by Someone’s just called me asking for a lesson on behalf of her husband. I managed to find a space in my diary on Thursday evening, and I was all set to pencil it in, but then she asked for my address. Er, Skype? Zoom? No, your actual physical address. We want face-to-face here. Fa-fa-face-to-face? No! No no no no no. Not until at least mid-April, three weeks after my first jab. I’m guessing these people might not be all that into jabs and stuff.
I’m starting to beef up my work volume again. Last week I got 30½ hours, and this week should easily surpass that (but you never know; sometimes it just rains cancellations). Some of my lessons are dead easy and don’t remotely feel like work, but others are a test of mettle. I recently started with a married couple who have a nine-letter, seven-vowel surname, and they want to learn from scratch. Hello, how are you, my name is, would you like a vowel? I have to speak a lot of Romanian in these lessons, and although I get by, I still make mistakes and get tongue-tied. For instance, last weekend I couldn’t say “he likes to run” correctly in Romanian. Sounds a simple sentence, doesn’t it? The verb to run is a alerga in Romanian (well, there’s also a fugi, but that’s more like “to run away”). Here’s how you conjugate a alerga in the present:
eu alerg – I run
tu alergi – you run
el/ea aleargă – he/she/it runs (notice the extra a before the r)
noi alergăm – we run
voi alergați – you run (more than one person)
ei/ele aleargă – they run
That’s great, but with sentences such as “he likes to run” we need to use the subjunctive, and for the third person (he/she/it or they) this is different from the normal form of the verb. The form I needed was alerge, not aleargă. The full correct sentence is Îi place să alerge. (The first word of that sentence, if you’re wondering, is an i with a hat followed by an i without a hat.)
By contrast, the very common verb a merge means to go, and it’s conjugated like this in the present:
eu merg – I go
tu mergi – you go
el/ea merge – he/she/it goes
noi mergem – we go
voi mergeți – you go (more than one person)
ei/ele merg – they go
If I wanted to say “he likes to go”, I’d once again need the subjunctive, and this time it would be Îi place să meargă. So the subjunctive ending of “to go” is just like the normal ending of “to run”, and vice-versa. I understand this, but I still get tripped up from time to time.
Another problem I have is stress. Not that kind of stress, but the way words are accented. Just like in English, it isn’t always obvious which part of a word gets the emphasis. I managed to confuse a kid this morning when I said “martor” (meaning “witness”) with the stress at the end, when it should be at the beginning. Unless it’s a word I use a lot, I often find myself guessing.
Poker. My biggest problem is how little I’m able to play. I haven’t run very hot since I last posted. In one tournament my laptop crashed five times – hopefully I’ve solved that problem. My bankroll is $470.
