Lost in Translation Spanish

 

campo countryside

manana means tomorrow or morning

sabado is not Saturday but Sunday

sopa soup

soap is jabón

sou - Jabon (accent on the o)

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Arabic Alphabet, Duolingo, the polyglot LILT Toastmasters International club to be on Zoom

 I am struggling to learn the Arabic alphabet. It is nothing like Greek, Hebrew or Russian. It is all curves. I have started on Duolingo. You get the sounds and match them up with pictures. It took me a while with other languages on Duolingo to learn that in matching pairs you don't start on the left but play the sound on the right hand column and then match it with the picture without sound on the right. 

Duolingo

The second thing to remember in Duolingo when learning the alphabet, is that you will be asked to guess the picture of the written letter on the next page. So look at it carefully and create your own memory aid, connected with an English letter of the alphabet, or the picture of an object or a scene.

For example, in the picture of a sign which sounds like dow ood, I see a raised L in the air, third stroke, and think it looks like a door. However, a couple of signs later, the same sign appears again at the left sign of the word. I now have to remember that the D sound is in both words, but not where you might hope, with D at the the start of the word, but at the end. So the sound ending in D has the little L shaped like a door at the start. 

I was surprised at my progress, faster than on Korean. I got through the first two lessons quite quickly. 

I learned another sound. It looked like two uprights and a dividing letter in the middle. I thought it looked like two people arguing over something.

Now back to the alphabet. However I shall look on Memrise and Youtube to see if I can get any more suggestions. 

I need to learn the Arabic Alphabet because I have three meetings on Arabic in the World International Language Lovers, WILL (now LILT), a soon to be established Toastmasters Club. We need twenty paying members to register a new club. I thought of asking on Facebook for Arabic speakers to give a 5-7 minute speech, or a twenty minute easy introduction to the alphabet. But I have to be the backup. Even if I only teach three Arabic letters, that would be a start.

The WILL (now LILT) club meets online every Sunday night at 9 pm Singapore time. Login on Zoom fifteen minutes earlier to say hello, rename yourself online, check you are visible, get to know everyone.  If Sunday doesn't suit you, or you want more, we meet earlier in the day, 7.30 Singapore time, on the second and fourth Thursday each month. If there is a demand, we will run  a satellite in person meetings in Singapore or other countries. Arabic is the language we are learning about for the first three meetings in October, Sunday 1st, Sunday 8th, and Thursday 12th, 2023. Do come along and tell your friends.

Update 

WILL changed its name to LILT. A search for will brought up websites writing your will! Carolyn had the inspiration to create a word from the initials for Languages for Interest, Learning and Travel. The T can also be for translation. 

July 2024 We no longer do the Thursday meeting. Friday and Sunday keeps us fully busy! We need some paying members to establish the club with Toastmasters International. If you want to be a dual member, or a founder member, or just a guest. come along to the next Sunday meeting. I usually rehearse a speech on languages on Friday at SGI. The timing is UK summer time 2 pm for chat and topics, a 2.30 pm start on prepared speeches. Sunday (is an hour later to accommodate President Edward at dawn in Belize in central America, 3 pm chat and table topics for 3.30 speeches. 

Useful Websites 

Duolingo

https://thehuntswoman.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-finish-a-language-on-duolingo/

https://thehuntswoman.com/learn-arabic-on-duolingo/

Song highlighting each letter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnLSy4nZI80

This version repeats half a dozen letters in succession

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joaa_H3ejoM

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The Red Bus And The Red Box In Singapore

The Red Bus was in the cetnre of Singapore near Somerset MRT train station.

Quite a humming spot. On a Sunday afternoon when everybody is off work, people were having picnics on the grass, using a low wall for table or seating. The red bus was a bright backdrop.

I saw the Red Bus on my way to The Red Box.
The red bus looks like a hop on hop off tour bus but according to their website they are a booking service for city to city and across country bus services. Currently (2019) offering a discount for Hari Raya for Ramadan, for aexample on tickets to take you from Singapore back to your home elsewhere such as a bus in Malaysia.

The Red Box, my destination that day, is a Youth Centre opposite the parked Red Bus.

More Red Bus photos and facts in the next post.

Useful Websites

www.redbus.sg
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Red-Box/

Author

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.

The River Walk Indian Restaurant On The Singapore River

Problem
Where can we eat an Indian meal, for a set price (no surprises from the management or a fellow guest who eats double).

