the world from a different point of view

In the last two months we had the pleasure to take a peek into the lives of two expats, one Slovenian and one Hungarian. Both Danijela, working in Hungary, and Bori, staying in Germany, reported to be satisfied with their choice of living in a foreign country but admitted the hardships coming from the fact that they communicate in English in a country whose native language is different. Today I brought you Eszter, who has chosen to work in a country whose official language is English. Ladies and gentleman, let's hear about life in Scotland.

Welcome to our TEA room. Are you already fed up with drinking tea, or your Scottish stay hasn't made a negative impact on you in these regards?

Thanks for the tea and the invitation. I'm not fed up neither with tea, nor malt whiskey yet. = )

Good, then let's get started. Why did you decide to leave your home country?

I had several reasons. The most important is that I need money to travel around the world, and earning it in Hungary takes ages. Secondly, I want to be an appreciated bartender in a fancy cocktail bar, but without significant experience and acquaintances it's hardly possible at home. Finally, it's fun to live a totally different life.

So you enjoy being an expat?

Eventually, yes. I like this role: being a cute little foreigner. However, sometimes it's a bit disappointing when someone thinks I'm dumb, just because I don't understand something. But I guess it's more rather me that thinks I'm dumb if I don't understand exactly what I was told or can't express myself properly. But I've still got a lot of time to improve.

Well, as I hear, you have some difficulties in communication. How does the English you learned in school relate to the actual usage of the locals?

Scottish English is notorious... it's hardcore, like any other dialect in the UK. The English language we learned at school isn't spoken by almost anybody, except for the cute, old English ladies wearing pearl and drinking tea. And there are also differences between Scottish accents. For example the Western or Glaswegian is terrible...  

Huh, terrible. And what is your experience about the Scottish themselves? 

Since I'm working in a hotel, we have had a lot of weddings, and it's cute to see that at the altar both people are wearing skirts, even though one of them is called 'kilt'.  Scottish people are friendly with some strange traditions they are so proud of.

 

Did you have any other memorable or funny incident, related to language use?

It was two years ago, when I was working on the west coast as a waitress. When my manager on my very first day turned to me and said 'Tablesex!', I was a bit shocked. Because of course, everything for the career, but I found it slightly inappropriate. (Besides, she wasn't my type at all.) It took me a second to realize that she was just referring to Table 6 and asking me to take their orders. 

Funny, indeed. Lucky you that you didn’t start undressing! Finally, to turn to a more serious tone, what advice would you give to someone considering to live abroad?

If you have the opportunity, take it. In the beginning it's going to be hard, but not as scary as you thought before... And your decision doesn't need to last till eternity: if you had enough or changed your mind, you can go somewhere else or back home. But it's worth to see the world from a different point of view. And it's pretty good to feel that your money has got an actual value.

Good luck with the delicious cocktails and fancy bars! Invite us over once.

to buy or not to buy

Tomorrow is going to be Buy Nothing Day. As the organizers put it, "Buy Nothing Day highlights the environmental and ethical consequences of consumerism," because only 20 percent of the population consumes 80 percent of the world's resources. A week ago my post addressed the very same issue: the pressing imbalance of the distribution of wealth and rights. 

What this initiative wants to point at is that consumerism, the constant drive to buy newer and newer things, is just a habit, not a need. And it has severe consequences that we need to take responsibility for. Let's participate by not participating!

In my institution there was a "used goods swap," to honor the day. You could bring clothes, household appliances, sports gear, and so on, as long as they were in acceptable condition. For each item, you got one coupon, which entitled you to exchange it to any other item. Whatever was not taken home by anyone was donated to charity. I submitted 16 items I hadn't been using for some time, and brought home 9 new ones, including a fancy jacket and a practical bowl.

To end on a bittersweet note, however nice the initiative was, very few participated. Despite the fact that it was hosted and advertised in an American private institution of mostly higher middle class students from Central Eastern Europe and the United States, it was predominantly the Hungarian -- not too affluent -- staff that contributed. To my question, how much she was satisfied, one organizer succinctly said: well, next time..

