I studied Chinese and Tibetan at different times with a tutor for several years. Since that time I've had little contact with indigenous speakers (here in the woods of Maine) so I'm rusty as all-get-out.
In Chinese, be CAREFUL with your tones. As a rookie, I embarrassed my teacher by confusing the word for 'pen' with the vulgar term for a female body part. 😲
Originally posted by eagles54Chinese is great with sounds. My English teacher was married to a Chinese woman, and he knew a gramaticcaly correct sentence (in Chinese 😛) only using variations of the vowel 'e' (spoken as ea in feather). Anyone know what it is?
In Chinese, be CAREFUL with your tones. As a rookie, I embarrassed my teacher by confusing the word for 'pen' with the vulgar term for a female body part. 😲
I will almost never admit to "speaking" anything other than English. At this point in my life, even my "reading" knowledge of anything else is pretty rusty, but with a little WD-40 😉 I could soon be back up to reading speed in German, Russian, Polish or French. Once upon a time, I might almost have admitted to speaking Polish, and I did at least sound pretty good. I could generally pass for being Polish in Poland -- for a short time, until I made some grammatical or vocabulary mistake. 😕
Poland is the only country other than the USA where I've actually lived long enough to use the language daily 🙁 so that's the only one where I have ever felt like I actually spoke it at all. I've managed to learn enough to get around in Guatemala or Bulgaria, but often that involved a fair amount of language mixing. For example, in Bulgaria, I'd try to say something in Bulgarian, but when I'd run out of vocabulary (quickly) I'd try for a Russian word and then Polish. Sometimes we'd end up in German or English. I was always embarrassed in the Netherlands because it seemed like everybody spoke English well and my education just seemed so inadequate. I've studied at least a dozen languages to some extent, but most of the time I haven't really got much practical use out of them.
Paul
