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#51
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So who's made an effort ...
Tom P wrote:
On 04/15/2013 06:18 PM, David Horne wrote: [] I didn't start learning Spanish until my mid 20s as my partner is Peruvian. I wouldn't say I'm 100% fluent but I'm told that I speak it very well, and with a pretty good Limeño accent! Probably no surprise as I've learned most of it by listening and practising. Great stuff! Monica, my Spanish teacher, is from Peru. Meant to add- Peruvians have a reputation for some of the clearest Spanish in Latin America. While it's a reputation they promote, IME other Latin Americans have agreed... D -- (*) of the royal duchy of city south and deansgate www.davidhorne.net (email address on website) "[Do you think the world learned anything from the first world war?] No. They never learn." -Harry Patch (1898-2009) |
#52
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So who's made an effort ...
to learn the language of the countries they visit?
I've been to Italy almost a dozen times but haven't learned anything beyond a few phrases. I'm OK at those languages I learned at school/college (e.g. French, German, Italian) and speak Spanish with my partner, but I admit to going to many countries where I haven't bothered to learn the most basic phrases. I haven't encountered terrible problems so far, I have to say. The one place where I've had real problems was in Slovakia. The issue was that Marion has serious food intolerances to wheat and dairy, so we needed to know what was in what we were eating. But Slovak food labelling is dreadful both in shops and restaurants, and packaged foods were generally only labelled in Slavic languages (no English, German, French, Italian or Turkish, any of which I can read labels in). Also, Slovak food tends to be unidentifiable brown goo (compared with Turkish or Bosnian food, where you can just look at it and see immediately what it's made of). Further, Slovak has as many different words coding the presence of wheat or dairy products as English does ("malt", "whey", "sodium caseinate", "bran", "cheese powder", "butterfat"...) and food handling staff are even more clueless about the basic composition of what they're serving than their British counterparts are. We ended up with a bizarre diet restricted to what we could positively identify. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- e m a i l : j a c k @ c a m p i n . m e . u k Jack Campin, 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland mobile 07800 739 557 http://www.campin.me.uk Twitter: JackCampin |
#53
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So who's made an effort ...
Jack Campin wrote: to learn the language of the countries they visit? I've been to Italy almost a dozen times but haven't learned anything beyond a few phrases. Having studied most of my life to become an opera singer, I have a smattering of German, French and Italian (although far from fluent). When I took my first European tour (Prague-Vienna-Budapest) I took along phrase-books to help. I found Czech difficult enough, but Hungarian totally impossible! (Even my attempts at "Good Morning" drew only blank stares, and I am convinced it was only the desperation in my voice when I pleaded for "kava" that produce the desired coffee from a sympathetic waiter.) |
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