In response to the current situation, we have decided to move online for the rest of the season and continue our scheduled sessions. The events are going to be organized in Discord, an online text and voice messaging application. We will try our best to stick to the regular format, including the introductory section, the small group discussions and the games. Find the latest event on our Facebook page to receive the invite link to our Discord server. The link will be posted in the event one day before the session.
Tag Archives: club
A healthy amount of English
Last Thursday was the second session of the spring season, and we were delighted to see that nearly 20 people joined us again, with a number of newcomers on board. In case you are a TAKE FIVE veteran, you may spot two new items in the room. The first one is a digital clock, and the second one is our brand new feature: the word of the day. At the beginning of each session we select somebody to say a random word which will later serve as an overarching theme for the night.
This time our session revolved around the topic of health and diseases, as we always like to reflect on current issues. In the game section, for instance, the groups were asked to come up with a ‘wacky’ disease for which they offered possible treatments, too. Combined with our word of the day, we had two variants of the “rainbow disease”. By the end we were struggling with breathing problems as we returned to our all-time favorite: Scattergories. Join us next time to become part of the fun!
Welcome aboard the chat carriage
The summer season is in full swing: last night we welcomed 13 lovely people in the backmost room of CDFŰ. Although we promised to bring you all up above the surface for the summer to catch some sunlight, we have encountered unforeseen difficulties, which eventually drew us back to our headquarters for at least two occasions.
Yesterday’s session revolved around the themes of summertime and festivals. We discussed how we prefer to spend our summer, and during the game section we even came up with crazy, or, as we call it, ‘wacky’ festival program ideas before we concluded the night with a game of Scattergories. If you have no plans for August yet, here’s our exhaustive list of offers:
- Chocolate Festival
- Sleeping Festival
- Impossible Festival
- Waiting for Time travelers to come back Festival (WTF)
- Tram and Metro Replacement Festival
About a year ago we felt that our format needed a few adjustments to make newcomers or shier guests feel more comfortable. We extended our introductory section with ice-breaker bits that are always done in pairs, allowing everybody to take it slow instead of being thrown in at the deep end. We also spiced up the section in which we used to pick one random topic for the night. We now offer three alternatives, but the attendees have to vote on enigmatic, two-word titles, without knowing exactly what the topics are about. The organizers max out their cheekiness by altering the two-word titles now and then to make unpopular topics seem more appealing.
Last night’s voting turned into a comedy show again when the title “repair services” received only one vote. Interestingly, “plastic bags” was not too popular either, even though it has been quite a hot issue recently. The winner was “chat carriages”:
“UK public transport companies decided to help their passengers connect during a one-day experiment. They introduced “chat carriages” where people could find conversation starter cards to try and get strangers to talk with each other while they were travelling.”
“We’re gonna go on a fifteen minutes break, but before that…” This is the point when we make our announcements for the rest of the day or the near future. This time we had quite a few things to share with the audience. First off, we awarded two more people with the Recurring Member Badge. One of the recipients was sixteen-year-old Anna, who, in the fall of 2018, quite swiftly became the highlight of our club with her fiery teenage presence and astonishingly sophisticated sense of humor.
Besides introducing the badge system, we will be facing another major change as of September: after eight years, the participation fee will be raised to 500 HUF, and it will no longer be optional. To favor our loyal attendees, there will be a premium membership plan, too, with a list of enticing privileges. Stay tuned until the end of this season for more information.
The upcoming session (July 25th) is going to be extraordinary. Two of the organizers will be teaching at an English course which overlaps with the TAKE FIVE meeting, so we have decided to do a crossover and bring the students along next time.
Click here to see our latest Facebook event.
Seven years and ninety seconds
“You have no more than ninety seconds to summarize your group’s discussion.” This is one of the phrases I have uttered at least a hundred times over the years. How many exactly? My gosh, the idea of this club popped out of my head in the summer of 2011. When we first sat down in the empty room of the art gallery seven years ago, I had no vision of 15-20 member groups filling up a bar room with their voices every second week. Today, if we walk down to CDFŰ, we have our flyers all over the place, and we are considered a top priority event there. A lot of people have at least heard about us. Every season somebody walks in saying: a friend of mine recommended this club to me. Not to mention the ones who simply googled ‘English club Budapest’, and they somehow ended up here.