Answer
An Indian buffet lunch. We chose the River Walk Tandoor restaurant. A tandoor is an oven, traditionally clay. tandoori, means tandoori style food. Restaurants in the UK are frequently called  (X... X... ) tandoori restaurant.  Here in Singapore in theory you have a choice of outdoor and indoor seating.

We went for a Sunday lunch and were told to eat outside. In theory you can't make a reservation for an individual or small group. There's no reservation number. However, a large party had booked the whole of the inside so they could be together - or maybe the restaurant kept them together for ease of  counting the number of them dining and ease of payment.

Luckily we took our main course just before they arrived.

What was good, bad, or indifferent?

Good
You can wash your hands in a basin below a mirror near the eating area without going out to the toilets.
Service was smiling and obliging.
Fruit for our health conscious family member and a diabetic family friend.

Bad / Indifferent / mixed
Toilets
The toilet seems to be part of the restaurant at the end of a corridor - then I wondered whether it was communal to the building's occupants. It has, as the popular saying goes, 'seen better days'. Beautiful blue tiles. If you concentrate on the tiles, you will be happy. If you frown at the state of peeling and dirty paint on the back of the cubicle door you will be less happy.

Best of All
A little aquarium by the door to the outside seating.
Gulub jamun - my family's favourite
Proper chairs - no problem with chairs being high backless bar stools nor backless low stools. (I have sat in gourmet restaurants in London paying high prices to perch on a high stool several miles away from my handbag which was on the dirty floor, bag kicked by passers-by, with hankies and business cards out of reach.)

A board

Mother's Day March 10-11th; order cards or book meals and holidays

Mother's Day Squircle cake from Mrs Fields, photo in Flickr by Gareth Simpson from Wikipedia

Problem
What shall we do for mother's day? When is it?

Answer
In the UK, Mother's day this year, 2018 is the weekend of March 10th-11th.

However, Mothering Sunday in the USA is the second Sunday in May. By travelling to another country you can celebrate twice!

(Or anybody without a mother could avoid it altogether.)

If you forget mother's day in the UK, or you and mother are in different countries, you could take a trip to the USA and celebrate Mothering Sunday there in May.

If you wish to celebrate, consider:

Cards - from supermarkets or online incorporating your family photo
Flowers
A pot plant
A cake - for personalised cakes check how long in advance you must order
Breakfast
Lunch
Tea
Dinner
Day out - eg spa break
Weekend away

An email.

Look at your local restaurants to see their offers.

Useful Websites:
https://www.facebook.com/bonnemamanuk/ Competition (and breakfast idea)
https://www.facebook.com/vintageinns Mothers Day meals at venues
https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/uk/mothering-sunday
https://www.cardfactory.co.uk/cards/mothers-day-cards
https://www.notonthehighstreet.com
https://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk/mothers-day-gifts
https://www.mrsfields.com/gifts/Round-Personalized-Cookie-Cake
https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/shop/browse/entertaining/cakes_and_biscuits/personalised_cakes?
https://www.spabreaks.com/categories/mothers-day

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.

The Lord Mayor's Show 2017

I made thumbnails of what I saw on TV to remind myself. That's especially helpful if subtitles tell you the names of people and you miss them.

One man has been in charge of the parade for years, as was his father previously. You can't have everybody racing to be first. An order of precedence is established. Nobody says where the toilets are but there must be some. The commentary told us he organizes lunch boxes for everybody participating. 

Somebody has to see the barriers are in place and removed. You need to keep track of the number of the people in the parade, anticipated number of spectators. From that you can estimate the numbers of police or marshalls. Set up the stand for the Lord Mayor. 

They didn't say so, but on a previous occasion, I heard the organizer of a parade say that you can't have two or more marching bands behind each other, with no gap, all playing different music.

Problem
What if I missed it? Where can I watch it?

Answers
If you have paid the BBC you are entitled to watch on your laptop, as a warning before the programme starts tell you.

First some statistics:
It's a three-mile parade with 20 marching bands, 140 floats and 6,500 participants including 1800 members of the military and 200 animals including horses, donkeys, and camels.

Beehives and bunches of flowers, given out to the crowd, were brought on a float

The PDSA (People's Dispensary For Sick Animals), brought magnificent horses with riders

The BBC version is on the iplayer later Sunday Nov 11 2017 for another 28 days.

