Life :) - Travel: Romania - Writing a book

When I get back…

July 20, 2021 by 0 Comments

My last day before I go away is a soggy one. We had yet another thunderstorm overnight. I had a lesson with a UK-based guy on Friday night, and he was even more adamant than my previous student that I should have booked a flight instead of spending an eternity on painful Romanian trains. Why would you do that to yourself?

Right now, instead of thinking about my trip, I’m contemplating everything I need to do when I get back.

I’ve written 400 pages of my “tricky English words and phrases for Romanians” book (it needs a better name!), but I’ve hit the wall in the middle of the S section. The Romanian teacher from the university was helping me but gave up on me late last year, and it’s hard to keep motivated when you get unspoken feedback that what you’re doing is pointless. But heck, I’m on the S section. Three-quarters of the way through. It would be crazy not to finish it now. Once I’ve finally dealt with the word zone, it’ll still need a lot of tidying up. Have I repeated myself? Have I put in adequate cross-references? Can I make my example sentences a bit more fun and enticing? And so on, and so forth. Z won’t be the end of it. And I won’t have anybody else to help me. As is almost always the case no matter what I do, I’m on my own. I’ve promised myself to work on the book for a minimum of 15 hours a week.

Then there’s moving. Scary stuff, but if I want to move on with my teaching business, I’ve got to do it. I need to view houses and apartments and see what’s really out there. On Friday I met an ex-student who now lives in Austria but was back in Timișoara for a few days. She told me to avoid the trendy new apartment blocks because they’re overpriced and the build quality is lacking. That was my instinct too. However, she said she didn’t trust the vaccines, particularly the messenger RNA ones, and although she’ll be visiting several countries in the next few weeks including Sweden, some others have been scrubbed off her list because they require vaccination. As we were drinking our coffees, a man walked by wearing a T-shirt covered in handwritten Romanian text: “I’m unvaccinated and proud of it. I will not be controlled! Covid is a big lie!” And there was more. I asked my ex-student if he was one of her mates. Anyway, I’ll draw up a comprehensive checklist and get the ball rolling on the house stuff.

I also want to improve my language skills. Ten hours a week of that is the goal. Romanian, Serbian, Italian, French. So much is in one ear and out the other, because I don’t keep it up. Obviously I do keep my Romanian up by actually speaking it, but I’m improving slowly if at all. Languages are definitely a case of little and often, and that’s part of the plan. In the case of Romanian, the next item on the list would help…

Finding somebody. If only that involved just a checklist and x hours a week. Any tips from my many long-term readers would be much appreciated.

What I won’t do until September is advertise for lessons. A relative lack of work will help me kick-start the other stuff in August, and it’s pretty rare that anybody wants to start lessons in August anyway. I’m better off not wasting money on online ads, and instead waiting until the start of the new academic year.

Poker. I’ll still play on a Sunday morning and the occasional evening if I happen to free of work, but that’ll be it until I get the other stuff sorted. I haven’t played much lately anyway, and my few attempts haven’t been particularly fruitful. My bankroll is $704.

And one more thing. I must buy a bike. I had a look at some at Mehala Market. There was a modern racing bike I particularly liked, but at 1500 lei it was out of my price range. Now, thinking back, I probably should have just bitten the bullet and bought it.

That was going to be just about it, but this morning I had a “lesson” with a woman who was depressed and will be flying to Bucharest tomorrow to see a doctor. The whole session was devoted to that. Like many people who suffer from depression (especially women?), she goes round in circles when she talks, going over and over and over things that happened years ago. I was worried she’d do this with the doctor tomorrow, so I wrote down a list of bullet points (in Romanian, in an English class) so she could just present them to her.

After my lesson I called my parents. Dad had received an email from my cousin (his niece). She’s 50 and got married last year. They’ll soon be going on their honeymoon (it was delayed by the pandemic) and she asked Dad to contribute to the cost of it. She and her husband, who had been married before, aren’t short of money. Dad said he’ll ignore the request which is utterly outrageous. I mean, seriously.

Before I forget, I mentioned spelling bees in my last post. The documentary Spellbound, which charts the progress of eight youngsters from radically different backgrounds in the 1999 national bee, is a must-watch. It’s hard not to get emotionally worked up by it.

