One article pointed out the difference between having a vague idea of studying some language and having more measurable goals as to what one wants to do with that language. I gave this a lot of thought.

Turns out I have definite ideas of what I want to do with the languages I am studying or want to study. Maybe I did need to write them out. Thus, for my future reference, here are the reasons for learning my target languages:

Romanian: to read one Romanian book every year, for ease in travelling and for less laborious reading. Basically, Romanian is a jokey and warm language that boosts my self-esteem; I just want to have more of it in my life.

Chinese: to read at least one Chinese book every year, for ease when travelling in Taiwan. I also want to read more comic books from Taiwan and Hong Kong. As well, I want to write more beautifully in Chinese, maybe hiring a tutor to help me with Chinese calligraphy. I want to write a lot of letters in Chinese to my friends in Taiwan.

Japanese: to read the occasional Japanese book or article on cultural topics that interest me (mostly onsens, food, games, arts, crafts and literature). To be able to understand my favourite Japanese tv shows and movies without subtitles. To be able to research new onsens for subsequent trips.

French: to read one French book every year and to read a few nineteenth and twentieth century novels or other books in the original. I also found French very useful when travelling in Tunisia, so I want to be able to use it in other Francophone African countries like Senegal and Rwanda. I want to read more French and Belgian comics. Of course there’s also the extensive travelling in France I want to do and possibly living there.

Spanish: so much great Spanish literature to read in the world! Plus, Spanish is just a fun language to speak. One of my goals is to spend the Mexican Days of the Dead in Oaxaca with a family there. Then there is a personal research project I want to do in South America.

Italian: for reading more Italian comic books, some literature and mostly for ease of travelling and of travel research. I also want to rent apartments there for month-long trips. It would be nice to have long conversations about Italy with my future neighbours.

German: because I want to live and work in Austria. I also want to read some German literature in the original language and I want to play boardgames in the original languages.

Russian: for speaking and some reading. I suspect there’s a whole world of cool, wacky children’s literature I need to read in Russian. I want to watch Cheburashka without making up my own dialogue (my Cheburashka DVD set only has Japanese subtitles).

Swedish: I want to read all of Tove Jansson’s books in the original language, as well as any biographies. Also, I want to travel to Sweden. Hopefully I’ll find more reasons to study Swedish once I start learning about the culture.

Inuktitut: mostly I want to learn to write in their cool alphabet. I don’t know any Inuit people, but it would be cool to try some out when I visit Iqaluit. Plus, I believe that one should speak the language of the country one is in. Canada has a lot of aboriginal languages yet all the annoying white people here snarl “Speak English!” to poor immigrants trying their best to speak English, when really English is not the original local language. Ideally, Halq’eméylem would be better for my needs but I like the Inuktitut alphabet so much.

Taiwanese: for speaking when I visit Taiwan. I also want to learn at least one Chinese dialect to see if it’s really a dialect or if it is a separate language. Plus, Taiwanese sounds so bad-ass.

Cantonese: to order dim sum in Richmond for starters. Also, to watch Hong Kong movies in the original, to chat more when I visit Hong Kong or when I meet grandmothers at friends’ houses here in Vancouver. Chinese grandparent types have lived through an amazing and dramatic century – they must have incredible stories.

Hungarian: like with Swedish, I hope that I’ll find more reasons to study when I start studying Hungarian. Mostly, I want to be able to have conversations when I travel to Romania and Hungary (Hungarians are such nice people), and especially to be able to do research on Romanian history.

Kinyarwanda: for travel when I go to Rwanda. I want to ask questions and be a good enough listener so I can understand the stories about life in Rwanda and the genocide. I bet too that there are some great etiquette lessons the Rwandans have, which, once I learn what they are, I’ll write about.

