{"id":1281,"date":"2009-12-30T21:15:28","date_gmt":"2009-12-30T21:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1281"},"modified":"2009-12-30T21:15:28","modified_gmt":"2009-12-30T21:15:28","slug":"zsoka-neni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1281","title":{"rendered":"Zs\u00f3ka n\u00e9ni"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s just been a little over eleven months since my uncle J\u00f3ska died<\/a>… and now it’s one of my aunt’s turn, aunt Zs\u00f3ka (as a child, I called her Zs\u00f3ka n\u00e9ni) died in her sleep this morning in Budapest.<\/p>\n

I have Zs\u00f3ka n\u00e9ni to thank for many things, most notably for improving my English. I was around 16 at the time, and I was complaining to her that despite my best efforts, my English is still not anywhere near where I think it ought to be. Her advice: go read a book or two. And don’t use a dictionary, figure it out yourself.<\/p>\n

The first ever book I read in English was a gift from her: The Eagle Has Landed<\/a>, by Jack Higgins. It took a year or so, and several false starts before I was able to get to the end. But my next book took only a few months; the next, just a few weeks; and after that, I was reading English almost as well as I was reading Hungarian.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, a few years later when I came to Canada, near fluency in the English language was a tremendous asset. Instead of washing dishes or selling hamburgers, my first job in this country involved writing C-language driver code for a government client. Thanks in large part to Zs\u00f3ka n\u00e9ni.<\/p>\n

Who is no longer with us. She was 77, the oldest of four siblings; now only two of them remain, my mother and my aunt Edina. I hope both of them will remain with us, in good health and in good spirits, for many more years, never mind years, how about decades, to come.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s just been a little over eleven months since my uncle J\u00f3ska died… and now it’s one of my aunt’s turn, aunt Zs\u00f3ka (as a child, I called her Zs\u00f3ka n\u00e9ni) died in her sleep this morning in Budapest. I have Zs\u00f3ka n\u00e9ni to thank for many things, most notably for improving my English. I […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-35-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1281"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1283,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions\/1283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}