mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5917 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish
| Message 1217 of 3737 04 November 2010 at 7:45am | IP Logged |
I truly believe that misplacing my Langenscheidt Swedish-English Dictionary on Saturday morning was a major catastrophe... Yes, this really bothered me all weekend.
ellasevia wrote:
When you see a Slovene book in a university bookstore and have an urge to buy it just because you'd never seen another Slovene book before, and because you just might consider it for your linguistic future, but don't buy it. And then when you dream of the same book a couple nights later in a nightmare when you return to the bookstore only to discover that it has been bought already...you should have bought it when you had the chance! |
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I had a similar experience in Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago, but it was Teach Yourself Estonian that I didn't buy.
Edited by mick33 on 05 November 2010 at 3:51am
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troglodyte Diglot Groupie BrazilRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5273 days ago 53 posts - 69 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishC2 Studies: Italian
| Message 1218 of 3737 04 November 2010 at 6:21pm | IP Logged |
...you are happy because GMail started showing ads in your target languages.
3 persons have voted this message useful
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LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5759 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian
| Message 1219 of 3737 04 November 2010 at 6:25pm | IP Logged |
When the best part of your week so far has been playing old RPGs in Russian and German and only having having to use the dictionary on a number of occasions that you can count on one hand. Also when you're amazed that your inexcusable lack of I.T knowledge managed to sort out a cookie problem you've been having for half the day which meant that you weren't able to access this site. This inexcusable lack of IT know-how extends so shamefully far that you had to look up what a "cookie" even was.
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maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5212 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu
| Message 1220 of 3737 04 November 2010 at 6:34pm | IP Logged |
When you are sat in a back street restaurant in Venice and you realise that the swarthy guy on the next table is actually Arab rather than Italian and his girlfriend is Italian from Piedmont though she looks German: and you can tell the difference because of their accent! His Italian is good but his accent is rubbish.
Then the conversation goes on in Italian & Arabic.
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Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7117 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish
| Message 1221 of 3737 04 November 2010 at 8:13pm | IP Logged |
Building on my contribution from last week...
When you realize that your idea of a rockin' Friday night is puzzling over Turkish word
order so you can manage to send a message to your new language exchange partner. I have
a social life, really guys, I promise.
But I just can't pause in the middle of working out a particularly knotty sentence, you
know? If I hadn't stayed in to finish untangling it, I'd probably be in town right now,
drowning the guilt of linguistic laziness with a succession of pint glasses. They would
have to carry me home, drunkenly bellowing out verb conjugations. I would be a Public
Menace.
So what I guess I'm saying here is that you know you're a language nerd when you
concoct elaborate and unlikely scenarios in your head to justify spending your weekend
hunched over a grammar book?
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jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6287 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin
| Message 1222 of 3737 05 November 2010 at 6:06am | IP Logged |
Sierra wrote:
So what I guess I'm saying here is that you know you're a language nerd when you concoct elaborate and unlikely scenarios in your head to justify spending your weekend hunched over a grammar book? |
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You know you're a language nerd when you get your buzz from the grammar books, not the contents of the pint glasses. (... You know that you've taken things too far when the idea of going out doesn't even occur to you.)
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mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5917 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish
| Message 1223 of 3737 05 November 2010 at 7:33am | IP Logged |
The last time I babysat my two-year-old nephew I sang a Finnish song to him and he tried to sing along.
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ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6135 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian
| Message 1224 of 3737 05 November 2010 at 10:22pm | IP Logged |
When, in the school library you hear the people (whom you don't know) at the table behind you talking about how one of them is taking a Russian class at the local university and the conversation quickly progresses to why Russian and learning languages in general, you desperately want to skip over to them and join in the conversation--like meramarina said earlier in the thread, "You're my people!" (or something like that). But perhaps that would be too weird, so sadly you decide against it.
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