Funfare for the Common Man

We’ve made it to the end: Part 10 (of 10) of my August 2020 Challenge.  Where do we go from here? If you’ve missed any of the previous 9 parts, a recap: Part 1: A decade in quotations: Part 1 (of 10) of the August 2020 Challenge Part 2: My readers ask, I answer: Reader Mailbag, part 1 Part 3: We live in a haunted house Part 4: The Joy of Getting Away From It All Part 5: Looking for truth in all the wrong places Part 6: From the wilds of Western Ukraine to the wild 1970s Soviet Union: Yaremche v Tiraspol Part 7: My wife tried to kill me: [mis]adventures in the Carpathians Part 8: Why my language skills suck: Part 1 Part 9: Why I speak such lousy Ukrainian – even after 10 years in Kyiv So what comes next? First, a quick English lesson: the past simple versus the present perfect. This should be easy for most of you. Compare: This pandemic period was difficult. This pandemic period has been difficult. Are they both correct? No. In the first example, the use of the past simple – was ...

Now I really start making excuses If you missed Part 1, click here: Why my language skills suck No pressure, really, but this part won’t make nearly as much sense unless you’ve read Part 1. Why my language skills suck: Part 1 There has been quite a tinge of nostalgia pervading this blog over the past six or seven months, and I’ve taken these posts in that direction as well.  This wasn’t my initial intention, and when students ask me about my language skills, I hardly think they’re interested in all this self-indulgent mumbo jumbo about my past. I took a ‘seemingly simple’ question and turned it an unnecessarily self-indulgent answer. What else would you expect? I’m not about to change anytime soon. I can just imagine the next time someone asks me why I don’t speak such good Ukrainian or Russian and I direct them to these blog posts and they take a look and say ‘seriously? You want me to read 4000+ words just to hear this answer? Get to the point old man!’ Anyway…picking up where we...

This is post 8 (of 10) for my August 2020 Challenge. We’re going back to the Reader Mailbag to answer one of my reader’s questions. It’s actually one of those questions I get asked a lot by students and is very tricky to truthfully answer in 30 seconds or less. This happens a lot in the classroom – questions requiring intricate answers, for seemingly simple questions. ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘What do you do in your free time?’ are much easier. But ‘do you speak Ukrainian or Russian?’ can lead down all sorts of rabbit holes and tangents. When I answer that my language skills are pretty poor and that I can merely ‘get by’, I often get puzzled looks that appear to say ‘What? Seriously? After 6, 7, 8, 9 and now 10 (!) years living in Ukraine, you can only ‘get by’?’ Actually, it’s worse: I’ve lived here nearly 11 years. With the 10-year anniversary of me deciding to come to Kyiv upon us (I arrived here at the end of August 2010), what a great time to revisit my horrid language skills and...

Though I don’t think it was intentional. I hope. It’s amazing, the number of words that exist in other languages that are untranslatable into English. German is especially rife with epic words that don’t seem to have a direct equivalent into English. Take Vergangenheitsbewältigung , for example: ‘coming to terms with one’s past.’ Less dramatic in size, but perhaps heftier and more foreboding in scope is Waldsterben : ‘forest-death’ (though I think it actually means the death of forests themselves, not people in forests). Either way, I very nearly succumbed to some form of Waldsterben on my recent trip into the Carpathian wilderness. 1. This is my final post about this trip. 2. This is post 7 (out of 10) of my August 2020 Challenge. 3. In my last, post-modernish post, there were no bears or boars threatening to eat us. 4. I really don’t think my wife wanted to kill me, truly, honestly, I promise. This was our 4th trip out west. All four trips have featured some sort of adventure/misadv...