The Friday Weigh-in

This week I am weighing in at just over 77kg so I am 6kg lighter than when I started writing these updates at the end of August and 5kg heavier than my target weight of 72kg. This week I was suffering from a cold and my car was in the garage so I only manged one training session but I will have the chance to catch up at the weekend.
On Sunday I am going to Tokyo and staying in a very plush hotel which has a gym so I don''t have any excuses not to do a bit of training there as well. I have heard that the food is very healthy in Japan but I am totally clueless when it comes to Japanese food so I will just eat what I am given and hope for the best. I have a couple of dinners scheduled. One is with a Japanese colleague who used to work here together with some of his workmates. I will be the only foreigner at the table so I expect that to be very good for my limited Japanese. The flight is 13 hours or so, luckily we get to go Business Class on intercontinental flights. Yesterday I heard that I will probably have to go over to Japan again in January for another project so this could be the first of quite a few Japanese trips.
I will try to post a few updates from Japan as I am sure to be culture shocked and that makes good blog methinks.

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Red, White and Blue

As John Hume used to say "you can't eat a flag" but you can certainly get many people worked up by displaying the 'wrong' flag in many places or by treating somebody's flag inappropriately (burning it being the extreme example). How early does this love of 'our' flags begin?

Well, here I am living in Holland, one of Europe's most liberal countries where nationalism is somewhat frowned upon and I can exclusively reveal that flag-loving begins at four years of age! Today my daughter was looking at a bottle of Pepsi Max and on seeing the Pepsi logo and started singing the following song:

Rood, wit en blauw, Rood wit en blauw (Red, white and blue, Red, white and blue)

Is van Nederland en ook van jouw! (Is for The Netherlands, and also for you!)

We were stunned to hear our allochtoon (immigrant) daughter inspired to sing a song in praise of our adopted country's flag. Our integration in Dutch society is obviously going very well indeed so to celebrate we took a snap of her holding a real flag.

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The Mutant Language

English never ceases to fascinate me as a language because it is continually mutating without any controlling body to dictate how it should evolve. In many ways English is the perfect language for the United States of America where everything is theoretically possible and democracy is a core value of the society. The English language has no real upper class to which the greater body of speakers aspires. Rather, accepted English is more likely to follow the lowest common denominator principle. It is for this reason that the use of 'whom' is gradually disppearing, that 'wh' is invariably pronounced as 'w' and not 'hw' and that the distinction between adverbs and adjectives is gradually disappearing (e.g. doing things good instead of well).
Part of me bemoans the loss of grammatically correct forms (from an historical viewpoint). If a language has basic rules that are accepted by its speakers then there are clear answers as to what is right and what is wrong. Most languages do have well defined grammatical rules and so a Polish person will learn how to speak their language correctly at school and at home just as Dutch, French and German people will be taught that their dialect is okay as a colloquial form of the language but that there is a higher register 'correct' version of the language too.
With English the goalposts are continually moving so what is correct now may not be acceptable in ten years time. Let's take a case in point, the plural form of Latin words in English that en in -um. In a rule-based language you would expect a clear decision of the right form to use so the plural of museum would either be musea or museums. English does not work that way so instead we have a panoply of plural forms for the -um words as described in the book Mastering English. What you tend to see is that the foreign plural is originally accepted but for more popular words the English plural with-s starts to dominate:
Words with foreign plural:
bacterium/bacteria, addendum/addenda
Words with vacillation between foreign and English plural:
acquarium/acquariums or acquaria, symposium/symposiums or symposia
Words with English plural:
museum/museums, album/albums
Words where plural has mutated singular/plural:
datum is not used while data is a singular mass noun also used as plural
In this small example we see why English is so frustrating as a language for native speakers and foreign learners alike. I tried to explain the distinctions above to some Dutch colleagues last week and they kept coming back to the question but how do you know which form is right?
Basically English speakers speak to each other, read newspapers and other media and watch television. By the process of osmosis the accepted form emerges and, if you are on the wong side of the linguistic divide you either adjust or begin to sound quaint or even risk being misunderstood.
As somebody who pronounces many 'wh' words as 'hw', who uses whom and is horrified at the use of adjectives as adverbs the mutations of the English language are a challenge. Consciously or unconsciously we all adjust our English over time with the guiding hand of the market pushing us towards new ways of speaking rather than having a Keynesian French Academy-like body to dictate the rules.

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So SAD

Every year the clock going back hits me with a thump. It seems so illogical but the shift that results in it getting dark that bit earlier seems to confuse my biorhythms disproportionately. A few weeks back I was full of energy and I felt like I could do anything, now I am in a near vegetative state in the evenings. I much prefer the term winter depression to Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), why make it out to be something more than it is? The winter is coming and this season pushes me into a depressive state every year.
I like to think that humans should be hibernating and winter depression is nature's revenge for us getting up when we should be resting. I've never tried one of the halogen lamps though I've hear they work. We've taken to going to the Canaries in the winter and we already have a trip booked for February. That is what will keep me going through the cold and dark days, the thought of lying out in the sun in Fuerteventura.

