46 messages over 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin
| Message 41 of 46 26 April 2014 at 9:15pm | IP Logged |
It's been a month, classes started again.
That includes Spanish and French. The teachers are nice, I'm still very scared of my classmates, and especially there are many in the French class who already spent some time in the country. Oh, the dread that comes with hearing that people did an Erasmus in France, and/or studied the language for 7 years in secondary school. Nope, I'm not that awesome, sorry.
(Oh, well, the same is true for the Spanish class - actually, the level of that class is higher though they are supposed to be the same.)
The Spanish language exchange partner found a job and I guess she is busy and uses enough German in her everyday life so that she doesn't have any need for a language exchange anymore. Should find someone else, and someone for French, and for Japanese if possible. Haha.
In other news, I've been using HabitRPG and, well. So far it helps with the tasks I'd been doing on and off. Not the ones I think I should be doing but don't feel up to, like finding a language exchange partner.
When I'm less depressed about these things I might start reading group/TAC logs again. Well. Possibly.
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| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5224 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese
| Message 42 of 46 03 May 2014 at 2:49am | IP Logged |
Bao wrote:
[...]Oh, the dread that comes with hearing that people did an Erasmus in France, and/or studied the language for 7 years in secondary school.[...] |
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So what? If people studied a language for seven years and still need to take classes, are you sure that's a sign of proficiency, however defined? As for having been abroad, well, apparently they got their language bumped up "so much" that they're in the same situation as the other group... you probably have a lot less to be scared about than you seem to think.
But why would you want to be scared* of people who do better than you, if there are actually any? Sure it might not work out, but it's still a chance to mingle with people with a shared interest and from whose experience you could benefit...
*Yes, being scared is still a *choice*, and therefore an expression of your volition, subconscious as that may be ;)
OTOH volition stemming from less debatable stuff ("gotta take a dump") is a slightly different thing...
Crush wrote:
I can't relate to the Japanese expression (what would a literal translation be?), but along the same vein, i personally have always been fond of the Spanish expression "¡me cago en X!", especially the phrases "¡me cago en el mar!" (a pretty odd thing to admit) and "¡me cago en dios!" "¡Mecachis en el mar!" is also not bad. |
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I've never heard "me cago/mecachis en el mar", perhaps it's a regional variation of the universal "me cago/mecachis [en] LA mar". Where did you hear that?
However, I don't think "admission" is really the right term, given its offensive nature and the reflexive marker for emphasis (think "I'm gonna shit all over you" -- I don't think that would be interpreted in any non-offensive way in any human language). I'd take the portraying enormous/imaginary targets for the deposition as indicative of how it's [not] actually, specifically targeted at the other speaker (i.e. "I need to vent, don't take it personally"), or how much frustration is being vented (how much sh*t would the whole sea[, and all ships in it] take?). There are many variations of the phrase, BTW, including some pretty creative ones.
But getting back to Japanese... As my Japanese flatmate tried to teach me for a while, I was pretty surprised to learn that verb conjugation has a "volitive" mood, just like we have a "subjunctive" one in Spanish, so it's deeply rooted in language and culture. I was at a bar with a couple of Japanese girls and I stood up with the obvious intention of paying before we left, so one of them asked "do you want to pay?" (not an odd thing to say in Japanese, we must guess), and I retorted with something along the lines of "It's not that I actually want to, but we'll probably have less problems if someone does". They totally cracked up. It worked so well every time that that and similar references kinda became a trademark :)
Edited by mrwarper on 03 May 2014 at 2:51am
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5863 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 43 of 46 04 May 2014 at 1:41am | IP Logged |
mrwarper wrote:
I've never heard "me cago/mecachis en el mar", perhaps it's a regional variation of the universal "me cago/mecachis [en] LA mar". Where did you hear that? |
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No, you're probably right that i remembered it incorrectly, i generally use "el" with "mar" and guess i never really paid much attention to the article before. I definitely won't forget it now, though ;)
And taking it literally, i just thought taking a dump in the sea was a kinda weird thing to admit to doing. English (and most languages, i would guess) has its own fair share of funny phrases to express frustration, like "f**k me in the ass!" I think in most instances that's not something you can really answer, that is, you won't be saying "ok!" or "no thanks!" when someone says it to you.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin
| Message 44 of 46 04 May 2014 at 2:59am | IP Logged |
Okay I just accidentally highlighted and deleted everything I'd written. Oopsie.
The short version:
mrwarper, you're right in a way, but habits are a weird thing someplace between volition and compulsion. I do have reasons for the way I react, I am trying to change my reactions but it's a long process. And I often start doubting myself. And whine.
Some people in my situation might think that they are "better" than the other students for being in the same class after three years than others after seven years. I myself start thinking about the things that were left out in my of classes. Yet, what I actually want to do is simply accept that people make different experiences and try to learn from others when they want to share their experiences and knowledge, and offer my own, and ignore those who don't want to share.
As for the Japanese volitive form, I think it can be understand as not making a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, while the expressions I am used to make a very clear distinction between those two.
Oh, Crush, in German we have "Leck mich (doch am Arsch)" (~kiss my ass) ... which is generally used as a way to emphatically state that you don't care about what another person says/thinks/wants you to do. When said about a third person people usually don't comment, but when it's said directly to the other person, it can come across as 'I don't want to and I need to vent' or as 'I don't want to and I want to challenge you over this' depending on the context, exact phrase and the way it is said. But, some of the ways to use this and other remarks easily elicit a response like (pretending to contemplate the offer) 'no thanks, I'll pass' and variations of it. (Or '... do you really want to do that?' or '... okay?' or '... now? here?' :P) "Fick dich" and "fick dich" or "fick dich doch ins Knie" also are candidates, at least for some of the people I socialize with. =D
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin
| Message 45 of 46 18 May 2014 at 12:06am | IP Logged |
Panic attack before French class (well, before every until now). Teacher was really really nice, told me to not just quit, and he'd leave me alone in class that day, and one of the classmates asked me afterwards if I was okay.
Today, a stranger asked me in English how to get the money back with our deposit system, and I showed him, and then I asked him where he came from (expecting China because there are many Chinese around) and it turned out he was Japanese, and I started talking in Japanese - and then I realized I was trying to talk in Japanese, panic attack. (I switched back to English, said goodbye and ran away ... xD)
... okay. No use trying to even think about finding a language exchange partner before I don't manage to tone this down a bit.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin
| Message 46 of 46 18 August 2014 at 2:25pm | IP Logged |
"Totally flunked the Spanish and French exams", I thought ...
... well, apparently I "flunked" them with the best and second best marks respectively.
On a different note, I've been too lazy to log anything. That, and I found my perceived lack of progreess embarrassing.
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