My strangest tutoring story

When I was in high school I was briefly a Na’vi tutor. Yes really.

Background

About the Golden Mouse competition

There is (or was?) this sort of contest called ‘The Golden Mouse’ (a.k.a. ‘The Virtual Olympics’), an annual competition for geeks held by the Tel-Aviv University and Mif‘àl haPáyis.

The way the competition works is that 50-odd schools that have a building paid for by MhP gather middle school students (20-odd in total, rough assessment) who are given subjects they have to study, like math and history and some more niche subjects, under the direction of one of the teachers at the school. The students normally divide into sub-groups, each dedicated for one topic or more. After some time spent studying, they are gathered to answer those questions online within a set timeframe.

After this, the 50-odd teams get whittled down to 30-odd for the second stage, and the process is repeated. Those 30-odd teams are in turn whittled down to 5 for the finals, for which they are taken (on a school day!) to TAU to hear three lectures. Then they are sent to separate rooms, where they answer questions related to those lectures. Finally, there’s a big ceremony and the top three places are announced.

Now, the second stage (or sometimes the first) usually requires basic knowledge of a given languge: one time it was Old High German, another time it was Esperanto, another year it was Italian, and that’s as far as my knowledge goes.

My personal connection

When I was 18, a loose friend of mine randomly asked me if I was familiar with the competition, and if I was willing to help her because she had to study a language for it and she knew I was a language geek. What she didn’t know was that I had competed in the competition myself twice: when I was in the eighth grade, and again the following year. The first time I was there, the language was Mandarin; six kids wanted to learn it, but they all gave up pretty quickly, and I was the only one who stuck with it. Nowadays I speak a bit of Mandarin, but I’m not remotely fluent or anything. That year we also won the competition. (The next year there was no language, and we didn’t win, but we did get to the finals.)

Naturally, I was overcome with sweet nostalgia and said yes. When she told me she needed my help with learning Na’vi, I was even happier, even though I didn’t know the first thing about the language.

The process



The first thing I did was tell my friend to learn to read IPA while I read about the language on Wikipedia. Then we started making little sessions on MSN Messenger, in which I taught her linguistic terms and how they’re applied in Na’vi, based on the Wikipedia article on the language and later the Wikibooks articles on it, essentially translating what it said and improvising little drills on the way, like:

‘In this sentence, which word is in the accusative?’ (She’s a Russophone Ukrainian, which was somewhat helpful.)

‘How would you change the sentence to convey that you’re going hunting, but you’re not happy about it?’



‘Name the noun cases and the suffixes that indicate them.’

I also taught her what ejective consonants are; while I was familiar with the concept, I originally misread the name as ‘ejaculative’ and told her not to laugh at—she didn’t even know the English word ‘ejaculate’, though. It took her a while to master, but she was so proud when she got it.

Meanwhile, the other girls who comprised the Na’vi group tried learning Na’vi on their own, but they focused more on vocabulary, using a website they were given by the organizers. As a result, they didn’t know the first thing about grammar or pronunciation—my friend told me she’d heard one girl pronouncing px as [f] instad of [p’], and she explained the mistake to her (‘once I was done laughing’). So they pretty much divided the work so that my friend was in charge of grammar and pronunciation and her group mates were in charge of vocabulary, and then taught each other the material they’d studied.

At one point my friend told me about a funny incident that had happened that day: the teacher in charge of their team once came up to them while they were studying with the transcripts of our sessions. He wanted to say something, then noticed the transcripts, picked them up, turned pale, gave them a thumbs up, and went to talk to another group.

Conclusion

Eventually they didn’t really need my lessons. They just had to translate a very short text in Na’vi, then call TAU and pronounce Oe-l nga-ti kam-ei-e properly. (In case you’re wondering, it’s a Na’vi greeting featured prominently in the film, glossed as ‘I-ERG you-ACC see-LAUD’, i.e. ‘I see you and I’m happy about it’, but more like ‘I see the inner you’.) Furthermore, Na’vi grammar is pretty much made of a collection of the most esoteric grammatical features of human languages, and the language with the most similar grammar to Na’vi I know is Georgian (which also shares ejective consonants with it). Not only that, but they didn’t even pass the first stage.

But at least I sparked her interest in linguistics, and now she can write in her CV, ‘Languages: Hebrew, English, Russian, Japanese [which she was taking at Berlitz], Na’vi…’, and I can write, ‘Also, I was once a Na’vi teacher…’ (I actually did have that in my CV for a while, until I realized it was pretty cringe.)

And, of course, we both have an nice anecdote to share.

