Month: November 2019

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Romania

Take the money and run

November 24, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

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.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

It’s only just begun

November 20, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning I picked up some ink cartridges that I’d had to order, and the man who served me said, “Sărbători fericite” meaning “Happy holidays”. A few minutes later I was in Carrefour, where Slade’s famous Christmas song was blaring out. This evening I was sitting at my desk next to the window when two people, just about close enough to touch, were up a crane fixing the festive lights to the lamp-posts. There had been little sign of Christmas until it all hit me today. Ten days from now, the market sheds will be going up, and with the waft of chimney cakes and mulled wine soon after, it’ll really feel like the festive season, particularly if daytime temperatures do eventually fall from the balmy mid-teens.

I had a new student yesterday. She actually teaches English to groups of beginner adults, but if I’m being brutally honest, her knowledge isn’t quite what it needs to be. I’d put her no higher than a 6 on my 0-to-10 scale. She told me, “I have teached English for three years.” Oh yes. She then got confused between “taught” and “thought”. She didn’t know the word “narrow”. As it turned out, we had a very productive lesson, covering acres of notepaper in our 90 minutes, on all kinds of matters to do with vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, and I hope I can get her up to speed. I’ll be seeing her again on Thursday. The crazy thing though is that she wants to improve her English to help her get out of her English teaching job! She also plans to take the IELTS exam in March, which is pretty soon. Tomorrow I’ll have my last lesson with the woman who sent me that strange text.

Dad has had a successful local exhibition, selling a number of high-value paintings. Spring and the run-up to Christmas make it an opportune time to hold a show. There are quite a few people in the area who have sold family farms for colossal amounts of money, and I think that money was burning a hole in their pockets. My latest conversation with Dad was all very upbeat until we discussed my predicament in Wellington. My body corporate’s self-imposed deadline for me to sign the sale agreement is Friday. That ain’t gonna happen.

A new mural on an abandoned factory by the Bega
Life :) - New Zealand

Saying no

November 18, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Six cancellations last week – pretty frustrating, but withstandable: I still racked up a reasonable 26 hours of teaching. I might soon be needing some new students, however. On Friday I got long, and bizarre, text from the woman I played tennis with last month. She seems to like me. “This is a delicate situation. We’ll talk about it when you’re ready.” I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready. But I am ready to stop having lessons with her, a married woman in her early forties whose twelve-year-old son I also teach. I think I’ll have to pull the plug on the lessons with the boy too, and that’s certainly a shame because we’ve been making good progress. Despite the money, it isn’t worth the risk. Her husband seems quite an aggressive man, and things could get ugly for me if I carry on. On Wednesday I’ll see her for one last time, explain the situation as nicely as I can, and that (I hope) will be that.

Committee members of my body corporate in Wellington are badgering me to sign the collective agreement to sell our apartment block. They’ve imposed a deadline of this Friday. I simply don’t want to sign. Maybe I’m just stupid, but none of the arguments I’ve seen so far convince me that now is a good time to sell the only property I’m ever likely to own, while I’m receiving over NZ$2000 a month (net) in rent. (If I ever do buy another place to live, it’ll almost certainly be in Romania. In either of the other two countries I have connections with, property will be far beyond me.) I had a Skype chat with one of the owners (she’s lived there since 1997) and she’s not keen on selling either. If she sells and I’m the only hold-out, perhaps I’ll be forced to.

My sister-in-law recently invited me to have Christmas at her parents’. That was a nice gesture, but it’s a non-starter. Getting down there would be an enormous hassle at any time of year, let alone over the festive season. Dad asked my aunt whether she’d be interested in having me over, but she apparently she’s going through one of her “black dog” periods and doesn’t want to see anybody. So it looks like I’ll be on my own. I’m sure I’ll manage.

Language teaching - Life :)

Isolation (again)

November 11, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s year four in Romania for me. Some things change. Most don’t. One thing that hasn’t is my success in meeting new people. (Well, actually, I had more luck when I arrived than I do now.) There are three reasons why it’s a struggle. First, it’s really tough to break into a society where everyone has their obligations and close-knit groups, even in a city where people are as open-minded as perhaps anywhere else in the country. Second, my schedule is hopeless for meeting people. So much of my work is in evenings and weekends. Third, and perhaps the biggest problem of all, as that I’m quite happy being on my own most of the time I’m not working (and I never have the urge to interact with dozens of people all at once). I simply don’t need much human contact (but I need a bit!). I don’t know what the answer is. If I found any of this stuff easy, I doubt I’d be in Romania in the first place.

