@f00l You get lucky or you don’t. Either way, you walk away on the winning end. Those whom will, want. Those whom won’t - well, there ain’t enough talkin’ one can do . . . If you have even a little bit of game and know when to use it, experience dictates you typically don’t walk away on the losing end after saying that line in ANY language.
I’m impressed that you know how you work that remark toward the stated goal. And, I presume, not be a dick during the process either.
For all too many people who might say that sort of thing to someone they don’t know very well, often the stated goal and the actual intention kinda seriously diverge, the latter sometimes toward toward unspoken hostility or a public power play and intended humiliation. And the speaker often/usually won’t admit to the real intention.
Not saying someone who says that for unacknowledged purposes wouldn’t mind a positive answer on the stated intention, but … That’s frequently not the game that’s being played.
@Pavlov, @f00l - I usually use the afore-mentioned French on inanimate objects, but it can’t hurt to try a new phrase! I’ll try yours and let you know what results I get.
Russian in H.S. - gone but a few words and phrases. Sister study Latin both H.S. and college which served her well in her field of Zoology. Son has been doing AP courses since 8th grade and started French back then, still doing it, and is quite fluent. Because my speech has gone to shit, and sometimes I can’t even get out words, my family and parents learned sign language. We aren’t half bad but we aren’t Ivy League level and the way I sound now most assume I’m deaf so it is helpful when I have no patience with society. Trying to talk on the phone is out the window unless you’ve been around me. I’ve lost most of my friends but am less depressed by finding all of you. Can’t thank this community enough for giving me a chance to rebound a little and get out what’s on my mind and in my heart.
@f00l I have my days and nights mixed up. I’m awake when most of the people are asleep and it’s funny how, for all the time I spent at work, the people I thought were “friends” faded away once I could no longer work with them (most of the people were friends because others don’t grasp what you do or go through in my line of work). When I went blind I couldn’t read or respond to their texts so when I got my vision back and tried to reconnect apparently some thought I was ignoring them during that time and others moved on. I have one friend that I was able to keep but she is on first shift (0600-1400) so I write letters to her and she will write back. But with the demand of her job and family it’s few and far between. I can’t go out to places that the others go and my speech is bad so that limits me from staying social. Because of my condition and the fact that I now have a lot of syncope episodes with the occasional seizure activity I can’t and won’t drive. Losing my freedom and friends has been a bit of a hardship. After 10 years you would think I’d be over it but it still stings.
Your situation is gravely complicated by your physical issues. But I don’t think it’s only that. It’s also modern life to an extent.
I haven’t many work related friendships be very active after we were no longer together frequently at work, people are just so busy. I guess the shared work itself was the motivator of the relationship. The few I do keep up with are thru FB and that’s more or less how we communicate.
It’s not that we don’t care about each other. We do. It’s just that we never graduated into a place where we routinely kept in touch work or no work.
I’m grateful that FB gives me a window into the lives of those that post a lot there, but I don’t post there (I have reservations about FB) and so they don’t know much about my current life. Sometimes with some of them we message a bit.
As for f2f private life friendships : I am pretty terrible about those that work thru email. I have some kinda avoidance/anxiety thing about email. So those are partially dependent on the tolerance of the other party for my misbehavior and my trying to get past other problems. And I am incredibly inconsistent as a correspondent.
Deep friendships are tough in an electronic age. Many people kinda don’t know how to operate true friendship (the kind that is there year after year without any other kind of physical or work proximity). When communities depended on f2f friendship and letters, and when we weren’t pressured all day long with so many information options and unfinished tasks, we knew better what to do in keeping our personal relationships vital.
Now we don’t seem to know how to operate this anymore. I am bad at it. (True friendships in the digital era). I think many other people are bad at it also; perhaps the techical means of communication changes the value and intensity and primacy of friendship.
Anyway, everyone’s I know had what they thought were intense strong friendships at work that didn’t really survive the loss of the work proximity very well. Me included. And I am as guilty as anytime else. I think that’s normal, unfortunately.
@f00l@WTFsunshine I met my best friend/life partner at work but we had so much else in common that work quickly ceased to be our primary point of connection and became an incentive to go there and spend time with one another. Another work friend is skilled in relationship maintenance and so when I retired she continued inviting me to social events. After my best friend died she and I started spending a lot of time on the weekends together going to community events, shopping, dining, etc. We don’t have that many common interests but we enjoy spending time together. Because of the gaming group I have a lot of friends that I meet with once a week or so to play games. Ive been gaming with several of them for over 30 years. I also take a lot of community art classes, and while I rarely see those folks outside class, we’re all very social in class. I’m fortunate that my hobbies tend to build FTF relationships, as I am not skilled in that. Because I constantly moved as a kid, I did not have much opportunity to learn the social interactive skills kids pick up in school. Those I do have were picked up in work environments as an adult and don’t come as naturally to me as to most people.