It’ll be an early start in the morning. My train will take me to Oradea and Cluj, before heading through the mountains on the way to Suceava and finally to Iași. The mountainous stretch should be very picturesque, and I’ll certainly post some photos of that and the rest of my trip. The city of Iași, the monasteries near Suceava, the mocăniță, and plenty more I hope. I don’t know if I’ll post while I’m away because it’s so cumbersome on my phone. We’ll see.

Language teaching - Travel: Romania

I’m not crap at everything (Warning: long post)

July 16, 2021 by 0 Comments

Last night we had a thunderstorm, and that should take the edge off the oppressively hot weather we’ve experienced lately. I’m now getting ready for my trip, booking this, planning that. I’ve just booked two nights at a guest house in Gura Humorului, a small town which has a famous 16th-century monastery. One of my students, a really nice guy, thought I was positively mad when I told him about my 15-hour-plus train journey to Iași. (I’m saying plus from experience.) “Couldn’t you find a flight?” Flight? Everyone’s got to be bloody flying everywhere. I never even considered flying; for the purposes of this trip, slow is good.

I often wonder how I ended up here, washed up in some place nobody’s heard of. (As much as I’d like my brother to visit if and when Covid is over, I can imagine what he might say. What are you doing in this shithole? Come back to St Ives. I can hear his voice now.) I like it here, of course. My mind tends to focus on all the big, important, life-defining things that I’m rubbish at. It’s a pretty long list. I’m crap at building relationships. I’m crap at working, or even being, with groups of people. I’m crap at being with any people for an extended period of time. I’m often crap at motivating myself. I’m often crap at organisation. In the past, my memory and concentration would turn to crap as a result of all the other crap, and what ever job I happened to have at the time, which generally made me feel like crap anyway, became a steaming pile of crap and I’d have no choice but to get the crap out of there. Then I’d move on to another job, and a couple of years later the same crappy thing would eventually happen, and so on. Regarding my lack of motivation over the last 10 to 15 years, I wonder how much has been caused my parents’ affluence, as bizarre as that might sound. I’m sure it has been a demotivator to know that, short of winning the lottery, I’m taking a giant leap backwards relative to their position regardless of what I do, because of all the other stuff I’m crap at, and that (along with the crap with my apartment in Wellington which is now mercifully over) perhaps gave me the impetus to cut the crap and come to Romania.

But I’m not crap at everything. Giving thousands of English lessons to more than a hundred people has made me realise that I’m actually half-decent at a few things that are come in pretty handy in my job. First of all, I can spell. I pride myself on being a good speller, and I kick myself when I get a word wrong (as I did in a recent email!). When I was twelve, in the pre-spell-check era, Dad got me to correct his spelling (which, at the time, was atrocious) for a book he was writing. I can’t watch footage of a spelling bee, a tradition that goes back to the 1800s in the US, without thinking, damn, why didn’t we have these in the UK? I might have won something. Alas, I was hopeless at football and not a whole lot better at cricket. Spelling bees certainly were a thing in small-town New Zealand in the late eighties. When I went to school in Temuka, a girl from the top class did well in what must have been the South Canterbury regional bee. It was all over the Timaru Herald and I remember thinking, how cool is that? As a bit of a joke, our teacher tested us (a class of nine-year-olds, about three years younger than the spellers in the bee) on a bunch of words that had come up; most of them were impossibly hard. A girl and I tied for the highest score; we got barely a third of the words correct.

On a similar theme, I can look up a word in a paper dictionary in somewhere between five and ten seconds. That’s because I’ve had lots of practice. My parents bought me a dictionary as a Christmas present one time, and I was immediately fascinated by it. The best thing about it was the IPA (pronunciation) transcriptions; I quickly became fluent in the sounds that make up English. Of course, it’s 2021 and we have no end of excellent online dictionaries as well as Google Translate (boo!), so I could get by perfectly well without being a fast dictionary looker-upper, or even being able to spell all that well, but they’re extra weapons I have in my arsenal. Another is an ability to read upside down almost as well as I can read the right way up, and that’s surprisingly handy. I could do that from an early age. I loved the Mr Men books, and I remember that Mr Impossible could read upside down. Hey, I can do that too. It’s handy because my face-to-face lessons are often literally face-to-face. In the last few years I’ve often found myself in a less-than-ideal cramped kitchen or bedroom where I’m opposite my student. I once managed to impress a twelve-year-old boy by reading a paragraph in Romanian upside down. Occasionally I’ve even written words upside down in lessons, but that skill still needs some work.