As I’ve said before, this job (or the way I choose to do it, at least) involves printing, cutting and sticking, sometimes on a near-industrial scale, as well as thinking about exactly what to print, cut and stick. One example of this is Taboo, a game you can buy, where you have to describe a word to somebody without mentioning any of the other words on the card. My handmade version of Taboo has been a success, and it works especially well with my pairs of students. I’d made ten sets of 36 cards, at various levels of difficulty, but I’m in the process of making another four sets. In total, that’ll be 504 cards.

Last Thursday I had another difficult lesson with the pair of young women, one of whom cried in the previous session. The other woman (not the one who cried) was so vacant throughout most of the lesson that I wondered why I was even bothering. She’s 27, but she was like a 14-year-old sitting in the back of a maths class, waiting for it to be over. She’d checked out. Are you bored? Tired? Would you rather we did something else? I did tell her that if she doesn’t participate, there’s really no point. Other than that (and the cancellations), I had some quite productive lessons.

A week ago a pair of 50-foot masts appeared in front of the cathedral, and last night two huge flags were hoisted on them: a flag of Romania and another showing Timișoara’s coat of arms. I wish they could have spent the money on a ramp for the poor man with no legs who has to crawl up the steps (and the numerous others with mobility problems) instead of pointless frippery.

I spoke to Dad yesterday. Mum was in Alexandra, on her annual golf trip. Unfortunately we only spoke for ten minutes because I had a lesson to get to. Somehow we got onto the subject of sanitation and wooden water pipes. After that, he sent me an email saying he’d been quoted several thousand dollars to get the engine on his MG repaired, and he wasn’t looking forward to telling Mum.

I pay virtually no attention to memes. I almost never use social media. But in the last ten days I’ve been hearing a lot about “OK, boomer”, a phrase used by young people who are fed up with the attitudes of baby boomers. Last week a New Zealand Green MP in her mid-twenties used the phrase in parliament. This inter-generational conflict is all a bit silly, really. We’re all products of the world we’re born into, which we have no say in. It does annoy me, therefore, when wealthy older people deny the role that luck has played in getting them to where they have, and instead (ridiculously) talk of overcoming adversity. We had 15% mortgage interest rates! Well, big deal. You also had annual salary increases of almost that. Sure, it was a struggle to pay off the mortgage in 1980, but by 1995 you were laughing. Of course, I’m not that young myself anymore, and things have got even harder since I went to university and entered the workforce. Degrees have become vastly more expensive, and less valuable, in the last two decades. Would I have even gone to university in today’s environment?

These generational differences crop up in conversation in lessons. Many of my students are surprised to learn that in the Anglosphere it’s often older people who have the money.

Books - Family - Life :) - Romania

Three years on, it’s still a great feeling

November 5, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a beautiful Tuesday morning here in Timișoara. Earlier I went to Piața Badea Cârțan where I had a coffee and bought some vegetables. Three years on, being amongst the fresh produce on a sunny morning, and watching the world go by, is still a wonderful feeling. As I sat on a bench near the market, I had a view of a brick wall I hadn’t noticed before. I couldn’t read what remains of the writing on it, but it looks like the letter to the right of the emblem is a W. So it’s probably more than a century old, dating from when Romania was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Back then, Timișoara was trilingual (Romanian, Hungarian and German), and German is the only one of those languages to use the letter W.

The writing on the wall

Yesterday’s weather was grim in comparison to today’s. My parents had ordered a book for me ages ago: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I think it will be a very good read, when I get around to it. But getting it in the first place wasn’t easy. It had come from Australia, via who knows where. Last Wednesday I finally got a note in my letterbox telling me that it was ready to be picked up. The next day I went to the main post office, where parcels normally go to, but I was told I needed to pick this item up from a different office, next to the railway station. On Friday afternoon I went there, only to find it closed at 1pm on Fridays and I was too late. Yesterday I went back – I got there ten minutes after it opened at 9:30. I went up to the first floor (where there was a poster telling me about the “new” notes and coins that came out in 2005) but was told I needed the customs office on the second. I spent the next half-hour in a forbidding waiting area, in which time six or seven other people collected their parcels before it was my turn. The room is what Romania must have been like under Communism. Everything was painted beige and brown, seemingly in about five minutes total. Aggressive-looking, bizarrely-printed signs adorned the walls. On the floor were some old scales, made in Sibiu in 1975, which had all the number fours printed in a typically Romanian way. I imagine they still work fine. The loud bang of metal doors closing in other parts of the building reverberated. I thought, I would not like to end up in prison in this country. When it was my turn, I entered another room, I handed over my passport, a man opened the package with a knife, decided there was no contraband inside, and I was free to go with my book.

