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Sep. 28th, 2005 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainInspired by this post by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dolorous_ett, I have decided that there needs to be fanfiction for Contemporary Czech, by Michael Heim.
I am aware that this concept may be a hard sell, because unlike the New Practical Chinese Reader, Contemporary Czech has no characters, no illustrations, and little vocabulary of interest for anybody other than the most abstracted of academics. Five weeks into the course, for example, we learn about pronouns and how to say "A symbol interests us not only for what it represents, but for what it is." By Week Eight we have progressed to telling people where you live and asking, "Excuse me, comrade. Could you tell me what university puts out a journal of Slavic languages and literatures?"
What this book does have, however, are an enormous number of random Sentences and Dialogues, all of them utterly disconnected from any sort of context or backstory, and many of them hinting at Byzantine intrigues lurking just behind the textbook's placid black-and-white pages. These stories, no doubt suppressed by the Communist regime, demand to be told.
In Lesson Three, we have a mysterious tale of distrust and estrangement within the family: I'll forgive Karel for not believing Father. I'll even forgive Jana. But not my brother.
In Lesson Six, we meet a helpful stranger, as one so often does in introductory language textbooks ... but this one is perhaps a shade too helpful. Is he taking advantage of a naive and vulnerable traveler for sinister motives of his own?
You don't know anyone here, do you? Can I help you?
I don't know where the hotels are or which are the good ones. Besides, I don't speak English well yet.
I speak English, so I'll ask.
You are very kind.
Aren't you even slightly curious as to why I'm taking such an interest in you?
The question, alas, must go forever unanswered, because the dialogue cuts off at this point. Has the Helpful Stranger abducted the clueless foreigner and vanished into the night, or has the foreigner taken the hint and fled?
In Lesson Seven, the atmosphere of vague paranoia deepens: Whenever we chat at the Faculty, he tries to look for a special meaning in every sentence, in every word of mine. I'd like to know why he does it. A few lines later, this speaker -- or is it a new one? -- is apparently being stalked: He even asked me to introduce him to my sister Vera. If he phones again tomorrow, have somebody tell him I don't want to have anything more to do with him. Lesson Eight follows this up with a single enigmatic warning, cleverly concealed between two mundane fragments of conversation about classes and publishing: Be careful what you say!
Lesson Ten hints at a scandal in the academic world in frustratingly elliptical terms: I know a thing or two about the affair from my own experience, so I can say that not even a part of what was said and written corresponds to reality. After all we were colleagues. We worked in the same institute and later in the same department.
And in Lesson Twelve, we contemplate the inexplicable behavior of yet another unnamed colleague of the speaker: I met him just as he was coming out of a bookstore in Karlovo Square. We walked almost an hour together -- between two and three. Suddenly he told me he had to go to a meeting and that someone was waiting for him there, that is, on the other side of town, and ran off. "I'll probably never understand him," I said to myself.
Intrigue. Concealment. Terror. And random conversations about philological monographs. The storytelling possibilities are endless.
dolorous_ett, I have decided that there needs to be fanfiction for Contemporary Czech, by Michael Heim.I am aware that this concept may be a hard sell, because unlike the New Practical Chinese Reader, Contemporary Czech has no characters, no illustrations, and little vocabulary of interest for anybody other than the most abstracted of academics. Five weeks into the course, for example, we learn about pronouns and how to say "A symbol interests us not only for what it represents, but for what it is." By Week Eight we have progressed to telling people where you live and asking, "Excuse me, comrade. Could you tell me what university puts out a journal of Slavic languages and literatures?"
What this book does have, however, are an enormous number of random Sentences and Dialogues, all of them utterly disconnected from any sort of context or backstory, and many of them hinting at Byzantine intrigues lurking just behind the textbook's placid black-and-white pages. These stories, no doubt suppressed by the Communist regime, demand to be told.
In Lesson Three, we have a mysterious tale of distrust and estrangement within the family: I'll forgive Karel for not believing Father. I'll even forgive Jana. But not my brother.
In Lesson Six, we meet a helpful stranger, as one so often does in introductory language textbooks ... but this one is perhaps a shade too helpful. Is he taking advantage of a naive and vulnerable traveler for sinister motives of his own?
You don't know anyone here, do you? Can I help you?