.. we will shop less and live more. Amen.

creativity?

Creativity is a crucial element in my life. It is as much my antidote to boredom and monotonicity, as it is my expression of vitality and presence. I cannot imagine teaching, or more generally, human relations, to survive without it. However, I had to realize that, even though this statement may hold true, what creativity means for the specific person or group of people is not self-evident. 

With children I tend to experience that creativity means handicraft, involving drawing, coloring, cutting, gluing, assembling, and so on, which must bring a tangible result -- a piece of art to take home.

For academic people, may they be students or professors, it is much more verbal production that is the safe manifestation of creativity. Debating challenging topics or writing dialogues and short essays functions as the canvas for them to express their intellectual power and creativity.

 

The toughest cookie, as far as creativity is concerned, seems to be the business environment. Accepting that it is a far too broad category, I still feel like grouping office jobs together, because, no matter what the specific topic and field is, they are quite standard in their expectation, and in the implications, of sticking the employees to their chairs for 8 hours. In such circumstances, the language teacher needs to be cautious with too much of creativity imposed on workers who, outside of the classes, are required much more to bear and conduct monotonous tasks. With business English students, what seemed to work is the variation of activities, each involving just a little bit of creativity, so to keep them within their comfort zones but to bring some color into the office black-and-white.

It also happened that someone just couldn't tolerate any extent of creativity. He refused to engage in pair assignments, situational tasks, or discussions involving personal opinion, let alone in the creation of his visual resume. I must say, I was struggling with him for a month until I managed to reconcile the group's needs, my expectations, and the dynamics of the class with his comfort zone. I don't intend to imply that he was wrong; he was just the exception, in that group. And it's a piercing dilemma how to "leave no man behind" but to satisfy the needs of the majority.

invisible

Imagine going to an event to which only the VIP are invited. You find yourself on the red carpet leading to a diamond saloon. Once you enter the double door of metal detectors, all you see is the glamor of gems and accessories, each costing more than your paycheck, but then you don't think about this because after all you are present where only the best can. You are escorted to a staircase resembling diamonds, enter the saloon, and you are served first quality French champagne and Mediterranean finger food. After a little bit of chitchatting and networking with the exceptional participants, you are called to listen to a chanson concert, given by the country's leading singer, which is topped by a fashion show. All this magnificent performance takes you on a journey to travel through time, to the era of the Industrial Revolution, the Orient Express, and the French Millennium, in short, to a time of aristocratic opulence and elegance. 

 

Well, I got to be opulent and elegant -- and more importantly, aristocratic -- for one evening last week. How did she get there, you may wonder. I'm sorry to break it to you, I wasn't mistaken for Paris Hilton or Eva Rezešova, despite the obvious resemblances, but I was the interpreter of the event. Lucky bastard, you must think. Indeed, one big advantage of working with languages, especially as an interpreter, is that you get access to many (different) worlds which would otherwise be closed for you. It was interesting to see how a VIP event of this kind looks and feels like, but I must confess it is more pleasant to recall it as an experience than it was to be part of it. Interpreting -- and, for that matter, translating -- is extremely helpful in making you see not only what you are but also what you are not. 

Having just finished a human rights film festival in which the key topic was unimaginable poverty as a main factor that shuts a great number of people off from basic human rights, I found it hard to identify with an event in which even the cufflinks of any of the participants would have been enough to feed a starving family, not to mention the raffle prizes. And the difficult part of interpreting is that you are expected, especially in such an exclusive, thus, rigid, environment, to be invisible and neutral.

 

A couple of years ago I was the interpreter in a case study of Roma oppression in a notorious town in North Hungary. Those people, although they didn't have electricity and their house was falling apart, welcomed me and fed me, not for being a VIP, but for being a P, a person.

Neither of these is my world. But it was not hard to feel at home in the latter one, because it didn't call for role-play, just for compassion.

pro

Pronunciation is an important part of language learning. You have mastered a language if you manage to express yourself in a way that the majority understands you. With English, used as a common but foreign language by millions of people, it is tricky to decide what guidelines to follow when teaching pronunciation.

