A journey into learning

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: Cover of Live After Death

I love giving the one-sentence introduction to people who don’t know me: I’m Tamas, a Hungarian born in Germany teaching English in the UAE?

I think all of us non-native speaker teachers start with a bit of inhibition, which in most cases remains, in some rare cases you just forget about it. At the beginning I was ashamed of being a non-native speaker. I knew that my pronunciation, intonation, and colloquialisms will never be on par with a native speaker teacher. It also took me quite a while to become comfortable talking to native speakers. Then, this gradually changed. Now, I enjoy telling people that until I was 14, I couldn’t say a single word in English.

One of the funniest early memories with English is a small poster I had on my wall for years which read “Hi, nice person!” I had no idea what it meant, and no one in the family could reveal the secret. I kept reading and re reading it phonetic Hungarian ['Hee, nitze pershon!'] until I had my first English lesson and learned the truth.

The love affair started then and became an infatuation. Reading, listening to and producing thoughts in this amazing, fascinating, terrifying and shocking language has become my life, and it’s going to be the first language of my daughter.

How did it start?

My father bought three LPs in the freest communist country in 1984:

- Iron Maiden: Live after Death

- Hair

- Pink Floyd: The Wall

All three LPs came with lyrics and in a few months, these lyrics filled my brain forever.

But it was the Iron Maiden album that changed my life.

They have a 14-minute rendition of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is quoted directly in the lyrics:
Part 1:

Part 2:

“Day after day, day after day, we stuck nor breath nor motion
As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean
Water, water, everywhere and all the boards did shrink
Water, water, everywhere nor any drop to drink.”

“One after one by the star dogged moon, too quick for groan or sigh
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, and cursed me with his eye
Four times fifty living men (and I heard nor sigh nor groan),
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump. they dropped down one by one.”

This led me on to the Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then English Romanticism. Do you need more to fall in love with a language and its culture?

Yes, The Wall.

Although I understood less than half of the allegory, it was enough to start me on a journey of questioning and not accepting ready-made answers.

We don’t need no education

This is the short story of my love affair. Now, many years later, the sublime has indeed become ridiculous, as I prance about the house listening to Little Boots singing “Move while you’re watching me, Dance with the enemy, Here is my remedy oh uh oh uh oh.“ And I must say, the love affair continues.

I’d love to hear your story.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 21:31 and is filed under Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “What’s your story? The start of the love affair”

September 23rd, 2009 at 23:25
Marisa Constantinides says:

Hi Tamas,
Good post Tamas – I had a little love affair with songs too! All the songs my brother’s band could not figure out the lyrics to! (not all on sleeves then…) so got appointed as the official lyrics recorder.

Even so, the singer managed to mangle every sing phrase into something unrecogniseable…but his drift was right, a little bit like Danny Kaye pretending to be speaking French, or Russian or whatever; you think he is but it’s all meaningless garble delivered in a flawless accent.

My true love story came with books – systematically, though uncritically, reading shelf after shelf after shelf of all the books I could get my hands on from the local American and British libraries – did not have enough pocket money to buy all those books!

NEST or Non-NEST, a love of the language looks like a typical characteristic of every (well, almost) English teacher I know!

I mean, who else can you think of who would read grammar books in bed?
September 24th, 2009 at 00:13
Ken Wilson says:

… and I remember myfirst sighting of a very skinny Lorincz Tamas doing a drama workshop at one of the Magyar Macmillan conferences in the 90s sometime. Oh how the boy has grown (professionally, of course. Still skinny, I’m sure)!
September 24th, 2009 at 00:23
Shelly Terrell says:

Tamas,

What a beautiful post! I am a big fan of Pink Floyd as well. My story is a bit different. I learned Spanish and English at the same time. Rather, I learned a distinct dialect of English due to the poor area I grew up in near Mexico. In my phonetics courses in college they referred to it as CHE or Chicano English. I often mispronounced words. When my father snuck us into a nice school in a rich neighborhood, I was often picked on. I soon realized I had not learn proper English. I made myself study hard but even now I’m very self conscious of this. I have a love affair though of several languages including Spanish and most Romantic languages. Italian, Spanish, and French music makes me very emotional as does the poetry. However, I do love English music as well but mostly blues like Nina Simone or what my husband calls depressing music like Bon Iver and Jeff Buckley.
September 24th, 2009 at 05:30
tamaslorincz says:

Thanks Ken for the comment and reminding me of that first time… (This IS turning into a love affair
Magyar Macmillan Conference 1998, first ever conference talk with Ligeti Agi, a fantastic English Teacher. The topic was: drama in ELT. We were brandishing a small collection of plays pirated by the Hungarian Coursebook Publishing Company, featuring one of your short sketches. At then end of the talk you came up to us asking, “So, where did you guys get this sketch from?” We showed you the book. You laughed and laughed. This wasn’t the first and not the last time it happened to you, I’m sure. However, it was a great lesson for me. That’s the seminal event where my pretty strong conviction about the rights of the author behind the product come from.
Maybe growing and expanding (only vertically most of the time), but always proud of that first time, to imagine that it was only about 11 years ago. What a roller-coaster ride….
September 24th, 2009 at 05:41
tamaslorincz says:

Thanks for this lovely comment Marisa.
Beautiful phrase: “meaningless garble delivered in a flawless accent”. Which reminded me of another story: I’m running down the corridor at primary “singing” in English, somebody stopping me and asking: “So, what is it that you are singing about.” Oh, the embarrassment of it…
True. Books are essential. The first book I actually bought – still haven’t read, I’m afraid – was Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”, just opening it randomly and trying to formulate the words still not really understanding them…. And then came “Leaves of Grass” (Walt Whitman) and I was smitten forever.
September 24th, 2009 at 05:52
tamaslorincz says:

Shelly,
Thanks for sharing this fantastic story. A beautiful reminder that our humble origins are what we have and and are not responsible for them. It’s what we do about it that matters. That little girl is now going to LA to represent a huge number of passionate teachers and making us all proud to know and love her.
Didn’t know Bon Iver until now. Great stuff. Thanks.
December 7th, 2009 at 19:38
Anita Kwiatkowska says:

Tamas,

You posted your story when I wasn’t a part of the blogsphere that’s why I reply so late

My story with English began in late 80′s in a communist Poland. My uncle who had a sister in Sweden brought a VCR and a set of videotapes for his daughters. So we watched ‘Color Purple’, ‘Prince in New York’ and many others films over and over again. All films were in English with Swedish subtitles but as there was nothing else on TV at that time anyway, we enjoyed watching them a lot!

My formal adventure with English started in gr.6 and continued for years with Grammar Translation in the background.

I guess I’m younger than you guys because I was never really fond of Pink Floyd. My heroes were the sexy boys from New Kids on the Block

Thanks for the post – it brought back so many memories

Anita