Working on our cookie technique

I found spring-themed cookie cutters in our local dm Monday, and they made their way home with me along with the usual tonnage of goods required to run a baby. Caroline ran in the door shortly afterwards. Faster than you can say Strč prst skrz krk she had her homework done, a few paintings hung up to dry and the cookie cutters washed. At 5:30 she pointed out that she had even spoken civilly to the baby several times without being reminded. With such overwhelming evidence of goodness in front of me, I agreed to quit work for the day and we made cookies from a mix I found hidden in the back of a cabinet.

Sugar cookies need to cool before they are decorated, so it wasn't until yesterday that we decorated them. We as in C, our babysitter, and myself. Or more truthfully, I whisked together the icing, set out sprinkles galore, ate a cookie to taste test the icing and ran to a meeting, leaving C pouring sparkles with abandon while Marie carefully starred a butterfly. We all liked the green lamb with its rather evil pink eyes. Its dialogue with the red rabbit (sitting in a field of green just to lambie's left) was quite remarkable for a spring lamb.

The cookies have disappeared by now due to their proximity to the main cook in the house and his sweet tooth, but this weekend I've promised C to pull out our baking cookbook and make another batch from scratch. She wants to make enough this time for all her class AND Dada too.

Strč prst skrz krk = a Czech tongue twister famous for its lack of vowels. We're working on our Czech pronunciation here at Kolokolo as C will go to Czech first grade next year and a tongue twister is a fun way to wrap up a practice session. This one means "stick your finger through your throat".

Maternity Ward Czech

Wow, it's been a long time since I last posted. Nothing like working full time with a newborn AND having guests and clients in town. Pshew. It’s not that I haven’t been writing in my head (I do that constantly) but finding time to sit at the computer and type it all out - that’s what I’ve been missing. To ease my way back into the blogging sphere, I thought I’d favor you with a list of handy dandy Czech vocabulary words I put together for a friend of mine who is about to have a baby here. I came up with this list while I was in the hospital, waiting to come home and finally catch up on my sleep, ha.

Why a vocabulary list? The maternity hospitals here are very comfortable and the care excellent, but if you are an English-speaking mother the nurses sometimes shy away from you, or get a bit aggressive and loud (do all cultures have the habit of raising their voices while speaking to mute foreigners?). Having just a few of the same words to bandy about can really relax the atmosphere - especially at, say, 5 in the morning when the nurse needs you to weigh the baby before she goes off her shift and you think she is randomly waking you up for crazy hospital regulation reasons (both would be correct, but I did take comfort in knowing the exact crazy hospital regulation reason).

It's a pretty basic list, but nurses and doctors tend to repeat the same words (thank heavens). I did leave out certain phrases such as: "You don't really expect me to eat THAT do you?" and "Are those really goats mehhing outside my window?" because the answers are self-evident and the sentences long. Any further thoughts on useful words are, as always, welcome.*

* Thanks to Anne over at Tuckova for her editorial advice!

The very basics
můzu mít... = can I have...
je to mozny = is it possible
profen = ibuprofen
led = ice
bolí mě... = I have a pain...
břicho = belly
šití = stitches
hlava = head

Who is who
miminko = baby
malé dítě = baby
kojenec = baby (who is presumably breast feeding)
sestra = nurse
doktor = doctor
maminka = mommy
matka = mother

Words you'll hear in labor
tlač! = push!
contrakce = contraction
dýchat = breathe
dýchání = breathing

Words you'll hear after the baby is born
potrebujete neco = do you need something?
ukašte mi = show me...
kontrolovat = to control, or check
kojeni = breast feeding
krevní tlak = blood pressure
vaha = weight
vážit = to weigh
koupani = bathing
vykoupat miminko = to wash the baby

Your newborn's top 10 to-dos
vytahnout = take in
kojit = suck
škytat = hiccup
krknout = burp
blinkat = spit up
plakat = cry
čurat = pee
dělat bobek* = poop
zívat = yawn
spát = sleep

*I’m not sure how common this phrase is, but it is the parlance in our Czech family.