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Change (the record)

I am so looking forward to the US Presidential Election because the last couple of months have been torture. Why do people in Europe actually care who the US President is? There will be little or no change to the relationship with Europe whoever is elected, the US will continue to operate a foreign policy with only a token nod to international cooperation and the US economy will not change in any way that a European is likely to notice.
Yet so many people in Europe are Obama crazy. Elsevier pointed out the sweet irony last week that European liberal classes want so desperately for America to elect a black president while, at the same time, a person from an ethnic minority has almost no chance of reaching the top in any European country. Do as we wish not as we do I guess.
Not that I don't love my politics, I do. I just cannot be doing with the schmaltz and autocues that come with US elections. Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of watching a programme on the BBC called "Prescott: The Class System and Me" about John Prescott and his attitudes to the British class system. Now that is change I can believe in, this is a flesh and blood politician who can actually engage with real people.
This was a man who could sit down with three girls from poor backgrounds (who were selected as model 'chavs') and actually have a conversation with them. He really listened to what they said and treated them with respect. So often you see politicians doing a token visit to a working class area and pretending to listen earnestly to the problems of the people they encounter. This was something wonderful. A man, a politician listening and really connecting with people. The following is copied from the Guardian article and describes the crowning moments of the programme far better than I can:
Prescott took Josie and two comparatively speechless friends out for fried chicken and Coke and then invited them to the Commons for double chocolate muffins and strawberries. They sat on the balcony and he talked about academic failure, the switchback of life and the importance of sticking with it.

I can't think of another politician of his rank who could do that so unselfconsciously. And Josie was interested. She said: "I've changed my lifestyle a little bit now. You didn't get here through sitting on your arse, did yer?" It'll make an appropriate motto for Lord Prescott.
That is what I call effecting change.

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"Every Stewardess Goes to Heaven" ("Todas las azafatas van al cielo")

I have been working my way very slowy through a box set of Latin films selected by one of The Netherlands' quality newspapers (De Volkskrant). This week I got to watch two Argentinian movies, the risible "The Swamp" ("La Ciénaga") and the quite wonderful "Every Stewardess Goes to Heaven" ("Todas las azafatas van al cielo"). The first film is a plotless arty film set in a mansion in a swamp. I never got into the film and the ending was so abrupt that I was left wondering what I had missed. Reading the IMDB reviews I was reassured that I was not the only person underwhelmed by "The Swamp".
"Every Stewardess Goes to Heaven" is a real treat by comparison. The film follows the lives of an air hostess and an opthamologist as they become intertwined in the breathtaking setting of Ushuaia at the tip of Argentina. Ingrid Rubio delivers an excellent performance as Teresa. The plot is straightforward and does not tax your concentration too much. The strengths of the film are its humour, the touches of magic realism, the location and most of all the acting performances by both the major and minor characters. Quirky and satisfying, highly recommended.

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Which Past Tense?

Now that I have spent almost a week with my older girls I have started to pick up on some of their linguistic characteristics that I may have missed before. For the most part they have been exposed to me speaking English for the last week, there were a couple of occasions when we were with other people and then we spoke Dutch. They have not met any Polish speakers in the last week but they have still primarily spoken Polish to each other with only sporadic bouts of English and Dutch exchanges. I let them watch Polish televison but they are probably watching more shows in English than normal.
Overall their English has already improved compared to last week. You would expect that since they have had so much exposure in one go. One thing I have really begun to notice though is that they don't seem to form the simple past tense in English at all. Instead they use the auxilary verb to be with the -ing form of the verb that they want to use. Here is an example from today:
- "We was buying this before"  (Their version.)
- "We bought this before" (What they meant.)
I hear this throughout the day because they to tell me about things they "was doing" rather than they "did".
I expect that English speaking children would make the same mistake of using "we was" instead of "we were" until that fault is gradually corrected away. However, I am not sure if their tendency to use the auxilary past tense form is related to the fact that they are multilingual and are transposing from one language to another. They do form the past tense correctly in Polish and translating literally you would think that they would be happy to use the simple past tense in English.
I must monitor this in the next months. Normally there is a very quick paradigm shift towards the correct usage of a language form. However, with Luna being a year older than Daisy it could be that it takes longer for these mistakes to get ironed out because the errors may well be reinforced by the younger sibling.

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The Friday Weigh-in

This week I weighed in at under 78kg which is positive considering that I have managed no training with having to mind the kids. This week was more about watching what I was eating rather than burning calories. When you are at home it is very easy to snack and drink beer in the evenings but I just ignored any niggling urges and stuck to a healthy diet.
I am near the end of my week with the girls and I am really happy to have spent all this time with the two of them. Yesterday we went to Katwijk because it was a beautiful day and the beach beckoned. They were running and laughing and playing, it was priceless. I also treated them to a bowl of ice cream so that went down very well. Today the weather is awful so I think that we will have a home day and I'll try to keep them busy.

