What language do I speak?
Tonight Dan and I played Boggle together. We both knew something was wrong when we were seeing a good number of foreign words in the game. Niet, jie, huis and others would just pop out at us. I even wrote down one word, certain it was a word, but unable to place its sound.
Dan gently reminded me it was Chinese.
This isn't the first time we've had this problem. I've been known to pronounce an English word with the Dutch sounds, or write an English word with the Dutch sounds. "UI" in Dutch is like "OW" in English. So, when I want to write "town" these days, I have to be certain I'm not spelling it "tuin". (Which means "garden" in Dutch, by the way.)
Attending months of lectures by foreign professors have had an effect on Dan. Because of the English and Australian professors, he no longer is quite sure when to write "analyze" and when to write "analyse". He sees misspellings so often from the non-native English speaking profs and students, that some words don't look right even when they are.
I hope that this is just a phase, brought on by knowing only bits and pieces of three foreign languages each. And of course, it has something to do with being thrown into an environment where we see so much of a language we really do not know. Certainly, if we do ever become fluent in a foreign language, we will be able to distinguish that language from English from others we speak at lesser levels...right?
Dan gently reminded me it was Chinese.
This isn't the first time we've had this problem. I've been known to pronounce an English word with the Dutch sounds, or write an English word with the Dutch sounds. "UI" in Dutch is like "OW" in English. So, when I want to write "town" these days, I have to be certain I'm not spelling it "tuin". (Which means "garden" in Dutch, by the way.)
Attending months of lectures by foreign professors have had an effect on Dan. Because of the English and Australian professors, he no longer is quite sure when to write "analyze" and when to write "analyse". He sees misspellings so often from the non-native English speaking profs and students, that some words don't look right even when they are.
I hope that this is just a phase, brought on by knowing only bits and pieces of three foreign languages each. And of course, it has something to do with being thrown into an environment where we see so much of a language we really do not know. Certainly, if we do ever become fluent in a foreign language, we will be able to distinguish that language from English from others we speak at lesser levels...right?
posted by Beth at 11:56 PM
1 Comments:
When I was taking the red-eye flight across the country with my mom, I entertained her by demonstrating my great knowledge of all the languages on the barf bag. It had labels in English, French, German, Spanish, and I think Portuguese and Chinese. Too bad they didn't have it in Koine Greek and biblical Hebrew.
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