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.