One time this man approached me in a bar talking in Spanish. So I assumed he was Spanish and we started speaking, we had a whole ass conversation and at some point he was like. So what part of Spain are you from? And I said well I’m Italian actually. What part of Spain are you from? And he was like. I’m Greek.
One time I was in Argentina and I was so tired of trying to speak Spanish because I’m not very good at it lmao so I broke into exasperated English and the retail seller girl quickly understood me and engaged me in conversation. We talked for a while, she introduced me to a makeup brand, and then I decided to buy it. While she was packaging the purchase, she asked me if I were from the US or perhaps the UK and I just said “oh no I’m Brazilian hahah” and she looked me straight in the eyes and said, in clear Portuguese, “I’m Brazilian too”
When my dad went to China on a work trip, his Mandarin speaking wasn’t great but his listening was fine (his first language is Cantonese) and he encountered a German guy who had moved to China to work. My dad knew how to speak German because he studied it in university (but wasn’t great when it came to listening to new vocab he hadn’t studied before), and the German guy knew Mandarin because he lived and worked in China, so they had a conversation where my dad spoke to the German guy in German and the guy responded in Mandarin. I’m sure it confused a lot of their coworkers who just saw the Asian guy speaking German and the white guy speaking Mandarin.
Some years ago, I worked for a manufacturing company that had a service depot in China. One of the engineers from the main office here in the US spent most of his time at the depot. The problem was that he didn’t speak *any* of the various Chinese languages, and no one at the depot spoke any English.
on one hand i understand the frustration with the fact that duolingo is only Now putting up yiddish as a language when they have fictional languages like klingon on there but on the other hand part of the reason why is that they literally for years could not pick a specific dialect of yiddish and ended up
actively employing yiddish scholars to work in bits from academic+historical yiddish as well as contemporary vernacular yiddish and basically had to build the entire thing ground-up rather than being handed some showrunner’s language bible
What if aliens showed up and were like “every language on this planet is confusing to us except welsh” and they declared welsh our planet’s official language and everyone who wanted to talk to aliens had to learn to speak welsh
Earth is renamed New Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch
ifesbob 