When I got home I called my parents to tell me the book had arrived. We then moved on to the subject of Duolingo. I mentioned to Mum that I’d given 28 hours of English lessons in the past week, and she’d spent about as long on that site. I said it was an inefficient use of her time if her goal is to actually learn French, and she’d be better off doing 10 hours of Duolingo and 10 hours reading news articles, or something along those lines. Even the occasional conversation with me, perhaps. Suffice to say, this suggestion didn’t go down well. She wouldn’t speak to me. (That’s the way she’s always handled anything I say that she doesn’t want to hear. Even on a subject as unimportant as this.) I was just trying to help her. I honestly think it’s great that she’s trying to learn a language, and if she could get to the stage where she could go to France and communicate with people there, that would be fantastic. But I do have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t (it’s kind of, you know, my job).

After our chat, I bought a few bits and pieces from the supermarket, and on the way I popped into the second-hand clothes shop. Every six weeks or so, on a Monday, they have a new collection of stuff. I picked up a bronze-coloured leather jacket, made in Palma de Mallorca, for 70 lei (£13, or NZ$26). Yeah, I like this. It’s had some use, but not much. I thought it was pretty damn good value. It’s worth rummaging around in there sometimes. Beats going to the mall.

Although winter is around the corner, the markets are still full of tasty produce. Right now there are mountains and mountains of cabbages. Sometimes I buy a ready-pickled cabbage and try to make sarmale.

Two cancellations yesterday. I try not to let that kind of thing frustrate me too much.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

Mum, I think you’re addicted

November 4, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

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.

Politics - Writing a book

Could I write a book?

November 1, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Lately I’ve been considering writing a book to help Romanians (specifically) improve their English. Three years and 90-odd students have given me a pretty clear idea of what pitfalls they face, and why. I’d divide the book up into chapters (confusing words, avoiding word-for-word translations, pronunciation, prepositions, verb tenses, and so on). There are plenty of similar books on the market here, but none of them are produced by native speakers as far as I can see, and most of them are brimming with misinformation. My Romanian is nowhere near good enough to write a book in that language, but maybe that wouldn’t matter, as long as I pitch it at people at intermediate level or above. It’s worth thinking about.

Yes, Britain will be having a general election on 12th December, the third in less than five years (the length of each parliament is supposed to be five years). The UK political system stopped being fit for purpose ages ago, long before the Brexit sham. It functions (if you can use that term) by making compromise almost a dirty word, and when dealing with something as divisive as Brexit it totally fails. I’ve watched snippets of Westminster in the last year, and with a few notable exceptions (Ken Clarke? Jess Phillips?) it’s been deeply depressing stuff from all the parties. The Tories (or at least those who remain in the party) have been the worst, though. So many complete and utter arseholes. And they now have double-figure leads in most of the polls. I honestly think any outcome would be better for Britain than a sizeable Tory majority, even the giant mess that a hung parliament would create, but that’s where we’re heading.

I put it to my dad a couple of weeks ago that all the time he lived in the ultra-safe Tory constituency of Huntingdon, he never really had a vote. What? Of course I had a vote. You did, but in name only. You physically marked an X on a piece of paper, but it didn’t matter. But I had one vote, just like everybody else. No! Some people’s votes in different parts of the country were dozens, hundreds of times more important than yours. But there was no point going on. I then mentioned (which I basically never do) that I have a maths degree and also passed a bunch of actuarial exams, so I really do get this stuff. He got a grade 9, which is the equivalent of an F, in his maths O-level. (They’ve recently changed the system once again, so that a 9 is the top grade.) Anyway, first-past-the-post is complete garbage, but maaaybe it’s garbage you can get away with if the (two!) major parties themselves are broad churches, but certainly not in the highly polarised environment we see today.

There are two recent election results that illustrate some of the problems with FPTP. In Canada, where they also have that insane system, Justin Trudeau was re-elected despite his Liberal party losing the popular vote to the Conservatives. Luckily, the Liberals would likely also have formed the government under a sensible proportional system, because they have a natural left-wing partner that got 16% of the vote (but not many seats). So it was really a case of two wrongs making a (sort of) right. Then in Wellington they had the mayoral election, which doesn’t use FPTP, but preferential voting instead. The incumbent Justin Lester was leading until the final count, when Andy Foster took the majority of the votes from the third-place candidate to win by just 62 votes, although Lester has requested a recount. Whichever way that goes, it seems totally fair.

It’s the second half of the week, and that means kids. Two of them coming up.