Categories: phd
Tags: language, Romanian, Russian
Date: 11 October 2005 11:09:32
Ian is madly learning Arabic, but whilst I can't match that in levels of difficulty, in the last 17 hours I have had instruction in not one but two very different languages, Romanian and Russian, so there will probably be similar levels of confusion (at any rate, I'd be confused if I was just learning Arabic, I don't know about Ian!). Romanian was OK, it was mainly revision of what I already know, so we won't start getting too complicated for a few weeks, and the only downer is that my class is a little way out of Glasgow so it's a bit of a rush to catch the train in time after my lecture and then I don't get back into the city till about 9pm so don't get home till about 10. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that last night we had Weather and I got drenched, and also starting this week I have to get up at 0-dark-00 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to go to Russian. The classes actually started a couple of weeks ago but I couldn't commit myself to them till I knew my tutoring timetable - I do have a tutorial that clashes with one of the lessons, but they have agreed that I will just turn up to the first hour of the Tuesday class and do some extra homework to make sure I don't fall behind (like that's going to be enough!). I was really thankful for those few Russian evening classes I did this time last year - even though I couldn't keep up with them because of full-time work, the fact that I had half a clue about some of the alphabet meant that I wasn't a total disaster today with the two guys (also beginners) who had a two-week headstart on me.
Weird language quirk of the week: in Romanian, the word for "beard" is a feminine noun, and the word for "breast" is a masculine noun.