new words

It has been pointed out to me that I am generally negative about my language classes on this blog. I am sorry to have given such an impression. I like going to classes almost always. I guess it’s just easier to write about the one bad teacher than the two good ones.

My classmates are all really interesting. It feels like a mini-UN with an Uzbek, Moroccan, Belgian, Kenyan, Ukrainian, a Chinese girl, a Japanese man and me. (Why is it that writing ‘a Moroccan’ is correct, but ‘a Chinese’ isn’t?) So, in addition to learning Serbian, I get to learn about life in Taskent/Casablanca/Mombassa/etc. Today, after reading a story about a bohemian who vowed to stop drinking and then rewarded himself for keeping his promise with a drink, the Japanese man spoke about how Japanese people generally have firmer characters, showing off our newest vowel-free vocabulary word, cvrst (firm). He continued on to say that this not always good and tried to explain that some Japanese students kill themselves if they don’t get good grades. It was a valiant effort, but he didn’t have the vocabulary to pull it off.

But now he does; we all do. We spent about 20 minutes going over different words for ‘to die.’ Serbian uses different words depending on the cause of death, one for old age and illness and one for war and injury. We also learned how to say ‘to kill,’ ‘to kill oneself’ and ‘to commit suicide.’

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Completely unrelatedly, not even in my language class, I learned the word for ‘to slit someone’s throat’ yesterday. It was in a press release that I was translating & wasn’t in my dictionary. A coworker mimed it for me.

Good times.