At an early age a frustration for me was my inability to tell the time – everyone else seemed to be able to do it. It seemed to me to be the badge of grown up-ness.
The first stage was for me to identify the
numbers themselves. Above you see a clock face with Arabic numerals. Now you may not recognize them at first but
you can identify their values by using both their location and your time-telling
skill. Incidentally it’s quite easy to remember these numbers using my method:
the number 1 has one stroke, 2 has two strokes, and so on to number 5 which
unhelpfully looks like a nought. Confusingly, the number 6 looks like a seven. :O
Then the numbers 7 and 8 are the same symbol inverted. Think of a soft drink to help you here: comparing
the two, you get seven-up and the other is the 8! The 9 is recognizable as
such, while the zero is a dot. That’s it, you’ve got it! 😊
So we have accomplished our number recognition, but there is a further stage to be completed and that is to interpret what each number represents in terms of its relation to the passage of the hour.
Helping us do just that is a clock that was
formerly used for Early Learners at The British Council Teaching Centre,
Thessaloniki to help them tell the time in English. I love it.
As well as coping with the numbers, I was, when
living in the Arab world, obliged to come to grips with the Arabic alphabet. As
with all languages, you will reach the level of competence required to meet
your daily needs. Beyond that it depends on the individual drive, interest, commitment,
aptitude, etc. as to how much further you will progress. So I could go to the souq,
greet people and ask for foodstuffs and their prices. At work I could converse
with clients to learn their personal data required for the registration procedure
at the Teaching Centres in both Sana’a and in Kuwait.
But my language
was at a basic level. On occasions, I would sound out the letters forming an
unknown word and Z, who grew up in an area where the local Greek dialect was
imbued with imported Turkish words, could recognize what this shared cognate
meant. Great team work!
Note that above, the first column is on the
right as writing in Arabic is a left-to-right affair.
In my youth, when studying English Literature,
I noticed that some poems would be prefaced by extracts from Greek writing that
had inspired the poet. This always intrigued me and I longed to be able to unlock
this code, just as I longed to tell the time.
(This is a quotation from the Nobel Prize
winner, Odysseus Elytis, wondering if loneliness feels the same to everyone
everywhere.)
And, of course, it was my fate to come and live
in Greece. Despite having attended some lessons and having a rudimentary awareness
of the language, my first encounters with the language being spoken around me were
quite disturbing. Spoken Greek was an inaccessible wall of unidentifiable
bricks; a sea of sound with a continuum of waves that defied being broken into semantic
units. It took me months before from
that wave continuum I could identify the general topic, and it took even longer
for me to understand roughly what was being said about that topic. But, oh, the
joy when it begins to make sense and when you can respond, even at a simple
level. Decoding and communication achieved- yay!
I regularly do crosswords and sudoku which
really are forms of decoding. In sudoku you use arithmetic hypotheses to
complete the grid. The crossword clues will often deliberately try to lead you
off the trail, just like a good detective mystery. The solving is so
satisfying. 😊
For
years there has been one more code that has eluded me and that I have wanted to
break. I’ve just embarked on a project to learn to decode what is to me a completely
opaque system.
To be continued ..........?!!?!!
To be continued ……….. ?????