Why only 28 days? It's a question of cost.

If you are not entitled to watch the BBC or are reading this after the programme has disappeared.
You can see the 2017 Lord Mayor's show as well as excerpts from the 2016 and 2015 shows on YouTube.

I particularly liked this version which showed lots of dancing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-gNvZLXB_M

So when's the next one? Same time next year.

Author Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Learning Malay From Newspapers and TV

Problem
When you are living in or visiting Singapore, or Malaysia or Idolise, how do you learn Malay easily and practise regularly?

Answer
Check your free newspaper - 'Today' is delivered to homes in Singapore six days a week. You will also see stack of free newspapers at railway stations (known in Singapore as the MRT).

On Sunday I looked for the Sunday paper to check the TV programmes. No Sunday edition of Today exists or is delivered. However, the Saturday edition has the Sunday's TV programmes listed after the Saturday ones, the last double page spread at the back of the newspaper.

Story
I was looking for the English language radio programmes, but instead found the English language TV news on TV in the listings.
After the titles of the English language programmes, I saw the letters E C M and T. The key at the bottom of the first column told me that these letters stood for Subtitles E = English C = Chinese (i.e. Mandarin) M = Malay and T was for Tamil.

As I read down I discovered that TV programmes were available in all of Singapore's four official languages, English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.

Channel 5, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL is listed first in Today newspaper, which is in English and presumably has a mainly English speaking AUDIENCE. Next comes Channel 8 which is Mandarin.

I scanned down the Malay programme titles and realised that I could recognize two words. M a k a n is food. W a n i t a is woman or women.

That prompted me to translate the other words.

MALAY - English
ceria - cheerful (the first three letters of both words are similar - not serious but ChEeRful)
demi c i n t a - for love
eksis abis - exist after (afterlife? life after?)
h u j a n t e d u h - rain shade or shady rain
j i w a - soul
k e c o h - commotion
m a l a m i n i - tonight (ini means this)
makcik - auntie
makan - eat (or food)
menunggu - waiting (waiting for)

English - MALAY
eat / food - m a k a n
tonight - malam ini
woman / women - w a n i t a

Tips
Malay and Indonesian languages are very similar, like American and British English.
On Sunday if you don't get a print edition delivered, you can read a Sunday edition online.
http://www.todayonline.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Malay-language_television_channels
An amusing video on saying a few words:
https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/ayyo?source=feed_text&story_id=10155994493523902

Author

Fun Pun Of The Week - Sundae

Problem
How do you remember jokes when you are asked to tell a joke at a meeting?

Answer
Just take a photo of anything funny you see.

Story
I was passing the ice cream parlour, Baskin Robbins, and saw this pun. Make every day a sundae. I had to go back later and take a photograph.

Tips
Store funny photos in one place, such as in an album called COMEDY or JOKES.
Or email them to yourself and keep a folder called comedy on your laptop or computer.

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer.

Rabbit and wine and a multi-course meal at Legligin Restaurant, Valletta, Malta

Legligin means glug-glug. (That should stay as g l u g but either my typo or spell check keeps changing it to glut, which is rather amusing as you might say this is a restaurant for gluttons or gourmets. I think it must be a typo because my headline turned multi-course meal into multi-curse meal, which was definitely not what I had intended.)  

You will get lots of chances to choose to drink interesting wine to accompany your a multi-course meal at Legligin. As the outside shows you, it's on one of the steep pedestrian or almost pedestrian only narrow sloping streets on Valletta, the capital of Malta. The yellow limestone walls are typical of the entire island.

We scanned through numerous sets of restaurant reviews and found one of the most useful was from England's Daily Telegraph. About a dozen restaurants sounded interesting, offering local food from a proper chef, interesting local wines - and this one was both in Valletta and open on Sunday night.

Here I am with genial owner Chris. Notice the horizontal bottle holes in the wall. This restaurant has great character.

The tasting menu costs EUROS 23.50. Lots of little dishes.

Plus the cost of any drinks you order. They have interesting local wines you won't see anywhere else.

PLUS 5 EUROS for the three truffles - highly recommended.

Legligin Wine Bar and Bistro

119 St Lucia Street, Valletts, Malta

Tel:+356 21221699 =356 79932985

E-mail: legligin@hotmail.com

Angela Lansbury BA Hons, travel writer.

Photograph by Angela Lansbury. Copyright 2015.