@WTFsunshine Do you enjoy reading? I see here that there are quite a few online book clubs, where you discuss and share books you are reading. It’s not as good as FTF but you might be able to make some good online friends someplace like that.
I can get through a conversation in Spanish and French. I used to know C, html and javascript, but that was 20 years ago. You fancy kids with your css…back in my day, all we had was the blink tag and we liked it!
@Cerridwyn I would have said no back in school, but after a decade out, yes, math counts. Even in a math-heavy job, so many of my colleagues are arithmetically illiterate, it drives me to petty villainy.
I can get by in a smattering of languages, but am only really fluent in English. Maybe Welsh if I have a day or two to prep, but I use it so rarely, I’m rusty.
I speak Mandarin fluently (though with vocab at a grade-school level), yet can’t understand a word of Cantonese. I’ve also picked up a smidgen of Japanese.
Once tried to learn Italian in college after Spanish in HS, but it didn’t stick.
I program in a variety of languages, but am most at home in C.
I used to be pretty fluent in French, but I haven’t used much in several years and feel pretty rusty. I need to start practicing for when my girlfriend’s parents come escape the Quebec winter. Her dad speaks some English but her mom doesn’t speak any.
We did Spanish every year in elementary school, but it was always the same basic things, colors, numbers, etc. I was pretty tired of it, so when I got to high school and could pick a language I wanted to do something different and picked French, and minored in French in college.
When I started working at a Spanish language TV station I was regretting not sticking with Spanish, but I do understand a decent amount now. And now that I’m dating a girl whose mother tongue is French it still seems like I made the right choice.
I did take a semester of German in college when I knew I’d be heading to Austria that summer. It helped, and I can still at least pronounce German words reasonably well, and understand a few words.
Lived in Japan so I can get by with the important stuff (train, beer, toilet - usually in that order) and have been watching tons of Korean dramas so I know all the words for family members and random exclamations but nothing useful. Weak high school Spanish and slightly better college Italian. Basically only fluent in anything besides English when I’m drunk.
I can sorta-program Python, C#, and T-SQL. Programming those is much more about understanding higher level concepts and being aware of the languages’ surrounding frameworks than the syntax itself, though. (That’d be true for all programming languages, I think.)
Really interested in picking up Haskell and Swift. and probably some more JavaScript… though… web design. Eugh.
I’ve managed to stick with German on Duolingo for a few months now. Wouldn’t stand a chance of using it to communicate anything, yet.
@alphapeaches Cool, thanks. I feel more constrained by the small amount of time I’m spending than anything else, right now. If you’ve got any suggestions I’d be glad to hear them. I’m not in a hurry though, and not sure I’m far enough along, yet, to make good use of good advice.
I’m mostly just going through the lessons in the app one at a time, and occasionally getting on YouTube to try to work on pronunciation a bit, or web sites to more easily make sense of things that are mostly implicit in Duolingo (mainly gender, or trying to keep better track of which one was einem and which one was einer… probably add verb conjugation to that pretty soon).
I’m mainly glad I found something where I can make some progress in small increments of time per day – 10-20 minutes somewhere, most days. Occasionally I’ll spend an hour or more.
I am seriously crappy at learning new languages (terrible memory for the new words despite scoring high on the verbal on the G-MAT. I’d score in the 1st percentile in learning them, of that I am sure. Go figure.).
Anyway 2 years of Spanish in high school and three semesters in college. Forgot most of it when I learned dutch living in Holland (there talked like a 3 year old, despite studying dutch, giving myself dutch lessons in my sleep, eventually thinking in dutch).
Then living in Germany spoke german with a dutch accent (or so I was told) and dutch words I thought I had long since forgotten would come flying out of my mouth when I didn’t know the german ones. Used a fair bit of English living there but in my defense I was working for a DoDDS outdoor adventure school with american kids.