The quintessential TAKE FIVE equipment: name tags, mushroom lamps, colored envelopes with the topics, laminated guidelines, and last but not least, the bell.
TAKE FIVE is a dream come true – one we did not even know we had. Nevertheless, this long road has its bumps and cracks too.
In January we were compelled to assemble a crisis team to unravel the reasons behind the ridiculously low attendance. I would say it was the first time we truly hit rock bottom. In such moments in our lives, it is good to have a childhood friend around. Besides a number of minor changes we agreed to make, Zoli – who has been a faithful partner in crime since kindergarten – “raised his hand” and verbalized the very essence of our existence. His words soon became our slogan, which we had never actually had before: come for the language, stay for the company.
This moment served as a sort of turning point to me (with the string and brass sections intensifying behind my back), since throughout these years I have kept focusing on English, and hardly ever stopped for a minute to contemplate how significant the rest is. As of now I have no doubts: TAKE FIVE is primarily a social event, and as a side project we provide a place for people to practice the language.
Especially during the last two years we have begun to broaden our horizons or, shall we say, expand our comfort zone and take on new ventures. In 2016 we organized two exclusive sessions for two groups of high school students, and in the winter of 2017 we announced our first Christmas charity campaign. In the meantime, our community is becoming more and more colorful by the month. We are opening up new channels in two particular directions. First off, a remarkable number of teenagers have joined us recently, with the youngest having been 13 years old.
What is more, we are proud to have welcomed three people with autism in the past two years. This is not the right time to discuss in detail what this extraordinary condition is about. It is enough to say that if they leave this place satisfied and they are ready to come back for a second time, that is the most valuable feedback we could ever possibly receive.
It is also life-changing to witness how shy and/or introverted people come to the club, and eventually spread their wings slowly but surely. I as a teenager would have been scared to death if I had been asked to talk in front of complete strangers. This is not the case with 16-year-old Anna who, quite similarly to my 14-year-old student Ambrus, sprang to her feet and took one of the hot seats to present a summary of her group’s discussion. In the above photo, two proud teachers are looking back at her, one of them being her form teacher and my colleague at the school, Ildi. Let us pause for a second to celebrate: it was the very first time in the history of the club for a student and their form teacher to appear together.
As far as our future is concerned, we have our evil plans, and not all of them are yet to be revealed. One thing we are willing to share with you: at the end of this season we will begin to award badges to our recurring members, as a way of expressing our gratitude for their loyalty. For starters, once you have attended the 10th session, you become eligible for our silver-blue badge, and your name will appear on our site. (If you so desire, of course.) In case you have been a hardcore member in the past years, you will receive a special golden-red badge. All badges will be awarded retrospectively too.
Over the course of seven years we have built up something amazing, which we could not have done without your support. We have our own format for the sessions, we have rituals, we have inside jokes, we have online forums, we have a reputation, but most importantly: we have a lovely and accepting community of enthusiastic people who either join us to brush up on their English, or join us to socialize, to make new friends. We can only hope that most of you come for both.
Voting for fun
The TAKE FIVE club has witnessed an exceptionally low attendance for as long as one year, but this tendency seems to be turning around now. Last Thursday, on April 12, no less than twenty people decided to spend a pleasant evening with us, and we are more than grateful for that. Among the old dogs we spotted quite a number of new members who are likely to mark the beginning of a prospective shift in our target audience. With the spring season in full swing, more and more of our students have been joining the sessions. The youngest member is an extraordinary 12-year-old gentleman who has the courage to speak in front of a crowd whenever it comes to games or the 90-second talk. The stunning diversity of the group have truly shaken (not stirred) up the life of the club.

The speakers are summarizing their group’s discussion in 90 seconds.