Amharic: also for travel. Plus, I want to learn the Ge’ez alphabet. Again, I want to be able to listen better to conversations and to meet the people who don’t just speak English. We’re also lucky in this part of Canada because we have a lot of Ethiopians. It would be nice to understand Ethiopian songs too. I can’t sing but I have a secret fantasy of going into an Ethiopian karaoke bar and wowing everyone. If there are karaoke bars for Ethiopians.

Arabic: mostly I want to conduct some history research in Syria. Maybe once I know a little Arabic, I would find some good literature to read in the original language.

Finnish: for ease of travelling and it is the language of the country where Tove Jansson was born and where she lived. Now that I have started studying it, it turns out Finnish is incredibly beautiful and melodic. No wonder they and their Baltic neighbours are such good singers. I want to trill like those Finns. There are also more and more Finnish comic books I am discovering that I want to read. Another reason I want to study it is because, like Hungarian and Estonian, it is not in the Indo-European language group.

Norwegian: I want to travel there. I also had a Norwegian penpal who sent me a book on his country and in the book it said that by law every library in the country must own a copy of every Norwegian book. With a government that supportive of Norwegian writers, they must have a few good ones. I want to read these authors in the original.

Dutch: I love travelling to the Netherlands and I loved Flanders. I want to chitchat more in Dutch/Flemish with the people there. I also want to research a WWI topic.

Estonian: because it’s another beautiful, trilling language. Mostly my goal is to learn from cover to cover the one Estonian textbook I started. I have no hope of speaking Estonian when I am not travelling there. But I can read and master this one book.

And yet today, so many women waste their time reading nothing but repetitious women’s magazines that promote wanton materialism, self-hate and ridiculous stereotypes. End rant.

For French, this project is straightforward. Read the book, look up words a lot at the beginning and slowly begin looking up fewer words. I figure I’ll remember the verb conjugations as I get further into the book. The book I picked is a Turgenev novella; last year, my friend D. suggested reading a book in translation to start with as translations are easier.

Chinese is slightly more complex. The biggest problem is that I recognize a lot of characters but I can’t remember the strokes for writing them. Since I am starting off with a children’s book (I haven’t been immersed in Chinese written culture since 2002), I figure I can zip through the book and then spend the rest of the year working on rote memorization by re-writing the characters over and over again. Ideally there is an app to keep track of this – we live in the future now so I can advance beyond actually writing out by hand on paper. If not, I’ll recycle the backs of ads and on junkmail envelopes.

Romanian is where my language studies get really difficult. According to Anglos, this is my first language. But I grew up in North America and spent nearly my entire 1-12 education in English-speaking Canada (aside from kindergarten in Romania, some sort of schooling in Austria and a few laughable months in China). I have never studied Romanian grammar. I can barely understand dialogue on Romanian television and especially not on news reports. My job for six months on a visit to Romania was to provide comic relief on radio for 100,000 listeners with my poor reading of Romanian news.

The Romanian book I want to tackle is a history of my ancestral village Tibru, written by the priest there. He autographed my copy and sent it through my parents to me. I have never met him. I am pretty excited about his book though.

Tibru is a village in Transylvania, more specifically in Alba County. It is about half an hour from the county capital Alba Iulia, tucked in a valley high up between two hills. The village got electricity and phone lines in the late 1970s and running water only in the last five years or so. Being in a valley, the village is long, with to churches and a picturesque, almost gothically spectral cemetery near the upper end. Each property is fronted with a tall wall and wooden gate that encloses a courtyard and a house and barn. Some houses, like my grandparents’, have vineyards at the back stretching up the hillsides. There used to be houses with thatched roofs but those were gone on my last visit in 2007. Between my grandparents’ house and the cemetery is a cottage-sized boulder in the middle of the road where my mother played as a child. I remember a werewolf neighbour when I was a child.

With Tibru’s location in what was once the Austro-Hungarian empire and later near one of Romania’s most historically important cities, the past has bestowed some drama for those curious about its local history. The priest’s book will clarify some mysteries for me. How old is Tibru? If it existed back then, what effects did the Mongol invasion have on my patch of Romania? How devastating was the Black Death in these parts? Just what happened in Tibru during the late eighteenth century revolt led by the Romanian peasants Horia, Clo?ca and Cri?an? Was Tibru always a Romanian village or was it Hungarian?