So I possess some skills that are mostly useless in 99% of jobs in the 2020s, but what else do I have? Well, I’m reasonably creative. I’ve made a bunch of games and exercises that have kept my students engaged, and they have a manual, tactile quality to them that appeals, especially to the little ones. It’s nice to have a job that allows creativity, after having that beaten out of me during all those years in the office. Follow the process, don’t ask questions, and you’ll make life easier for yourself. Talking of kids, I’ve had more lessons with kids than I expected when I took this giant leap into the dark, and I’m better at teaching them than I thought I’d be. I can be quite animated, and I play games like Simon Says which they find fun, and it’s exciting to teach someone with a long future, a world of possibilities, still in front of them. (Whenever we do Simon Says, or Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, I think to myself, this is mad. Totally mad. And awesome. I was supposed to be a bloody actuary, wasn’t I?)

I’m also better at thinking on my feet than I expected I’d be. It’s a skill I didn’t really have when I started out, but I’ve picked it up along the way. It just comes down to experience, drawing on what I’ve done before. For instance, last night I did a lesson on ordering food at a restaurant, and I pretended to order for a table of six. Sometimes my lesson plans go out the window. I can tell my student is tired or has had a tough day, and last thing he or she wants is to learn the conditional forms. Or they might tell me that they’ve got a job interview, in English, the very next morning.

Another important skill I’ve partly picked up is being able to communicate in Romanian. With kids it’s vital – they didn’t ask for a strange man to enter their territory and start babbling away to them in a foreign language – so being able to speak Romanian goes some way towards winning their trust. But with anybody it’s extremely useful. I constantly get asked what the word for x is. And very importantly, it helps me understand why Romanians say what they do in English. Please open the lights.

Finally, my most important skill, dwarfing any of the word-play stuff, is being personable, tolerant, and flexible. I sometimes fail here – I have little time for hyper-arrogant people or, right now, anti-vaxers (who intersect with hyper-arrogant people) – but I take pleasure in teaching people from all walks of life.

That’ll do. Apologies for making this so long.

Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Time to make something happen

July 13, 2021 by 0 Comments

I ended yesterday’s post saying I hoped England’s first major final in 55 years wouldn’t go to penalties. It damn well did. The game started with a hiss and a roar. We had the rousing Italian national anthem (the less said the better about England’s dirge) and then within two minutes of kick-off, Luke Shaw (or as the Romanian commentator said, Luke Show) had scored. England didn’t really ever look like adding to their lead, and Italy dominated the second half. England looked buggered in extra time. Thirty minutes of that, then here we go again. As soon as I saw six-foot-five Donnarumma (awesome name) square up against Pickford, I thought, this looks ominous. I had no idea how massive the Italian keeper was, and what’s more, he’s only 22. The fall-out from the match has already been nasty and insular, as it would have been had England won. Race-based idiocy and irrelevant bollocks about Brexit. Mum will be happy – her mate Novak won Wimbledon to make the grand slam tally between the Big Three 20-20-20, and England didn’t win. So that’s my fleeting interest in Big Sport over with for a while.

I’ve been reading back over the early days of this blog. I was buzzing, wasn’t I? These days I’m on a pretty even keel, and that’s way better than where I’ve been in the past, but I wouldn’t mind getting late 2015 back, or even late 2016 when I washed up in Romania. So how can I do that? First, I’ve gotta gotta gotta move away from this flat, as fantastic as the location is. I need a place of my own, with an office just for teaching. Some comfortable furniture. A record player. A car, so I can push off from time to time and see more of this beautiful country. It’s time I established something. Made something happen. I’ve also got to get back to this damn dictionary. More about that next time.

Getting away will help me plan at least some of this. I’ve booked my train journey from Timișoara to Iași (15 hours – travelling by train makes Romania seem massive) and four nights in the city that almost borders the Republic of Moldova. I leave early next Tuesday morning. Then I’ll explore the surrounding villages, though I haven’t booked that part of the trip yet. We’ve got more scorching weather this week: 38 tomorrow and a ridiculous 40 on Wednesday.

Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Slow-motion setting finally switched off

July 12, 2021 by 0 Comments

I might be back in business, finally. Lately I’ve been mooching around my flat, just about getting by, but then the moment I step outside, ugh. Heavy going. Putting one foot in front of the other has been a major effort. I’ve felt frozen by the hot, beating sun, if that makes any sense. Now my cold is still there, but this morning I found myself walking at just about my normal pace and managing with the sun. That’s a relief; feeling close to normal means I now feel safe booking trains and accommodation.

This morning I got a surprise call from my aunt; I spoke to her last weekend following her husband’s passing. She’d called me by accident – she meant to call her only son, who lives in Perth (she has four daughters). Soon after that I had a lesson with the young couple. The river of classes has slowed to a trickle, so a bonus lesson on a Sunday was welcome. It was one of my better sessions; we went over the present simple verb forms – positive, negative, question, to be and not to be – before moving on to food. They said they were rooting for Italy in tonight’s Euro final against England. I expect most Romanians, if they’re following it at all, will do the same.

It’s finals weekend at Wimbledon. Ashleigh Barty made all the running in the final against Karolina Plíšková – she won the opening 14 points as Plíšková seemed anaesthetised, as a Romanian commentator put it – but it oh so nearly slipped away from her. When she finally held on in the third set, you could see how much it meant. Wimbledon was the one. Then the women’s doubles final managed to be even more dramatic. The all-Russian team of Vesnina and Kudermetova led 6-3 5-3, had two match points, and could only have been millimetres away from wrapping up a comfortable win. Fate somehow conspired against them, and Elise Mertens and Hsieh Su-wei dragged the match into a third set, which extended into overtime. The last time such a match had reached 6-6 in the third was in 1998, when Hingis and Novotna beat Davenport and Zvereva 8-6; back then, top women’s singles players were serious about doubles too. The Russians served for the match again, at 7-6 in the decider, but Mertens and Hsieh broke back and won the following two games for victory. Both teams won the same number of points, 112, but the contrast in emotions at the end could hardly have been starker.

The men’s final is just a few minutes away. Matteo Berrettini has been very impressive and his raw power could cause Djoković some problems. I expect Djoković to win yet again, but we’ll see. Then a bit later Berrettini’s countrymen will take on England at Wembley. Dreams will be made and shattered. Twelve men will be immortalised, or not, largely due to events out of their control. One or two might even be villainised – think David Beckham in ’98 or Gareth Southgate himself after missing that penalty in ’96. Heaven forbid it goes to spot kicks.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

The park

July 9, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’m on day twelve, at least, of feeling like rubbish. Going to the park this morning was the most exciting thing I’ll do all day. I brought a flask of coffee and read a couple of chapters of my book. It was already 30-odd degrees, but at least there was a breeze. I FaceTimed my parents, expecting my battery to die at any moment, but just like me, it ran on fumes. They were fine. They’ve now had both doses of Pfizer, with no side effects to speak of, and the sale of their house will go unconditional any day now. We discussed the tennis, and briefly the football. Dad thought England had already won the competition, when in fact the final against Italy takes place on Sunday night.

When we hung up, two men in their sixties, one grossly overweight, sat down on the bench next to mine. They talked about the football, then switched to politics. After some time, a friend of theirs showed up on his bike. He wore a Germany football shirt that he’d almost certainly bought at a second-hand shop, and on his left forearm he sported a faded blue heart-and-arrow tattoo with an illegible name underneath. He talked extraordinarily loudly, his sentences punctuated by laughter and filler words like ba and păi. Then a fourth man arrived, also on his bike. His name was Ghiță, a diminutive of Gheorghe. He wore a red-and-white striped shirt, with just a single button done up in the middle. The tattooed bloke had a conversation with him, mostly one-way, cutting across where I was sitting. I find people talking across me unbearable in any language and at any volume, let alone the combination I faced then, so at that point I upped and left.

The lady from tennis, Magda, also phoned me when I was in the park. For the second week running I had to say I wouldn’t be playing.

I hadn’t watched any of the Euro matches, but did stay up to watch England’s nerve-jangling extra-time win against Denmark. They’ve got a very good team and a fantastic manager, and now they stand on the brink of history. Staying up until after half-twelve was no issue; my body clock is way out of whack. I had no work the next morning either; my hours have suddenly dropped through the floor.

