We are moving online!

Posted on March 27, 2020 by Zsombor

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.

A healthy amount of English

Posted on February 13, 2020 by Zsombor

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!

Hurricane of laughter

Posted on September 23, 2017 by Zsombor

Three Americans walk into an English club… and this is not a joke! One of our most loyal native speaker visitor, Sara, has been stunningly eager to advertise the club ever since she first joined us. About a year ago she rushed back to her homeland after hearing Balázs using his late-night Scottish accent, but now she’s back and fully recovered. (The rest of the organizers are on the mend.) Sara has made our heart melt with one of her Facebook posts in which she explains how difficult it must be for anyone without a great support system to immigrate to Hungary. “TAKE FIVE – English Language Club has been my safety net for sanity when things seem rough…” These kind and reassuring words could be considered a present for our 6th birthday.

6:17 pm. The spotlight is gone forever, and there’s no way to replace the bulb. Only a spherical lampshade on the ceiling is scattering some light around the club room while half a dozen of lamps are timidly glowing in the background as moral support. We should already be sitting around the table introducing ourselves, but probably thanks to the unexpected deluge raging out on the streets, only a few people are wandering around bemused. What we have in common with TV series: every season begins with the appearance of interesting new characters. I am more than excited to welcome three newcomers. I’m used to hearing “oh, my friend told me about the club” from new visitors, so my heart skips a beat when Józsi tells me he just googled “English club Budapest”.

“The crowd is overwhelming,” said I to greet tonight’s guests. Balázs kindly encourages me to drop the irony. He is right.

What thoughts or feelings does fall/autumn evoke in you? We agreed this would make a good introductory question for today. The room is soon filled with laughter as most people associate this season with fairly depressive thoughts. The dramatic effect could be boosted with the pouring rain… if the place had any windows. I can’t seem to smother the urge to share my favorite quote from David Letterman: “Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.” A heartfelt giggle erupts from four people as a way of showing empathy towards the aspiring club organizer.

We have new cards for forming groups. Balázs very wisely pointed out that orange cards with only numbers on them are easy to mix up. Therefore, he created cards of different colors. We had to polish our negotiation skills to find the golden mean between practicality and enthusiasm. His original plan was to put numbers on the colored cards in order to provide a “multi-sensory experience” for the people. I suggested we should not get carried away with such luxurious dreams. Colors will be just enough. Era helps us out by joining a two-member group in one of the corners. Today’s topic is “ALL BY OURSELVES?”, an experimental topic about extraterrestrial life. We decided to try topics that rely more on our imagination than our up-to-dateness on current issues.

Balázs and I are standing at the bar. The door opens and she walks in: a lady with ginger hair and glasses. She’s no stranger, she’s our lovely colleague with whom we joined forces to organize a six-day English course a month ago. I’m wondering if she’ll spot the outline of Mark Hamilton’s dead body on the club room floor – a prop that served as an important part of our murder mystery game for the English course.

Before we go on a fifteen minute break, we announce the launch of an unprecedented TAKE FIVE contest. Whoever attends at least four sessions or sends us a topic during the fall season will be put on the list of possible winners. In the end, we are going to pick a random person who wins a TAKE FIVE T-shirt. (Something I didn’t manage to find after having washed all of my clothes.)

Zoli is passionately presenting his group’s crazy invention.

7:55 pm. Let the fun begin! Just to get the ball rolling, we bring back our “whacky invention” game, but this time the groups have to invent a piece of equipment that helps defend ourselves against hurricanes. To all language learners’ delight (that is, all of the non-natives), by this time there are three Americans sitting in the room. What an ironic coincidence that we are dealing with hurricanes. The selected speakers from each group take the hot seat on the podium to present their inventions. They never fail to amaze me with their creativity and exceptional sense of humor. One of the things is a ukulele which, when being played, generates a protective bubble around itself.