The tricky thing about reading in Romanian is that I don’t know how to study it. I am so poorly equipped with the grammar, I recognize grammar structures but I can’t replicate them on my own. My vocabulary remains at a kindergarten level. Yet, I can’t see myself writing Romanian words over and over like I do with Chinese characters I am trying to remember. One thought is to write out the book in a notebook, with one line in Romanian and a translation below in English. Certainly that’s not something I want to do for every book. But maybe to start off with that might be good. (Then too I would have an English translation to let friends visiting Tibru with me read and I can pass on a digital copy to the priest for his use.)

Is anyone reading this who has suggestions? How are you studying foreign languages? And if anyone has advice on how I can get WordPress to show the accent marks on Closca and Crisan’s names above, that would be most welcome. I keep updating WordPress but it refuses to let me use accent marks.

*Hopefully in a few years I can pick Spanish again and eventually add more languages. One day, my wish is to read a book every month in a different language alongside all the English language books I read. German, Italian and Japanese shouldn’t be too far off in the future if I apply myself. Then there’s my budding interest in Finnish and Dutch, and my longtime interest in Swedish too. Not to mention the other languages in which I eventually want to hobnob (Kinyarwanda, Inuktitut, Cantonese, Norwegian, Amharic, Arabic, Russian, Taiwanese and Estonian). I may have to learn Czech too to watch some Czech cartoon DVDs I got in Japan. Or maybe the Japanese subtitles will eventually get me through the cartoons.

Tonight I looked at my pets and really, really, really wished they could talk. Matt and I tried to imagine their voices and how their vocal personalities would match what we make of their gestural personalities. Adelina the semi-shy, hyper guinea pig would sound like the girl with the low self-esteem in the fashion club in the tv show Daria. Penelope the cool, calm guinea pig would be Daria. Ivan would sound dignified, said Matt, but would say undignified things. He would be like the dwarf guy in Game of Thrones. Ivan and the dwarf guy are both hedonists, Matt explained.

Then I realized that if all animals could talk, maybe people would feel bad about eating Henrietta the kind-hearted chicken or castrating Jimmy the wise-cracking but vulnerable bull calf. Wouldn’t everyone just turn vegetarian. Matt said that there would be some real asshole animals so people would still eat animals to make them shut up.

I am not sure about Greece, but my friends the Rs have very good stories about their annual visit there. Yes, sitting on a beach reading four books at once kinda does sound good. So does going to beautiful church after beautiful church. And siestas? Where can I sign up?

The author agrees about all these nice Greek things. After realizing the futility of offering advice on banking, housing and drinking water, the author sums up a section on prices by writing:

What the country excels at is allowing you to spend hours sitting in a beautiful, shaded spot, sipping your drink, reading your book, or talking away.

Why is Greece so lacking in professional charms? Here is a quote Buhayer offers from Greece – The Modern Sequel by JS Koliopoulos and TM Veremis:

Modern Greeks entered the civil service as marauding invaders in enemy territory: to plunder, pillage and bring the spoils back to the haven of the family.

I hate sports but I have to appreciate the literary approach here. Me, I was lauded by a high school teacher for my literary sports essays when, after sitting out a PE class, I turned in two sports essays instead of the required one. Mr. H. read my essays on downhill skiing (which I was actually good at, though I needed to use the poles for better form) and surfing (which I had never tried but achingly longed to do so), and then he grimly told me that I should consider becoming a writer. So, I appreciate a fellow good sports writer.

There are three passages I wanted to note and push across the table to the world. The first is:

Belgium’s cobblestone roads were, as some Amsterdam riders put it, ‘built by the Romans, who just dumped a bunch of rocks out of a helicopter.’