After a long brainstorming period in winter, we introduced a few changes in an attempt to fine-tune our format, and thus make it more inviting to all of our guests. As a starting point, we have extended the intro section so that newcomers have an opportunity to get to know the others and become more comfortable. We throw in a simple ice-breaker, preferably in pairs, to get the ball rolling. Besides the ice-breakers, we also agreed that once we form small groups for the upcoming discussion, people need time for some catching up and getting in the mood. As a cherry on top, we now have an entertaining and interactive way of selecting the topic of the day. If you join us next time, you can see it for yourself!
After introducing ourselves, we formed groups of three to play an amusing get-to-know-you game. There were three questions: What is your favorite food? What is your dream job? Where would you go if you could go anywhere? However, it was not you who had to answer, but your partners had to make guesses before you revealed the truth. The buzz of a crowd quickly overwhelmed the room while we struggled with sorting out the colored cards to assign the five small groups. The winner topic for the night was titled “A series of series”, and it raised questions about the necessity of making TV series out of books:
“…there are more and more series coming out every year. One of the latest was the announcement of a Lord of the Rings series. Do you think series can be a good way of adapting books (because they are longer than films, you can have all the details of a book)?“

Kincső is giving an inspiring speech about how she is going to continue what her brother started.
The rest of the night, that is, the game section took an unexpected turn. Since covering significant current issues has always been top priority for us, we had planned to bring up the elections in a way that it would not go against our own guidelines. We were not at all curious about who favored which political party. Instead, we intended to cover this topic with two hilarious games. First, as a warmer, the groups were asked to come up with whacky ways to vote, as part of the well-known “whacky inventions” series. The second and last game required even more creativity with a grain of acting on top: each group had to elect a candidate who would replace Zsombor as founder and organizer, and write a campaign speech to be presented by the candidate on the podium.
The breath-taking fun should not stop here. We will celebrate the arrival of our fresh members with a brand new board game from England called Scattergories. We hope you will enjoy playing it just as much as playing Taboo. In case you are interested in the upcoming session, check out the latest event on our Facebook page. You can also find the full photo album of last week’s meeting there.
5th Birthday
Gallery

This gallery contains 32 photos.
Ladies and Gentlemen, allow us to present to you a fine selection of the professional photographs taken at a special event celebrating the 5th birthday of the TAKE FIVE – English Language Club. All the credits go to Szilvia Liska.
Our second summer
Ah, how soon the summer goes by. You just blink one – because the darned sweat got into your eyes – and another one (damned blinding sunlight, I can’t open my eyelids, my pupils will disappear) and it’s gone. But don’t worry, TAKE FIVE will resume soon on the 22nd of September! Don’t forget, it will be a special occasion:
our 5th birthday!
The name of the club is TAKE FIVE, so you can imagine what the fuss is about. There will be a special topic and everything. And speaking of topics: the Topic Hat is about to run out, so we look to you to help us! If you have an idea, don’t hesitate to send it to one of the organisers.
Until then, you have a choice: you can read the brief summer summary, or if you have the time, why not read the longer, creative writing approach featuring the dystopian apocalyptic future.
So, for the short summary:
The summer went pretty well. After serious consideration and evaluating several options, we chose to have the first occasion in Muzikum. We had no idea that we would like the place so much that all of the summer sessions would be there. But we did and it was a good choice. We always had a summer themed game: a whacky summertime invention, a summertime cocktail or a summertime photo album that the members had to act out. Also, the organisers got in touch with their musical side, and after rewriting the lyrics to Walk Off the Earth’s Little Boxes, they performed the new version of the song titled Little Mushrooms. Towards the end most people must have been on holiday, as there were a bit fewer people than before. But that was never a problem, and we had fun nonetheless. All in all, it was a good summer to look back on, and now it’s time to look forward to the autumn (or fall for those who prefer US English) season. See you then!