Do you pick one of the most dominant English-speaking cultures, say British or American? But then why not Irish, Canadian, Australian, South African, Nigerian, Indian, and the list could go on. Or do you expose the student to the dominant accent of the culture he/she will need to use the language in, say German English? Since for most students the destination is not this clear-cut or exclusive, do you choose to use different Englishes, giving up on a uniform, standardized input? Either way, it remains a dilemma, and most probably you will need to adjust the material to the needs of the specific student(s), while of course you won't be able to change your own (acquired, inherited, chosen, preferred) dialect. Or could you?

Check out this guy and be amazed by the variety of how English can sound and still be English.

Any preference?

guess who

The other day I had a funny incident with my adult learner. It is not only its specificity and comic value that I decided to share it for, but also because it felt to me to be a general manifestation of our globalized society. So here's the thing. The class was focused on the practice of prepositions and numbers. At some point I introduced an exercise in which the particular linguistic units were embedded in a list of sentences referring to one person. After identifying the numbers and the prepositions in the phrases, she had to guess the subject of the sentences. The first set was about a notorious Hungarian celebrity, known for accidentally shooting himself to death and for earning the honorable title of the world's ugliest woman. The second set of sentences referred to one of the learner's acquaintances, someone she used to meet several times a week and just saw a couple of days before.

 

Can you guess how it went? She immediately knew the first one. With the second, however, she was seriously struggling. I had to confirm several times that she did know this person.

Were the questions wrong?* Or does she know a person she never met better than someone she played, laughed, cried with? Or is she not the exception but the rule, because we tend to spend more time, paying more attention to Twitter and Facebook than to our neighbor, sister, mother?


* Actually, I even made a mistake in the first description, as Zámbó Jimmy died, not, like I wrote, around 2004, but in 2001. But still, she was not misled.

an englishman in new york

Last weekend I went to Prague for a teaching conference. Ironically, the most inspirational input found me in the hall of Kino Lucerna, before a film screening at a festival I just dropped by. As I was waiting for the film to start in a packed auditorium, a guy sat down next to me. He arrived alone, so he decided to socalize with whoever fate brought next to him; and it was me. He asked me, in English, the supposed common language of ours, where I was from, and when he got to know I came from Hungary, he changed to a broken but cute Hungarian. Hungarian! We, Hungarians, tend to consider our language to be a secret code that few know about and even less manage to master. This guy, a Sicilian, born in Argentina, now living in Prague, is one of those. The funny part, in addition to the serendipitous fact that he was meant to sit down right there next to me in an audience of mostly Czechs, was when he shared the reason that had pushed him to master our language. As he recalled, he decided to learn Hungarian when his Hungarian penfriend sent him a song that left him mesmerized.

"Nagy utazás" (Big Journey), from Gábor Presser, has never been any special for me. Apparently, for someone else it was. Although the success of learning a language doesn't depend solely on liking a song connected to that culture, the initial spark ignited by any such experience can serve as an impetus strong enough to help overcome the inevitable obstacles on the road to acquiring the language.

So don't stop searching and sharing inspiration!

versions

As the third film festival of the week, Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival brings more than 50 films, in original language with English subtitles, to 3 Hungarian cinemas, for almost a week. The festival, which was inspired by Prague's OneWorld Festival, still the biggest human rights documentary film festival in the world, had its 10th anniversary this year (feel free to check out who made the promo video :-). Featuring documentaries in four different sections, Verzió offers a journey for you to travel through time and space and wake up from your life which is too comfortable for you to realize. Think of the Guinean students who fail to have the luxury not only of the computer and internet you are now using but they even lack such a basic utility like electricity. In the evening they need to travel to a gas station or to the airport, to study. Would you go that far, every night, so you can learn to speak English?

 

Or imagine being an albino in Tanzania. Not only does the sun damage your skin, your face, and your vision, but your neighbors are also hunting you, because they believe, thanks to the local witch doctors, that you are the incarnation of the devil and owning parts of your body brings fortune. Can you imagine that you cannot go to school, work, or simply fall asleep unguarded, because you may wake up like some of your fellows: without an arm or cut up into pieces?

