Continuing with the stories about Italian, Spanish and Russian.

In my first year at University I had to choose a second language. I didn’t know which one to choose, but my father told me that at the end of the first year, in the summer, there is a chance I can go to Milan to stay at an apartment of a business friend of his who will be out of town. So I took Italian. Unfortunately my Italian professor wasn’t very good (or I was bad at learning a language in the “scholarly way”) so I didn’t learn anything throughout the year even though I was regularly visiting the lectures. This was worrying as I had an oral exam to take. I was pinning my hopes on that trip to Milan. When that one came, in the summer of 1995, I was feeling as lost as possible. It was my first trip completely alone (I even had to take a bus to Belgrade to take the flight to Milan) and upon landing in Milan I had no idea where I had to go. I somehow found the bus to take me to the Central Station and when I got off I had no idea where in the city I was. I had one map of the city with a circle around the address of the apartment but since I couldn’t see where I was at that moment (in spite of me finding a McDonalds and sitting down and carefully studying the map) it was of no use. I wandered around for a while and eventually got tired, so I decided to take a taxi. I found one, but the driver refused to drive me to the address! He explained (in Italian, of course, which I didn’t understand one bit!) that I was very close to the apartment and I could walk there. Sign language helped as he pointed me towards the street and after some walking I finally found my home in Milan!

Apart from trying to learn the language my idea of going to Italy was to play tournaments. So I bought some chess magazines where the tournaments were announced and I started calling them. This was the biggest frustration as they didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Italian (often I forced myself to, leading to more frustration) so it was very difficult to get the information I needed. I barely opened my mouth in Italian for the month I spent in Italy that summer. But I was exposed to the language all the time around me, both in spoken and written, and upon returning to Skopje I was amazed at the miracle that happened at the exam. When I opened my mouth to speak I started to speak fluently! The professor was as shocked as I was, she couldn’t understand how a student who didn’t know a single thing during the year now suddenly speaks fluently! So the exam consisted of me basically retelling my Italian trip and she enjoying the story. Needless to say I got the highest grade.

If this wasn’t strange enough, the fact that the exactly same story repeated during the second year at University makes it even more perplexing. As the lectures started I again returned to the “know nothing, understand nothing” student. I couldn’t follow the lectures, which this time were more complicated, and I also had problems understanding when things were discussed in class. After another year of frustration I went to Italy again in the summer (this was in 1996) and it had exactly the same effect as the year before – in spite of me not speaking the language (I remember a funny story when after struggling to find a tournament address I ran into a chess player who was also looking for it and when we found it he told me “Abbiamo trovato il torneo”, meaning “we found the tournament” but I didn’t understand that simple sentence then, it only dawned on me the following day what it meant) it was the exposure that did the work and when I returned and took the exam it was with the same success as the year before.

In 1996 I visited France and Spain for the first time, but while I started to play in France more often almost immediately, Spain was still further in the future for me. As for Italian, I kept on going there every single year and was spending more and more time there playing tournaments and soon enough I was speaking it fluently. I must say that I don’t speak it in the way I’d like to, for example I never use congiuntivo and passato remoto, but after the years of frustration I’m just happy to feel comfortable when I speak it and when I’m in Italy.

The year 2005 was a huge year for me. I made my second GM norm and I travelled extensively. Two of those travels had big impact on my languages.

From May to July I spent a month and a half in Cuba and immediately after that a month and a half in Spain, all the time playing tournaments. These three months in Spanish-speaking countries helped me learn Spanish.

It is curious that I first learned Spanish in Cuba. It is different than the one in Spain and I was surprised to learn that when at the end of my stay in Cuba I understood Cubans talking to me I didn’t understand the Spanish in Spain!

The way I learned Spanish was again by exposure. My knowledge of Italian also helped, even though I often confused and mixed the two. I remember what helped me a lot was watching films on TV in English in Santa Clara that had subtitles in Spanish and this was very useful for me as I am a visual type who best remembers when he sees something in writing, thus helping me distinguish words and their meaning. Of course, the social life in Cuba is fantastic and the constant communication (or the attempts at it) sped up the process of learning. I remember one funny episode in the restaurant of the hotel in Santa Clara. For some reason GM Borges Mateos, who spoke only Spanish, and IM Schilow, who spoke Russian, thought that I am the best person to translate for them so they can communicate. As I described above Russian still sounded “nyanyanya” to me and in Spanish I could barely distinguish the words, but somehow I managed to enable them to understand each other! This is probably my most successful translation attempt ever!

