Edinburgh Exchanges

This has been yet another week of English linguistics. I went to St Petersburg for the weekend with some of my friends on a trip organised by ESN. It turns out St Petersburg is actually only 6 hours from Helsinki and the Russian border is a mere 2 hours drive, so we didn't have that long to kill on the bus whilst we were travelling. It was however enough time for the linguistical discussion to surface. We've been here for 2 and a half months now so the non-native people are getting pretty good with their English and some of them speak with very high levels of fluency. So over the last week they have all started asking very specific questions relating to English rather than the more general ones we had at the start of the term such as irregular past tenses. Now they want to know the exact difference between 'stop', 'end' and 'finish' or the differences between 'quick' and 'fast'. In what contexts would one use 'on' rather than 'in' or 'at', and also, which contexts should 'make' be used over 'do' or 'take'. These are all examples of questions which occured in the 4 hour period between St Petersburg and the Russian border yesterday. There are loads more but I have forgotten them all!

Trying to explain specifics of the English language is surpisingly difficult. I'm a linguistics student, I study language but I can not work out the set rules for the English language for the life of me! My German friend Nittaya found it hilarious that I spent about 10 minutes deliberating over 'quick' and 'fast' before concluding that there was no real difference and they were synonyms but native speakers use their intuition to decide which one is more appropriate to the situation. I wasn't 100% confident in my decision so ended up running to the back of the bus to check my answer with Gregor- the other guy from Edinburgh. We concluded that they were in fact synonyms and my analysis has been correct. As it turned out, he was currently engaged in a conversation with another German girl - Imke- and she was explaining that in German there is not a different word for policy and politics. Here they use the same word, and if they are refering to a policy they would talk about a law or an act, and not actually use the word policy. This is what was concluded between a 15 minute discussion, after which symbolised to the Germans how hard it is for the native English speakers to work out the answers to their questions. Usually they just laugh and tell us how awful we are at English!

Another aspect of English which is apparently hilarious to the German speakers is the fact that in English we would call the container which holds juice (tetra pack) a carton regardless of whether it is a 1 litre one or the little ones which Ribena comes in and you got for your school lunches. In German, each one has a seperate word whereas in English you would explain the smaller one in a manner as I just did above. Not good enough for the Germans apparently, they have to give it a special word!

Its actually really funny being around the Germans the entire time. My best friends here are mainly German. Which isn't surprising given the population of Germany appears to have moved to Helsinki for erasmus and they make up more than 50% of all of the exchange students here. When we were in Russia I was the only non-German in our hostel room, and Gregor and I were literally the only ones out of the 10 friends we went with who didn't speak German. As a result of all of this German-ness I am learning lots about German linguistics, and Germany in general. I realised last week that I had no idea where in the country all of my friends live so set to work learning where all of the cities in Germany are so I can have an idea of where they all live. I've also learnt a lot about how Germans percieve the world wars. As I said last week, they don't commerate 11th November. I've since found out that this is because they don't regard WW1 in the same boat as WW2 and for Germany, it is all about Hitler and the Nazi regime. This is something much closer to their hearts and they all have very strong opinions about it- some feel ashamed to be German and they feel that the international community has never forgiven Germany even though the people today had nothing to do with what happened 60 years ago. Its really hard discussing topics such as the war with the Germans, as obviously, 60 years ago we were enemies and bombed each other. We all have grandparents who fought against each other in the war and even our parents have grown up hating the other to a certain extent. Then it comes to us. We've talked about it a lot recently- apparently they thought that the British people believe that we did right in the war yet in reality, there are no winners in war. Yes, the Allies won, but we also lost a lot too. When we talk about such emotional topics such as this it makes me see what a good thing erasmus is- it was only 60 years ago that our respective nations had just finished fighting each other for the second time within 30 years. Yet even though its only 60 years ago, we were able to sit together in a hostel room in Russia chatting about the differences between how our countries percieve the wars.

I love my German crew. I'll be nigh on German by the end of the year though, the way its going as it feels normal now to be the only non German member of the group if we're doing something without the boys.

Wow, weekend again, such a hardship, it seemed to come round quickly this week because of the holiday I guess, but we also seemed to have crammed loads of stuff in.

Last Saturday we decided to go to the cinema to see ‘W’, we wanted to see High School Musical 3 but were a bit dubious about it being dubbed- it would be weird, so we saw ‘W’ which was subbed. It was fairly good although I spent a lot of the time comparing the subtitles to the words and learning some new phrases. We went in Les Galaries Lafayette before the cinema to marvel at the nice expensive clothes, then after we went to ‘les 3 brasseurs’ for flamekeuche and beer, yummy. Then, a bit ‘happy’ we shopped for the weekend and the holiday in Carrefour.

Despite the late hour we didn’t stop there we had dinner and then went round to Sarah and Rob’s to give Rob his birthday present (a cuddly panda, beer and chocolate) and played poker ‘til 3AM.

Sunday was meant to be relaxing but we had a three course meal planned (Rachel, Andrew and I) which involved more wine, of course, and ended up being a four course meal as we had to have cheese at the end.

Because of the holiday we planned a monochrome party for Monday night, I was late because of Japanese, but I wouldn’t miss my class, I like Japanese far too much it’s so interesting but difficult. Monday we watched an old BBC learning video, it was in English which helped me, sort of, it was embarrassing quite frankly, it was filmed with such an eighties tone but I think I was the only one who picked up on that…

Tuesday was pretty much a write off, late to rise and then a quick shopping trip but I was still recovering from the party which was really fun. I spent most of the time talking in French to people and discussing, yet again, differences between our cultures and how much labs are annoying. I learnt a tiny bit of Flemish- we’re going to Bruges soon so we will need to know some! And we were educated in a little bit of Cantonese culture; it’s endlessly fascinating talking about language and culture.

I discovered an unexpected bonus of spending a year abroad, something that never occurred to me, I knew I would enjoy meeting people from all over the world, not just France, and that I would want to learn bits of other languages but I didn’t realise how much I would learn about my own language! Not just the linguistics of it either, I’m learning about how to communicate across language barriers and how to communicate more efficiently in English. Communication is a vitally important skill and yes, you practice it all of the time but being aware of it is totally different, being aware of how to explain something, describe something, agree to something is as much about body language as about words.

By Friday I was shattered, although nothing went terribly wrong, I didn’t feel I had achieved much and my grades from my first to assignments from Edinburgh were not as good as I would have liked. Although I have had my literature review idea approved which cheered me up no end, I can’t wait to start although Lydie did suggest that I write it I French for the practice, yes okay, it would be good practice but I’ve never written one of these before, I’m not sure I can manage it in French as well. I’m going go give it a go anyway, you never know…

Ah, the weekend, it feels like a Sunday because we had a very crazy night last night, impromptu trip to Auchan for wine and a few bottles later the three of us were singing along to ‘Hairspray’….

Anyway, there is much more fun to be had this weekend, but before that there is a lot of stuff to get done like buying train cards, tickets, concert tickets, internet things… And of course, shopping for food…

Until next time…