For the last 45 minutes we put on a storytelling show – a kind of thing we usually have mixed feelings about. The concept of one person speaking while an audience is listening does not necessarily harmonize with the concept of a conversation club. Nonetheless, this one seems to work out well as we have spiced it up with an interactive feature. The game is the following: one person takes the hot seat and begins to share a memorable summer story with the audience. At random moments, Balázs rings the bell and the storyteller freezes. Anyone from the audience can guess how the story is going to continue. We can hardly breathe as born stand-up comedian Jake presents his story of a weird girl chasing him with her love. It seems that Americans are here to bring our talk shows up to standard.

9:00 pm sharp. Let’s give a big hand to Jake! The podium is empty now. I glance at my phone and call it a day. We always take pride in being so precise. I thank them all for being here tonight, concluding my brief monologue with a modest, almost undetectable bow. Meanwhile, I’m very awkwardly trying to avoid making eye contact with them.

Where are we heading? I came to realize a while ago that running an English club requires an incredible degree of innovation and creativity. If we set out to be up-to-date with our topics, and we respond to several events as they are happening in the world, it is then inevitable that we constantly redefine ourselves as time passes. After six years of persistent (and at times painstaking) work, we have now decided to raise the club to a whole new level. From this season on, TAKE FIVE is diving headfirst into the world of charity. Not only do we want to donate money to certain organizations, but we also plan to appear at carefully selected institutes with special tailor-made club sessions.

If everything goes according to plan, the first such institute will be the Tüskevár school where I currently work. It would be a great honor to bring an extraordinary TAKE FIVE session to the school at the beginning of February.

Written by Zsombor

Summer has begun

Gallery

Posted on July 3, 2017 by Zsombor

This gallery contains 13 photos.

On June 22 we gathered for the opening session of the summer season. As always, we prefer to leave our headquarters in the summer to catch some sunlight. This year we contacted Magvető Café, and booked a few tables to … Continue reading →

Secret session

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Zsombor

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

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Balázs

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?

Freshmen and flyers

Posted on September 27, 2015 by Zsombor

“Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.” — David Letterman

September 17^th, 2015, a few minutes before 4:00 pm — we can hardly breathe. It is hot and stuffy in here. I am rolling up my sleeves in front of the mirror and wash my face. We are ready to go. Balázs and I step out of the bathroom and set out towards the lobby on the fourth floor. The venue is Building R on our campus. As we get closer, the indistinct noise of a small crowd fades in. We catch sight of Era, greet her, and the three of us settle down on a desk by the wall. The place is jam-packed with people. There are only a few untaken seats. We are waiting for our turn, perplexed.

It is time. Margit Szesztay announces the TAKE FIVE club and calls our names. I grab the packet of freshly printed flyers and take it to the “stage”. We are in the spotlight. Dozens of freshmen, graduate students and teachers are staring at us curiously. Here we go. The presentation doesn’t take off seamlessly, but that is only how we feel. The audience seems to resonate with us. They respond with laughter to every little joke. Before we finish up, I address the freshmen and encourage them to join us today for our fall season opening. “Thank you very much for your attention.” A round of applause ensues.

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A couple of students run to us for flyers and ask about the club enthusiastically. A girl and a boy appear. They would come with us and check out the club, they say. While we are waiting to move on to CD-FŰ, I strike up a conversation with them. Dorina and Dani are both first-year teacher trainees of the freshly reintroduced undivided program. I tell them not to worry about the uninteresting introductory courses. The best is yet to come.

6:00 pm — after having woven our way through the jungle of narrow streets, we arrive at CD-FŰ. The ever-delightful manager lady welcomes us with a smile. I fish the stack of flyers out of my backpack and walk up to her. I feel the bonds between TAKE FIVE and CD-FŰ are becoming stronger. They have shared our event first time since we moved here. We have put their logo on the flyer. She is grateful, and so are we. I hand her about fifteen pieces and she places them on the counter.