Coming to Spain from Cuba took some time to adjust to the new accent but at the end of these 3 months in Spanish-speaking countries I could speak the language. Not ideal, of course, but I could understand it and people could understand me.

In the winter of the same year I had a chance to spend one month in Russia. I played a tournament in Saratov and then I spent some 20 days in Moscow. This is when Russian “clicked” for me. I started to distinguish the words from the “nyanyanya” and since I already had enough book knowledge of words from my childhood and chess books I could easily start talking. My accent was far from perfect, but for me the feeling of comfort with a language and in a country where that language is spoken is the measure by which I determine how well I speak a language.

There was a curious episode with my Russian. I was standing in line for a ticket in one museum and I noticed that for Russians the price of the tickets was literally cents, while for foreigners it was almost 40 times that much. So I thought there is no harm in trying to pretend I was Russian. While still standing in line I was thinking whether I should say something or just hand over the money. I knew I was running a risk to be recognised as a foreigner if I spoke… When my turn came I gave the cents for the ticket and with a tightly closed mouth said “один” (“one”). The cashier abruptly raised her head, looked at me sharply, but said nothing. She gave me the ticket and I walked away. I knew that if she talked I would have been exposed, but I was lucky she didn’t.

Ever since the end of 2005 I feel comfortable with Russian and speak it freely, which has helped me tremendously in the chess world.

In 2007 I was invited to live in Spain and it is then that I finally mastered Spanish. That year I also went to Cuba but this time I felt different and much more comfortable, practically serving as the local guide for the foreign players. It was a great time going to discotheques in Havana and mingling with the locals. Starting from 2007 I lived in Spain for 2 years and as my job consisted of coaching the kids in the local club. I was forced to speak Spanish all the time and this meant that finally I felt in Spain like at home.

After feeling at home with Spanish I was surprised to find out that it has overtaken my Italian and in the period 2009-2010 I had problems in Italy as all the time the Spanish words were coming out of my mouth! This was frustrating, but then things evened out as I started to go more often in Italy and eventually both languages somehow “separated” in my head.

Nowadays it is a nice feeling to go to Italy or Spain and feel like home. It brings back memories from decades ago and I really feel comfortable in these countries. And I am happy for that.

People have told me that I have talent for languages. I don’t know what that means, but I suppose it’s the same for talented chess players – it just comes naturally. It’s not always easy, but sooner rather than later you overcome the difficulty and come to a new level.

This concludes the stories of the languages I learned. I have been asked whether I’ll learn another language, to which I always say “I don’t think so” even though I’ve always liked the sound of French. But as I don’t see myself spending a prolongued time in France I think that for now I’ll stay with the above 7.

This post is from my newsletter. Some time ago I decided to put down to (virtual) paper the stories of how I picked up the languages that I speak. I think it makes for an interesting reading, so here I share it again.

After reading my Coaching and Playing email, Scott, a reader of this newsletter, pointed out that perhaps there is similarity between teaching a language and learning a language in the same way there is similarity between coaching and playing chess. While I have never taught a language, I have managed to learn a few and this comment spurred me to write the story of each language I have learnt.

There is no direct chess connection in this email, but if it wasn’t for chess I would have never been in all these situations where I was exposed to the languages I eventually learned.

I speak 7 languages: Macedonian, English, Serbian, Bulgarian, Spanish, Italian and Russian. I understand some French and I can say a few things in it, but I don’t really count it as a language I know. While Macedonian is my mother tongue, all the others have a different story how I came to master them. Here are their stories in chronological order.

The second language I learned was English. I was always in contact with the language since I was a child, even though living in Yugoslavia this wasn’t always that easy. I think it was my father’s interest in western culture that brought the language in the house. Both him and my mother went to English courses and they knew to speak it. I think an important factor in my grasp of the English was that when I was 6 or 7 my parents bought a ZX Spectrum computer and I was fascinated by it, even more so by all the games I could play on it. The computer worked in the computer language Basic and I learned some of the commands and how to write simple programs in it. The games were also in English (my favourite was Football Manager) and I was forced to learn in order to be able to play them. I was constantly asking my father what something meant and we also had two huge volumes of English-Serbo-Croatian and vice versa dictionaries that I quickly learned how to use. A bit later, when I was around 10 my parents sent me to the School for Foreign Languages which I visited until I was 18. Long before the end of those courses I spoke, read and wrote English without a single problem and this only made my University studies in English Language and Literature more pleasant and easy. English became an integral part of me so much that I often think in it and I even don’t remember a time when I didn’t speak it in some way.

