¡Viva español!
things i will never understand about germany:
wurst
women over 40 with purple hair
why germans are constantly trying to tell me who i am and what i know (or don't know!)...
seriously. this happens about once a day. i'm trying to think of an example... ok, so there's a group of students and a couple of teachers from spain visiting our school this week, which means there's a lot of spanish being spoken, right? and what was one of the most frequently asked get-to-know-you questions when i first arrived here? what other languages i speak/why i decided to learn german. now these are perfectly legitimate questions. with perfectly legitimate answers. which the germans evidently decided to completely ignore (or reinterpret). because here's what i said: "well, i learned a little spanish in school, but i never really spoke it, and then i forgot it all, so i decided to try german instead." and here's what the germans heard: "i speak fluent spanish." yeeeeeeah.
see, my history with the spanish language goes a little like this: first year of spanish, learned nothing. (our final exam at the end of the year consisted of listing the days of the week, the months, matching up some pronouns, and conjugating an -ar, -er, and -ir verb. for real.) the next couple of years--with a new spanish teacher, surprise, surprise--were spent more or less trying to recover/undue the damage done in the first year. by the time it was over, we had all given up and resorted to using babblefish.com to do our homework. (although, for no apparent reason, i can still recite the pledge of allegiance en español. juro fidelidad a la bandera de los estados unidos y a la república, que simbolisa, una nación, bajo dios, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos. because THAT's useful...)
wurst
women over 40 with purple hair
why germans are constantly trying to tell me who i am and what i know (or don't know!)...
seriously. this happens about once a day. i'm trying to think of an example... ok, so there's a group of students and a couple of teachers from spain visiting our school this week, which means there's a lot of spanish being spoken, right? and what was one of the most frequently asked get-to-know-you questions when i first arrived here? what other languages i speak/why i decided to learn german. now these are perfectly legitimate questions. with perfectly legitimate answers. which the germans evidently decided to completely ignore (or reinterpret). because here's what i said: "well, i learned a little spanish in school, but i never really spoke it, and then i forgot it all, so i decided to try german instead." and here's what the germans heard: "i speak fluent spanish." yeeeeeeah.
see, my history with the spanish language goes a little like this: first year of spanish, learned nothing. (our final exam at the end of the year consisted of listing the days of the week, the months, matching up some pronouns, and conjugating an -ar, -er, and -ir verb. for real.) the next couple of years--with a new spanish teacher, surprise, surprise--were spent more or less trying to recover/undue the damage done in the first year. by the time it was over, we had all given up and resorted to using babblefish.com to do our homework. (although, for no apparent reason, i can still recite the pledge of allegiance en español. juro fidelidad a la bandera de los estados unidos y a la república, que simbolisa, una nación, bajo dios, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos. because THAT's useful...)
posted by be at 12:04 AM
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