(you can read the creative writing summary below the pictures)
The FALL of mankind
The days of the scorch are gone. We get a few afterburns every now and then, but that’s about it. The long haul to the everlasting winter and soulless cold has begun. Say what you want about heat, but at least it has a soul. It lives, pulsates around you, and like most living things, it can kill you. But I’d rather die at the hands of something that at least gives the impression of life rather than just a passive destructive force, like cold. It’s not even destructive… it just forces out all life. Like darkness, it creeps up, non-threatening at first, but then you find yourself cornered into a small hole, and you know it’s gonna be over soon. Best you can do is hope, but all you can do is fend off insanity. Well, some can do it, anyway. Not all of us. But now’s not the time to reminisce. Now’s the time to try and do whatever we can. For whatever reason you can tell yourself. Tell it hard enough, you might just believe it.
We rounded up whomever we could find. As the deserts started freezing over, it became easier. Those that survived came looking our way. Of course we can’t stay long in one place – I can already feel the ground here getting colder and colder each morning. All life shrivelling up, becoming a frozen memento of what it once was. Soon that would be us. Unless we come up with something. If there is anything to come up with.
I was tasked with gathering information. Whatever information I could get my hands on: art, manuals, a kid’s drawing on a freakin’ fridge, a flyer for some club. I got some good stuff over the time. It isn’t much, but then again, my whole mission is crazy. It is meant to guide those that will come after us. The future generations, maybe the ones born during the fall, perhaps even children of the winter. You never know when you might visit for the first time. You never know how long you might stay.
This one thing I found, it’s really interesting. Reminds me of a world I used to know. Used to be home. It used to be warm there. It’s just a flyer, nothing fancy. Colourful background, mainly orange. It’s an out of focus picture of people sitting around a table, talking. Having a good time. Once there was writing in the foreground, but the powerful rays of the sun have seen to it that it become faded. All you can make out now are ‘IAK IV’. Although some say the first letter is a ‘T’. Whatever it is, it used to be a language club. During the days of the scorch it was quite popular.
I went down to the archives to find out more about this club. It was pretty much the same until, a few months ago, the name ‘Muzikum’ started popping up. Quite a few people visited the club. Their first meeting there went good enough. That place is pretty good. Dear Lord, back in those days you could go outside without protective gear. They must have enjoyed the sunlight and the warm. Letting it shine over them, heat their skin, fill them with energy. Like a loving caress. A warm hand running over you, yet untouchable. Before it became a strangling, burning grip… This club must have been doing something right. The second time they were at this new place they had even more visitors. I can’t tell much from these pictures, but it seems like they were acting out an imaginary holiday in three frames. Seems like fun. The organisers even rewrote the lyrics to a song and performed it. They also took imaginary trips to alternative universes, like a fairy tale or a superhero universe. How sweet. How innocent. Neither of those words mean much anymore.
Summer was a privilege back then, a time to rejoice and welcome the life it brought. We never thought we could have too much of it. After a while the sessions got homelier with less visitors, as if people were on holiday or something. Still, the club carried on and it looks like good fun. Sometimes they were inside, sometimes they could go outside. Their games are clearly of an era of hope. They always had something related to summer – a summertime cocktail, a summertime invention, summertime this, summertime that. I cringe from the phantom heat burning me just by reading about these.
Well, seems like this club had a good run. They say as the cold came, they moved underground. I suppose that’s as good an idea as any. Who knows, it might even make a difference. They might even carry on, keep humanity together with their English speaking and fun games.
I sometimes think that we won’t make it. More often than not, to be honest. I should be keeping hope alive, but… I don’t know. I don’t know if we can survive on the surface. It will become cold and unwelcoming. The rigid, uncompromising cold will take over, step by step, degree by degree. Those that are not frozen will have to endure for as long as they might, watching their breath billow away from them only to disappear in the chilly air. Just a puff of air, an ominous harbinger of what is to come. Of what will happen to all of us. Snuffed out by the cold, withering and alone, drained of all energy. At least in this club you wouldn’t be alone. If the cold’s about to get you, you may as well have fun and spend your time with a bunch of cool people. I guess that’s better.
I think I’ll go to this ‘IAK IV’ club or ‘TAK IV’ or whatever it was originally called. I need to have a look to see what would I find. If they are still there. Who knows, we may even see the sun again. But at least we’ll be together, no matter what.