Serbo-Croatian was the official language of the country I was born in, Yugoslavia. I was constantly exposed to it when I was a child as there were many books, newspapers, comic books and TV shows that I was consuming that were in that language. Similarly to English it didn’t feel like a foreign language and I never felt like I had to “learn it”, I just understood it. When I started going to tournaments in Yugoslavia as a junior and I got to know people from the country I started to speak it. The language has cases, unlike Macedonian and English, but this has never been a problem for me even though I never learned them – in fact this gave me some problems in school later on when we were learning the cases as I couldn’t really be bothered by the grammar when I could speak the language without mistakes. Generally, and this applies to all the languages I speak, I never liked grammar and never studied it, always relying on the exposure to the language and speaking it myself.

[Curiously enough, I also struggled when I had to learn “logical languages” like Latin in high school and Old English at University.]

Bulgarian is a language I also assimilated quickly. In the early 90s there were many tournaments in Bulgaria which were easy to go to and were rather cheap to play in. Bulgarian always sounded to me as mixture of Macedonian and Russian and I never had problems understanding Bulgarians when they spoke to me. This led me to conclude that they can also understand me when I spoke Macedonian to them, but while this was mostly true for the chess players, it wasn’t so for the other people. So what usually happened was me speaking Macedonian to the chess players, them speaking in Bulgarian and we understood each other perfectly, while I spoke Bulgarian to people outside the chess world. A bit later, at the beginning of the new century, I had a Bulgarian girlfriend and I was spending a lot of time in the country, which only made me more comfortable with the language.

These three languages were the only ones I spoke for quite some time. As a child I was also exposed to Russian, because of the many Russian chess books we had at home and my father also knew some Russian. He even made the Herculean effort to translate Nimzowitsch’s My System from Russian, writing in a notebook, so he can read it while we were going over the book. After a while I started to read the chess books in Russian myself, but as I later found out a funny thing happened with this “reading.” While after a while (bugging my father for the meaning of the words and later constantly using a dictionary) I could understand 100% of the chess books I realised that this wasn’t the case when what was written wasn’t about chess. I discovered this when I attempted to read Botvinnik’s memoires about his life. I saw that when he was talking about chess I could understand everything, but when he was talking about other topics I understood very little. Another issue was that at that time I didn’t realise that what was written was not pronounced in the same way as the letters used, a bit similar to English. I was rudely awakened to this difference when I first heard Russians speak at a tournament – it all sounded like “nyanyanyanya” to me! So I couldn’t speak or understand spoken Russian until 2005 when I spent one month in Russia.

In the next installement I will tell how I learned Italian, Spanish and Russian.

It’s been a month since I last posted and this is the longest period I’ve gone without a post since I started this blog back in 2014.

As usual, I followed everything that was happening in the chess world, the Grand Swiss, the European Team Championship, the Fischer Random World Championship, to name just the biggest events. But I didn’t have the time to write about them, so I think this is a good opportunity to explain what I am so busy with and what my activities are nowadays.

The last period was entirely dedicated to the creation of my Chessable repertoire on the Anti-Sicilians. This was the plan ever since my Najdorf repertoire was published. I had to complete the work and provide a full repertoire after 1 e4, not just the Najdorf.

It took me quite some time to finish this and in order to do so I had to block out everything else. Now of course “everything else” is coming back with a vengeance. But first, this blog post.

Apart from my online coaching, I do quite a lot of writing. I write for a few websites (Chessable, The Chess World) and for British Chess Magazine. I have my newsletter, which I send out every week and of course this blog. I also have a YouTube channel, but that one has been the most neglected of all.

When I mentioned the coaching, this is not only online. On Friday I go to Montenegro to be a captain and coach of the Italian women team of Caissa Pentole Agnelli in the European Women Club Cup.

I also manage to play a game or two from time to time. I love playing chess, but in view of all the other engagements this one suffered a heavy blow. So these games are mostly league games as I play in teams in England and Germany (with the odd game in the Swiss league).