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A Thousand Splendid Suns

I have to admit that I approached Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns" with a fair degree of a caution after reading some quite dismissive reviews that classed it as 'mis lit' or 'misery literature' if you haven't heard the term before. I had my stomach churned by a couple of Dave Pelzer tomes in the past so I tend to avoid anything smelling of that genre. However, I enjoyed "The Kite Runner" so I thought that I should give this book a chance.
Thankfully this book is far more than a melodramatic tear jerker. The modern history of Afghanistan is tragic and covered in blood so the author can hardly set a novel in that country which does not reflect this. There is a lot of pain and suffering in the novel but it is certainly not the only point of the novel. The central message is one of hope with love and friendship emerging intact despite everything thrown at them. The friendship between Mariam and Laila is wonderfully conveyed, from its fraught beginning through to the magically ethereal episode at the end of the novel. It was so touchingly described that it reminded me of the wonderful "Inge and Mira" by the late Marianne Fredriksson. In fact I have not read something by a male author showing such empathy with women since "The Kindness of Women" by J.G. Ballard.
The novel does stray somewhat in places with some misplaced superlatives. Mariam is prison for just two weeks but one of the other inmates, whom we have barely been introduced to, describes here as "the best friend she has ever had". The book is definitely more 'Hollywood' than what I would normally go for with extra 'explanations' included in the narrative for readers who may not be able to derive the meaning of a word from the context.
These criticisms aside I think that this is a book that is well worth reading. Khaled Hosseini includes an afterword concerning his work in refugee camps for the UNHCR. He cares passionately about the plight of refugees in Afghanistan and elsewhere and that shines through in this book. It is also a book which is sympathetic to Islam and includes many references to the Koran which show how many people can live by this book in a moderate way just as Christians live by the Bible. The origin of the title is also quite beautiful, taken from a poem about Kabul by Saeb-e-Tabrizi, a seventeenth-century Persian poet:

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,

Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls. 

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A Linguistic Identity?

Living in a country which does not use your mother tongue as its first language presents challenges. Clearly you are confronted with the struggle to master the language of your adopted country but as the years go by another obstacle appears. You start to wonder if you are speaking your own language properly. The use of who or whom may never have concerned me in my younger years but now I think twice before making my choice.
One thing that I have learned is that my own linguistic identity is not based on certainties. Although Ireland is conveniently classified as a country that speaks British English that is an assumption which can crumble quickly when one is confronted with the reality of how Irish people actually speak English. The main dialect of English spoken in Ireland is Hiberno-English which has many peculiarities originating from the influence of the Irish language on the English spoken in Ireland. However, it is true to say that Irish people speaking in non-colloquial situations will generally try to speak a form of English closer to British English. In terms of television and film influences I grew up with two Irish channels so I would say that we got an equal dose of American, British and Irish programs. From what I remember though the shows we liked were generally American ("Brady Bunch", "Starsky and Hutch", "Little House on the Prairie", "Kojak" etc.).
The English I speak is obviously rooted in Hiberno-English but, as I have mentioned previously, my father's Manchester upbringing meant that I had a lot of exposure to 'northern' English while growing up (e.g.expressions like She's proper poorly.). One might imagine that I would speak English in a way that is close to standard British English when you consider my 'English' family, that I went to a boarding school where regional accents were diluted away, that I studied for four years in England and that I generally watch  BBC 1-4 as they are the only English language channels we have other than CNN. However, it seems that my linguistic identity is a real hybrid mix of Irishisms, Anglicisms and Americanisms. I am a linguistic mut.
Perhaps the American influence in western Ireland in the 1970s has really marked me. In terms of vocabulary there are countless examples where Irish people use the British or American word interchangeably (e.g. trunk or boot, garbage or trash, truck or lorry, lift or elevator). There are some words where the British form is clearly more prevalent (tap not faucet, nappy not diaper) but it would be wrong to assume that Ireland always defers to the British form. After all, there is no controlling institute for the English language linguistic choice is always somewhat à la carte.
What got me thinking about this was coming across the sentence 'he was unshaved'. For me that just sounds wrong, it should be 'he was unshaven'. Similarly I would say 'you haven't proven anything', never 'you haven't proved anything'. If somebody told me that he had 'sawed' some logs I would think to myself ' yes, he's sawn some logs, hasn't he?'. And the weird and wonderful thing is that we'd all be right whatever choice we made above but the question is why?
I had to look this up so a Google search on 'past tenses with n shaven shaved' brought me to the book 'An Introduction to American English' by Gunnel Tottie and here is what he says. The past participle shaven is more American and generally not used in British English. Sawn is more British, sawed is the American. Finally proven is more American but acceptable in the British dialect while proved is not used as a participle in American English. So basically my dialect is clearly mid-Atlantic using this example. He has some other pointers revealing my linguistic confusion. I would always say she dove into the pool (American) and never dived. I would say that we fitted in quite well (British) and not we fit in quite well (American) when meaning the past tense.
Could it be that Irish English is now a merged form of British and American English on a bed of Hiberno-English exceptions? Or could it be that my own linguistic identity is so confused that I no longer have a home dialect?

