I just had to know what my friends were saying behind my back in front of my face.
When I was 4 or 5, my weekday afternoon routine included watching Villa Alegre on TV. I learned to count from one to twenty-nine (they never did tell us how to say “thirty” ). Years later, in junior high, I enrolled in the AP Spanish courses and essentially took my first year of high school Spanish before I left middle school.
I went to a high school with a fairly high Asian population, and many of these kids spoke Mandarin or Cantonese (two dialects of Chinese). It was a tiny bit exasperating to hear a few of my friends talking to each other, recognize my name, and ask them “What are you guys saying about me?” only to receive the reply, “Oh - nothing.”. (Yeah — pull the other one, it’s got bells on.) I talked about enrolling in some conversational Chinese classes when I started college the next year. Oh, but Chinese is so hard to learn when you don’t grow up speaking it, people said. Even native Chinese people have problems with it!
...oh really?
I enrolled in full spoken-written-reading courses in Mandarin Chinese, and after several years I actually got close to being functionally literate in Chinese. This requires that a person be able to recognize over 3,000 characters on sight, so it’s no mean feat. (My own observations about the Chinese numerals: the first three are just like Roman numerals, except laying on their sides...so after the party, I suppose. The Chinese character for “ten” is a cross — the Roman numeral ten, staggering home from said party.) I was able to learn the spoken language relatively quickly, especially compared to other American students. The tones didn’t seem to give me that much of a problem, and I was able to minimize my American accent. Still, it was demoralizing to visit my friend’s home and listen to his three-year-old niece speak better Chinese than I was able to speak after three years of study. Never mind that I knew kids learn language faster, and that she was essentially immersed in the language. (Maybe, for my own ego-protection, I should have stayed away?) I eventually studied Chinese for seven years, but have lost almost all of the spoken language ability...though I can still recognize many of the characters and even break some of them down into their components (also known as ‘radicals’.)
In between learning these two languages — in high school — I took geometry. I loathed geometry. Proofs were irritating, and I didn’t get the point. (I was never fond of the whole ‘show-your-work’ phenomenon if I was able to solve problems in my head. I even wrote my essays “backwards”...but I digress.) The geometry prof was also in charge of the cheerleading squad, so any time during sports season we had an easy way out of tests: “Hey Mr. GeometryProf, how’d the basketball team do?” And off he’d go, talking about last night’s game in great detail....et voila, no quiz that day!! I’d sit quietly, assembling wordsearch-like blocks of letters. Then I’d look through these blocks for things that looked like they could be words in some language. Over the year, I wrote down about 600 words or syllables; and a friend and I spent the last two weeks of that school year deciding on definitions for the words I’d “found”. There was a mixture of whimsy and logic: J. decided that nsi was why because it just sounded like a why. I then decided that because the two words were so highly similar, nsia would be because — the answer to nsi. It made sense to me: add one syllable, make a word’s partner or response.
I later ended up using portions of this language in a roleplaying world I built. I also use some of these words as passwords. Since they mean something to me, they’re memorable to me: yet it’s not likely that these words would be in any cracker’s brute-force-attack password dictionary, nor would they necessarily occur to someone. It’s just another little plus of my being intensely bored in geometry class, all those years ago.
Keywords: | Spanish | language | Holidailies | Chinese |
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