Then adopted a nearly 10 year old kid from Cambodia and started an NGO there. Learned some Khmer (also in trying to help her keep her language but she mostly forgot it all after about a year), could read some transliteration (transliterated using French pronunciation of our alphabet which only added to the confusion for me), but could not read it in the Khmer alphabet. Overall am not nearly as fluent in any of them as I should have been and that others were/are with the same level of experience. I have forgotten much of what I knew.
(photos aren’t mine, they are from a group for those of us who worked there, students who participated in the program there)
One photo is looking up the mountain, the other looking down.
Thong i song i song hong o wong mong yong pong a rong e nong tong song song pong o kong e whong e nong tong e long long i nong gong song e crong e tong song (when I was a child).
Younger Bro did Spanish in HS and college. Despite having never lived in a border state or state with a large Hispanic population as an adult, he can still get by reasonable well in Spanish decades later.
@f00l So am I because when I learn a new language I basically lose the old one. Must only have space in my brain for one extra one or something (and that storage space is really small LOL). And then I apparently do a brain dump of the new one after a few years. Sad actually. I suck at learning and retaining new languages.
I can swear in many languages.
Elementary school: French
Middle school: German
High school: Russian
Forgotten: all of the above
Say, me too! But I DO remember a couple key words and phrases from each language:
Merde! Fils de pute!
Schiesse! Scheisskerl!
Der’mo! Sookin sin!
@aetris @djslack - “Salut beauté! Tu veux baiser?” has proven to be a very handy phrase to remember . . . .
@Pavlov
Does it work for the stated goal?
Does it work as intended?
@f00l You get lucky or you don’t. Either way, you walk away on the winning end. Those whom will, want. Those whom won’t - well, there ain’t enough talkin’ one can do . . . If you have even a little bit of game and know when to use it, experience dictates you typically don’t walk away on the losing end after saying that line in ANY language.
Works incredibly well at strip-clubs.
@Pavlov
I’m impressed that you know how you work that remark toward the stated goal. And, I presume, not be a dick during the process either.
For all too many people who might say that sort of thing to someone they don’t know very well, often the stated goal and the actual intention kinda seriously diverge, the latter sometimes toward toward unspoken hostility or a public power play and intended humiliation. And the speaker often/usually won’t admit to the real intention.
Not saying someone who says that for unacknowledged purposes wouldn’t mind a positive answer on the stated intention, but … That’s frequently not the game that’s being played.
@f00l I’ve always been impressed by my luck(?) also.
@Pavlov
Nothing like lucky, huh?
@Pavlov, @f00l - I usually use the afore-mentioned French on inanimate objects, but it can’t hurt to try a new phrase! I’ll try yours and let you know what results I get.
Russian in H.S. - gone but a few words and phrases. Sister study Latin both H.S. and college which served her well in her field of Zoology. Son has been doing AP courses since 8th grade and started French back then, still doing it, and is quite fluent. Because my speech has gone to shit, and sometimes I can’t even get out words, my family and parents learned sign language. We aren’t half bad but we aren’t Ivy League level and the way I sound now most assume I’m deaf so it is helpful when I have no patience with society. Trying to talk on the phone is out the window unless you’ve been around me. I’ve lost most of my friends but am less depressed by finding all of you. Can’t thank this community enough for giving me a chance to rebound a little and get out what’s on my mind and in my heart.
@WTFsunshine
Can you talk your irl old time friends into communicating by text?
@f00l I have my days and nights mixed up. I’m awake when most of the people are asleep and it’s funny how, for all the time I spent at work, the people I thought were “friends” faded away once I could no longer work with them (most of the people were friends because others don’t grasp what you do or go through in my line of work). When I went blind I couldn’t read or respond to their texts so when I got my vision back and tried to reconnect apparently some thought I was ignoring them during that time and others moved on. I have one friend that I was able to keep but she is on first shift (0600-1400) so I write letters to her and she will write back. But with the demand of her job and family it’s few and far between. I can’t go out to places that the others go and my speech is bad so that limits me from staying social. Because of my condition and the fact that I now have a lot of syncope episodes with the occasional seizure activity I can’t and won’t drive. Losing my freedom and friends has been a bit of a hardship. After 10 years you would think I’d be over it but it still stings.
@WTFsunshine
Your situation is gravely complicated by your physical issues. But I don’t think it’s only that. It’s also modern life to an extent.
I haven’t many work related friendships be very active after we were no longer together frequently at work, people are just so busy. I guess the shared work itself was the motivator of the relationship. The few I do keep up with are thru FB and that’s more or less how we communicate.
It’s not that we don’t care about each other. We do. It’s just that we never graduated into a place where we routinely kept in touch work or no work.