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Zombification

I am near the end of my fourth day home alone with my two older girls. As I haven't been able to go to the gym due to my caring duties I purchased a skipping rope and did a skipping session on Sunday morning in my back garden. Ever since my leg muscles have ached in that way that muscles do when they have rarely been exercised before. That's a bit like how my brain feels too. I am zombified every evening because of the day's efforts. In normal life I do look after the kids regularly for short intervals but what I am doing now is like a Spartathon compared to that.
It is a lot of fun doing things together with the girls and it is really great to have those special moments when everything feels just right and we are smiling and laughing as one. However, there are plenty of tears too and you are just continually occupied with thinking of the next task ahead. I am used to having plenty of time thinking about myself and how I feel but these last few days there have been precious few me moments. I am happy if I get to sink a coffee in peace. In the evenings I manage a couple of pages of my book but I can forget about learning languages or anything too heavy.
One amazing thing we did was go to the cinema for the girls' very first film on the big screen. It was a Danish animated film called Cykelmyggen og Dansemyggen (The Cycling Mosquito and The Dancing Mosquito). Naturally it was dubbed into Dutch. It was a really funny and beautiful film. It was even more beautiful to look at the girls' faces. It was my own private Cinema Paradiso.
I have also become quite the Nigella-d the last few days. I have made rye scones not one but twice (aided by my able assistants) and I was scrutinizing the Domestic Goddess recipes earlier this evening looking for further inspiration.
Anyway, my heart goes out to single parents who have to do what I am doing all of the time. It is a great thing to have a partner you love with whom to share the burden (and joys) of parenting and a nice cup of tea on a cold and wintry evening.

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The Friday Weigh-in

This week I am weighing in at below 79kg so things are still moving in the right direction. When I met my wife in 2000 I was 69kg though so you have to put things into perspective. She says that I was too thin then but I loved that David Bowie, Brett Anderson skinniness and I wore tight fitting clothes to accentuate the look. I don't think that I'll ever be quite that thin again though.
I purchased a new mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson W350i Electric Black , which was going for a great price. I wanted an MP3 player so that I could rip my languages CDs and play them back easily on the move. It turns out that the best value was to buy a phone so now I have a Walkman phone with a cool radio, a brilliant MP3 player, a camera with video and a phone too. For the price you just have to smile. How do companies actually make money any more?
Anyway my Walkman will come in very handy on the trip to Japan which is all booked. I am really getting into the Japanese. Right now though I am also getting addicted to my wife's Polish soap operas "M jak miłość" ("L as in Love") and "Barwy Szczęścia" ("The Colours of Happiness"). Polish soap operas are quite aspirational so it is a case of enjoying escapist fantasies rather than the Schadenfreude one might experience watching Eastenders.
Next week I am home for the week with Luna and Daisy so it will be an action packed week that they are never going to forget including their first trip to the cinema and plenty of eats and treats.

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Cutting It

A while back my wife was talking to a Dutch woman who had had twins at around the same time our baby Nadia was born. The twins brought her total to four so my wife counselled her on maybe being careful from now on as they both agreed that four really was the max these days. She did not know the woman very well but with typical Dutch directness she said "Don't worry about that, my husband has already had the snip so its not physically possible."
Ah yes, Dutch directness. You've got to love it. Impotence is a step too far even for here but infertility is not taboo (especially in my office which is above a specialist clinic which we loosely term the 'sperm bank'). Family planning is a very acceptable subject to bring up when you know that your conversation partner has had three children. Since the birth of my third child I have been overwhelmed with advice and by a genuine concern that I might be planning more. I have been regaled with stories of (mainly foreign) families procreating to beat the band. Evidently that is just not cricket these days. Our country is crowded enough without us my family singlehandedly embarking on a mission to increase the entries of Walsh in the phone book.
Anyway, I now know everybody in my office who has had a vasectomy (aka 'the snip'). I know how painful (or not) the operation is and I know that I should wear Speedos for a few days after to have that extra 'support'. All of this advice was good-natured but unsolicited. I will decide myself if I want to subject any part of my manly goods to the mercy of the surgeon's scalpel. I don't feel any peer pressure as such but I just don't know how I could face people if my wife got pregnant again. Welcome to The Netherlands where social control is a most effective form of contraception.

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Modern Torture Instruments

So my daughter has been at school for a while now and we are delighted that she already has a 'hartsvriendin' (best friend). So much so that the teacher sometimes has to separate them because they are so engrossed in each other that they don't do their tasks (her school is a Dalton school which is based around getting the child to do tasks individually and in groups).

Having a friend means that you get to fill in their 'vriendenboekje' (friends book) which is Facebook for four-year-olds. Every day you see children outside of the school discussing who should get the book next with their mama (it's not a dad thing). They then present the book to the chosen one who beams delightedly. On a good day the more popular girls (or boys but it is more of a girl thing) might even be given two books to fill in.

And so from the very first class in school the popular children are publicly lauded while the quieter, less popular kids try not to look. Last week my daughter gave her book to a new girl in the class. Her mother was so happy that there were tears in her eyes. Her little one would have friends here after all. 

Maybe these books actually mean more to the parents than the children. I don't like them, they are pink-coloured torture instruments bringing back bad memories of belonging then not belonging, being in and then being out.

Luckily the school has a rule about birthday invitations. Dutch tradition dictates that you have as many guests as your new age (i.e. 5 for a 5-year-old). Parents must give the invitations to the parents away from the school or send them by post. Thank God some children are being spared the torture of not being invited. Humiliation is one thing, public humiliation is quite another.

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The Plural of You

It was not until I had reached a relatively advanced stage of childhood that I realized that ye was not a word in standard English. You might ask what standard English is since there are so many English speakers living in so many different countries who cannot refer to an Académie française or Academia Española. There is no clearcut answer to this but it is easiest to consider that the British English and American English used by the authoritative television and print media in those countries more or less sets the standard for other English speakers.

