When I got into college, you had to study two languages. English was the primary language (the major) but there had to be another one. For some, it was German or Spanish or French. Not being confident enough that I could do well with the German I had learned in highschool, I picked the old stand-by, Romanian. But, by the end of the first few weeks of the first semester in the First (freshman) year, I hated it and mostly because of a course on Romanian phonetics with a historical perspective. It was absurd. 95Î of it was based on sheer memorizing. We had a test in it and nobody did well. We had another test and we all decided to cheat and we did and of course, we were caught. The test was voided.
At that time, there was a notice on the bulletin board in the main hall, that whoever wanted to switch from their secondary language to Japanese was encouraged to do so. You would stop studying the language that you had picked previously as your minor and study Japanese for the entire 4 years of college. Japanese became your minor. Of course, I applied. But many others did too. They had only about 7 spots for the Japanese introductory course that was offered and they screened the applicants based on their college entrance exam scores. And I didn’t make the cut although my score had been pretty good. One of my good friends got into the course and she was delighted with it. She had the opportunity to go to social functions offered by the Japanese embassy.
Not long after that, another opportunity came along. It was Arabic. The deal was the same as with Japanese. And I applied for this too. And I didn’t make it into this course either for an entirely different reason. They only accepted male students because they considered that as a female you were not safe to mingle within Arabic circles. In this country, both the women that were turned down and the Arabic community would have screamed bloody murder. In Romania, we all took it in stride. One of the colleagues in my team, a man who was known for having entered college with one of the lowest scores, got in.
Finally, a third opportunity for abandoning my Romanian studies came up. And this time I got in. What was it? Hungarian. A very particular language, spoken only in Hungary and unlike any other language except a few distant affinities with Finnish. I picked it out of desperation but also because my grandfather on my mother’s side, grandfather in whose large house we all resided, was Hungarian, in fact still a Hungarian citizen after almost 50 years of marriage to a Romanian woman. But I could not speak a word of Hungarian.
The Hungarian language did not attract too many so they accepted everybody that applied. There was only young man in about 7-8 people who could speak some Hungarian. He became our interpreter. Our teachers were Hungarian but they did most of the teaching in Romanian because we didn’t understand it. It became quite funny to learn about Hungarian grammar, sentence structures, Hungarian history, literature and even take exams in which we struggled bravely to learn enough of the language to actually be able to talk and write in Hungarian. It was incredibly difficult but still much more fun than Romanian. The teachers were very good and very understanding. I managed to do well in these courses. I even encouraged others that had more difficulty than me. We struggled with this for 4 years. My grandfather was of some help but not much.
At a certain point, we had to take a third language for at least a few semesters. The choices were Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. Everybody seemed to apply for Swedish. Norwegian was the second choice. As usual, I got the third choice, Danish, an extremely harsh, complicated language. But it was fun. Our teacher was a middle-aged Danish man. He had been very interested in Romanian and was speaking it fluently, with no accent whatsoever. His Romanian was so perfect that it sounded unreal.
We managed to pick some Danish at the time but I promptly forgot it. There were some funny episodes with this course. Once, he had brought a book of modern Danish poetry to class and during break he left it on his desk. One of our colleagues, a young man, picked it up and started to read from it out loud, without understanding anything. He picked a funny sounding word and kept repeating it. Just then, the teacher returned to class and overheard. He started laughing uncontrollably. Apparently, that word meant bowel movement.
An interesting development with this Danish professor was that one of the students married him. He was much older and apparently less good looking than the girl’s own father. She was or pretended to be very interested in Danish and then in him. She invited him out to shows, dinner, etc. until she managed to find her way to his heart. In the end, she left with him for Denmark.
During communism, a lot of girls had married foreigners just to be able to leave the country. Girls (and everybody for that matter) were desperate to leave by any means. There was a lot of joking and sarcasm in the media regarding this phenomenon. There were even programs on TV in which women were brought in to tell the whole nation their story of misery (lured away by false promises and then abandoned, living in poverty until they managed to be returned to the motherland, Romania).
I know of another girl who married a Norwegian. We both worked as tour guides for the National Travel Office during our vacations from college. But while I obeyed the strict rules imposed by the Security Police not to mingle with foreigners outside normal working hours, she didn’t. She broke all the rules, went to dance with foreigners at the discotheques that charged admission in foreign currencies only (where Romanians did not normally have access).
During college, we were basically trained to become teachers. We had pedagogical training (methods and methodology of teaching English and Hungarian). As part of our training, we had to have some hands-on experience. In groups, we went to various highschools, observed how English (and Hungarian) were taught and then each of us was supposed to give his/her performance (twice) by teaching an actual class. A class was 50 minutes. We had to have a plan as to what to do with the students all that time. The first part of the period was to ask questions from the previous lesson. And we actually could pick a few students to give comprehensive answers and then grade them. Then we had to teach the next lesson. This was a relatively stressful situation for us. But at least we were confident that our English was much better than the highschoolers’ so we coped fairly well.
(to be continued)
