanian.

Here are a few miscellaneous features of Romanian that I’ve picked up:

Romanian is a syllable-timed language, like French but unlike English which is a stress-timed language. To show you what I mean, consider this English sentence: I ran into my brother’s bedroom and hid in the wardrobe.

When I say the sentence above, I split it into two sections, a bit like bars of music: I ran into my brother’s bedroom / and hid in the wardrobe. The first section contains nine syllables, the second only six, but I take about the same length of time to say each section.

Furthermore, there are “important” syllables which receive extra stress, like a drum beat: I ran into my brother’s bedroom / and hid in the wardrobe. The time I take between those stressed syllables is (roughly) the same, no matter how many intervening syllables there are. I say the “into my brother’s” bit quickly so I can get to the next drum beat in time. Also at play here is that running into the bedroom is a short period of frenetic activity, whereas hiding in the wardrobe involves waiting. The speed at which we talk takes account of this difference in pace. Romanian doesn’t really do this and neither does French; in both languages you take about the same time over each syllable regardless of its importance in the sentence.

Romanian does have word stress, just like English but unlike French. Romanian stress isn’t always predictable, however. In English we stress the word elephant on the first syllable but in Romanian it’s the last syllable of elefant that is stressed. (Romanians write f where we write ph; good for them.) In French, all three syllables of éléphant receive more or less equal emphasis.

Romanian has schwas, just like English, French, German and Welsh, but not Spanish or Italian, or Maori for that matter. If you don’t know what a schwa is, you probably should because it’s the most common vowel sound in English. It’s represented by ǝ (an upside-down e) in the IPA, and it’s the “neutral” vowel found in the last syllable of normal, happen, pencil, bacon and album. The fact that English uses any of five letters to represent that same sound (actually make that six: zephyr) is one reason why so many of us struggle with spelling. Throw unpredictable double letters into the mix, and it’s no wonder people don’t know how to spell occurrence. (Is it an a or an e? One r or two?)

In French the schwa is represented by e; in Romanian it’s ă (and it’s great that it’s always the same letter). Unlike in English, schwas can occur in stressed syllables in Romanian, as in fără (stress on the first syllable) which means “without”.

The Rugby World Cup final is almost upon us again, but unlike last time when the All Blacks just squeaked by France and I was on the edge of my seat, I’m finding it really hard to care. I’m writing this to the sound of Robbie Williams’ Let Me Entertain You – they’re rehearsing for tomorrow night’s gig at the Basin which I live pretty much right next to.

A lot of languages have two genders. Some, like German, have three. English has somehow (and I’m grateful for this) evolved to have just one. So how many has Romanian got? Well, kinda two, kinda three. Officially it’s three: masculine, feminine and neuter, but the neuter gender behaves as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. Just like in French, the indefinite article (when you want to talk about a thing, or one thing) has a masculine and a feminine form (un/o), but the number two also does (doi/două). So for neuter nouns, which switch gender when they team up, you use the masculine “one” (un) but the feminine “two” (două). As for definite articles, when you want to talk about the something, well they don’t really exist in Romanian. There’s no “the” word. Instead you tack something on the end (and there are rules for what you tack on the end and when). Then to make things plural, you change the ending, or the middle, or both… Things get complicated quickly.

Masculine example
A boy:              un băiat
Two boys:       doi băieți
The boy:          băiatul
The boys:        băieții

See what I mean?

Feminine example
A girl:               o fată
Two girls:        două fete
The girl:           fata
The girls:         fetele

Diacritics matter! Here you’ve got two different words, fată and fata. There’s also față, which means “face”, and becomes fața when you want to say “the face”. And făta, făța and fâță are all words too. They’re all pronounced differently. Wonderful isn’t it?
A French bloke I flatted with in Peterborough in 2003 has just had a son to go with his daughter. He wasn’t sure whether to call him Gaétan or Gaëtan. Both options work in French, but he was having a hard time deciding which accent (the acute or the tréma) his son would be saddled with for the rest of his life. These little dots and squiggles matter.

Neuter example
A chair:            un scaun
Two chairs:     două scaune
The chair:        scaunul
The chairs:      scaunele

This one is actually fairly simple.

Another feminine example
A sheep:          o oaie
Two sheep:     două oi
The sheep (singular):  oaia
The sheep (plural):      oile

Riiight. Of course “sheep” is weird in English too, but I think it’s weirder in Romanian! While we add an ‘n’ to avoid saying “a apple”, they seem to manage fine with “o oaie”. So many vowels! (But no U of course. A sheep could be some kind of cryptic emoji meaning “missing U”.) They count sheep in Romanian just like we do. I might cover numbers in another post.

Another neuter example
An egg:            un ou
Two eggs:       două ouă
The egg:          oul
The eggs:        ouăle

In some languages “egg” can get a bit scrambled so I was intrigued to see what might happen here. In French the F of “œuf” (singular) is pronounced but it’s silent in “œufs”. I don’t know of any other French word that behaves like that. In Italian it’s one of the very few words that is masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, in other words it’s neuter! I’m not surprised that it’s neuter in Romanian too.

I’ve completely ignored cases here. The case of a noun is what the noun “does” in a sentence, and it can mean you have to make further changes to the word beyond what I’ve shown above. I might talk about that some other time.

I was about to write about my experiences with an employment consultant, but I’m trying to keep things positive on this blog.

Here’s some more Romanian. I’m getting just a little obsessed with this language (I need to be obsessed with something or else I’ll go mad). I often used to look at Wikipedia pages on obscure languages in dull moments at work, but this is the first time it’s gone further (and this is hardly what you’d call an obscure language).