In Hiberno-English, the main dialect spoken in Ireland, the word ye is used as the plural version of you. My childhood was gloriously uninterrupted by moments of awkwardness prompted by the need to clarify my yous e.g. Are you coming out tonight? Oh, I meant all of you (supported by hand signals to indicate including the whole group) not just you (pointing at the original person who thought they were being asked out on a date). No, in Ireland ye means the same as vous in French, was in Polish or jullie in Dutch.

In standard British English you is both the singular and the plural. However, if we look beyond the leafy home counties we see that there are plenty of dialectal equivalents of ye in Britain. In Liverpool and Scotland  (and indeed Dublin) yous is often used as the plural of you. In American English there are countless dialectal variations from the well known southern y'all through to yons and the television friendly 'you guys'. There is a great thread on Word Reference dedicated to this topic.

There are other options besides ye for the plural of you but ye has the preference because of the fact that it was used in this way in Old English. There is a post on Brian Cugelman's blog dedicated to bringing back ye as the plural of you and, without an English language academy at our disposal, he proposes the following steps:

To help facilitate this linguistic revolution, ye may support this cause by doing the following:

• Start introducing ‘ye’ into your daily usage. Ye may have to practice till it feels correct. Whenever ye hear yourself thinking ‘youz-all’, try to remember ‘ye’.
• Contact all major dictionaries, newspapers and publishers and ask them to prominently feature ‘ye’ in all successive publications.
• Lobby your educational ministries to place ‘ye’ back in your national curriculum.
• If ye’re a writer, performer, singer, public speaker, introduce ‘ye’ into all public discourse. And in particular, contact Ali-G and ask for his celebrity endorsement on our revolution.
• Help undo the introduction of slang second person plural pronouns by adopting the following colloquialisms “How ye doin?” or “Where ye come from?”
• Help fix up the Wikipedia ‘ye’ page and promote it wherever possible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_(pronoun)
• If ye feel overwhelmed by resistance against ‘ye’, and are feeling demoralized, seek support from friends who speak Latin-based languages, or other languages that possesses this grammatical feature. They’re likely to understand your frustration and can provide ye with needed support.

Some nice ideas there. I wish him good luck. With Irish people he will be pushing an open door.

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Democracy and the Political System

Every evening now I tuck into the news bulletins with gusto, watching the NOS Nieuws, Nova and the BBC News. I never joined the debt-fuelled party so my own life will probably not be aversely affected by the oncoming global recession but many people I know are sure to suffer unwelcome shocks.
At a time like this leadership is everything and in this respect I think that Dutch political leaders are standing tall. The premier Jan Peter Balkenende and the Finance Minister Wouter Bos have both come across as decisive men who are able to move quickly and analyze the situation incisively. It is very reassuring not to have to worry about the quality of those with political power in this country. Interestingly, the three leaders of the parties making up the Dutch coalition government all come from the same Reformed Protestant background and all three studied at the Free University of Amsterdam. At times like this in Calvinism we trust unreservedly.
The Irish political system would not have produced these three politicians because the whole system is biased towards popularity and not political quality. In Ireland politicians are elected in multi-seat constituencies and the catchphrase that 'all politics is local' is all too true. Brian Cowen, the Irish premier, first got elected as a TD at the age of 24 following the death of his father. Brian Lenihan, the Finance Minister, was first elected in 1996 following the death of his father. There is a trend here. Basically the Irish political system encourages political dynasties and 'family seats'. It is quite possible for the Irish system to produce top-class politicians but the pool of political talent is naturally small because of the in-built nepotism. Ireland's system is nominally democratic but the bias towards political families and well-known sportsmen makes it quite undemocratic in practice.
The Dutch system is less directly democratic. You generally vote for the individual at the top of the party list which is effectively a vote for a political party. The parties get seats in the Dutch parliament based on their percentage of the vote and the seats are allocated based on the order of candidates on the list. There is no link to the regional origin of the candidates. Nominally a party could choose a list of candidates from a single province. This does not happem but the parochialism and parish pump horse-trading endemic in Irish political life is not a feature of Dutch politics.
Although the Irish system would appear more democratic I would argue that Dutch politics is far more open to outsiders. If you want a political career there are many avenues to get there. The normal course is to study something with relevance to politics, work for some kind of think-tank or research institute linked to a political party and start to make your way up the party food chain. In this way very bright politicians like Jan-Peter Balkenende can emerge. Both Balkenende and Wouter Bos were exceptionally bright children who skipped a year of school. Intelligence is certainly not everything but clearly Dutch politics does attract some of the brighest minds. There are many intelligent Irish politicians, including Brian Cowen and Brian Lenihan, but they both emerged from the 'closed shop'.
When I was younger my ambition was to be a politician. I even went to the right school to achieve this but in practice I saw no real route into politics. The fact that it would have been a realistic option had I been born Dutch reassures me that Dutch democracy is healthy and open even when the political system does not necessarily reflect the regional or demographic make-up of the state.