Wimbledon has had its moments. I haven’t followed it as closely as in previous years. Ashleigh Barty’s win over Angelique Kerber yesterday was one of the more enjoyable two-setters I’ve seen. Barty will be a very popular winner if she beats Karolina Plíšková in tomorrow’s final.

I’ve been planning my trip. My idea is to take the train to Iași in ten days’ time (I hope I’m up to it by then), and then visit some towns and villages in the middle of nowhere, before taking a trip on the mocăniță (narrow-gauge train) from Vișeu de Sus, and eventually coming back home.

Books - Family - Headaches - Life :) - Other sports

Trying not to do a lot

July 5, 2021 by 0 Comments

For the last few days I’ve been living in the crawler lane, bogged down by coughing and headaches and lurid green mucky slimy custardy gunge. It’s been particularly bad first thing in the morning. I soldiered on with my online lessons on Friday and Saturday, and intentionally haven’t done an awful lot today.

Lately I’ve played poker on Sunday mornings, but today I did something much better. I had a FaceTime chat with my aunt, whose husband died at the end of May, and my cousin who lives in Wellington but was staying with her mother in Timaru. It was a great pleasure to catch up with them, particularly my aunt. I’m looking forward to the day I can fly over and see them. I fear that will be still some time away.

Before and after our longish chat, I watched three episodes of a documentary series on Netflix (which included a depressing part on deforestation in Romania), then I spent most of the afternoon on a bench in Central Park, reading The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. The weather was pleasant, and it was quiet; I couldn’t hear much apart from the jet of the fountain, the occasional train, and the clatter of tiles and dice from people playing rummy and backgammon. I’m fortunate to have such a lovely park on my doorstep. On one side is the river, on the other the train tracks, and I thought about how I might be on a train two weeks or so from now.

No tennis today, either playing or watching. For the last time, Wimbledon is taking a rest day on the middle Sunday. Next year they’ll play on all 14 days. It’s a sensible move. And I definitely was in no fit state to be running around a court.

I haven’t watched any coverage of Euro 2020, but after a 2-0 win over Germany and last night’s 4-0 thrashing of Ukraine, England are daring to dream.

Coronavirus - Environment - Life :) - Poker

Under the weather

July 2, 2021 by 0 Comments

I picked up a cold at the beginning of the week, and that’s made things pretty shitty. This morning, after only sleeping a couple of hours (what a horrible night that was – it started with a big thunderstorm which set the tone) I’d lost my voice almost entirely. I had an online lesson at eight. I called my student, and planned to put on a video if she still wanted to have the lesson, but she was happy to call it off as soon as she heard me speak. So then the big question. It can’t be Covid, surely. I’m fully vaccinated, and there isn’t much virus swilling around at the moment. But then again. my symptoms aren’t far off what the Delta (Indian) variant gives you. I texted another of my students (who caught the virus last autumn) to ask her where she went for a test, and instead she came all the way over to my place and dropped off a self-testing kit. A Youtube video from the UK told me how to administer the test. Swab your tonsils four times on each side, then twizzle the swab around inside your nostril ten times. That was easier said that done – I wanted to sneeze at only the first twizzle. After the swabs, I was on tenterhooks for the next half-hour, to see if a second line showed up, next to the letter T. It didn’t; as expected I was negative. (Yes, I know these self tests are far from perfect, but I’ll trust it.)

How I picked up a cold I don’t know. The air con? I’ve hardly seen a soul. Mercifully the temperature has dropped off today, following the thunderstorm that lasted more than two hours last night. We’re now sitting at 29. There are second-round matches going on at Wimbledon, and I’ve got the TV on with the sound down in the background, but I can’t get into it, or anything else.

The searing heat (up to 48 degrees) and humidity in Canada have made for distressing reading. This planet is becoming less survivable by the year. All because, as far as I can tell, people want more shiny shit.

Yesterday I snapped a streak of 14 cashless tournaments by finishing second in a pot-limit badugi. This one player had been hounding me all morning in all three of the tourneys I played, and it was almost inevitable that he was the one to beat me when we got heads-up. I was very lucky to make it that far, but at one stage I was a significant favourite to run out the winner. My bankroll is $730.