Other useful odds and ends
záda = back
bok = side
oblečení = clothes
plenky = diapers
prsa = breast
polštář = pillow
porodnice = maternity hospital
očkovací = vaccine
postýlka = crib

And now the tune to "Zajicek v sve jamce"

A few days ago, my friend Karla of rabbit blog fame asked about the music to the song C taught me last week. Karla is in the midst of wrapping up her dissertation and applying to schools next year - in my mind, decidedly in need of being pampered with cookies or, perhaps, a new tune to hum. Since Prague to Pittsburgh is a hike for cookies, I decided to send her a tune. I searched around the web for simple (free) notation software, found it at Finale, and wrote out the song. At first try, the software appears too basic to let me use diacritics and as many hyphens as the text might need, but I think you can get the idea.

Language lessons

Caroline wants to add a new song to our going to bed repertory. It's a Czech song and I don’t know the words, so I promise to learn them from Teta Jarka and sing it tomorrow night.

But no. "Now!" she says, in a four year old sort of way. When I tell her I can’t, that I really don’t know it, she says "That’s okay Mommie." Then she starts, very slowly, to sing a phrase at a time, getting me to sing phrases back to her just the same. She even stops and corrects my pronunciation, and I make my lazy tongue work hard to sound Czech.

Afterwards, I can’t remember most of the words because I spend the lesson wondering when this jump in language arrived, and how C learned to teach someone to sing a song so slowly and still get the words just right.

After Caroline falls asleep I go to Google and look up Czech nursery songs until I find it:

Zajíček v své jamce
sedí sám, sedí sám.
Ubožáčku, co je ti,
že nemůžeš skákati?
Chutě skoč, a vyskoč!

Little rabbit in your den,
sitting alone, sitting alone,
poor little thing, why is it
that you cannot jump?
Try* to hop,
hop and skip!

The song is so apt somehow, such a good nudge for me and language learning, that I laugh when I translate it. Maybe it is time to hop out of my den of comfortably bad Czech and try again to hop and skip in this language C shares with me so patiently.

........................................................
*Want or desire to hop would be a closer translation but somehow try works better in English.

Roll those rrrs

Drrrrnda, drrrrnda.
      Drda, drmda.
Again! Drrrrnda, drrrrnda.
      Drnnda
Super!

Caroline and Lucie are practicing rolled rs in the living room while I work. There are plenty of kids who don’t have r down yet, but Lucie is heading to Asia for four months Monday (the life of a babysitter model), and wants C to get in some practice before she leaves. Lucie learned her rrrs on drnda, or chatterbox, and so Caroline does too.

Thanks to Lucie and her family, our babysitter family, C speaks fluently in Czech, with a Prague accent to boot. She speaks to Lucie in Czech automatically, but English is the language she pulls out when she meets strangers, and especially new children. Rumor has it that she tried to convert her kindergarten to English a few months ago but that the kids stuck to their native tongue. When I asked her about this, she said that she thought everyone should speak like us. She said it regretfully, as if she thought they were missing out and she was just trying to help. (I sometimes wonder what her kindergarten teachers make of C. Once every two weeks or so, they’ll send her home with a note that says she was awfully good and didn’t boss anyone around that day. It makes us wonder about the rest of her days.)

Luckily her idol worship of Lucie, home for the last two months from Singapore, has helped make Czech cool again, and she has pulled out her Czech children’s books and asked us to start reading them. She gets Will to read them in English, but she says she doesn’t mind if I read like Lucinka. The nursery rhymes are easiest for me to pronounce well, so that’s what I mostly stick with. Rhymes, plus I’ll read Czech kids’ magazines, pages beautifully full of pictures and activities with only a few words in between.