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Counterintuitive thinking

I had an interesting conversation with an Irish lady yesterday about why Irish people are generally so poor at languages. I was surprised at her theory which was that Irish people spend too much time learning Irish in primary school when they should maybe be concentrating on other languages.
I must admit that I find it hard to look at this objectively. I would like a world in which the Irish really were the 'young Europeans' with a cosmopolitan outlook, switching languages as easily as changing socks and exuding self-confidence and verve. The reality lies somewhere in between. It is too easy to generalize and say that 'the Irish are bad at languages' since I know many Irish people who can and do speak other languages than English on a daily basis. At the same time I can't escape the niggling feeling that this is a minority. I might like to big up the minority but the fact is that the average Irish person I meet on my travels may have the cúpla focail, unas palabras or quelques mots but their last conversation in any language other than English may well have been in the orals during the Leaving Certificate. I am ashamed of this, though I should clearly not be linking my emotional state to the performance of the Irish nation in general.
The question that must be asked is why? Why is the Irish educational system producing people who have spent up to fourteen years learning Irish and up to six years learning French/German/Spanish and are still not capable of having a simple conversation in another language?
Attitude is certainly a big factor. Irish people slip very easily into the anglophone colonialist mode whereby you can come away very easily with the idea that only speaking English is acceptable and even desirable. This blind attitude is readily reinforced when one congregates around other English-speaking nationalities who are equally deficient in this regard. It also readily forgets the fact that English is not the native language of Ireland.
In my opinion there is also something else at work. I don't blame the Irish inability with foreign languages on the amount of time spent teaching their own language. On the contrary I would argue that learning Irish from a young age should be increasing our ability to learn other languages. In my own experience I have seen that everybody has the ability to learn other languages no matter what their academic ability. The language pathways in the brain just need to be activated and the younger this happens the better. It does not matter what language you are learning from a young age, any language will stimulate your inate language ability. Anecdotally, the problem in Ireland seems to be that many of the teachers of Irish are not themselves fluent in Irish. The entry requirement to become a primary school teacher in Ireland is that a trainee teacher must pass the Scrúdú Cáilíochta sa Ghaeilge. I cannot judge the standard of this examination but I can say that many people who are not Irish speakers by any means and may have a scored a poor grade in the Leaving Certificate seem to be able to pass it.
Since the Irish system is already based around teaching Irish from a very young age it makes no sense to introduce other languages that parents may find 'more useful'. The teaching of Irish needs to be excellent from the start of primary school so perhaps it would be wiser to have dedicated Irish teachers in primary schools who can speak the language fluently and who would teach more than one class. I have never met a non-native Irish speaker who cannot speak at least one other language (normally French as this is the most common third language taught in Ireland).
I had the fortune to always have good Irish teachers so by the time I started French the task of learning another language was undaunting. If I had have a bad experience with Irish I may never have developed the will and interest to learn other languages. Irish is the entry language for Irish children so it is critical that the experience they have is a good one. The solution to the Irish 'languages' problem is not less Irish but better Irish despite what the anti-Irish lobby may think.

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Purple Hibiscus

After reading the stunning "Half of a Yellow Sun" I was really looking forward to "Purple Hibiscus", Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel. The novel is a coming-of-age novel centred around the fifteen-year-old Kambili who is being brought up in a very protective, Catholic household. As Nigeria begins to fall apart under a military coup, she finds freedom, laughter and her sexual awakening while visiting her aunt's family in the unversity town of Nsukka.
The novel is a rewarding on many levels. For me the fact the post-colonial intellectual struggle between embracing the modern while preserving the traditional is very recognisable in an Irish context. The emphasis on the natural above the material is something that will strike a chord with anybody who has been horrified by the global greed of the last ten years. Above all else the Adichie's writing style draws you in and leaves you wanting more when the book ends all too soon.
Adichie is a truly great storyteller in the mould of Vikram Seth. I look forward to reading a lot more of her work in the years to come.

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Beautiful Post

There is a beautifully written post on K8 the GR8's blog. If you have a few minutes to read it, I think that you will find it very worthwhile.

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Construction Time Again

There is a quite wonderful article in the Iceland Review about the human cost of the current financial crisis. There will clearly be pain for a lot of Icelanders in the months and years ahead but even with all the negativity the author finishes on a positive note:
When a hungry man stumbles home at the end of a long night out on the town, he doesn’t reach for what’s good for him, he stuffs his face with what fills him up fastest. I only hope that as the Icelanders close the book on the “economic miracle” and open up the book on the “green energy miracle” they write their first chapters with a provident hand. That will be the true miracle.

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The Friday Weigh-in

It has been some week for me, what with the amazing events happening on the world financial markets, my last minute escape from having losing my Icesave money for God knows how long and the gearbox of my car breaking down with as yet unknown financial consequences. Maybe all of the excitement rather than my training resulted in me finally going below 79kg on the weighing scales. It has never taken me so long to lose weight, I guess that I am getting older.
I am really enjoying learning new Japanese words, the Teach Yourself Japanese book is so well laid out that it makes learning a lot of fun. Besides that I have managed to squeeze in French and Spanish reading every day so my languages are getting a big boost these days. Home life is great and my girls all have a routine that gives us a lot of time to do our things once they are asleep. The week after next I will be with the older two girls for a week while Aga goes to Poland with Nadia so I am already planning a lot of activities to keep them busy. I just hope that we have okay weather as they will be on school holiday.