Family - Life :) - Music - Other sports - Poker

Need to escape this slump

June 26, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’ve been feeling down the last couple of days. No mental energy. No drive to do anything. The crazily hot weather hasn’t helped – I’ve been struggling to sleep. The reduction in my hours hasn’t been much fun either – work gives me energy to do other things as well as somebody to talk to. People have been going away, to Turkey, to Bulgaria, to attend weddings and baptisms and whatever else – events that didn’t happen in 2020. I could really do with getting away too, and will try to escape in the second half of July. My plan is to stay in Romania (it’s plenty big enough, especially if you travel by train) and visit the northern Moldova region, or Bucovina. I’m feeling cabin fever now.

My parents now have a buyer for their place in Geraldine. Dad is already talking about extending and renovating and gutting the new place. I wonder where the energy to even think about that kind of stuff comes from. They got six figures, only just missing out on a seventh (again, the mind boggles here), although it hasn’t yet gone unconditional. This is all excellent news obviously because their place had been on the market a while and they can now hopefully get on with the rest of their lives. This morning my student gave me two contacts in the real estate business; I’ll hit them up next week and hopefully get the ball rolling. I’m clueless there at the best of times, and now I’m adding a foreign language and totally alien systems and processes into the mix. I’m really fumbling in the dark.

New Zealand are inaugural World Test champions, when it looked for all the world that the English rain would have the final say. That’s a pretty big deal. Way bigger than, say, the America’s Cup. It’s NZ’s finest moment in the game, that’s for sure. They’re a brilliant team of cricketers and a great bunch of guys to boot. Good on ’em, that’s all I can say. World beaters at Covid, and now cricket. I wonder what’s next?

No Simona Halep at Wimbledon. That’s a shame.

Mum has just sent me an email with a picture of her plus three other women (combined age close to 300) holding aloft a big silver plate. It’s obviously a golf trophy of some sort. I’ll probably get all the details of that at the weekend.

Unusually, my weekend will be completely free of lessons. Tomorrow’s temperatures are forecast to be tolerable – a max of “only” 31 – so I’ll pop to the market and if I’m lucky I might find a second-hand bike.

My student told me all about the nai, or Romanian pan flute. A famous of exponent of this instrument is Gheorghe Zamfir; this is him playing Păstorul Singuratic, or The Lonely Shepherd. It’s quite lovely.

I’ve blanked my last nine poker tournaments; my bankroll has dipped to $718.

Language learning

Romanian Commentary 18 — Pronouns: the peculiar, pernicious ‘pe’

June 22, 2021 by 0 Comments

Today is a public holiday in Romania. It’s Rusalii, or Pentecost.

Pe. Two little letters. A mountain of complications. Outside any consideration of pronouns, pe is a preposition, which is usually equivalent to on (pe masă = on the table; although there are exceptions, such as pe cer = in the sky). Pe mâine means until tomorrow or see you tomorrow.

Pe is also used with direct object (accusative) pronouns, for emphasis. To give extra weight, you use both the unstressed accusative pronoun and the emphatic pronoun. In my previous post in the series, I said that te iubesc meant I love you. If you extend this to te iubesc pe tine, it means I love you, only you, and nobody else but you.

Here are the full set of emphatic accusative pronouns, with examples:

(Tu) m-ai sunat pe mine?: Did you call me?
(Eu) te-am chemat pe tine: I called you
(Eu) l-am întrebat pe el: I asked him
(El) a văzut-o pe ea: He saw her
(Voi) ne vedeți pe noi?: Can you see us?
(Noi) nu vă vedem pe voi: We can’t see you
(Eu) îi urăsc pe ei: I hate them (males or a mixture)
(Ea) le-a cerut pe ele: She asked them (to do something; a request) (females only)

This is actually fairly straightforward; the emphatic pronouns are the same as the stressed accusative pronouns, but with the addition of pe. You just have to be careful to never use them with the dative pronouns which I’ll talk about in my next post.

We’ve so far dealt with the case where pe is optional, but often it’s mandatory. When you talk about specific people, you must use the same constructions as in the list above, with the unstressed accusative pronoun and an emphatic-style pronoun with pe, except that instead of pe el or pe ea, you say pe Dan or pe Maria or whatever the case may be. It’s not just named people that you have to do this with. Mum and the policeman and the kids and nobody all trigger pe. Animals and plants and inanimate objects don’t, however. Here are some examples:

Ai văzut-o pe Simona?: Have you seen Simona?
Nu îi am pe copiii mei: I haven’t got my children
L-am cerut pe medic: I asked the doctor
Le-ai sunat pe fete?: Did you call the girls?
Încerc să-i învăț pe băieți: I’m trying to teach the boys

The last example uses the verb a învăța, which can mean both to learn and to teach. Similarly, a împrumuta means both to borrow and to lend. The fact that each of these Romanian verbs maps to two English verbs, one for each direction, causes a headache for my students.

