The corrections are more specific to the article/posting
of the coffee shop.
First the coffee shop owner’s name isn’t Radi.
Her name is Roska.
Also the man in the middle of the three gentleman
named Stefan (that is his name, I got that right)
didn’t work for a TV station.
He really was a TV repairman.
Ok, how did these mistakes happen? I think it has
to do to the fact that after 5 months there is still a
lot more of the Romanian language that I need to learn.
Which leads into the real purpose of this posting …
and that is to describe the pretty funny and interesting
situations that you can get into when you don’t really
have a handle on the language. I know that I just plain
didn’t understand what they said. The name was kind
of easy and I probably should have gotten that one. But
the TV repairman thing was a little more complicated.
The words ‘prepara’ and ’repara’ are pretty similar. So
of course you can see that one is to prepare and the
other is to repair. I guess when he told me what he did
(at about 90 mph Romanian) I just didn’t get it. I thought
that he prepared TV programs.
Of course that isn’t the only two times that’s happened.
The other day I went to the local school and with a teacher
we went to the park. The kids are from the 5th grade and
they went to the park for a lesson to learn the trees, flowers
… etc. I took my little digital camera and took some pictures
and movie clips. After that I was going to make a little
amateur film showing the kids naming plants, trees and
flowers.
I put the little film together and I put in some frames
with words in them, of course the words were in Romanian.
I was lucky enough to have a person take a look at it. Good
thing, in one of the frames I put in Romanian ‘ A tree ‘. I
wrote it this way ‘ O Capac ‘. It should have been ‘ O copac ‘.
I will explain the differences in the words. ‘ O copac ‘ means
a tree. ‘ O Capac ‘ means the cork on a bottle of wine. So …
good thing he looked it over. I could just imagine the kids
watching this little film and that frame comes up … cork of a
wine bottle … then the next clip comes up with a little girl
pointing to a tree and saying it‘s name. Could have been kind
of funny. If you think of it it is kind of funny.
One other experience was a few weeks ago I went to this
church in the city of Timisoara, about 100 kilometers away.
After the service I was invited to talk to the pastor. They
were a few of us there and we had a discussion. In this point
of the discussion we were talking about parents and their
children. So I said in Romanian what I thought was ‘ you
should love your children, shouldn’t you'? The word for
children is ’copii ’. I used the word copac (that word again)
which again means ’tree’. So after they stopped laughing …
which took a few minutes … they told me that they do love
their trees. But they asked what does have to do with a
parent and children?
Of course these are just a few of the instances and they
have been many more than I want to remember. It is sure
that they will be a lot more.
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