• In the UK near the beautiful Peak District
  
• Groups of 3
• 6 days and 1 changeover day
• Any week in August
• Fee per person €1000
• Fee includes
  • Homestay, breakfast, lunch, dinner
  • 15 hours classroom work per week
  • activities
  • airport transfer

• Започват между 25 и 31 март и се провеждат 2 пъти седмично или през уикенда.

• Продължават 10 седмици до 9 юни, 40 астр. часа.

• Цената при записали се поне 10 души е с 20% отстъпка, тоест 480 лева с ДДС с включени материали, учебници и международно признати сертификати.

• Преподавателите са Пол Дохърти, Ник Грийн  и още няколко, които  може да видите в секция ‘екип’.

• Групите ни са малки – между 5 и 8 човека.

•  Записването за следните курсове започва на 15 март и приключва на 24 март.

Ще проведем следните курсове на Хан Омуртаг 82 и Зайчар 117 (вижте адресите от тук):

General English (B1 & B2)

Понеделник, сряда и четвъртък от 8.00 до 9.20 сутринта.

General English (В1,B2 & С1)

Вторник и четвъртък или понеделник и сряда от 6.30 до 8.30 вечерта

Ще проведем следните курсове само в едно от училищата ни:

General English (А1, А2)

Събота от 14.00 до 18.00 в офиса ни на Зайчар 117

General English (А2, В1)

Събота от 10.00 до 13.00 в офиса ни на Хан Омуртаг 82

General English (С1)

Събота от 9.00 до 13.00 в офиса ни на Зайчар 117

Financial English (B1, B2, C1)

Сряда и петък от 6.30 до 8.30 вечерта в офиса ни на Зайчар 117 (метрстанция КВ).

Medical English (B1, B2)

Събота от 14.00 до 17.30 в офиса ни на Зайчар 117 (метрстанция КВ).

Business English (B1, B2, C1)

Вторник и четвъртък от 6.30 до 8.30 вечерта в офиса ни на Зайчар 117 (метрстанция КВ).

Legal English (B1, B2, C1)

Вторник и четвъртък от 6.30 до 8.30 вечерта в офиса ни на Зайчар 117 (метрстанция КВ).

CAE, FCE, CPE – Cambridge Advanced English (C1/C2)

Събота от 14 до 18 в офиса ни на Хан Омуртаг 82.

TOEFL & IELTS

Вторник и четвъртък от 6.30 до 8.30 вечерта в офиса ни на Зайчар 117 (метрстанция КВ).

Conversation English (B1-C1)

Събота от 13.30 до 15.30 в офиса ни на Зайчар 117.

Conversation English (B1-C1)

Сряда от 18.30 до 20.30 в офиса ни на Хан Омуртаг 82.

За всякакви въпроси не се колебайте да се свържете с нас: 089 836 5026

The Shrewsbury Experience – Near the Peak District, homestay, full board, 15 hours per week and trips  € 1,000

IH and ELC Summer School - In Sofia, a 35 hour a week summer course from 9 to 5 weekdays from € 60 per week

The Black Sea Summer School – Near Lozenetz, 35 hour a week intensive summer course for € 450 per week

The Greek Summer Camp – Aristotle Beach, 70 hour two week intensive summer course for € 500 per week

Study with International House World - Modern languages in over 50 countries worldwide from €580 per week

And Here’s the translation:

Veneta: You’re listening to Za Dumite (about words), I’m Veneta Gavrielova. Now I would like to introduce you to a young American, a Bulgarian zet (son-in-law or brother-in-law from the perspective of the wife’s family).

Hear how Daniel Bensen deals with the Bulgarian language, and with Bulgarian family relationships, and what we can find in common between the Bulgarian and Japanese languages.