When you want to say somebody, anybody, everybody or nobody, you no longer use the unstressed accusative pronoun, but you still need pe.

Cunoașteți pe cineva care poate să …?: Do you know somebody who can …?
Poți să chemi pe oricine: You can call anybody
Nu poți mulțumi pe toată lumea: You can’t please everybody
Nu am pe nimeni: I don’t have anybody (In Romanian, you say I don’t have nobody)

With non-people, it’s much easier: no pronouns, no pe:

Am văzut câinele: I’ve seen the dog
Citești cartea asta?: Are you reading this book?

Now we come to another important use of pe. To say the book you read or the boy you hit, you need pe care, which is a bit like of which in English, along with the unstressed accusative pronoun. (This is counterintuitive to me; with pe care, it feels like you shouldn’t need that pronoun as well, but you do.) What’s more, pe is used here whether you’re talking about people or not. Some examples:

Cartea pe care ai citit-o: The book (that) you read
Băiatul pe care l-am învățat: The boy (who) I taught
Mășinile pe care le vindem: The cars (that) we sell
Banii pe care îi câștigi: The money (that) you earn (Money is plural in Romanian)

This is all vital stuff for me. So often I find myself drowning. Next time I’ll try and deal with the dative (indirect object) pronouns, which are another ball game entirely.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

A dizzyingly hot week in store

June 21, 2021 by 0 Comments

It’s hot, and in the coming week we’re forecast to hit dizzying, hellish 37s, 38s and 39s. If you deal in Fahrenheit, that means we’ll be heading into triple digits. In California and Nevada they know all about triple digits at the moment. It sounds horrendous there. (When I lived in the UK it was common to talk in Fahrenheit when things got a bit balmy. Eighty-something just sounded hot. I don’t know if they still do that.) Here are some of the two dozen pungent lime trees outside my block of flats.

My aunt called me yesterday. It was the first time we’d spoken in a while: she’d been through a depressive spell of not picking up the phone. We chatted for half an hour; I have more in common with her than I realised. Her world has continued to shrink, sadly. I later spoke to my brother who said she never ventures beyond Earith and St Ives these days, not even to Cambridge which is 12 miles away. (She used to go there regularly, to shop until she dropped.) She was amazed to learn that the majority of Romanians are, and are likely to remain, unjabbed.

I had more anti-vax crap yesterday. I don’t mention vaccines anymore, but my student did, saying that they’re basically useless but his work had pretty much forced him to have them. He seemed a sensible guy.

Tennis was a bit awkward last night. I waited for my near-neighbour to appear, so we could walk to the courts, but he never did. When I got there alone, there were only the staunch anti-vax guy and his daughter. We played a set of two-on-one, then he made me play a set of singles with his daughter so he could spend the whole time on his phone. I then played singles with him, and was up 6-1 5-1 when we ran out of time. He had paid for the courts, and at the end I realised I didn’t have enough money to pay him back (because there were unexpectedly only three of us, I had to pay more), so I gave him what I had, promising to give him the remaining few lei tonight. He then went into a spiel: “we’re just here to enjoy ourselves”, as if I’d done something to prevent that. Something to do with the money? I’m guessing it was that. Or maybe it was our one-sided game? It wasn’t the first time he’d said that to me, but this time his daughter also joined in. Sometimes I don’t get people.

Some Romanians, like the woman who stopped lessons with me three weeks ago, are straight out of the series of books I read about Naples. Everything is about their emotions, how this or that utterance makes a person feel, and everyone is entangled in a cruel and exhausting game where they’re trying to outwit each other with their feelings. Practical considerations, like whether to protect yourself and others against a deadly virus, go out the window in that world.

No luck at the poker tables today. Not much skill either, perhaps. I made a particularly bad fold this morning in a single draw tournament against a maniacal player; I didn’t realise quite how maniacal. That game is extremely player-dependent. My bankroll sits at $737.