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In Stormy Weather

I have long been a fan of the Iceland Weather Report blog which gives a regular update on life in Iceland from an Icelander's perspective. In the last few days, as Iceland has been in the midst of a financial tempest, Alda has been giving her thoughts on what is happening from a thoroughly unbiased, ordinary citizen perspective. Let's hope that things will calm down for Iceland very soon and that ordinary people will not be forced to suffer because of the greed of a few. As one Icelander put it in a report I read yesterday "I had no money before, I have no money now so nothing has really changed for me." Not everybody gets to join in the party when the pigs are at the trough.

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Ice(saved)

Following my post yesterday it turns out that the Icelandic government has take over Landsbanki today and Icesave have frozen their accounts in the UK. I am not sure if that will happen to the Dutch accounts too but I can't see why it wouldn't. Talk about getting out on time!

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Japan

I don't normally get too excited about business travel (the word business gives it away) but I am all aflutter right now because it is almost certain that I will be going to Tokyo for a week in November. Travelling within Europe is always fun but it is just never feels really foreign any more. I am pretty sure that Japan will be different in a very good and mind-blowing way.
I have long had a casual interest in Japan. I went through ninja and samurai phases as a teenager and I used to wear a pennant with a Japanese flag. I have gone through periods of watching Japanese films and I have made one major attempt at learning the language. At work I followed our requisite 'Understanding Japanese Culture' course. I was quite good friends with a Japanese colleague before he left Holland and his wife did a mini tea ceremenoy for us on one occasion. For all that I will freely admit to knowing very little about the country having only dipped into the enormous mix of traditions and historical influences that constitute modern Japan. I imagine myself being 'Lost in Translation'.
I am very excited though and learning new Japanese words every day. The bridging technique is getting a good run out. Here is one I have to remember the word oishii meaning delicious. Thinking of a beautiful woman "Oh, she is delicious!".

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Logainm

Via Damien, what a fantastic resource. Logainm is a database of Irish placenames in Irish and English. There are also archives  including documents pertaining to the origin of the placename e.g. my home town of Kilrush meaning Church of the Wood:

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Ice Melting

I don't like to think of myself as somebody who is too easily caught up in the herd instinct but this article about the Icelandic economy with the following statement scared the hell out of me:
"Iceland is on the brink of collapse. Inflation and interest rates are raging upwards. The krona, Iceland's currency, is in freefall and is rated just above those of Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan."
I had substantial savings in an Icesave account (part of Landsbanki) and I decided to move that money out of the account forthwith.
My deposit was guaranteed by the Icelandic deposit guarantee but I don't really want to deal with a load of bureaucracy and a potential time lag to get access to my money again if Landsbanki should fall. Given that hundreds of thousands of savers are reading these type of articles I wonder how many people are shifting cash from A to B today. I am beginning to think that the safest way of saving right now is just paying off your debts. In the Dutch system paying off your mortgage is unattractive because you can write off mortgage interest against tax but at times like this having less debt is far more appealing that having uncertain savings.

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The Bridging Technique

For as long as I can remember I have used a mnemonic technique to learn words in foreign languages. I always called this the 'bridging technique'. Particularly when I came into contact with a new language I found it useful to have a device to remember useful words in the new language. What I did was to look for a word or words in English (or other languages) with the same sound or shape of sounds as the word in the target language. In my mind it was always easier to think of the bridge than the word(s) in the new language.
In every language I speak I have used bridges to remember words until the target word was so crystallized in my mind that I could drop the bridge. I can illustrate the technique with the following examples.
Polish:
I heard a sentence that made me think of 'Czech bananas' . The sentence was 'Maja czeka na nas' (Maja is waiting for us). To remember the czekac I just thought of Czech bananas.
French:
I came across the word raccourci meaning shortcut. My way to remember this was to think of 'a rat running'. The rat reminded me of  the 'ra', the running reminded me of the french verb courir (to run) which led me to courci.
Another word that springs to mind is éraillé meaning hoarse. This made me think of the acronym IRA so that was a bridge that stuck in my mind.
Japanese:
Here is an example of where it gets a bit random. To remember the word kasa meaning umbrella I remember that a Japanese umbrella is the same as a Spanish house which is of course 'casa', more or less a homonym.
At this stage I think that the technique is clear. It might seem unusual that my bridges are not necessarily related in any way to the meaning of the word I am trying to memorize. The only explanation I can give for why it works is that the existence of a bridge for the word seems in itself to promote its hard-coding in my mind.
A while back I had a look around the internet and, lo and behold, the bridging technique is a well-known method of language learning that has been formalized as the Linkword technique. In the formalized method the links are normally related to the meaning of the word you are trying to memorize.The wiki gives this example:
One example is the Russian word for cow (корова, pronounced roughly karova): think and visualize "I ran my car over a cow."
The advantage of this, of course, is that other people can use the links. My bridges are pretty obscure so they are generally not too useful even if I reveal them to somebody else.
I do actually have a book called Kanji Pictographix which uses a similar idea to help you remember how to write the kana and kanji symbols. Here is a good example of how you can remember the hiragana symbol 'mu' by thinking of the picture of the moo cow depicted.

Mnemonic and visual techniques really are a powerful method for learning languages. People who only speak one language are often amazed at how polyglots can pick up language after language. The truth is that you can save a lot of work with any language by just applying some of these techniques. They really work.