(music) My Bulgarian Language (music)

Dan: Hello, I am Daniel Bensen. I’m from the US, and I’ve been here for 4 years and a half. My wife is Bulgarian. We met in America in university (i.e. “at school”), and after we finished university, we worked in Boston. But after a year, she lost her visa. And before the Crisis, there isn’t (whoops) a way to get a visa. So we moved here, exactly when the Crisis started. Fortunately, we’re here, where there are jobs. And we’re happy here.

V: So it isn’t your choice, to come live in Bulgaria?

D: It wasn’t hard. First because of work. So my wife could work. Also, for her family. They are here. We can live together. And that’s more convenient than…than not.

V: How did it happen that you came to live together with your wife’s family? That’s extremely unusual for a young American.

D: It isn’t. There are bad points. There isn’t, how do you say…privacy.

V: Personal space.

D: Personal space, yes. But, after all, we have a new baby, and they help a lot with that, with taking care of the baby. If we lived in America, we didn’t…we wouldn’t have care…that kind of I help.

V: Help.

D: Help. Thank you.

V: What’s your child’s name?

D: Magdalena. Magdalena Danielova Bensen.

V: What do you study, what is your specialty, with what do you occupy yourself?

D: Now, I’m an English teacher. I did that in Boston, too. But in college I studied Japanese Philology (actually Asian studies with a Japanese concentration, but I don’t know how to say that and nobody would understand it anyway). So no…

V: Connection.

D: Connection with my job now.

V: So you know Japanese.

D: Yes.

V: So what on do you think of Bulgarian (literally how does Bulgarian happen to you) from a background of Japanese, in comparison to your mother language?

D: Bulgarian is much closer to English.

V: Of course.

D: But then again there are things in common with Japanese, which English doesn’t have. Because I studied Japanese as my first foreign language, I have a way of thinking which helps me to think about Bulgarian. The grammatical different things between Bulgarian and English (I meant to say the different grammatical things). So it still helps me.

V: Do you have any tricks (lit. clevernesses) for learning languages?

D: Clevernesses?

V: Clever ways, personal to you, which help you to enter a foreign language in a short (i.e. easy) way.

D: Yes. I think that to learn a foreign language. It’s a habit. Not only information, but a habit. Because of that, I listen to Bulgarian music and children’s movies, which I listen to many time (I mean timeS) and after a lot of time, I have phrases, which are particular for different times. (I could have been more coherent here, if I’d understood that she wanted me to give examples of how Japanese helps me think about Bulgarian. Anyway.)

V: That’s very interesting about the children’s movies. They give you phrases you use to communicate with your students.

D: (I didn’t understand “communicate,” so I said) Yes. For me, Bulgarian children’s movies. For my students, English. If they are adults, I have to be clever, and I get something that will be interesting for the students from the internet.

V: Is Bulgarian difficult?

D: I know I don’t speak Bulgarian perfectly. It’s hard for me to remember Bulgarian words. For example, what the difference is between nakopaya (something Pavlina’s grandpa says, which has something to do with digging), zakopaya (dig something completely), and razkopaya (dig around or bury). And that, with practice becomes better. It improves.

V: With the family, how do you communicate with the tyshta (mother-in-law, from the perspective of the husband) for example. By name, or do you call her “mom”?

D: By name, but my wife also calls her mother Madlen, her name. That’s something between them, I don’t know, but for my tusht.

V: Tyst (father-in-law, from the perspective of the husband).

D: Tyst. I call him Petyr, his name, not like “father.”

V: Do you know what vuicho is, for example?

D: Yes. Um. A brother of my mother, and the other one is the brother of my father.

V: Chicho is the brother of my father.

D: And vuicho is the brother of my mother, right?

V: Do you know what a strinka (the wife of your father’s brother) is?

D: Strinka. That’s …no. No. What is it?

(cut)

D: Or in the family of your wife, the brother of my wife is my badjanak, right (I was wrong. Badjanak is my wife’s sister’s husband. My wife’s brother is my shurei)? But I’m not his badjanak, I’m something different. (the word I was looking for is zet).