Ha, ha. Pretty good, huh? I love a good stereotype.

The second quote is this:

(For a surprisingly long time I kept thinking: the race at Zichem-Keiberg was a week ago today; the race at Zichem-Keiberg was three weeks ago; and, even as I am writing, it’s been no more than a month since the race at Zichem-Keiberg…)

I had no other people marked the distance in time from memorable events like I did. That is what I find so remarkable about that sentence.

Near here there is a bridge. In early 2010, maybe it was January 26, a car crashed into a truck, which crashed into a car that crashed into another car. In one of the cars was a 37-year-old man. He had a young son of about five. He probably had a wife too. His car caught on fire and he burned to death. I passed by a few hours after his death. The spot on which he died on the bridge was blackened. Every time I crossed that bridge and passed the scene of his death, I crossed myself and thought of this man. I think of his wife too and his son. Did she get married now? Does the son remember his dad? And then I calculate. How long it’s been since his death, since the wife stopped grieving, since I last thought of that man. It’s been two years and two months since he died.

Krabbé wrote his book in 1977 and the race at Zichem-Keiberg was in March 1975. Since I don’t go over that bridge anymore, I don’t think of that burned man every day anymore. That’s how one departs from sharp feelings, as they get whittled down.

The third passage is:

Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure.

I chose this quote because it rambles on as it illustrates the Portuguese proverb “What was hard to bear is sweet to remember.” That’s what I tell myself in times of suckiness. As time now spans into a third year away from a very bad year, I am not sure that that time is sweet yet. I’ll look back at this quote in a few years’ time and decide then.

The Bad

• My grandmother disappeared completely. Physically, she’s still around, but that’s it. Her voice has devolved to muttering, with only a few coherent words that make no sense in the context.
• My lovely little guinea pig Daciana, on the close of 2011, developed a growth on her back leg that will kill her this year. The vet cannot do anything. We do have a surgery date for amputation n January 11, but no one has confidence that she will survive until then. I, on the other hand, am hoping for a miracle.
• Last January, I found out I had to work full-time seven days a week in two museums. Though ultimately the result was excellent, the seven-month schedule was tough.
• Other miscellaneous, annoying things that are now past me. Hopefully from here on, my life calms down a bit.

The Good

• I got a new job! I was almost in my last job for six years and there are some great friends I made there. It’s time to move on to novel challenges. And boy do I get challenges with my new job. But my new coworkers are great and the challenges are exciting! In May, when things were very frustrating, I reviewed my life goals and added one: to become a curator in a municipal museum. At that time I hadn’t even started looking for a job. Who knew that in August I would get two offers on the same day within minutes of each other? Though I could only take on one job, I hope to eventually work with the other museum too as I much admire what they are doing as well. The lesson here: a ton of work and many achievements made mincemeat out of the naysayers who warned me against a career in the arts. It took me fourteen years to decide on a career and hone my skills but I am there!
• I also finished my diploma work. I am a little miffed for spending so much time and money on something that’s not another degree, though I should be thankful that the diploma did pave the way for my bout of upward mobility. I am now excited about the possibilities of taking a class in something fun. Will it be another dancing class? A sewing class? Or a German class? Probably all of them!
• I got to know my book club friends a little better this year and I have the semblance of a social life. We even went on a group trip to Seattle on Labour Day weekend for Bumbershoot. For many summer weekends as my work schedule relaxed, we also spent some relaxing weekends at A’s cabin on Howe Sound, looking at the fjord.
• Matt visited France properly in September. It’s been years since I took someone up the Metro stairs for their first view of the Arc de Triomphe and since I walked through the Louvre courtyard. Now I knew a thing or two about French history, so with each step I could almost see the blood on the sidewalks. As part of this trip, we also spent a snippet of time in Switzerland and Germany.
• Matt and I also went to Whistler for a weekend of tea, games and reading. Matt decided after work one day that we were going and minutes later we were in the car and off north.
• For our contests contest, R won, with about $1000 in prizes. I barely cracked $100 with my 3.5 prizes. One prize never even got sent to me. The .5 prize turned out to be a cosmetics scheme to squeeze me out of money for pricey facial stuff. (Don’t they know I have more face creams than I know what to do with?) Oh well. At least, I now own a toy bear that boasts of its insane loyalty to chocolate.
• I only read 38 books out of my goal of fifty. Who cares? I had fun and I am trying for fifty again this new year.
• My new niece Claire arrived in June and my new nephew Oscar arrived in August. I haven’t met them yet, but forces are working to arrange a meeting between us in 2012.