Tonight we played a game from one of her magazines, Méd'a Pusík, and I read the instructions, deciphering them together with C. Okay, take the kostky, that's dice, and if you land on the walrus you have to go back three ice flows because he was grumpy. Um, does that make sense?

We look at the picture of the walrus and decide it probably does. Then Caroline practices saying mrož, or walrus, a few times. She doesn’t quite get the r but that’s okay, and we roll the dice and keep playing.

Czech language at the A2 level

A few days ago, our babysitter greeted me with the morning's news - foreigners wanting to get a long term residency permit were going to have to pass a language exam! She was aflutter with the news and I suggested that she'd have to add bureaucratic jargon to our day-to-day conversations, since that is what the stories said foreigners would be tested on. She thought that as Americans with conversational Czech, we'd have no problems passing the exam. Having been denied my visa last time I applied based on missing page numbers in the statement my health insurer mailed over, I doubted this leniency and started reading up on the subject.

The proposal seems to still be in discussion, but the tests would be based on Czech at the A2 level. The government has agreed that the tests would be free; lessons, not. A little digging found a book in pdf form called "Čeština jako cizí jazyk, Úroven A2" or "Czech as a Foreign Language, Grade A2" It is downloadable from the Ministry of Education and is a guideline for the European Union on how Czech at the A2 level is understood, taught and assessed. For anyone interested in taking the test, I hope this helps.

I scanned through the guide tonight and can assure you it covers grocery shopping and visiting embassies. Unfortunately, it lacks a discussion about the colloquialisms that truly make getting around the country an easier experience. I feel a bit sorry for the studious foreigners armed with their A2 lessons trying to understand the slang used by their fellow citizens (in stores, taxis, restaurants and even governmental agencies). But, in the end, we learn from our language failures and experiences and that may be what the people recommending the exam want foreigners settling in to be encouraged to go out and get.

Conversations with Caroline

Words you never thought you’d hear from a 4 year old
I’ll hang out here, you take a nap.

Thoughts on knit pants
C: Ahh, teplaky. I like teplaky....they are for home.
M: Just for home?
C: Yep. For home.

*Teplaky is the Czech word for knit pants. They are considered house clothing, something to change into when you get home, to save your good clothes for later.

Compare and contrast
I like chocolate and bread, you like chocolate and bread...
I like pink and you like pink.
You like showers, and I like baths.
You like naps. Not me.

Hatmatilka to some, poetry to others

Sometimes my job involves reading contracts. They start out shiny and smooth on the surface, impenetrable. I tend to get a lot of other work done before I read a page. Then I’ll reward myself with coffee, sit down again and realize I haven’t absorbed a thing. That’s when I pick up my pen and start drawing. ?? and "what in the.." and before I know it that contract has lost its hermetically sealed look and become something a bit turfy and easy on the eye. The work gets fun then and I argue my way through each clause until I’m done. It’s a lot like reading Wallace Stevens, actually.

Except that, working in Prague on contracts written by non-English speakers in English, I’m bound to find a humdinger of a sentence that just doesn’t work backwards or forwards. So sometimes I send it over to my Czech business partner, ask him to think about it in Czech and then in English again and see what we can figure out. (His hourly rates are a lot better than the lawyer‘s.) It mostly works.

Yesterday I sent him one of my humdingers, prefaced with "gobbledygook coming your way!" Gobbledygook was a new word for him and we looked it up. Lingea Lexicon gave us hatmatilka as its Czech equivalent. My etymology dictionary told me that hatmatilka is from the expression hat' mat', which is similar to hatla patla and halabala and related somehow to Halí belí, the Czech song and nursery rhyme that Caroline currently has stuck in my head from incessant singing. If anyone can tell me what hat' mat' means I’d be most appreciative. In the meantime:

hatla patla and halabala = seem to mean slapdash or shoddy. I love learning words like that, they just seem to stick in my mind somehow.

Halí, belí...
Halí, belí, koně v zelí
a hříbátka v petrželi.

Whoops, the horse is in the cabbage
And the colt in the parsley.

