Today I broke my no-newspapers-during-the week rule – how else to get through the Saturday paper and its supplements – to get The Guardian.
Its Languages For The 21st Century series reached Hindi and, having steadfastly not opened the Teach Yourself Hindi book I bought three years ago, I thought the little primer might ease me into learning the language.
It’s available online, which will be handy for future reference, along with three short audio segments that can be steamed or downloaded as mp3s. Keep reading →
If you’re looking to prepare yourself linguistically for the coming decades you’d best steer clear of European tongues.
That’s the message from The Guardian, whose Languages For The 21st Century series began today with Japanese and will include the so-called ‘BRIC’ countries of Brazil, Russian, India (represented by official language Hindi) and China.
The seven-day run of phrase books continues tomorrow with Arabic and then continues with Mandarin, Hindi, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish.
It looks like the phrasebooks, plus audio conversations, will be put online pretty much in their entirety and you should be able to find them all here in due course.
It’s some time since I read a book that hit me as hard as Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Bought on a whim at a second-hand book fair, I knew nothing about book or author. But the cover said it was shortlisted for the Booker in 1996 and I want to read more books that are, at least a bit, more up to date that some of my usual ones.
It’s such an expansive book, covering generations of multiple families, shifting location from city to mountains to village and back to city, that I was surprised to realise that, on one level at least, you can boil it down to a year in the life of a widow, her student ‘paying guest’ and the two tailors she employees to work in her flat. Keep reading →
Last year I watched all five series of Baltimore-set US police drama The Wire when they were screened on BBC Two.
It made for such a dizzying sprint through the five series but one I had to keep up with, such was the draw of the show. The dvd boxset approach of broadcasting a series at double or triple time may well have been the way to approach The Wire, despite its late-night scheduling, allowing as it did for episodes to be gulped down.
Many’s the time, having just finished one episode I had to watch the next one’s introduction segment, even if there wasn’t time to see the episode all the way through – though frequently I found the time to watch the rest too. Keep reading →
Recent posts seem to see A Tangle of Wires veering perilously close to becoming a television blog, which was hardly my intention.
Nevertheless here’s another (short) post on a forthcoming film, this time on UK television channel More 4 on Tuesday 19 January at 23:40.
From the TV listings: The Last Thakur (2008) Sadik Ahmed’s debut feature drama is set in a Bangladeshi village where two corrupt politicians find their rivalry disrupted by a mysterious gunman.
I know nothing about either film or director, and have only seen three Bangladeshi films before, but according to The Internet Movie Database it is in Bengali, which would have been a reasonable assumption anyway of course.
Channel 4’s current India Winter season of programmes is not quite as light on films as I first thought.
I’m off shortly to watch as much of Om Shanti Om as I can manage and then tape the rest, but there are more films scheduled over the next few days.
Tomorrow it’s Dhoom 2, an enjoyably glossy cop vs robber film – though with a quite baffling plot twist towards the end, and then Monday it’s Jodhaa Ackbar. Keep reading →
Channel 4’s short India Winter season kicks tomorrow with Brit ‘Bollywood’ flick Slumdog Millionaire.
The season’s content is very much Slumdog-themed, with an episode of The Secret Millionaire alongside programmes on Gordon Ramsey’s cookery and Kevin McCloud on learning from the Devanari slums. There’s even a Shah Rukh Khan-hosted Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? from a couple of years ago.
Teaser clips for some of the programmes are available on 4OD’s YouTube channel, including (more promisingly) Kristnan Guru-Murthy on terrorism and poverty in India, as well as the country’s rising superpower status, for a news special. Keep reading →
I’ve been thinking about studying for a Bengali qualification for a while. It’s idle musing so far, partly perhaps because of the time constraints adult working life, not to mention having a young family, impresses on you.
Nevertheless, it’s fun to consider and as a first step I now and then looking into the Bengali GCSE.
GCSEs replaced O-Levels in the late 1980s as the qualifications UK secondary school students, that is, those aged 11-16, tend to take at the end of their studies. About 17 years ago they’re what I sat for. Keep reading →
On the one hand it’s just a bit of snow, and the BBC last night certainly went into apocalyptic overdrive with tales of The Great Freeze, on the other hand there is a sense of being gently confined.
Only a handful of cars managed the hill that is the only exit out of our estate yesterday, and my local train station made the national news as an evacuation point for rail passengers whose journey wasn’t going to continue.
My more distant neighbours, some of whom I talked to today for the first time today, say the shelves of the Tesco Metro have been stripped, and tomorrow is the third day A’s primary school will be closed. Keep reading →
I’ve been thinking about studying for a Bengali qualification for a while. It’s idle musing so far, partly perhaps because of the time constraints adult working life, not to mention having a young family, impresses on you.
