The thing I'm finding about Mandarin or Standard Chinese or whatever the fuck you want to call it (a good warning sign that a language is going to be a massive pain in the ass for an Anglo to learn is that Anglos haven't even settled on what to call the fucker yet) is that getting it into my head is reasonably okay - no less okay than, say, cramming Italian or French into my head was once upon a time. The problem is getting the cunt to stay there. In Vancouver I stopped studying for my nice downtime week of R&R and everything just fell out of my head. And my bastard of an exam is on Friday.
With Italian and French there were hooks keeping it there - still are - the hooks of phrases learnt from the paternal side as a child, the hooks of bilingual writing on a cereal box, and most importantly, I realize now, the hooks of English vocabulary being chock full of Romance vocabulary. English may not seem like a Romance language but when your brain is spasming around trying to process Mandarin and all the little connections in your head are firing as wildly as the popo after the levies break, desperately seeking any, even the most obscure or strangest connection that can be found, between the words you're learning and the words you already know, and it comes up with sweet fuck all - you realize, Anglos learning a fucking Romance language should not be any sort of fucking stretch.
Anyways, I'm pottymouthing, but I'm enjoying it. Also enjoyed going for a canoe this morning with my doublecousin, and also enjoyed seeing her happier than I've ever seen her before. And enjoying being here, enjoying being with Lexie, enjoying all the rest of it. Just not enjoying realizing I'm just two and a bit weeks in here and already getting overwhelmed with lusty nostalgia for the F-word. Emotionally this trip is whizzing by to the point where my heart wants to stop time, but from the point of view of my pantsjungle it's crawling to the point where my poon is ready to hijack a plane and fly into the arms of my old man. I wish my conscious being didn't have to be so fucking schizo about everything.
6 commenti:
First of all, what is a "doublecousin"? It sounds like something from the US South.
One of the things I love about having been raised in a "latin" country is the fact that people here (in the US) think I am so cultured for knowing all sorts of "SAT words". Turns out if you want to say something of substance - or use words that are very particular in their meaning - you end up using an etymologically latin word.
They probably have a lot of them in the US South. My mother's sister married my father's brother. All very romantic, but somehow shocking to my Italian family despite their tolerance of cousin-marriage. Figure that one out if you can.
Erm, what's a SAT word?
Ah! Well, they're not blood relations so I guess it's all kosher.
"SAT words" is an expression used to convey words that normally not used in every day conversation. One studies these lists of (literally hundreds of) words when taking the SAT or ACT exams here in the states. Either of the two exams is required to get into college.
Oh, I see. Just googled the 100 most popular and could only see two that I was pretty sure weren't Romantic. How funny!
Keep saying to yrself, "this is easy, I could be learning Finnish, this is easy, I could be learning Finnish"...
Hey hey! I had a Finnish roommate for a long time. A good night's entertainment was getting high at the kitchen table with her and then listening while she talked to her family on the phone. A complete absence of mental hooks there too, but I did discover that the Finnish expression for "look at the sea" sounds an awful lot like "cazzo merde", which is the worst thing you can say in Italian that doesn't involve Jeebus & Co.
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