Working at the UN as a consultant
I’ve got some news… One of the requirements for working at the UN as a consultant, is learning a second UN language to the B2 level. For those interested, these languages are: English, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, and French. Notice how, unfortunately for me, Italian, Dutch, and Turkish are
not a part of this list. Why these languages? The answer lies in league of nations decisions taken in the first and second half of the last century. So, this means that if calypso wants to stay in the UN, I’ve to buckle up, and learn one of these languages. Realistically, given my romance background, the only options I could learn by the end of the year (that’s when my contract ends), are Spanish and French. I chose French because Spanish is overrepresented in my team. Alas, for Turkish, I am very sorry, but for the time being, it will be güle güle (goodbye).
#PicDuMidiDOssau one of the most iconic mountains of the French Pyrenees. This picture marked the end of a 150km hike I had embarked on with a Summer Camp.
My French exam will take place sometime in October/November, and assuming I get enough marks to pass the B2 level, we should be game. I’m taking a slightly different approach to Turkish, which you can read about in pretty much all my previous blog posts. As I was saying, French is a romance language, which is particularly advantageous for speakers of other romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian). But the advantages don’t end at romance languages, because, in fact, French heavily influenced English. This is something I already kind of knew, but didn’t appreciate until I started taking Language Transfer’s “Intro to French.” For those that don’t know, I wrote about language transfer before, and I am a huge fan. It will revolutionize how you think and learn about language through something its creator calls, the Thinking Method. So, how are French and English related? The answer lies in suffixes.
Similarities between English and French
As an English speaker, I never paid much attention to suffixes. In Turkish, the whole language is suffixes. In English, on the other hand, suffixes can often help us reveal the origins of a word. Here’s a couple of the ones that are present in many romance languages, as well as English.
Neat, isn’t it? I actually ripped this table off from an existing website because I can be quite lazy with these things… I did add a couple things here and there, but, give credit, where credit is due. In either case, I added a column for Italian suffixes and Italian examples. Note how, some of the words barely change from English to French, or some don’t even change at all (Imagination and imagination). Note the verb suffixes (-er, -ir, -re); this is something I want to cover in later posts as it’s a language hack that gives us a lot more information than we think (hint, conjugations).
I’m rambling on, so, à bientôt!
calypso
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