So I'm taking Hungarian lessons, and we had a lesson on telling time today. I'm thankful for my Czech experience for many reasons, but I was especially thankful this evening when instead of saying "it's 10:30" we had to say, "It's half of the 11th hour". That's how we say it in Czech. I caught on quickly to that much and was ahead of the class because of it. That was easy. But in addition to saying things backwards (because of course, that is obviously the backwards way of saying it), Hungarians will tell time in reference to the quarter hour, regardless of what time it is. If it's 5:12, they will say "in 3 minutes it will be 1/4 of the 6th hour". If it's 9:52 they will say, "it's 7 minutes past 3/4 of the 10th hour"... Isn't that crazy? It's so complicated and uneconomical. Your brain has to work HARD just in order to know what time it is. My brain is working hard just in order to remember what I'm supposed to be doing right now...
It's not bad. It's just different.
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I am over here Why are you way over there? We might could change that (Haiku meets the South)
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- Lisa Blomquist
- "Te vagy az eletunk" "Nem miénk, csak Tied minden dicsöség!"
3 comments:
crazy people...that's really funny. We should come up with our own rule for some random, every day thing, like weather. Instead of saying it's snowing (like it most unfortunately is here), we could say "it is the wet weather which follows cold winds and precedes the spring" or something like that =)
Nice. Or, "then you take a turn that is not to the left. After 4 less than 8 blocks, turn, but not to the right. You wont come to a stop sign, but you will come to a stoplight. Proceed through this intersection when the light is not red or yellow." =)
that's hillarious. When I was in 11th or 12th grade, my chemistry professor made us take home our lab assignments the night before we would do them in class and rewrite the assignment in our own words. I was so furious at this total waste of my time that I would look up every single word in the dictionary and write its definition or some crazy synonym to replace it. Like if the assignment said, "Use your pencil to outline the shape of the..." I would write "place the writing utensil that uses graphite on the paper and trace..." Of course, I got nothing out of chemistry except a better vocabulary!!
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