I don't know where the hotels are or which are the good ones. Besides, I don't speak English well yet.
I speak English, so I'll ask.
You are very kind.
Aren't you even slightly curious as to why I'm taking such an interest in you?
The question, alas, must go forever unanswered, because the dialogue cuts off at this point. Has the Helpful Stranger abducted the clueless foreigner and vanished into the night, or has the foreigner taken the hint and fled?
In Lesson Seven, the atmosphere of vague paranoia deepens: Whenever we chat at the Faculty, he tries to look for a special meaning in every sentence, in every word of mine. I'd like to know why he does it. A few lines later, this speaker -- or is it a new one? -- is apparently being stalked: He even asked me to introduce him to my sister Vera. If he phones again tomorrow, have somebody tell him I don't want to have anything more to do with him. Lesson Eight follows this up with a single enigmatic warning, cleverly concealed between two mundane fragments of conversation about classes and publishing: Be careful what you say!
Lesson Ten hints at a scandal in the academic world in frustratingly elliptical terms: I know a thing or two about the affair from my own experience, so I can say that not even a part of what was said and written corresponds to reality. After all we were colleagues. We worked in the same institute and later in the same department.
And in Lesson Twelve, we contemplate the inexplicable behavior of yet another unnamed colleague of the speaker: I met him just as he was coming out of a bookstore in Karlovo Square. We walked almost an hour together -- between two and three. Suddenly he told me he had to go to a meeting and that someone was waiting for him there, that is, on the other side of town, and ran off. "I'll probably never understand him," I said to myself.
Intrigue. Concealment. Terror. And random conversations about philological monographs. The storytelling possibilities are endless.
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Date: 2005-09-28 09:05 pm (UTC)I'll never forget the BBC's sex, drugs and television introduction to German, with the classic chat-up line "I used to love swimming - now I love you." She fell for it, too.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 09:12 pm (UTC)I'm tempted to say "I'll do it if you will"...
no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 09:52 pm (UTC)When was that book published? Certainly before 1989.
I would love to see that book. (I`m a Slovak person, born in Czechoslovakia with two Czech grandmothers and Czech is my second mother language, so I`d be able to appreciate the dialogues).
I started studyng English as 11y.o. before the fall of the communist regime. Our textbooks were aimed at children, so there were only traces of facts and athmosphere of the era in the content of those books. However, I found some of my mother`s textbooks for English course and I remember that they were very similar, only the languages were vice versa. Strange, unreal conversations etc. I`ll try to find that book next time i`m visiting my parents.
How did come to this book? Are you studying Czech?
your devoted reader
benvenuta
no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 10:01 pm (UTC)How did come to this book? Are you studying Czech?
Not any more. I spent a year studying Czech, and gave up in despair (and because my main motive for studying the language was so that I could get a job on the same general continent as my boyfriend, and he broke up with me halfway through the year, so...)
I did find some of the vocabulary really useful when I went to Croatia and Bosnia last year, so it wasn't a total loss.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-29 12:15 am (UTC)benvenuta
no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-29 12:12 am (UTC)This makes me think of Fleur and how would she call "plucked chicken". I wonder if she ever had to pluck a chickens at the Burrow.
benvenuta
no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 11:07 pm (UTC)The electron encountered little resistance as he left his cell, since he had no ohm to go to ...
Easleyweasley
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Date: 2005-09-29 06:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-29 06:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-29 06:48 am (UTC)How this related to the anthropomorphised bunnies and things I haven't quite gotten yet.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-29 11:26 am (UTC)But seriously, what an incredible snapshot of a time. Wonder if anyone's ever written a thesis relating language coursebooks to contemporary culture.
language lesson fanfic
Date: 2005-09-29 02:31 pm (UTC)My introductory Danish book was centred on the social lives of a group of foreign students and was produced by the university itself. I assume they were meant to be just like us; they went to the local cinema, cafe, the supermarket, wandered round the university into the wrong classrooms. There was even a lesson on swearing. They also had extraordinarily complicated love lives – "Natalie" was going out with a Danish bloke, stringing along two fellow-students, and had a 'real' boyfriend back in the Netherlands. We actually did produce fanfic about them; when a friend and I had to produce a dialogue for our oral exam, we did a gossipy session on who was inviting whom to a dance, ending with the revelation "Nej, Sylvie er lesbisk!"