There are several different words for Hello/Hi in Romanian, just like in English. The ones I’m seeing the most are:

Bună ziua (literally “good day”), bună dimineața (good morning), bună seara (good evening). Good night is noapte bună – I’ve no idea why that one is the other way round.
Bună – this seems to be a nice informal catch-all for the bunăs above. It’s used quite a lot I think.
Salut (as in French)
Servus (used mostly in Transylvania, as well as a bunch of other Eastern European countries)
Ceau (pronounced like the Italian “ciao”, and mostly used in the west of the country)

It’s quite nice that they use different greetings in different parts of the country. I’ll talk about a city in the west of Romania in another post.

Servus and ceau are also used for “bye”, as is pa or pa-pa. The “official” goodbye phrase is la revedere.

It’s important to know what words/phrases people actually say. I noticed as I was coming up and down Mt Kaukau on Monday (public holiday: lots of people) that “morning” was more common than “hi” or “hello” at that time of day. “Good morning” (which you’ll see near the start of any English phrase book) didn’t crop up at all, but it certainly does in more formal situations. It’s interesting that we keep the “morning” in informal situations whereas Romanians keep the “good”.

The next post on Romanian will deal with nouns.

I really enjoy looking at and thinking about language. My decision in 1996 not to study languages at A-level, because I’d never get a job if I did that, was immense muppetry on my part. I went down the scientific route, because that’s what I was born to do, and I’ve regretted it ever since. But better twenty years late than never. If I do end up teaching in Eastern Europe (and that’s my master plan) I’ll want to, and feel obliged to, learn the language. I’ve been looking at Bulgarian, Hungarian and Romanian, three languages that are virtually nothing like each other.

Bulgarian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. That means it’s out of the question for me, since I’m thirty years too old to be learning a whole new alphabet. Only kidding, I’d love to, and I have some idea of Cyrillic already, but it does add an extra layer of complexity. My biggest problem with Bulgarian isn’t the alphabet, it’s the verbs. According to Wikipedia, “The Bulgarian verb can take up to 3000 distinct forms, as it varies in person, number, voice, aspect, mood, tense and even gender.” That 3000 figure is flagged as being dubious, but Bulgarian verbs still sound like they would mess with my head. I still wouldn’t discount learning the language completely.

Hungarian, I must say, looks bloody horrible. The “gy” combination, which is very common in Hungarian and even counts as a letter in itself, doesn’t appeal to me. It crops up in English from time to time in words like “edgy” or “gyrate”, to say nothing of “gypsy” which is lovely with those other descenders, but it isn’t something I’d want to see all the time. It isn’t even that easy to pronounce in Hungarian. Another digraph which is its own letter is “sz”; that’s a bit nicer than “gy”, but not much. Hungarian also has far too many diacritics. Its vocabulary seems to be very different from just about any other language, making it hard to get a handle on, and it’s a grammatical nightmare with a ridiculous number of noun cases. All in all, it looks extremely hard, and not that much fun to learn either.

Romanian, well that’s a different story altogether. To me Romanian is great and here’s why:

• First and foremost, it’s a Romance language, but its strong Slavic influence gives it extra variety. There are beautiful words like frumoasa (the feminine form of “beautiful”), Russian-sounding words that you’ll see at the market like morcov (carrot) and cartof (potato), and words like scump (expensive) which is only not an English word by pure accident. Lots of variety is really important to me when learning a language. On the face of it Italian lacks variety (fairly small sound inventory and just about all words end in a vowel) but you’ve got geminated consonants, words beginning with “sb”, and wonderful stuff like that. And it sounds great. Maori also sounds great, but it has no sibilants, no voiced consonants except the three nasals, and no consonant clusters (of even two consonants) at all. Maybe it’s just me, but I find Maori to be missing something.

• It’s totally phonetic. That might sound boring, but I find it quite refreshing when my native language is anything but.

• Vowel combinations that get me far more excited than they probably should do: two, three, sometimes four vowels in a row, as in creioane (pencils/crayons). Then there’s copil (child) which becomes copii in the plural, and the wonderful copiii (yep, three i’s in a row) when you want to talk about the children. That word could make some good logos. When I lived in Auckland there was a restaurant in Northcote called Tastiii. Would you dare eat at a place called that? Maybe it was owned by Romanians. Words like copiii would be great for Scrabble – I always get too many i’s in that game. Scrabble seems to be fairly big in Romania. Ceausescu once famously banned it.

• Sound changes between masculine and feminine, and singular and plural. These certainly make the language harder. It’s not just a case of changing an ‘o’ to an ‘a’ or sticking an ‘s’ on the end; you have to learn the different forms, just like mouse–mice or goose–geese in English. Luckily, because the changes are cool, I’ll want to learn them. That’s what I think is great about Romanian – plenty of weird stuff going on, but it’s all totally awesome weird.

• A sensible number of diacritics. There are enough to pepper the page and make words look cool and exotic, without things getting out of hand as in Vịềtnẳmễsệ. Most importantly, there are only five different letters with accent marks. Two of those are pronounced identically (î is used at the beginning or end of a word, â in the middle). The â/î sound is a bit tricky because it doesn’t exist in English or any other language that I’ve studied, and it gets even trickier when combined with another vowel, as in câine (dog) or pâine (bread), two words that rhyme like they do in Italian (cane/pane). Some Romanians are lazy and type without diacritics; that’s a pain in the butt for people trying to learn the language. Is that a normal ‘a’ or has it got a bowl or a hat?

I’m sure I’ll find more cool stuff if and when I delve deeper into this weird and wonderful language.