There is no crowd today. I count thirteen participants, including the three of us. I am holding the first color envelope in my hand. The topic is “Good intentions”. After a few minutes it turns out to be somewhat philosophical, not easily tangible. Nevertheless, the groups are eagerly discussing it, sometimes going off on a tangent. I decide to bring one more topic in, to resolve the tightening philosophical atmosphere. “Cursive writing is obsolete, or is it?” says the description. This will do, I think.

flyers2

Around 8:00 pm — we are smack dab in the middle of the game. The groups are inventing funny university courses, such as “How to be cool I.” Three more guests arrive and sit down at the farthest table. To my great surprise, James Leavey walks in. He used to be my language practice teacher in the first year. I have been expecting him for a while. He spots the beers behind us and decides to join. On the way to the bar we discuss the problem of quantity. In Hungary, a glass of beer is the small one. A pint of beer is more, but in many countries it is not the same amount as a korsó here. It is not a challenge to bridge the cultural gap, though: he orders a glass of Soproni, in Hungarian.

The fall season of 2015 is in full swing now. I kindly remind everyone to pester us with topic ideas as the black cylinder hat is getting more and more hollow. Contribute to this new season with your precious thoughts and get ready for the upcoming session! The forecast says there is an impending swarm of freshmen arriving on Thursday, 6:00 pm. Besides them, we are missing a few old dogs. Are you joining us next time?

Full house with poker face

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Zsombor

Ladies and Gentlemen, the meeting of 23 July bears special significance. We could even go as far as to say that it is a milestone in the history of our club. At 5:45 pm Era, Balázs (wearing a kilt) and I were sitting at a table drinking and eating. Little did we know that in two hours’ time we would be surrounded by a total of 19 visitors. Era was astounded, Balázs was overwhelmed, and I was flabbergasted. (Later on we switched emotions in rotation.)

Whilst the modest crowd of people were discussing the current topic – Plugged In – we kept asking the same question deep down in our souls (and occasionally out loud): is this manageable? After a brief period of breathless deliberation, we came to the following conclusion: yes, it is. And our hearts are filled with joy and excitement. However, our heart rate tends to strike an unhealthy level whenever we remember that our presentation for the freshmen is yet to come…

Over the summer we have been experimenting with new places, but for the fifth session we plan to return to the headquarters. The reason is that the two bars we have tried are too hot and/or too small, while at CD-FŰ the climate is just perfect, and we have the possibility of booking the whole room for at least twenty people.

You will find the event on Monday. Until then, check out the latest photos!

The more the merrier

Posted on February 15, 2015 by Zsombor

Three days ago the club came to life with a loud and chaotic opening session. No less than 13 people attended the first meeting of the season, which is quite encouraging and startling at the same time. When we moved to this fantastic bar last year, we started off in the smallest possible room. One year passed and we ended up in the backmost room where all these people could sit around a long table comfortably.

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What if the number of visitors keeps rising? We have already hired a bunch of highly skilled economists and mathematicians to calculate probable outcomes of this tendency. It’s not that we dislike the increasing popularity of our club, but – and now comes the serious part – if we go on like this, we will have to consider making changes to the agenda to make it fit a generally bigger group of visitors. We will see.

This time we did not yet have any topics prepared. The plan was to sit down together and discuss recommendations. All thirteen people introduced themselves in two and a half sentences for the sake of the newcomers. (Balázs either said twenty sentences or used lots of commas.) We also played a brief catch-up game in which everyone had to tell us about one of their best and one of their worst experiences from the past two months.

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From the next session onwards the one and only, the original, the genuine, the peculiar TAKE FIVE routine will keep the discussion on track with the usual warm-up questions, the colored envelopes, and the ever-amusing games. Keep in mind that we gladly take your recommendations both regarding the topics and the games. Feel free to harrass us on Facebook. See you on February 26!

Special thanks to Kla for the photos! Check out her photography, and our Facebook for a few more photos from Thursday.

Winter Course, 2015

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Zsombor

February 1, 2015: We spent a long day with a group of enthusiastic English learners (A2 and B2 levels). The daily menu contained amusing introductory games, a bit of grammar practice, translation, whodunnit, and gap-filling listening exercises. For dessert, we offered short “Awkward Situation” scenes written and performed by the teachers themselves. This was only the first intensitve English course for 2015. Stay tuned until the next two-day summer course!

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TAKE FIVE — English Language Club

Come for the language, stay for the company.

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