V: You can get very confused about this.

D: I think it’s interesting that I call my baby tate (daddy). I mean, I’m tate, but I call my baby by my name. And the mother of the baby calls it maichentse (little mother). In English, (we) don’t do that and also in Japanese (they) don’t do that. And that may be unique for Bulgaria.

V: You want to say that we Bulgarians in communication with their children, for example I as a mother, call my baby mamentse (little mommy). “Come here mamentse!” And a father will say “come here tatentse (little daddy)” or “come here tatko (dad).” And that you seems strange to you.

D: Yes. Maybe not strange, but it’s interesting.

V: Do you have curiosity to learn our language because there’s something you want to understand or books you want to read or you want to know how to get around. I mean, some kind of stimulus for you to learn Bulgarian faster?

D: The most important thing is to get something you enjoy, and which you can’t do in English, or the other language. Something you can only do in Bulgarian.

V: For example?

D: Well, it depends on people (the person), but for me, Bulgarian children’s movies, or friends who don’t speak English, or huro (Bulgarian folkdance) for example. If you want to learn how to dance huro, you have to speak Bulgarian.

V: Do you dance huro?

D: No. Sorry. Actually in Boston, I danced huro, but since we’ve moved here, no. (except at weddings, I forgot to mention).

V: What do you do with Japanese, now that you’re in Bulgaria and learning a new language?

D: I’m studying Japanese here in Sofia. I have a teacher at the Japanese embassy (actually someone I met through the Japanese embassy, but I didn’t know how to say that). So I don’t lose the language.

V: And how do you switch between Japanese and Bulgarian?

D: It isn’t such a big problem now, but before, while I was studying Japanese and Bulgarian at the same time, I used Bulgarian words in a Japanese sentence or Bulgarian words with Japanese grammar. And I didn’t know that. In a conversation with a Japanese woman, I said something like, “Nihongo razbirimas ka?” Which is razbiram (to understand) from Bulgarian, but in a Japanese sentence.

V: Say that again?

D: Nihongo razbirimas ka? Or Az nihongo wo razibirmas kedo…

V: What does that mean?

D: I understand Japanese but…something. Because the sound (soundS) of Bulgarian and Japanese are very close. The grammar…they have nothing to do with each other, but in the sounds, there are many similar things.

V: Now in honor of our listeners, we have a sentence of this Bulgaro-Japanese.

D: Okay, with Bulgarian words in Japanese grammar, taka govoritoki nikoi mo razbiremasen. That’s it.

V: What does that mean?

D: When I talk like this, nobody understands (actually it should be “nobody CAN understand.” J)

V: Very well, that was your greeting from Daniel to our listeners in Bulgaro-Japanese. Daniel Bensen from the United States.

Designed as a mobile vocabulary book, the app stores words that students would normally learn in class, scribble on a piece of paper and then never look at again. With the app, they can input the word straight into their smart phone in the language they are learning and the translation into their native language. The app has the option to include a voice recording so that a student can record their teacher saying the word and then use the recording to practise the pronunciation. For each word they can also include the following information:

• Definition
• Gender (masculine/feminine/neuter)
• Category (students create categories for groups of words)
• Part of speech (noun, verb, adjective etc)

If a student sees a word in print or on a signpost, for example, they can also take a photo of it, store it and show it to their teacher to find out the translation and pronunciation.

The app allows students to translate words into two foreign languages if they are learning two at once eg if an English speaker is learning French and Italian they could input a word in English and enter the translations in French and Italian. There are 15 different languages that students can select from. There is a Search function, allowing students to find words that they entered previously, in any language.

You can download  the app at http://ihworld.com/ihexperience, in both Apple and Android versions.

Essay question:

Should the government ban smoking in public places?
Answers:

My  take on the subject is really that tobacco being banned would be a good thing for the majority of people who are opposed to smoking.
Being fair, the government should be more concerned with what tobacco companies put in cigarettes, rather than where smokers are.
Smoking is bad.

