by It’s ages since I last discussed my Romanian language skills, or lack of them. It’s an ongoing battle. People who don’t live in Romania might assume that after more than two years I’d be just about fluent by now. Total immersion, right? Well, no. Considering how many barriers there are to learning the language, I haven’t done too badly. What do I mean by barriers, exactly? Every time I go to a fast-food outlet or a bank or a pharmacy and I’m dealing with somebody under thirty or so, I get nervous. I’m going to get Englished again, aren’t I?! I always speak Romanian, but I might be the only non-native speaker who has attempted to speak the language that they’ve come across all week. Even if my Romanian is perfectly understandable, they’re likely to find my error-strewn version, with a funny accent, comical or worse. So then they reply in English, often with mistakes, and in a slightly funny accent: “Sorry. Are not dere.” But as a speaker (and teacher!) of a language that everybody wants to speak, I’m used to mistakes and funny accents. They don’t bother me. So Romanians can get away with their dodgy English whereas I can’t with my iffy Romanian. Usually I persist, speaking Romanian for the rest of the exchange, but still feeling that I’ve failed. Sometimes, if I’m not desperate, I simply walk away.
It doesn’t happen like this all the time, of course. Or even half the time. But it happens enough to frustrate me. Am I really this bad? Still? Often the person behind the counter will greet me with “Spuneți!” which means “Speak!”. Talk about putting the pressure on. Speak, boy, speak! Shit, what do I say now? The “Spuneți!” situation is just one of many where I become anxious and uncomfortable, and therefore less able to process the language. One of these times came up yesterday, when I got my hair cut in a place I hadn’t been to before, just on the other side of the bridge. People were talking loudly across me from opposite sides of the room, cracking jokes. I couldn’t see my watch from under the cape I was wearing, nor could I see the clock from where I was sitting, and I had a lesson to go to afterwards. That sort of stuff makes me tense in any language.
I’m more comfortable in open-air markets or funny unsophisticated dive bars, which are generally run by slightly older people who didn’t start learning English when they were at kindergarden. Those places also have a couple of side benefits: they’re more interesting and cheaper.
Since the start of the year (which isn’t very long, obviously), S and I have been alternating languages. We spoke Romanian the first time we meet up, English the second time, then switched back to Romanian again, and so on. This seems to be working. At one point, S suggested that my Romanian level is something like B2, but that can’t be right. Perhaps I’d just scrape B1, or about a 5 on my personal 0-to-10 scale.
It’s been brass monkeys here. We had heavy snowfall last weekend, and on Tuesday morning the temperature dipped into the double-figure negatives. One of my students then showed up on the wrong day: Tuesday instead of Thursday. Somebody else would be coming minutes later, so I had to turn him away. I felt sorry for him, having braved such bitterly cold weather to come here, and I also felt that it was partly my fault: I’ve been teaching in Romania long enough to know that everybody seems to struggle with the words Tuesday and Thursday. I’ve even had texts from people wanting lessons on Thuesday. In this case, a simple reply of Marți? or Joi? and this misunderstanding never would have happened. Luckily he was still able to come two days later.
It’s been a good work week, and the more work I get, the motivated I seem to be with everything else. Hopefully that will extend to the Romanian language.
