Monday, July 5, 2010

Foreign languages, and what I think of them...

Location>> messy desk
Eating>> toast with butter 'n' jam
Drinking>> So Good
Weather>> Sunny! With a high of 19C.
Mood>> kind of neutral..

The Positives and the Negatives for each one, so it's (somewhat) respectful.
NOTE>> Mandarin and Korean are gonna get it because there's tons of those speakers at my school who don't know a lot of English, so I have to deal with their ramblings everyday and, after a while, the respect gets sucked out of you...

  1. FRENCH: Negatives>> people sound like they have digestive problems, it's too guttural, and even though I probably knew what they were saying since I STUDY French they talk so fast it's a landslide of tongue rolling. Positives>> it's Canadian (YAY!!), sounds more classy than English (compare "La guitare" vs. "The guitar"), besides, it sounds super cool when you're ordering French food ("Le coq au vin, s'il vous plait!").
  2. GERMAN: Negatives>> sounds so sharp, and it's kind of english-y yet not english...which confuses me, and I always wonder why people don't trip on those "tsch" sounds, words are also way too long! Positives>> I have Austrian friends! And, it's handy when you're trying to talk classy in the field of music... (I know "Empfinderskeit", "Sturm und Drang", and "Getsamkindswert", which is about the only German I know...). My spelling is probably wrong too..
  3. MANDARIN (this is gonna be fun): Negatives>> LOUD, OBNOXIOUS, super annoying when all you hear is "GAN MA!" in the hallway as if they OWN the hallway, but I guess it's only bad if the rude people say it and say rude things..as in really, really, annoying. Positives>> When classier people say it, it's a nice-sounding language, you can make a lot of poetry out of it, and I need to learn those four-word proverbs to make myself sound like a smart 16 year-old Confucius...
  4. KOREAN: Negatives>> also LOUD and OBNOXIOUS, they always sound like they're pissed off, and I can never get how they pronounce those "oeul" kind of sounds... Positives>> sounds a lot better in songs! Less obnoxious than skyrocketing Mandarin, and the Tae Kwon Do language....TKD is cool...
  5. JAPANESE: Negatives>> super fast (how on earth do they do it?!), very dramatic, don't like those cutsey, high-pitched announcers in the subway, and I kinda get annoyed when they tweak foreign words to make it Japanese, since I can never tell what's being meant. Positives>> generally a nice, sounding language, I like the quiet-ness, and the syllables sound nice, besides, I listen to it all the time with my own free will since Japanese music pwns.
  6. CANTONESE: HAHA!! I can make fun of this one however I want 'cos I speak it. Hmm, well, generally I think it's loud (depending on who speaks it), and it probably sounds terrible to those who don't understand it. But it also gives me a homey feeling cos there's less and less Canto people in Vancouver.
Um, that's all for today...hope no one got offended.

Oh dear Wednesday's gonna be 29C, and there's gonna be 3 days of 28C after that. Who else is worried??!! And I thought the volcanic ash would shield us this year...

- CharTheShark

4 comments:

  1. Nice round-up. Well, i guess you meant "Empfindsamkeit" but your spelling is pretty neat, considering that you did this by ear. I guess my accent also sounds pretty sharp, sorry about that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Armin>> no worries, accents are interesting. Languages are cool and a headache at the same time.

    ReplyDelete
  3. And we Mandarin speakers think you Cantonese people sound loud and angry all the time =D Also, I could never get the deal with Korean. Maybe i don't listen to it enough, but if someone's speaking Korean, I usually can't tell that it IS actually Korean and not something else.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Korean only sounds loud and obnoxious if the speaker is fricken yelling. Which I must agree, a lot of the students at our school do. And I hate that so many of the Korean population swears. I mean, some of the people I know can't go 2 sentences without adding something obscene to their speech. It's like a "spice" or something, and they can't get enough of it; they sprinkle it liberally all over the place.
    Which is offensive. Especially to those who can speak it and find it embarassing. They're spreading a bad impression of Korean around.

    ReplyDelete