The above has been about chess. However, I am also involved in chess politics. Ever since I became a President of the ACP this spring I have had a lot of obligations on this front. These are mostly “under the hood” and rarely see the light of day. What the public sees will be an official announcement, while what happened before and led to that announcement is never mentioned. I can assure you that a lot happens and that it is hard work!

My work in FIDE is different, as it is of a less political character. I am a member of the FIDE Fair Play Commission (formerly known as the Anti-Cheating Commission). Here the work is expanding by the minute with the cheating cases we need to work on coming in on regular basis. There are many problems here as well that take away both time and energy.

When you add to the above the need for some time off, family time, meeting friends and probably also time to breathe, I think you get a pretty good idea why I called this blog post “busy times”.

To wrap up, just a fact from my upcoming schedule: in the period starting this coming Friday, 8 November, when I leave for Montenegro, until before Christmas (24 December) I will spend mere 13 days at home. The other 33 days I will be away travelling. Busy times indeed.

Solving studies is never easy, but it is very beneficial.

It develops the good habits of disciplined and structured thinking and often demands self-control in a situation where it appears that one side has a lot of options. In such cases it is of primary concern to control the feeling of overwhelm and tackle all options one by one.

The following position is a late favourite of mine. I have written before of my fascination when it comes to the theme of domination and this study by Rinck from 1922 is a beautiful illustration.

White’s last move was 1 Ng7-e6. On an empty board with seemingly a huge number of possible moves Black can simply resign as he is losing the rook in all the variations. Try to figure out the lines, it’s a simple exercise and the lines are maximum 2 moves long.

On Monday I start the European Individual Championship and these tournaments have always been very difficult for me. I think this one will be the last one I ever play, so my only hope it to improve on my previous (horrendous) results. Soon enough we’ll see how that will pan out.

When I was a kid my father bought me the computer Mephisto Munchen. A multiple-world champion on a heavy wooden board, Staunton pieces and a strong opponent were a good substitute for practical play when I couldn’t play tournaments (and that was most of the time during school years).

Some days ago I received another chess-playing board. It definitely brought back some childhood memories. Heavy wooden board, Staunton pieces, strong sparring partner. This time it came in a big box.

Inside this box, there was another box, a white one.

The World’s Smartest Chessboard, Kingdom Set. That definitely sounded royal when I read it to myself. So I continued to unwrap the package.

I wondered what was in the envelope.

As it turned out, instructions how to start the whole process. The Square Off app is used to connect the mobile phone with the board so that it is used for pretty much everything – playing the game, challenging other people on the internet and choosing the strength of the engine. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I was curious to see the pieces. I have a soft spot for nice pieces and they didn’t dissapoint.

I guess it wasn’t called Kingdom Set for nothing. Next to the pieces is the adapter, with the conveniently provided plug for European sockets, as you can see below.

When everything was out of the box, I finally I set up the pieces and moved them around, just to get a feeling for the board and how the pieces glide over it.

After taking my time to enjoy the aesthetics, I eventually connected the phone with the board (via the Square Off app) and started a game against Level 16, rated at 2205. There are 20 levels, rated from 800 to 3380. The last three levels (20, 19 and 18) are rated 3380, 3185 and 2606 respectively, while already Level 17 is rated 2295. Quite a lot of variety for any type of user, from a professional to the casual player.

Naturally, for the world’s smartest chessboard the actual movement of the pieces was the real spectacle. For somebody who was used to moving Mephisto’s moves on the board, this was quite impressive. This is how that looked.

After checking Stockfish (no need to ask about the result) I tried challenging other people online (always via the app). I managed to play one game against a user. It all went smoothly (pun intended) and my only quibble was that I couldn’t see the clock and the time left during the game.

If you ever wanted to play chess with somebody (human or engine) but there was no one around and you didn’t want to use a laptop or phone and wanted the real feeling of actually touching and moving the pieces instead, the world’s smartest chess is made for you. And the best part about it, you even won’t have to move your opponent’s pieces, something that bothered me when I was playing the Mephisto.

With all of the above, it is understandable that the world’s smartest chessboard doesn’t come cheap. But my readers can use the promo code ALEX10 for a 10% discount on the official prices. I would also like to know how others find the experience of playing against an “invisible opponent”. My advice would be just to make sure not to choose too high a level. After all, why not enhance the joy of playing “real” chess with some pretty sacrificial and winning attacks?