Okay, enough procrastination, back to clause 10.4.1.

Working on my roots

When I turned ten, I defined sophistication as the ability to successfully harbor candy in your purse. My grandmother has that gift, but I thought I never would. Unscabbed knees and manicured nails, a pack of almost full peppermint lifesavers in my pocketbook - on the advent of adulthood and my first double digit birthday I couldn’t imagine a time when I might reach a level of maturity and self control able to pull off all three. Twenty some years later, my knees stay unscathed, and I don’t bite my nails any more, but I’m still not very good at approaching candy or life one tasty tidbit at a time. I don’t have the patience and when it comes down to it, I don’t really have that type of long term attention span.

So when I revved up another one of my New Year’s resolution this week (to learn more Czech by practicing it a little each day) I had to hold myself back from jumping in and trying to memorize a chapter of words. I decreed I’d learn one word per day, and then I tried to choose a word, the first word for my list.

Ceskenoviny.cz stood in as my rosetta stone. I skimmed through several stories, trying to find a common word, something I could use in daily life and hear with regularity, something worth focusing on for one whole day. I finally picked snížit because it showed up several times in a row, and I like a word with a z in it. Thirty seconds later, I’d typed snížit = to decrease, lower into my word list, and I was done. One word seemed a tiny, futile step towards improving my Czech and resolving my resolutions. I wanted another word, something more substantial. Reaching for my dictionary, I realized I was once again about to pull the bubble gum pack from my pocket and chew through it all in one sitting.

Then I noticed three letters buried in snížit: niz. Niz - its root. I wrote a new decree in my head (one root per day), and then, my sweet tooth for words on the way to being sated, settled down to foxing out some of niz’s relations.

snížit = decrease
nízký = low
nízce = basely
nižší = lower
Nizozemsko = the Netherlands

Pronunciation – Help!

I just installed Lingea Lexicon on my new computer. It’s an excellent Czech English dictionary that I’ve used for several years as it is fast and includes what I imagine to be useful examples. For instance, thanks to Lingea I know the correct preposition to use - "o", should I need to ask someone to shout for help. “Křik pro pomoc”, the literal translation, probably wouldn’t get me as far.

Of course, even knowing that I should use “o” and “pomoc” together is no guarantee that anyone would understand me if I yelled “křik”. It has the ř in it, that devilish letter that twists my tongue about and renders my speech unrecognizable unless I’ve had lots of practice on a word, or simply learned the way that Czech lispers get around it. So when I saw in the Lingea installation package that I could add a pronunciation option using only 6 more MB of hard drive space, I said “báječný nápad!” - “super idea!”, and hit go.

Five minutes later and installation complete, I typed in “křik” and looked for the pronunciation button. No sign of it, so I clicked over to the English translation, found the button and confirmed that “shout” spoken by a British man can sound very dull indeed. English to český, Czech to anglický, after a few more dictionary flip floppings I had to conclude that yes, there was pronunciation for all English words, but no, there wasn’t any for Czech. It is, after all, a phonetic language. And if just anyone learned how to say “křik,“ how would one know the Czechs from the foreigners (or lispers) among us.

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 - tak”

Caroline is counting everything she can find, from bricks on the wall to pieces of breadstick she’s partially eaten and then thoughtfully scattered across the carpet. She often counts the same thing twice, but she always gets to 10, now that she can. And then she says “tak.”

Czech dictionaries define tak as “so” or “thus.” Many people use it as a way of opening a sentence, or changing conversational gears and introducing something new. Our babysitter says tak when she finishes setting something straight for example, or succeeds in brushing Caroline's hair, and when she says it you know that she is happy with her results. C has picked up the habit too and it tickles me to hear her summon up a satisfied “tak” at the end of a counting game, or when a block fits well within her design of a Lego chair for dollies. It sounds so adult somehow, so careful, such an alien impulse in someone attracted to order as a means of demonstrating, yet again, the second law of thermodynamics.