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The Friday Weigh-in

This week I trained every day and maintained a diet without any rubbish or alcohol. My reward was that my weight has stayed basically the same at just under 80kg. I really need to start using that measuring tape around my waist or I am going to end up thinking I am making no progress. My wife assures me that my stomach is getting smaller though so I will keep on going.
Physically I may not be noticing too much change in myself but mentally I am feeling better than I have done in years. At the moment I am really able to concentrate on my languages again. I started reading another French book called "Portraits de Pechkoff", I am reading and listening to some Spanish every day from my  Punto y Coma magazines and I have started going though the Teach Yourself Japanese book. When I feel like this I can really do so many things at once. The key will be not slip into a dip again now that the days are getting colder and darker.

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Still Dreaming

One of my oldest blog posts was called Japanese Dreams about my ambitions anno 2005 to learn the Japanese language. A lot of water gone has gone under the bridge since then so it is both interesting and embarrassing to read that post and admit that I have pretty much failed in my aspirations.
I followed a first year Japanese course in 2005/06 and we used the well-known 'Japanese For Busy People' method. My class was quite small and everybody was enthusiastic. There were two problems with the class though. Firstly, my teacher had a lot of personal issues so she kept cancelling classes and rhythm is crucial when learning a new language. Secondly, the method itself is not practical enough for my purposes. The focus is on survival Japanese for business people so I do indeed know my greetings and how to give someone a business card but I do not have any conversational Japanese.
Parallel to my course I studied Hiragana and Katakana on my own using exercise books and I even started learning some Kanji. I did quite well with this but I started to run out of time as I was also doing my MBA at that time. Eventually it all got a bit too much and I abandoned Japanese to focus again on easier languages.
Just recently though I heard that I will most probably have to go to Japan in November on business so my interested in Japanese has fired up again. I have started to use the Teach Yourself Japanese Book/CD and I am extremely impressed.
This method is good for learning Japanese I can really use in Japan. I am not going to look at the syllabaries again for now, I am going to stick to learning spoken Japanese through romanji. I'm still dreaming and maybe my goals will be more attainable this time.

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The Pensive Quill

I came across a very interesting blog called The Pensive Quill via a link from Slugger. The blog is written by a former IRA man and ex-prisoner called Anthony McIntyre and provides his perspectives on the current situation in Northern Ireland. He is an articulate and intelligent writer and he is not afraid to voice opinions that I am sure are not very popular in the republican community.
Having grown up in the south of Ireland with a quite orthodox nationalist slant on the desirability of Irish unity the reality on the ground in the north has always been much scarier. Primary school in my day involved an awful lot of history, it's not for nothing that they say "If the English could only remember, if the Irish could only forget". The conclusion inevitably drawn from that view of Irish history was that the partition of Ireland was an historical wrong to be righted.
Beyond the rhetoric was the reality of life in the Irish state coping with major economic woes, the 1980s heroin epidemic, Self Aid and mass emigration. Sure we had debates about Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act but the reality of what was happening in the north was something we did not want to contemplate. I don't recall ever having spoken to a single person from the south who explicitly supported militant republicanism though I do remember the black flags at the time of the Hunger Strikes.
My own life led me to study in England where I became far more nationalist than I had ever been while living in Ireland. Living there was the most depressing experience of my life as I have described before. My nationalism led me to study at Queen's in Belfast where I met people from many different backgrounds. One of the more interesting people I got to know was an ex-seminarian (actually from the south)who was doing a Masters in Peace and Reconciliation. He continually re-emphasized that the long-term solutions in Ireland were not about uniting Ireland but about about uniting the Irish people.
This idea was the backbone of the Good Friday Agreement. Peace was the first priority and partition was explicitly accepted by all in agreeing to the consent principle. Tactically the republican movement must have thought that this could still deliver a united Ireland but as Anthony McIntyre points out in this very insightful post the idea is fanciful at the very least. His analysis puts it into stark perspective:
The British got there. In assisting the Sinn Fein leadership bring about the demise of the Provisional IRA as a serious anti-British entity the British government ceded not one key tenet. The border is still here, as is partition, and the Unionist veto, whereby those who favour the union with Britain can ensure its continuity so long as they command the numbers to do so.
In effect a united Ireland is not even on the agenda any time soon. With territorial unity no longer of chief import one might think that uniting the Irish people might be firmly on the agenda but the reality seems to be that the two major communities in the north are quite often living alongside each other but not exactly living together.
The British government managed to achieve a stalemate by realizing something quite important as Anthony McIntyre describes:
The Provisionals did not mushroom into a mass movement because the British were in Ireland. They did so in response to British behaviour while in Ireland. The strategic logic of this was simple if anyone astute enough existed within the British establishment to take cognisance of it. Britain did not have to withdraw from Ireland in order to take the wind out of the Provisionals sails. They merely had to change the terms on which they stayed.
The outcome of this strategic choice is plain to see. Northern Ireland is a province of the UK shielded from the cold winds blowing in the wider European economy with the public sector accounting for 63% of the economy. With such a degree of dependency on the UK treasury it is hardly a wonder that the majority in favour of the status quo remains steadfast. The current agreements have not delivered a functioning Executive in the north as yet but perhaps every alternative would be worse.

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