Secret session
On 19 May the TAKE FIVE club passed another milestone on the freeway of its five-year history. We had the immense pleasure and honor of welcoming 10 first-year secondary school students to an extraordinary one-off session. In collaboration with their English teacher we paddled into uncharted waters to discover and embrace a long-dormant possibility of our club.
“Hi there, Take Five organizers! I’m Svoboda Róbert, English teacher from Budapest. Balázs knows me…” That’s how it all began. We agreed that a regular session would be deep water for the students with all the strangers (not to mention the psychological trauma Balázs is likely to cause with his mere appearance), so we put our heads together and decided to organize a one-time special event, elegantly squeezed in between two scheduled meetings. Our goal was to keep the original, academically acclaimed and at the same time world famous TAKE FIVE format, but adjust everything to the proficiency level and age group.

One speaker from each group summarized their discussion in a few sentences. On the tables you can see our newly-acquired mushrooms that the groups can turn on once they finish.
Robi was brave enough to join one of the preceding events to sit down with us and help us lay down the foundations. In harmonious cooperation we imposed our brilliant ideas on him, which he tacitly and respectfully accepted. Our final plans included an ice-breaker, three of the topics we had already used at the club, and two amusing picture-based creative writing tasks. The session lasted for two hours with a ten-minute break.
Despite the fact that I am quite used to being surrounded by ladies, I was preparing for the event with a more or less healthy gender ratio in my mind. If you take a brief look at any of the photos, you may see how close I got. I think I will never be able to write down in a public blog how terrified I felt when I saw ten teenage girls walk into the club in a straight line. They all settled down and we dived right into the introduction part. One of our most favorite ice-breakers is a game called alphabet, in which we scatter the letters of the alphabet all over the floor. Then we ask questions and everyone has to find the starting letter of their answers. The girls became pretty excited upon hearing the questions “What’s your favorite band/singer?” and “What’s your favorite TV show?”. I turned out to be the only one who was having trouble coming up with answers and finding the letters.

Robi was giving us a helping hand.
Our lovely guests began to feel more and more comfortable as time passed. I would probably have burst out crying and/or run away if I had been taken to a club like this in the first year of secondary school. But to my astonishment, these girls made themselves feel at home by the end. They were ready to volunteer when it came to summarizing the topics, the room was often filled with laughter, and – as far as I could see – they did enjoy most of what we had prepared with. The session was concluded with a round of applause and a volley of thank-yous.
As the founder of the TAKE FIVE club and as an English teacher, I can confirm that this exceptional occasion was nothing but the first step. From now on we are looking forward to working together with other schools as well to provide more and more students with a genuine English-speaking setting where they have a chance to put theory into practice.
Report on the Multiverse experiment
Ship’s log 2016/05/11
Entry number T-5.
It has been almost two weeks since the last TAKE FIVE session. I swear to God, sometimes those meetings are the only thing that keep me going. When we were asked by the International Multiverse Committee to investigate the gateway and the possible universes we can explore, I didn’t know what I would sign up for. Well, I’ve sure got a handful now. But we have to keep on going. For science.
As I’ve mentioned, it isn’t easy, examining these universes. We never know what twisted world we will set foot on. I mean some universes aren’t so bad: we’ve been to the future, we even met a whole new alien species! But there were some universes that bore an eerie resemblance to ours. I still get chills from the communist society we stumbled upon. Or the one where you are the only person in the whole universe… my blood curdles when I think about it.
The crew is more than satisfactory. It’s a great team, and we complement each other with our individual skill sets. It’s amazing how well-oiled sometimes work goes. Of course, it’s not all easy. But we do try. The experiments are on schedule, and many of our findings may alter the way we think about life and English clubs. The IMC knew what they were doing when they asked us for the job – I can only hope that we’ll continue in the same vein and deliver on the promises that are expected of us.
As the ship’s Speech and Lame Puns Officer it is my duty to check for and analyse all forms of linguistic communication we find in these universes, and try to make a badly formed joke on words out of them. It’s not always easy, but as long as there are inhabitants, we’ll manage. It would be hard to crack a joke about a universe with no-one in it. Although if we called it a blank-verse we might get the literature majors to move there, as long as they don’t notice the hyphen. Well, one can always hope.