Whatever your opinion on smoking, you probably know that none of those sentences does a good job of arguing a point. Why? Those sentences fail to work because (among other things), they depend too much on variations of the word “to be.”

Consider that first sentence. This monster looks very complicated, but actually the writer just packed it full of meaningless nonsense. You can expose the nonsense by focusing on BE verbs:

My take on the subject is really that smoking being banned would be a good thing for the majority of people who are opposed to smoking.

What if you forced the writer to eliminate those verbs?

Most people who oppose smoking would welcome a tobacco ban.

Wow. See how much shorter and clearer that sentence became after I replaced the BE verbs with actions like “welcome”? Now, does the sentence actually say anything incitement? No, it does not. Obviously people who oppose smoking would welcome a ban. No d’uh. The original sentence not only wasted your time with needless words, those words obscured the fundamental fact that the sentence said nothing in particular.

Okay, so the next sentence does actually say something. However, the sentence loses a lot of impact due to those pesky BE verbs.

Being fair,  the government should be more concerned with what tobacco companies put in cigarettes, rather than where smokers are.

See?

The beginning and the end of the sentence, the places the reader will most likely focus their attention, mean nothing. Being…are. What the hell does that mean? But remove the verbs  and you get:

Fair-minded governments should concern themselves less with where people smoke, and more with what tobacco companies put in cigarettes.

Now the sentence begins and ends with “fair-minded…cigarettes,” which demonstrates the theme of the sentence, as well as the author’s positive stance on the subject.  Especially when imbedded inside a long essay, sentences with this sort of clarity make life much easier for the reader, who can understand the basic idea even if they only read the first and last words of each sentence (hint hint, students with lots of reading to do).

Now consider “smoking is bad.” This sentences implies a universal logical truth: smoking=bad. Unfortunately, nothing in the laws of physics as we understand them says anything in particular about the morality of smoking. Even a more supportable statement like “smoking is unhealthy” requires a lot of data to convince the reader, and depends a lot on your definition of “health”.  If you really want to convince people to agree with you, replace the BE verb with an action like, “Smoking causes health problems,” a statement you can easily verify with data. Plus, you keep the excellent “smoking…problems” in the positions of emphasis, so the impact of your statement remains unchanged.

BE verbs clearly make writing weaker. But what about BE verbs in speaking? Surely we shouldn’t eliminate those, should we? Tune in next week for the answer…

Pretty good, if you’re into that sort of thing. Then I saw a comment that got me thinking: “Japanese are amazing…”

Huh. Didn’t that commenter mean “Japanese PEOPLE are amazing”? It’s a positive comment, but something fells…off about it.

Thank you, random commenter, for triggering an interesting bit of socio-linguistic programming and giving me a theme for a blog this week.

You see, English speakers of my generation rarely say “a Japanese” or “a Pole” or “an Australian” any more. Why, that would be as politically incorrect as saying “a Jew.” There. Did you just shiver a little in revulsion at my racism?

Americans of my generation “say the whole word,” by which I mean “the whole adjective and then another word.” We say “a Japanese person” “a Polish person” a “Jewish person.” Why? Because sometime in the 1980s (I’d appreciate if anyone can help me be more specific), someone decided it was rude to define people by adjectives. He is not “Japanese” (or Mexican or whatever), he is “a Japanese person.” (this is, by the way, a good translation of the real word in Japanese: 日本人)　The thought being that if we all talk like that, we’ll come to think of this guy as a person first and from Japan second, and thereby avoid war and racism and other gross stuff. This is, by the way, related to the battle against the verb “to be,” which constitutes a blog in its own right. Similarly, I need to devote a blog to the subject of changing the way people talk in an effort to change how they think (here’s a preview: it doesn’t work.)