Now for my new goals for 2012:

• Edit those photos already!
• Paint that polar bear.
• Read those fifty books. One of those fifty has to be a Romanian book – probably the book written by the priest in my ancestral village. Another one of the books must be a French book: I am torn between reading that short Turgenev novella in French or The Little Prince. A third book must be one of my Chinese books. I have a number of kids’ stories from Taiwan, so that must be a start. This is the year when I get back into Mandarin. (I am even vowing to make it out to some Mandarin meetups.)
• Study German. I will take one class and read one textbook.
• Also on the language front, I want to read one Japanese textbook. I have dreams of continuing my studies in Finnish, Estonian and Dutch, but that’ll be a bonus, not a required challenge. However, I am very close to signing up for a Finnish class I found nearby.
• Go to Europe. It’ll probably be Germany this year. Though we haven’t decided if it’ll be a Hamburg or Berlin trip. Definitely not Bavaria.  (I want to visit Japan again in 2012; however, trips to Texas for family reasons will supplant Asia for another year.  If I can’t go this year, 2013 will be the year and Uzbekistan will be in 2014.)
• Loan more money through Kiva. I loaned $100 to a baker in Kinshasa as part of my vow to donate some money in thanks once I get a new job. Coming from a baker family, I was so happy to help out another baker, especially one in the Congo, a country I am getting more and more interested in.
• I barely worked on my own books this year. In fact, I am losing hope in myself for ever writing anything that matters. On the one hand, R’s advice to prospective writers was sad. On the other hand, an acquaintance called J disagreed with me when I said failed writers should just stop. I wonder if I’ve been just too tired to write with my hectic work and study schedules. I also wonder if I should not stop thinking about other goals and concentrate on my existing career. Then I remember that I have a five-year goal to move out of museum work. (Unless I miraculously get a job with weekends off. The problem with museum jobs is that I can’t be with family on the weekends. Though I love museums, Matt is irreplaceable.) I am not sure if I should include a writing goal anymore, so instead, here is this rambling hesitant paragraph of a semi-goal. Lyn, thank you for your support in this!
• Another goal is to make some new friends and acquaintances. Yes, I want to start going to the local Mandarin meetup and I still want to make a bit more of an effort to play boardgames more often. I want to write to more people I admire and let them know. I also want to do some more work-related networking, including some European networking, since I eventually want to move there.
• Figure out why this blog can’t do accent marks. I hate that all my Romanian words look garbled. Once I do this, I want to go through my previous posts and correct the garbled stuff.
• Write real letters to my penpal in Austria, my penpal in Norway and my friends in Taiwan. Maybe a good goal is twelve letters, one in each month?
• Miscellaneous cleaning and getting rid of old tasks. A lot of them are boring, so they are on Wunderlist. But I need to get them done.

How was 2011 for you, dear reader?

The quotes below are descriptions of various parties and celebrations that the French court hosted.

From page 110, here’s a description of the marriage of the snot-nosed Francis II (when he was still dauphin) and Mary Queen of Scots, on April 24, 1558:

Among the fantastic entertainments laid on for the wedding was a banquet at which twelve man-made horses covered in gold and silver cloth were led in to be ridden by the royal princes and the small Guise children. The shimmering horses pulled carriages carrying singers glittering with jewels, who entertained their guests with their music. These were followed by the arrival of six silver-sailed ships that appeared to float over the ballroom floor, on board sat the gentlemen who were allowed to bring a lady of their choice. Francis invited his mother [Catherine de Medici] to join him and Henry chose his new daughter-in-law.

