by I’ve given just seven English lessons in Romania so far, but I’ve learnt a lot, and who knows, maybe my students have learnt something too. I’ve learnt that Romanians can’t pronounce “squirrel”. Or “vowel”. Or “valve”. I’m going to make up a lesson (or part of one) on V and W sounds for both my current students. Yeah, both. I need more, don’t I? My latest student is a 28-year-old in only her second week as a junior real estate agent (or consultant, as it says in her job title). She lives in Giroc, a village just outside Timișoara, with her boyfriend, four cats and two dogs. She picks me up from the hotel: that’s a win-win because, well, I haven’t got a car and I’d be struggling to get there, and she gets to speak English in the car, in effect a longer lesson. The first lesson ended up being about numbers, which are a pretty big topic in any language (I might do a post on Romanian numbers). I hear so many people with otherwise good English fail to make the distinction between “thirteen” and “thirty”. Her main confusion was between “hundred” and “thousand”, numbers she’ll be using a lot in her job. At the start of our second lesson she told me of her ingenious method for remembering those numbers: she called her biggest cat Thousand and her smallest (and she is tiny) Hundred. In our second lesson we practised introductions with customers. After my own experience with real estate agents here, I could give her plenty of examples of what not to do.
My other student presents me with all kinds of curveballs. He might ask something like, “Why do we use the present perfect continuous here?” Why is it “I have been waiting” and not “I have waited”? Sometimes I’m really struggling to come up with an answer. This week he asked me how to pronounce Nike and Adobe, and whether those words actually mean anything. I said that, yes you do pronounce the E’s (I always want to pronounce Nike to rhyme with Mike even though I know it’s wrong) and mentioned the goddess of victory and something about bricks. I then gave “recipe” as an example of a common word where you pronounce the final E. Then came the real doozy. He asked me whether there was a difference in meaning between “theatre” and “theater”. He said something about the building and the performance. I said no, one is British and the other American, whether you’re talking about the building, the performance, or even an operating theatre/theater. I said it was just like centre/center. I then did a quick Google search just in case, and lo and behold, he was right (maybe I was reading the exact same source he had read). Apparently some Americans attempt to distinguish between theatre (the performance) and theater (the building). You learn something every day (not “everyday”, which is one of my pet peeves).
Drumming up more teaching business has taken a back seat to the very stressful process of finding an apartment which isn’t over yet. I was supposed to view two flats today but both owners declined to see me because of my foreignness. I’ve got two new agents. I’ve already chucked hundreds of lei at one of them, to no avail yet. My other agent is somebody my female student knows. Today I emailed her in Romanian, explaining that I get a good income from my apartment in Wellington and paying my rent every month won’t be a problem.
I’m beginning to wish I’d voted differently in the EU referendum.