I’m grateful that FB gives me a window into the lives of those that post a lot there, but I don’t post there (I have reservations about FB) and so they don’t know much about my current life. Sometimes with some of them we message a bit.
As for f2f private life friendships : I am pretty terrible about those that work thru email. I have some kinda avoidance/anxiety thing about email. So those are partially dependent on the tolerance of the other party for my misbehavior and my trying to get past other problems. And I am incredibly inconsistent as a correspondent.
Deep friendships are tough in an electronic age. Many people kinda don’t know how to operate true friendship (the kind that is there year after year without any other kind of physical or work proximity). When communities depended on f2f friendship and letters, and when we weren’t pressured all day long with so many information options and unfinished tasks, we knew better what to do in keeping our personal relationships vital.
Now we don’t seem to know how to operate this anymore. I am bad at it. (True friendships in the digital era). I think many other people are bad at it also; perhaps the techical means of communication changes the value and intensity and primacy of friendship.
Anyway, everyone’s I know had what they thought were intense strong friendships at work that didn’t really survive the loss of the work proximity very well. Me included. And I am as guilty as anytime else. I think that’s normal, unfortunately.
@f00l @WTFsunshine I met my best friend/life partner at work but we had so much else in common that work quickly ceased to be our primary point of connection and became an incentive to go there and spend time with one another. Another work friend is skilled in relationship maintenance and so when I retired she continued inviting me to social events. After my best friend died she and I started spending a lot of time on the weekends together going to community events, shopping, dining, etc. We don’t have that many common interests but we enjoy spending time together. Because of the gaming group I have a lot of friends that I meet with once a week or so to play games. Ive been gaming with several of them for over 30 years. I also take a lot of community art classes, and while I rarely see those folks outside class, we’re all very social in class. I’m fortunate that my hobbies tend to build FTF relationships, as I am not skilled in that. Because I constantly moved as a kid, I did not have much opportunity to learn the social interactive skills kids pick up in school. Those I do have were picked up in work environments as an adult and don’t come as naturally to me as to most people.
@WTFsunshine Do you enjoy reading? I see here that there are quite a few online book clubs, where you discuss and share books you are reading. It’s not as good as FTF but you might be able to make some good online friends someplace like that.
I can get through a conversation in Spanish and French. I used to know C, html and javascript, but that was 20 years ago. You fancy kids with your css…back in my day, all we had was the blink tag and we liked it!
Tried Latin, French, Spanish, German. Mostly HS, some college.
Hah. Guess how that went. I still have some Latin vocab.
Right now I speak English (semi-fluently).
And (fluently) Chaotic and Incoherent.
(for these languages, both formal and “street”)
Piglatin?
used to be able to translate 1337 speech
a smattering of gaelic
left over high school spanish (not enough hardly to count)
and math? Does math count?
@Cerridwyn I would have said no back in school, but after a decade out, yes, math counts. Even in a math-heavy job, so many of my colleagues are arithmetically illiterate, it drives me to petty villainy.
@Cerridwyn yes, math counts. So does music, if you ask me.
@alphapeaches
/
I can get by in a smattering of languages, but am only really fluent in English. Maybe Welsh if I have a day or two to prep, but I use it so rarely, I’m rusty.
I am fluent in LOLcat.
I speak Mandarin fluently (though with vocab at a grade-school level), yet can’t understand a word of Cantonese. I’ve also picked up a smidgen of Japanese.
Once tried to learn Italian in college after Spanish in HS, but it didn’t stick.
I program in a variety of languages, but am most at home in C.
Does reading music count?
@Salohcin714
Yes.
/image “musical score”
@Salohcin714 yes. If it’s sightreading/-singing, even moreso.
@alphapeaches @ Salohcin714 In that case I’d need to add latin, french, italian, and hebrew… of which I knew little of what those words meant.
I just english, barely
I used to be pretty fluent in French, but I haven’t used much in several years and feel pretty rusty. I need to start practicing for when my girlfriend’s parents come escape the Quebec winter. Her dad speaks some English but her mom doesn’t speak any.
We did Spanish every year in elementary school, but it was always the same basic things, colors, numbers, etc. I was pretty tired of it, so when I got to high school and could pick a language I wanted to do something different and picked French, and minored in French in college.
When I started working at a Spanish language TV station I was regretting not sticking with Spanish, but I do understand a decent amount now. And now that I’m dating a girl whose mother tongue is French it still seems like I made the right choice.