(Frieda got this info from Antonia Fraser’s Mary, Queen of Scots.)

In February of 1564, Catherine de Medici and her court began travelling around France. The trip was to take about two years and there were lots of triumphal entries, banquets, balls and the like. In Fontainebleau, “Catherine had ordered that each of the most important nobles give a reception or a ball”:

Both the Constable and the Cardinal de Bourbon gave suppers at their lodgings, and on Dimanche Gras, Catherine threw a banquet at the dairy of Fontainebleau which lay a little way out from the palace, near a meadow. The courtiers dressed as shepherds or shepherdesses for this fête champêtre, a precursor of the Petit Trianon parties thrown by Marie Antoinette nearly two centuries later. Everyone judged the day a huge success; the nobles having enjoyed their little afternoon of pastoral simplicity, albeit in February. Later in the early evening the guests attended a comedy in the great ballroom, followed by a ball at which 300 ‘beauties dressed in gold and silver cloth’ performed a specially choreographed dance. Henri of Anjou gave his banquet the next day, after which a mock battle was held between twelve young knights. On Mardi Gras an enchanted castle had been built in which six maidens were held captive by devils and guarded by a giant and a dwarf. Their liberators appeared, led by the four Marshals of France. Six groups of men came to claim the captive damsels. At the sound of a bell, Condé led the defenders out of the castle to fight a superb mock battle and the scantily-clad nymphs were rescued by their gallants. The royal children also played a role in the festivities giving a performance of a pastorale written by Ronsard.

(From page 182.)

In 1565, there was another big celebration:

…The spectacle on the Bidassoa river is considered to be one of the most famous of Catherine’s ephemeral works of art. After a waterside picnic, with all the participants dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses, Charles [IX] appeared on the river in a barge that had been disguised as a floating fortress. As the other participants took to their own sumptuously decorated barges, a gigantic artificial whale appeared that was then attacked by ‘fishermen’. Suddenly a gargantuan man-made tortoise was seen swimming towards them, on it stood six tritons blowing cornets. The two marine gods, Neptune and Arion, surfaced: the former in his chariot was pulled by three sea horses and the latter carried by dolphins. The extravaganza ended as three mermaids glorified France and Spain with their siren songs.

(From page 194.)

Finally, after the capture of the Protestant stronghold of La Charité-sur-Loire on May 2, 1577, Henri III hosted a banquet for his brother, the Duke of Alençon: “The theme of the celebration was that all should wear green, Catherine’s favourite colour (coincidentally also the colour often associated at the time with insanity), and that the men were to dress as women and vice versa.” (From page 336.)

Frieda cleared up one mystery for me: why the royal family had so many castles and why they were always on the move. It’s related to food, its transport logistics and a little bit to hygiene. She explains how the food situation worked in the court:

..The king was fed by the cuisine de bouche and everybody else by the cuisine commun. The purveyors to the royal kitchens were kept busy finding enough for the thousands of dependents to eat. Food was divided into three sections, panéterie, échansonnerie and fruiterie (bread, wine and fruit). One of the principal reasons that the Court had to move, frequently after only a month or two, from one château to another was the lack of food available after a stay in one particular area. Sanitation prompted another compelling reason for leaving. After weeks in the same place, especially during the summer, the stench and filth became dreadful, and the risks of disease grew proportionately. The Court also moved to find new hunting grounds where fresh game could be found. When the King left one château to lodge in another of his residences, most of the furniture and hangings accompanied the caravanserai. The castle left behind was thus almost completely empty when the royal family had moved on.

(From page 178. Frieda credited R. J. Knecht’s 1994 biography Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of François I.)