Lol, I'm in a mood; you really don't want to hear my rant about women whinging on about "that time of the month" and expecting to be taken seriously "the rest of the time"
Nothing at all to do with "that time of the month" and everything to do with we have to live in the world we're in...
Also, I'm pleasantly surprised at how much of the spanish-language TV I understand, despite never taking a lick of spanish lessons in my life. Trabaja a Tejas, habla espanol.
I find Spanish and French easy because they're closely related; the trouble I have is I often intermingle the two in once sentence.
German is completely impossible for me; I've tried several times but it's hard for me to get the hang of. I think it's because one of my family languages was Yiddish -- again, I keep mixing them up.
I speak French reasonably well, read it well enough to read some literature in the original text. Unfortunately the more spanish and afrikaans I learn, the more french I forget.
I never learned enough Maori to start crowding out the Hawaiian I learned years ago, although I did run into some interesting linguistic oopsies. Was seriously confused about why people kept talking about eating salt water, until I learned that the Maori word for food is the same as the Hawaiian word for sea water. I also had several "duh" moments when I connected the linguistic dots between Hawaiian, Maori, and Samoan.
See, the difference in my case is, if I mangle Spanish and French, people tend to laugh. If I mangle German and Yiddish, that can be, er, culturally dodgy in certain circumstances, if you catch my drift.
First time in Paris, hanging out with a Parisian friend, I kept flummoxing her by saying things like, "OMG Champs-Elysees means Elysian Fields! How cool!" and "Are female gendarmes called dames d'armes?"
More that she was a native French speaker and had never made the connection with these words that she heard every day. She'd never thought of gendarme actually meaning "man at arms", you know?
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Also, I'm pleasantly surprised at how much of the spanish-language TV I understand, despite never taking a lick of spanish lessons in my life. Trabaja a Tejas, habla espanol.
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German is completely impossible for me; I've tried several times but it's hard for me to get the hang of. I think it's because one of my family languages was Yiddish -- again, I keep mixing them up.
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I never learned enough Maori to start crowding out the Hawaiian I learned years ago, although I did run into some interesting linguistic oopsies. Was seriously confused about why people kept talking about eating salt water, until I learned that the Maori word for food is the same as the Hawaiian word for sea water. I also had several "duh" moments when I connected the linguistic dots between Hawaiian, Maori, and Samoan.
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See, the difference in my case is, if I mangle Spanish and French, people tend to laugh. If I mangle German and Yiddish, that can be, er, culturally dodgy in certain circumstances, if you catch my drift.
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When the light bulb in my head went off and I realized that Talofa = Te Aroha = Aloha, you could have seen it from space.
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*snicker*
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And yes,yiddish and low german are basically sleeping together.
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