I mentioned in February last year (I’m sure you’ll remember) about our “word of the day” language learning tradition during my Wednesday Private lists. Here’s a recap and update.
For every one of my regular Wednesday Private lists over the past decade or so, the surgeon has put a ‘word of the day’ on the whiteboard in some foreign language for us to learn (guess) the meaning of. Initially it was Hungarian, as our surgeon was half heartedly studying the language to get vicarious citizenship and an EU passport. That was fun for a while. Hungarian words are either completely impossible to guess the meaning of, or it’s really obvious, like “New York” or “November”. My favourite words were “sajt” for cheese (pronounced “shite”), and “fák” for trees (pronounced “fark”).
After a sudden change in domestic circumstances, Hungarian was ditched last year in favour of Russian. Our surgeon had a trip planned to Moscow in the dead of their winter, for New Years Eve, which was in retrospect a very well timed trip, considering Russia has been racing up the coronavirus leaderboard over the last month or so and is currently second only to Trump’s super winningest US of A. Sadly I remember not a single word from our year or so of Russian, but I do remember loving the Cyrillic alphabet.
After toying briefly earlier in the year with something useful like Te Reo or even Chinese, and getting the hurry up from our regular nursing team for faffing around so long, our surgeon finally plumped a couple of months ago for Lithuanian. I have not yet met a single word in this language that I could deduce the meaning of, which means each week it’s just a guessing game with lots of usually unhelpful hints from the surgeon. For example, vairuoti is to drive or steer. Miegas was last weeks word, meaning sleep. Exciting news today that Lithuania has done an excellent job of dealing with the COVID epidemic, and is in fact forming a little travel bubble with two of its tiny Balkan neighbours, Estonia and Latvia. Not much use for us for the next year or so, but still, nice to know there’s progress going on in some other parts of the world.
I know a lot of work teams do the Stuff five minute quiz together each day, which is admirable. I think this is more fun, and probably less stressful for competitive types. And shorter.