The mission was off to a good start, but our work is far from over. We had to send out Era on a special sole expedition. The girl’s got guts, I gotta give her that. I know she can handle herself, but still I worry. Until she returns it’s just Zsombor and I, so we’ve got our work cut out for us. I’ll be interested to see though what she comes back with. I hope it’s not the place where people wear 90s clothes, have 80s hair and talk like in the 50s. Science has so far failed to explain any of those things. They’re just… not natural. All that denim and windbreakers, those curls and waves, and those sounds… I mean if there were a universe where the eyes could vomit and the ears could weep that would be it. I desperately hope for Era’s safe return – this expedition would be lost without her.
Speaking of which, which universe do you think we should go to next?
Saint Patrick’s Parade
March 17 was undoubtedly a noteworthy day this year. We organized the fourth TAKE FIVE session of the spring season. Oh, and Saint Patrick’s Day happens to have fallen on the very same Thursday. For this negligible reason we decided to go off the weather-beaten track and invite our visitors to celebrate this special day with us. We also had the honor to welcome an extraordinary guest.
We took off with the following introductory question: what would you be a patron saint of? Then, instead of reaching for the color envelopes, we continued with a nice Saint Patrick’s Day quiz compiled by Era. It contained twelve questions carefully arranged in order of difficulty. We had the wonderful plan of showing the questions on the big screen using a PPT. As the saying goes: man proposes, CD-FŰ disposes. The TV had been moved to the other room for the darts players. Mastering your ability to improvise is among the perks of being a club organizer. We ended up reading out the questions one by one. In each round the members of the three small groups had to put their heads together and find the answer in one-two minutes.

The two organizers on the left are immersed in a riveting debate on how many beers they were going to order in the break. They even wrote it down just to be on the safe side.
We concluded this exciting show with two extra questions, one of which was “How many million pints of Guinness are consumed world-wide on St. Patrick’s Day?” (The astounding answer is 13 million pints.) The extra questions served as a smooth and almost unnoticeable transition to the topic of the day. The credit for the description goes to Balázs.
IT’S SAINT PADDY’S, HAVE A PINT!
Saint Patrick’s Day is celebrated all around the world. Not only is it celebrated, people celebrate it in fashion – mostly dressing up in green and getting severely drunk. This happens more than enough at other occasions as well, but on Saint Patrick’s Day it is definitely encouraged. Do you think that it is wrong to encourage drinking on a society level because it maximises peer pressure, or it doesn’t matter because anyone can say no whenever they want to? Do you think that peer pressure is harmful in general? Have you ever done something out of peer pressure – because everyone else was doing it?
The questions of social drinking and peer pressure planted the seeds for an insightful discussion, which was later crowned by the four speakers on the podium. After they had presented their thoughts on the matter, the conversation shifted from the original topic to social media – whether creating a Facebook account could also be the result of peer pressure today.

Before the break, Era and I read out the trivia questions again with the correct answers, and announced the winner group. As a prize each member of the group could choose one thing from the menu for free.
However hard we tried, we didn’t manage to withhold our creative power when it came to the game. We had previously made a list of all the patron saints the people had said as their answer to the introductory question. We started off by giving one patron saint from the list to each group. They were then asked to come up with a name and a brief history for their saints. Finally, one person from each group took the hot seat and read out their stories. The game turned out to be so successful that it became more and more difficult to breathe from the laughter as the speakers took turns. It was indeed the perfect way to end our Saint Patrick’s Day event.
English Club Crossover
As Mac Taylor and Horatio Caine from the two CSI series met occasionally in crossover episodes, a kind gentleman from another English club was among our guests that night. Balázs and I spent an hour talking with Gergő before saying goodnight. He told us that they had founded their club just recently, and we were invited to check it out in the near future. Their club is called Chatterbox Chat Club. (Click here to see their Facebook group.) We were delighted to receive lots of compliments from Gergő on our work.
As you know, you can always find our latest event on Facebook. Keep in mind that we are open to your topic recommendations. Feel free to contact us and tell us about your ideas.