I did take a semester of German in college when I knew I’d be heading to Austria that summer. It helped, and I can still at least pronounce German words reasonably well, and understand a few words.
I’m fluent in sarcasm & profanity.
Lived in Japan so I can get by with the important stuff (train, beer, toilet - usually in that order) and have been watching tons of Korean dramas so I know all the words for family members and random exclamations but nothing useful. Weak high school Spanish and slightly better college Italian. Basically only fluent in anything besides English when I’m drunk.
@hollycrisson ah yes, the ol’ “just enough to be dangerous”
Oesda Igpa atinla ountca?
O-nay
@emt305
Iay oughthay uoyay ereway upposedsay otay adday “ay” atay ethay enday.
I can sorta-program Python, C#, and T-SQL. Programming those is much more about understanding higher level concepts and being aware of the languages’ surrounding frameworks than the syntax itself, though. (That’d be true for all programming languages, I think.)
Really interested in picking up Haskell and Swift. and probably some more JavaScript… though… web design. Eugh.
I’ve managed to stick with German on Duolingo for a few months now. Wouldn’t stand a chance of using it to communicate anything, yet.
@InnocuousFarmer I am fluent in German if you’d like more material. Learned it on exchange (read: as fast as I could) so I have a few hax
@alphapeaches Cool, thanks. I feel more constrained by the small amount of time I’m spending than anything else, right now. If you’ve got any suggestions I’d be glad to hear them. I’m not in a hurry though, and not sure I’m far enough along, yet, to make good use of good advice.
I’m mostly just going through the lessons in the app one at a time, and occasionally getting on YouTube to try to work on pronunciation a bit, or web sites to more easily make sense of things that are mostly implicit in Duolingo (mainly gender, or trying to keep better track of which one was einem and which one was einer… probably add verb conjugation to that pretty soon).
I’m mainly glad I found something where I can make some progress in small increments of time per day – 10-20 minutes somewhere, most days. Occasionally I’ll spend an hour or more.
I speak a little border Spanish, understand quite a lot more. I know food in a lot of languages, I can order in restaurants all over the world.
I am seriously crappy at learning new languages (terrible memory for the new words despite scoring high on the verbal on the G-MAT. I’d score in the 1st percentile in learning them, of that I am sure. Go figure.).
Anyway 2 years of Spanish in high school and three semesters in college. Forgot most of it when I learned dutch living in Holland (there talked like a 3 year old, despite studying dutch, giving myself dutch lessons in my sleep, eventually thinking in dutch).
Then living in Germany spoke german with a dutch accent (or so I was told) and dutch words I thought I had long since forgotten would come flying out of my mouth when I didn’t know the german ones. Used a fair bit of English living there but in my defense I was working for a DoDDS outdoor adventure school with american kids.
Then adopted a nearly 10 year old kid from Cambodia and started an NGO there. Learned some Khmer (also in trying to help her keep her language but she mostly forgot it all after about a year), could read some transliteration (transliterated using French pronunciation of our alphabet which only added to the confusion for me), but could not read it in the Khmer alphabet. Overall am not nearly as fluent in any of them as I should have been and that others were/are with the same level of experience. I have forgotten much of what I knew.
@Kidsandliz what city were you in/near in Germany?
@alphapeaches Berchtesgaden (about 4 miles from there up the mountain)
@alphapeaches missed the edit window
(photos aren’t mine, they are from a group for those of us who worked there, students who participated in the program there)
One photo is looking up the mountain, the other looking down.
I’ve been trying to learn Klingon and whatever it is they speak in Massachusetts.
Doing better with the Klingon.
I also speak several languages aside from US-English.
/giphy i speak jive
Thong i song i song hong o wong mong yong pong a rong e nong tong song song pong o kong e whong e nong tong e long long i nong gong song e crong e tong song (when I was a child).
Pig Latin… and the Language of Love.
@TimWalter Oh yeah I forgot about that. Just about every kid I knew growing up figured that one out in late grade school…
@TimWalter “language of love” – that would be Italian?
Younger Bro did Spanish in HS and college. Despite having never lived in a border state or state with a large Hispanic population as an adult, he can still get by reasonable well in Spanish decades later.
I am deeply impressed by this.
@f00l So am I because when I learn a new language I basically lose the old one. Must only have space in my brain for one extra one or something (and that storage space is really small LOL). And then I apparently do a brain dump of the new one after a few years. Sad actually. I suck at learning and retaining new languages.