But to get back to the main point, there was a push to turn /demonym/ to /demonym(adjective form)+person/ back when I was learning to talk. It might have been half-baked political correctness, but now it’s become ingrained, to the point where using the demonym is actually offensive. Why? Partly because, given our history (as Anglophones and as human beings in general), there’s no group of people we haven’t hated at one time or another. That means that virtually any demonym comes freighted with historical baggage of past war and racist hatred. “The Jews,” the “the Indians” (both kinds), “the freaking Bosniaks.” There’s bad history there that you might not want to recall every time you talk about these places and peoples. If you want to have a civil conversation with someone, it’s easiest just to use the “X-person” form. It’s just polite to use words that don’t make your conversation buddy remember hundreds of years of death and oppression.

The parallel here is with swearing. Why shouldn’t you swear at someone? Because it’s impolite, and also because it makes you look like a moron. At this point, the “X-person” form has become so ingrained, that the people who don’t use it immediately label themselves as either old and out of touch, uneducated, or self-consciously racist. Because the people who say “he’s a Chinese” (or “a Brazilian” or “a gay”) are usually old, uneducated, or racist. Yes, you could say “I like Chinese,” and follow that up with a thoughtful and sensitive discussion of how you reject stereotypes and our nations’ past history of violence, and express your honest interest in China and its people. But you’re more likely to say something facile and racist.  Imagine someone saying “those Spaniards” (or “those Angolans” or “those Mongols”). What’s likely to come next? Probably not something positive.

Don’t believe me? Let’s test my theory with the world’s greatest English-language corpus, Google auto-complete.

Here’s what I get when I search for “Japanese are”:

Negative stereotypes and Nazi-era racial theory. Ура!

Even putting in a definite article is no help.

“Evil?” “sick?”…”a disease of the skin”? Freaking seriously? Enough people typed “The Japanese are a disease of the skin” on the internet to make Google  think that phrase was statistically significant?

But, a ray of hope shines. Use the PC X-people formula and you get:

…a lot more racist hatred. BUT there are two positive adjectives in there, which is two more than we got from Tweede-dee and Tweedle-fascist up above.  You see, even with a skewed sample (the majority of people who write things on the internet are supperating clumps of pimply hatred, as is well known), the “X-person” formula gave us more positive results.

This habit of speech and thought is one of the things that gives me twinges living in Europe, as I do. Because in Bulgaria (and it seems in Ireland and England too, but correct me if I’m wrong), demonyms-as-nouns are still common. Това е моята прятелка. Тя е рускиня. That’s my friend. She’s a Russian. But even in Bulgaria, this construction causes problems (it’s impossible to say “he’s a Turk” without causing offense because the word “Turk” is literally a swear word on the level of “bastard.”) It’s a good rule of thumb that if someone says “The Xs are…” you are probably listening to a racist.

Sorry, I mean a racist person.

There are people who will tell you that we should abandon these words, or change them into forms that make sense in French. No, you can’t say “he’s the maître d’” that’s like saying “he’s the master o’.” It’s a military coup d’état (a blow of the state), not a military coup (a blow).  The Anglicized versions make no sense!

Well, no, they don’t make sense…in French. In English, however, everyone knows what I mean when I say “a military coup.”  Why should I follow the linguistic conventions of a language I’m not speaking?  Do you want to eat some sushi-o? No thanks, Sushi-wa isn’t my favorite.  How about some alcohol? No, I don’t wear al-kohl, the eye-shadow. But you’re so fashion-conscious, with those lovely moccasins you’re wearing. Excuse me, the correct plural is “makizinan.”

English doesn’t work that way (and I doubt any language does). We do sometimes get silly about retaining the grammatical baggage of loan-words (one thesis, many theses), but the vast majority of the time, we apply our own grammar to foreign words.  Yes, the word “coup” comes from French, but when imbedded in a conversation between Anglophones, it becomes an English word.  Anglophones don’t “borrow” foreign words. We take them.