Rob's Life: My first week of school

The arrival of a long weekend for carnival marks the end of my first week of what is politely called "A0", and in practice is "the place they send you when you know no Greek whatsoever" where everything is either a delightful surprise given your native language ("year" is "chrono", "after" is "meta" etc) or a horrible shock ("university" is "panepistimio" and "family" is "oikogeneia" which, to experience in its full shocking form, you have to see at least once the way I have to, which is η οικογένειά).

The letters are now all pretty much ready to spring from the page and I get the pleasure of living purely in the present for at least another few days before the miseries of past and future are reintroduced to me. Today when a taxi driver told me that all of Greece has the same number of people as London I said "I don't know that" and he said "no, I know, I'm telling you". I wanted to say "I meant I didn't know that, but the closest I could get was "no, no, I say 'before I don't know that'". As I understand it, that's how Mandarin Chinese works: no tenses, all just before and after in the present. To be honest I can see the appeal.

The school itself is tiny: currently there are 12 students in the whole place. A0 consists of me and "the French guy" a young man who has distant Greek ancestry from some tiny island and wants eventually to do a PhD on the shared history of the French and the Greeks. His English is absolutely all over the place, but his Greek makes his English sound like Oscar Wilde's in comparison. He started the week thinking that the letter we call "pi", Π, was a capital M, and he seems to basically be stuck forever saying things like "Manestiminio" as a result.

It seems to me as if the French are almost uniquely affected by their own language when learning a foreign one. My mum would call it "First language interference" and it seems to be particularly brutal for the Francophone. Apparently it comes from both from orthography and from the culture. He can't get his head around the idea that a final "S", which is very common in Greek, would be included in the pronunciation or that there is no concept of liaison, where letters change their sound based on the start of the word that comes next. He's also interested only in aspects of the language which I couldn't care less about. We were limping our way through the numbers from one to ten, and he immediately wanted to know how to say "one thousand" so that he could express something like "In the year 1792...", and he always wants to know about the fine-grained levels of politeness which are seemingly still required in the academic world in France. "Is it more polite to say 'Kalimera' or 'Ya sas'?" is the typical thing he wants to know, and when the answer is "meh, they're the same" he will the persist and invent his own ultra-polite forms to test the teacher.

Still, despite my moaning, school is a fun place to be. It seems like even the really good students are absolutely terrible and the teachers are just what you'd expect language teachers to be: fun, energetic and communicative. They're a special breed, adult language teachers. A universal truth that it's always a joy to be reminded of.

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This weekend I've escaped the narrow streets of Exarcheia, the anarchist district of Athens where my hostel is, and hired a car to drive to Nafplion, a port city a couple of hours drive away. The weather is still very variable here, it's cold and rainy at night but today was glorious so I swam in the sea (in my pants, having not planned for swimming) and climbed a ridiculously vertiginous set of mountain steps to an ancient fortress on the hill. In stark contrast to the brutal climb to the rocky outcrop, I also paid five Euro to ride around town on a little train. All good fun.