Oddbean new post about login | logout Your deep description of word meanings and helping to define thanks made me think of going to France with my family when I was in highschool. My dad is very bad with languages. We went into a French restaurant for dinner and a lady offered to take his coat. My dad, making his best attempt, says in a loud American voice, "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!" They(the French) and we (my mom, my sister and I) all broke down laughing. He was making his best attempt to say, "merci" (thank you), but it sounded like a cry for help.
Yeah, the french are really mean. I mean, plenty of nice ones but the culture is snobby and aloof and almost cruel
I haven't had trouble with them although I know why they could be considered snobby. Americans are loud, obnoxious and expect everyone on the planet to speak English to them. Most people can and do. The French tend to make you work a little for it, especially older French people (at least this was true 30ish years ago). If Americans ask a question in English, they will frequently play dumb. If you then make an attempt at speaking French, even if you do a terrible job, they will answer you in clear English. It never upset me. Us Americans do tend to be too America-centric and can't see beyond our own nation and our own language. I wish I was better at foreign languages. I used to know a little of several languages (some very little), but I haven't used them in so long, there isn't much left of any of them. Now I only speak menu (meaning I can read a menu in multiple languages, but especially French and Spanish).
haha, yeah, this is why i always try to use what i have of the local language, did the same in bulgaria and in serbia and bosnia even in hungary i learned a few basics, oh and the netherlands, this is yeah part of the reason why i have some grasp of some interesting features of the most common used words in a wide variety of european languages what was quite shocking for me as i started learning more portuguese was how many words were related between them and the "slavic" languages... they use many old latin words all the time, most of them are actually latin! but you don't see that until you learn portuguese which is very much based on old vulgar latin... what struck me straight away about portuguese was that the same phonemes appeared so much as i was used to hearing in slavic languages, and many sounds that were very similar to other words but as i learned them, nope, not even closely related i'm a bit tired of knowing only a few hundred words of the language of the street around me though... learning languages is not so easy at my age and other reasons have converged towards me seriously planning to move somewhere that english is spoken anyway... and the thing about church... i don't want to be at orthodox or catholic, even if they speak english all the time