{"id":5169,"date":"2018-07-12T19:45:50","date_gmt":"2018-07-12T17:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skrivanek.sk\/uncategorized\/do-we-need-the-plusquamperfect-on-holiday\/"},"modified":"2025-03-28T10:31:56","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T09:31:56","slug":"do-we-need-the-plusquamperfect-on-holiday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/do-we-need-the-plusquamperfect-on-holiday\/","title":{"rendered":"Do we need the Plusquamperfect on holiday?"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p class=\"blog-article__perex\">Do you also feel that you have been learning English for many years, but still prefer to let your children or your better-educated loved ones speak for you on holiday? Are you worried about\u00a0embarrassment from\u00a0misunderstandings or embarrassment from mistakes?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div>\n<p>English is the third most widely spoken mother tongue in the world. If you learn it, you can talk to at least\u00a0<strong>372 million people<\/strong>. And many others use it as their main language of communication. Recently, on two trips abroad, I realized that\u00a0some of us\u00a0are trying, perhaps unnecessarily, to hone our skills\u00a0to\u00a0perfection.<\/p>\n<p>When checking-in in\u00a0Hungary (let&#8217;s all brush up on our English), the receptionist, after looking at my travel document, says to me in broken English with a\u00a0wink: \u201cIf you want to wait for a receptionist from\u00a0Russia, it&#8217;s that lady over there with\u00a0big eyes and long hair.\u201d Since I had overheard him speaking German a few moments before, or, to be more precise, telling a\u00a0German-speaking guest the room number in German, I switched to\u00a0German to ask why he was sending me to\u00a0a Russian-speaking colleague. The German in the answer\u00a0was even more broken than the English:\u00a0<strong>\u201dBecause you are Slovak and Russian is supposedly the same.<\/strong>\u201d\u00a0I quickly looked at my passport. It&#8217;s Czech. But to appreciate the efforts of the receptionist, I switched to\u00a0\u201dRussian\u201d. I pulled out some long forgotten words, some of which might have been in Czech with a\u00a0Russian accent. The lady took my passport and said in my native language: \u201cYou can speak Czech.\u201d This closed the\u00a0linguistic exchange slot at the\u00a0reception. It continued in the hotel spa, where the staff spoke Polish. Although\u00a0I\u00a0think I have a knack for languages, Polish is incomprehensible to me, so we went through the basics of all the aforementioned languages just for me to\u00a0learn where\u00a0\u00a0to change\u00a0towels.<\/p>\n<p>Coincidentally (but not purposefully), before my trip to Hungary I learned a few expressions of this\u00a0<strong>Finno-Ugric language<\/strong>, which is the first language of 13.3 million people. I don&#8217;t know more than 30 of these words, including numbers up to ten. But all you had to do in a\u00a0restaurant was to say hello and thank in Hungarian for being taken to the table and the lively waiter could not be stopped. The learned words \u201cI don&#8217;t speak Hungarian\u201d didn&#8217;t work, so we were treated to a free language lesson \u2013 the staff were so pleased to hear Hungarian at the beginning that they wouldn\u2019t speak any other language.<strong>\u00a0Gyertya, poh\u00e1rk\u00f6sz\u00f6nt\u0151, Fizetek!<\/strong>\u00a0The more I googled what I heard or wanted to say, the more popular a table we became. The messy Hungarian may have been amusing for the\u00a0people there, but it was enough to\u00a0ensure that nothing was missing on the table. There was no end to the gratitude from the\u00a0staff as we left.<\/p>\n<p>On holiday in\u00a0Greece the situation was almost the same. Only Greek instead of Hungarian, and\u00a0even\u00a0Spanish popped up\u00a0thanks to a student from\u00a0Andalusia working in\u00a0the local spa, and Italian, spoken by Giovanotto, who led the animation team. I heard from a chef with\u00a0<strong>pleasantly chocolatey<\/strong>\u00a0complexion doing show cooking that\u00a0he makes the best cr\u00eapes in the world. So it came\u00a0to\u00a0the language from which a large proportion of international words originate \u2013 for example, in English,\u00a0<strong>up to 70% of\u00a0words<\/strong>originate from\u00a0French.<\/p>\n<p>I am not at all trying to encourage anyone to stop studying English. It just might sometimes pay to not be afraid,\u00a0to speak<strong>with\u00a0mistakes and strange pronunciation<\/strong>\u00a0rather than clinging to\u00a0perfect grammar and a refined linguistic style. Language learning could\u00a0become\u00a0\u00a0fun for you with\u00a0this approach, which is always more enjoyable than responsibilities. So join us for\u00a0the\u00a0fun.<\/p>\n<p><em>Pavla Hou\u0161t&#8217;ov\u00e1, Sales Director<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tak\u00e9 m\u00e1te pocit, \u017ee se angli\u010dtinu u\u010d\u00edte mnoho let, ale st\u00e1le za sebe nech\u00e1v\u00e1te na dovolen\u00e9 rad\u011bji mluvit d\u011bti nebo sv\u00e9 l\u00e9pe jazykov\u011b vybaven\u00e9 drah\u00e9 polovi\u010dky? M\u00e1te obavu z\u00a0trapasu z\u00a0nedorozum\u011bn\u00ed nebo z ostudy kv\u016fli chyb\u00e1m?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4813,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5169"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6014,"href":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5169\/revisions\/6014"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.skrivanek.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}