Categories: phd
Tags: interview, Romania, fieldwork, language
Date: 19 June 2007 12:07:02
[If 3 similar copies of this post eventually appear, it's due to internet cafe slowness and posts disappearing into the ether and not technical incompetence on my part. Honest!]
I've been learning Romanian, on and off, for the last 15 years, and am at the point now where I can hold my own in a conversation, do interviews, read the broadsheets, understand lots of what's going on on the TV, etc etc. For almost the same amount of time before that I learnt (and was quite good at, in my day) French which is a very close language to Romanian and has a lot of vocabulary which is remarkably similar. You would think then, that by now I would have figured out the difference between the word for "Tuesday" and the word for "Wednesday".
On the bright side, at least I was 24 hours early for my appointment and not 24 hours late.