I wrote a post called Dagu Dagu Dagu. Dagu is a word from some African language and probably the best English explanation is "spreading news by word of mouth." You might translate it as "the grapevine."
I don't even know which African language it's from. I just know trivia about language sticks with me, so I'm a wealth of knowledge about language, yet wholly incapable of speaking anything fluently, often English included.
I'm medically handicapped and sometimes just sound like a blithering idiot. If I'm physically stressed out enough, I lapse into German -- though my German is TERRIBLE -- and I sometimes CAN'T speak English for an hour or so.
I've made a few stabs at talking about my relationship to language learning and recently tried to make a compendium of that here. I'm going to try again to give people some idea of how I'm a sponge for language stuff yet I'm not fluent in anything, probably not even English.
I grew up in a bilingual home. My mother was a German immigrant who pronounced the leading K in words like knee and knuckles until I was something like eight or ten years old and I am her youngest child.
I learned as an adult while homeschooling my sons that having grown up in a bilingual home where mom didn't WANT to teach me German, I somehow absorbed German grammatical tidbits and have to look up certain things in English regularly because I do it wrong A LOT.
I tend to capitalize too many words in English. In English, we capitalize proper nouns aka names of things. In German, you capitalize all nouns. I capitalize something between those two standards and I blog a lot so I frequently have to look up stuff or I just explain my stupid quirks.
I also routinely have to look up "Is that one word or two?" In German, "post office" or "rail station" is written as one word. They just smoosh them together and make it one word. I get accused of using "scare quotes" for my ongoing struggles with trying to find some way to signal that "these words go together" because I feel like English does a lousy job of clearly communicating that in writing, knowing that spoken English benefits from inflection and prosody and other vocal details not encoded in our writing.
My sister's first language was actually German. My sister and brother were both born in Germany and my mother knew no English when she met my father and his German was so bad, she asked someone what language he was speaking.
My mother spoke High German, so she said Ich -- the German word for I -- similar to Ish. My father grew up on a farm and learned German from German farmers. He said Ich like Ick with a hard K. Most Germans say that final sound similar to the ch in loch of Loch Ness monster.
So my mother and sister were both bilingual and my mother had a lot of friends who were German immigrants. I heard German enough I have an ear for it which I don't have for any other languages (other than English).
And I know random trivia, like Germans think it's rude to ask "What?" which is "Was?" in German and they sometimes rebut that rudeness by saying "Water is wet." (Wasser ist nas.)
I know bits and pieces about German culture but largely stopped trying to assume I know something because I don't always know what was typical for a German and what was "My mother was just like that and most Germans don't do that."
My mother was big on health stuff and promoting drinking water. I've had other Germans tell me it's weird and not done in Germany.
My mother grew up in East Germany, so she took Russian in school because all East German kids were instructed in Russian. It wasn't anything she had a choice in.
My father thought that was cool and learned a few Russian phrases, like gavarete pa ruski (do you speak Russian) while dating her and according to her "the fool told people that and was in the US army, so it got him investigated as a SPY."
My mother didn't want to teach me German because being German was a problem post World War II, but would tell me Russian words because it was a cool foreign language!
I was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia and my father retired from the army when I was three and I spent my childhood hearing endless stories about when he was active duty and they lived in Germany. Those were the good ole days and I wasn't there to experience them and felt denied my heritage and culture and was grasping at straws for ANYTHING my mother would share with me.
So I learned to count to ten in Russian as a child from information in the family encyclopedia and was thrilled to PIECES when she was ironing one day with the News on during the Cold War and there was an interview with a Russian and my mother got upset about the translator saying "That's a lie" and she said "That's NOT what he said. He said that's not TRUE."
I can't tell you how to say it in Russian but a gamer friend of mine from my teens who worked as a Russian translator told me a Russian joke: There's no Truth in the News and no News in the Truth.
Truth and News were the names of the two main newspapers.
My dream college was a rigorous liberal arts Great Books college called Saint John's with a campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico and a campus in Maryland, and it required two years of a foreign language to be accepted. I learned this a year too late to get in two years of foreign language in high school but took French my senior year in high school because of it.
Why French when my mother is German? Because my brother already took a year of German from the psycho bitch German teacher that all the German moms LOATHED.
German immigrants would tell their children "That's NOT correct." And psycho bitch would say "Your mom speaks Hillbilly German."
My mother spoke High German and was flabbergasted because "There's no such thing as Hillbilly German. That's an AMERICAN concept."
We had two foreign language teachers at Kendrick High School: psycho bitch, who taught German and Spanish, and a lovely lady who taught French and spent a year in Paris at University as an exchange student.
So I took French.
Where I would sit in the back of the class and pass multilingual notes back and forth with a Turkish exchange student from La Paz, Bolivia who already knew Turkish, English and Spanish.
So I randomly know a little trivia about Turkish, like they have a single letter for the sh sound and if you put a line over G, it's a silent letter.
Anyone who knew him learned that second fact because he had a silent g in his first name and a single letter for ch in his last name.
At one time, I added some to my Russian vocabulary and could recognize the sounds of about half the Russian alphabet and picked up a smattering of Spanish which is probably the most common language in the US after English and we sometimes have Spanish TV channels or similar.
I took four quarters of French in college, still sort of hoping to transfer to Saint John's and not knowing how to make that happen. In my teens and twenties, I used audiotapes to work on my German and French and I lived in Germany for nearly four years in my twenties where to my consternation everyone LEAPT at the opportunity to practice English with a native speaker so it didn't improve my German as much as I hoped it would.
I was involved for a time with an Iranian man and I know from him Farsi -- the Persian language -- has a single gender neutral pronoun. He would get he and she mixed up at times.
I took linguistics in college and Swahili was analyzed in lessons in that class. No, I don't know ANY Swahili.
My best friend in high school was a Korean immigrant and I knew two sentences of Korean from her.
I took two quarters of Classical Greek which I remember little of but I can tell you "En archai ain ho logos" is Greek for "In the beginning, there was the Word." And I can tell you archai is the root word for words like monarch and archaeology.
En archai doesn't really mean "In the beginning." It means something more like "At first." Monarch is one who is first. Archaeology is the study of that which came first.
Ology comes from logos and logos means a lot more than word. It shows up in many words that mean the study of something: Astrology. Biology. Geology.
In the beginning, there was a CONCEPT and it led to humanity. There was a mental model, an intricate set of ideas.
In a high school gifted enrichment class, I studied Latin and Greek root words for fancy English words as preparation for the college entrance exam and based on that I was able to read half the first chapter of my husband's Latin textbook for introductory Latin, as told here.
I know a lot about language and languages and I have a history of putting together language learning posts on various blogs of mine, currently including Adult Learners Handbook and Raising Future Adults. For that second site, I'm currently going through old posts from previous parenting and homeschooling sites of mine and reposting slightly edited old pieces, including stuff like Free Latin resources.
I know a little conversational German. I can cope with a little WRITTEN French having studied it in school but never had much exposure to spoken French. And I know random words from multiple languages because I saw it on Sixty Minutes or it showed up in some story I read as a teenager
Pectopah: Russian for restaurant. No T on the end. It's restoran because the Russian R looks like an English P and the Russian S looks like a C and N looks like H. Thus CCCP -- Russian for SSSR -- for USSR on the uniforms of Olympic Athletes back in the day.
But I don't really speak anything but English and I don't really want to hear about being an ugly American because I TRIED to learn more German in Germany and most people in Germany kept speaking to me in ENGLISH.