Romanian

On other unrelated news, my Romanian language skills are progressing nicely. I had a lovely hour-long discussion with my neighbour the other night. Of course, I don't speak perfectly, but I can use the past and future tenses fairly well and more importantly, I can understand people and they can understand me.

I am quite upset at my "Learn Romanian" book though. It was the best of what was available here but is mainly for business people. So I can say "Please enter. My secretary will be with you shortly" and "When is our business meeting?" In the begining, all the exercises had answer keys. Now, maybe 1/5 of them do, and I'm the type who needs constant reassurance that what I am doing is correct. Not to mention that the author uses vocabulary that isn't found in the back of the book, nor in my dictionary. And she doesn't explain grammar. Verb conjugation is top notch but I need to know how to put everything together.

Romanian is a difficult language. I'm embarassed that I am having such a hard time with it. When I lived in Sweden, I had Swedish classes for the first few months, but five years later I'm still more or less conversational. I've been fluent in French since I was six years old, so living in France wasn't a problem.

Now I'm at the point where I pick up small idiosyncracies in the language. And I have to make sure I don't mix in Swedish or French (or Italian or Spanish) words. I tried to tell my neighbour that I missed my mom. Since I have no idea how to make reflexive verbs yet, nor to I know the word for "miss", I was formulating a sentence along the lines of...well...I won't embarass myself and say what I was going to say, but the English translation was that I wanted to eat my mother. (Manque in French is "miss", manca in Romanian is "eat"...both are pronounced approximately the same).

And the word for tomatoes, "rosii", is the same word for "red" in the plural sense. So does that mean that "tomatoes" mean "reds"? After all, tomatoes *are* red.

And "light" and "dark" and synonyms for "open" and "closed".

Just weird stuff like that.

I have small victories though. Yesterday at the fountain, a woman asked me "apa este bun?" (is the water good?) and without thinking, I answered "da, apa este foarte bun" (yes, the water is very good).

Note for locals: the fountain on Alba Iulia street kicks the ass of all other fountains in town, even the supposed "magical" fountain in PIata Unirii.

I also found out the psycho demonic cats who live on top of the garage don't belong to anyone: they're strays adopted by the building! Now I don't feel so guilty about hating them! One of the kittens let me pick it up and pat it but it is an incredibly ugly cat regardless.

Funny the names the ladies gave the cats. The kittens are "Jimmy" and "Charlie". The big fat tabby upstairs is "Bombonelu" but this gets turned into any number of nicknames like Bombonitchka and Bonouchka.