Category Archives: language

Three words I learnt last weekend

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Buzzard: a large hawk-like bird of prey (unless you are in the US where it is some sort of vulture). Not an uncommon word, but I’m a city mouse so I just gathered it is a bird, and that it is feared by the fauna in the inlaws’ garden.

Finial: an ornament at the top, end, or corner of a structure or object. I learnt that one of Stuart’s maternal grandfather’s many hobbies was to restore grandfather clocks (and their finials).

Skein: a coiled length of thread or yarn (or a complicated situation). Stuart’s aunt mentioned it and then had to show us what she meant.

They did not teach me zouk in school

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It was the end of summer 1991. I’d just arrived in Paris. It was my first time in France, I’d studied French for six years but had never spoken it and so I was unable to even ask for change to make a telephone call to a friend who was putting me up while I looked for accommodation.

I soon realised that everyday spoken French is filled with slang words and expressions they did not teach me in school. I was confused. ‘Je vais au travail en voiture’ often becomes ‘Je vais au boulot en bagnole’ when chatting with friends. You can even play around with words swapping syllables (an argot called ‘verlan‘). It was like cracking a code.

The fact that this Zouk Machine song was playing everywhere did not help. My French was so bad I had not realised it was sung in Antillean Creole! Close enough to make me think it was the language I learnt, yet different enough to make me panic that I’ll never learn French – let alone write a whole dissertation in it by the end of the year!

Enjoy the video. Guaranteed to shower you with warmth and colour on a cold grey day like London today.

My first day at school

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Yesterday after work I attended to the first class of a twelve-week Spanish language course.

My teacher is very lovely because she brought cupcakes. She also has an open smiley face. She comes from Argentina and her accent is as sweet as dulce de leche. Not as lovely as the Castilian Spanish I love so much, but I like it too.

My classmates are nice. Many of them have taken classes in the previous levels with the same teacher and they know each other already, but they are very friendly with all of us newcomers.

The level of the class is perfect for me. My vocabulary and pronunciation are good, but I am very bad at grammar and verb tenses, and this is exactly what we are going to do during the next two weeks.

Our teacher asked us to introduce ourselves and asked each of us where we learnt Spanish. I said I learnt by reading Harry Potter books in Spanish and that I could therefore talk at length about witches, spells and broomsticks. My classmates giggled. I hope they like me.

How I’m brushing up my Spanish

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I am leaving on Thursday morning for five days in Spain, and along with scouring the city to get myself a good stock of cheap SPF50 lotion, I’ve been finding three new ways to revise and improve my Spanish (last time I only Michel Thomassed myself until my ears were bleeding in Spanish):

  1. Marina and Ben’s podcasts from notesinspanish.com. Marina is Spanish, her husband Ben is English, and they chat for 10 to 15 minutes about different topics, usually contemporary, relevant and interesting. Plus, they are fun, and Ben’s got the faintest trace of an English accent in his excellent Spanish, plus the fact that he is a foreigner living in Spain gives an interesting perspective to what he says. Marina is sweet and warm and bloody clever too.
  2. La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind), a novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. It has been described as some sort of Da Vinci Code, only it’s set in Barcelona – and not written by a ten-year-old after one afternoon’s worth of research on Google. I have just started it, and am finding it a bit tough (last year I read a Harry Potter book in Spanish, that was easy once you find out how to say which and wizard).
  3. Spanish Word A Day straight into my feed reader. Slightly below my level, but it’s good revision and they give you examples of use for each word too.

Off to Paris with the in-laws

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Dr B.’s parents are coming down from Staffordshire tonight, then tomorrow morning the four of us are hopping onto the Eurostar and spending the next forty-eight hours in Paris.

He has organised this as a present for his dad’s birthday, and getting his mother to come along took some planning and presentation skills, as in the past she had threatened to divorce her husband if he ever sprung a surprise trip abroad to her. Ireland? That’s OK. Anywhere where people speak foreign and eat strange? Nah.

So Dr B. told his mum he was taking his dad to Paris, and would she be at all interested in coming along if I was there? She knew I lived there for six years, and having me around probably means that she would never have to interact with the locals.

I don’t have more information about this, but I know her a little and she does not strike me as a closed-up or fearful person. Maybe she is a little like me, in that she gets extraordinarily frustrated if she is not able to communicate properly.

Why do you think I got so interested and good at languages?

Why do you think I made super human efforts to lose my accent?

Why do you think I start boiling with rage whenever I mispronounce something?

Introducing ‘Word of the day’

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I love words. Words make life sweeter.

I wish I knew every word. Unfortunately, I don’t. I am told I do a pretty good job at using an extensive vocabulary for someone whose first language is not English, but I get extremely frustrated whenever I encounter a word I do not know.

So I usually make a note of it, then look it up – but very often forget what it means, unless I use it shortly afterwards. Sadly, with age this happens more and more often.

I recently noticed that I look up on average a word a day. That’s when I thought I could put this website to good use and post them here.

A few points:

  • some of the words you will see might look very ordinary to you. As I said, keep in mind that English is not my first language. Sometimes these are words I have never heard before, or everyday words I cannot get into my head;
  • most of the definitions are taken from the Answers.com website. This is because I find the descriptions concise yet complete. They also have very nice semantic URLs that enable me to write handy scripts to code this section of the website;
  • if you access bitful via an RSS feed reader, you will not see the Word of the Day. However, if you are interested, you can subscribe to the Word of the Day feed or bookmark the Word of the Day page;
  • contrary to what the timestamp says, I do not get up in the middle of the night to publish. I’m a bit of a cheat: I do it all in advance and make it magically appear when I am in fact (most nights) sleeping.

I hope you enjoy flexing your vocabulary as much as I do.