Languages

[Rain611]

I could kinda read your Spanish, Uniq, so I guess I retained a little more than I thought lol.

Mein Deutsch ist okay, doch ich schriebe besser als ich horen. Ich habe das Deutsch fuer mehrere Jahren lernen. Kannst du verstehen?

(My German is okay, but I write better than I listen. I have been learning German for many years. Can you understand?)

I still lack confidence because of my sad extent of conversation with actual speakers, but at the same time if I was dropped in Germany tomorrow I wouldn't exactly be worried about asking for necessities. And perfecting my grammar will probably take many more years lol.

 

[Jonipoon]

Intresting topic. Whenever I meet people from different countries, talking about languages and differences between them is always something that comes up, and its alot of fun.

I currently speak Swedish (my mother tongue), English, and Chinese fluently, although my Chinese is a bit rusty. I used to be able to speak German pretty well too, but since I'm not keeping it alive it gets worse and worse every year.

I don't really plan to nor want to study another language in the near future, but sometimes I think about which other languages would be "cool" to speak. What usually comes up is Russian, Japanese, Turkish and Arabic. I would probably never be able to commit to such hard studying at my age now, though. :lol:

 

[Rain611]

Russian is good fun to learn. I would actually like to revisit my Russian lessons. The words are fun to say, they just roll off the tongue perfectly lol.

 

[UniqTeas]

When I was in Martinique (A French speaking Caribbean island) - my step dad got in a minor bump with another vehicle. Not unexpected since we had like a 15 person MEGA van and the roads in Martinique are about the width of a single cattle. We ended up causing a small traffic back up which I tried to clear up. But a lot of the island speaks only French and Google translate took about 2 minutes to translate ANYTHING for me. It sucked. Eventually, I got in to the driver side and drove 10 meters to an empty parking lot.

My step-dad, mother, and the initial guy whose mirror we bumped had a long drawn out argument. You could see no damage was done to his vehicle and he was demanding we pay for his damaged bumper. No one could communicate since he spoke only French and they spoke only English. Eventually, we flagged a cop down to hopefully translate it and the guy literally broke down and said, "We don't need cops in this" and drove away. haha.

It was one of my better memories of the island in hindsight because the story is good. But man, I can't wait for REAL TIME translators to be a common phone feature.