About a week after smashing my Nexus tablet (rip) i am back with a Lenovo laptop that I bought from the local equivalent of Best Buy. It works fine, but I really dont like the keyboard, i dont like any laptop keyboard, it just feels all wrong and I dont know where the keys are, not really. Also I cant really use a laptop built-in mouse. So yesterday I went back to the store and for another 25 dollars picked up a wired mouse and a standalone keyboard, now I am , as the title says, up and running.
Continuing to plough ahead with the Hungarian. Went to a bookstore to get something else to read that was not too expensive, just a simple paperback, asked for "young adult" literature, wound up with something really heavy out of the 1930s, dense prose. ESTI LORNÉL, written by Kostolányi Dezső. I knew I was in trouble when i ran into a paragraph that took up about a page. The narrator describes a former friend....
The way he presented himself was unrefined and unfashionable--broad open collar, narrow yellow tie, and rumpled green puns.
It took me a long time to make sure that the word really was "pun" and that the description was of the way he clothed himself with them, along with the narrow yellow ties.
Some of this stuff I can handle without too much difficulty, once I get started with the particular vocabulary. For example, I have been reading a book by a local author, Wass Albert, which is a set of somewhat modernized "fairy tales" of the Transylvanian forests. So I have to learn the words for elf, fairy, types of birds and plants, moss, dew, brook, snail, badger, fox, and the like. Once I get them down, the rest pretty much flows, so that I get about 80 percent without having to look words up. And the really hard book I mentioned, Esti Kornél, does settle down a bit. Chapter two describes the experience of a six year old heading off to school for the first time .. the setting is a town in Eastern Hungary around 1890, I read that during breakfast today, about 15 pages, again hitting around 75 percent, enough to know what was going on with him, his mother, the other kids in the class, and the teacher.
I am meeting up with either of two students (Balázs and Tomi, both Juniors) daily for about an hour after school. The Harmonia coffee shop has a no-smoking section, so we sit there for an hour, I always have tea and something to eat, the students will sometimes accept a coke or some juice, and we review understanding and pronunciation.
Finally I am getting some control over the food situation. Breakfast had been heavy, way too much salami and cheese, finally I have got them to come down to a half portion of stuff for me along with a generous serving of fresh vegetables. So breakfast is almost like an american lunch-- sandwich and salad. I will have a sandwich or a pastry with my tea when I do the lesson around 2 or 3. Then in the evening I do a bowl of soup and a fresh salad in the dining room, afterwards I do some yogurt and fruit or nuts back in my room.
All in all I am doing about 5 hours of Hungarian a day, maybe more. Not really speaking a lot of it, because I am not really living in an environment where I have to speak all the time.
Máté has invited me to go to his family's house after the graduation ceremony and meet all the relatives who will be there. It will run late, he says I am welcome to spend the night, so I will do that. He has apparently done pretty well so far in the national biology competition, coming in at Nr. 11 in round one and then Nr. 4 in round two. Third round is the final one, sometime later this month in Budapest.
Not sure what I will do around Easter. Was thinking of heading south to mountains and renting a car, but the new computer set me back financially, so may forgo that.
No comments:
Post a Comment