Or do you know how it feels not to remember your name, recognize your mother's face, recall the fact that you had children, or to forget whatever you were so busy to achieve in your life and collect on your CV? Can you imagine to live without memory? To live without a past, only in the present? Don't we define ourselves through yesterday and tomorrow?

I hope you didn't miss out on these previously described festivals, not only for the sake of language practice, but also for the sake of gaining insights into the diversity of the wide world and your own micro universe.

mazel tov

To continue with film festivals and their generous offer of thought-provoking movies in original language, let me turn to the Jewish Film Festival. In the program of the event, taking place from November 7 to 10, you can find short films, feature films, and documentaries, from various countries like the US, France, Poland, Brazil, and Hungary, in addition to Israel.

The film that I wish to recommend is Deaf Jam, portraying a community which is especially quiet about its existence, let alone about its achievements, but would really deserve the world's attention. Why? Well, would it stop you from doing music if you couldn't hear? I bet it would. Ladies and gentlemen, these people it just didn't. 

Like I wrote last time, we are all minorities in some way. But equally true is it to say, we are all unique in some way.

pride

As mentioned before, Hungarian cinemas stopped featuring films in their original language, which is an unhappy circumstance both for movie fans and language learners. Film festivals, however, are pleasant exceptions, and the first weeks of November abound in options. The first I will introduce is the LGBTQI Film Festival, between October 26 and November 3, in Budapest and other major cities of Hungary. The festival features numerous award-winning films from around the world, most of which are shown for the first time in Hungary (and one can expect, for the only time in the near future). The topics cover a wide spectrum, from gay to intersex themes, from fictional films to documentaries, from positive idealisms to realistic accounts. You can read the detailed program of the festival on their webpage.

The festival, whether you are involved in LGBT issues or not, is definitely worth a visit. Challenge yourself and your students about gender and sexual orientation. Is it really a given? Is there really just one (or two) ways(s)?

Your neighbor could be one of them. Your teacher could be one of them. You could be one of them. 

We are all minorities in some way.

just dub it

There is an infinite number of theories about what makes language learning successful. I encountered one crucial ingredient for sustainable results, namely, to find the way to link the given language to the learners' hobbies. By incorporating the language into their everyday lives, the teacher can overcome a very significant barrier: the resistance to learning. If the exposure to the language is embedded into a pleasant, everyday activity, it will feel less like learning, and much more like living. 

With English, we are lucky, because a plethora of (types of) material is available, from books and blogs, through games and communities, to music and movies, so everyone can find their preference. Many people, for instance, seem to be fond of films, so I usually include film experiences into our learning process. A couple of times we even went to the movies as part of the class, and I must say, people loved it. 

Lately, however, it is getting harder and harder to find movies in their original language, at least in the cinema. The current administration overruled the previous practice of subtitling and forced the dubbed distribution of movies, which means that despite the fact that Hungary is inundated by American films, like most of the Western hemisphere, we can only watch them in Hungarian. Refreshing exceptions are film festivals. Since this week hosts a cluster of these festivals, I am going to present some of them briefly, as they offer the rare and precious opportunity to watch quality films in English, on the wide screen.

I am going to write about the LGBTQI Film Festival, the Jewish Film Festival, and Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival.

from mentor mob to lesson paths

As the third useful site, let's see what LessonPaths (ex-MentorMob, http://www.lessonpaths.com/) can do for us. Like Pinterest and Scoop.it!, LessonPaths helps you gather and share online content into themed folders. What is more here, you can edit them into a playlist. After each step, let's say, track, you can pose a test question, to check if your students got the point, or simply to poke and entertain them before the next assignment. 

I put together a selection of talks for an academic course on presentation skills, but business learners were also interested in going through a public speech development. Even if you are neither, I bet you'll profit from giving it a go. Let educator Ken Robinson, entrepreneur Steve Jobs, and "magic pixie" Brene Brown take you on a journey of inspiration!