For a number of years we’ve had the tradition of having an Hungarian word of the day up on the whiteboard in our private hospital theatre every Wednesday. Unfortunately it hasn’t proved a particularly useful means of achieving fluency in a language. I can only remember a few words, including “uborka” (cucumber), and also, for some reason “sajt” – pronounced “shite” – (cheese) and “fák” – pronounced “fark” – for trees. Recently we decided that perhaps Hungarian had had it’s day in the sun, and it was time for a new language. So, for the last few weeks, we’ve been trying Russian. It’s crazy hard, especially in the original Cyrillic alphabet – those Russian kids must be really smart. If we were sensible, we would have a Maori word of the day, of course – but somehow, if it was a useful exercise, it would ruin the whole vibe of the thing.
I’m still learning French at the moment, having cycled through Italian and Spanish in recent years, but English remains my favourite language, in part because of it’s enormous vocabulary, but mostly for it’s sheer effrontery. The following is a short excerpt from a very excellent poem (“The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html) which I highly recommend, demonstrating just how discombobulating our language is, in it’s pronunciation at least.
