Jiu Shi Jiu Qi Qiu [NOT 4/2/23]

4/2/23 ManchuCandidate 13

For those wondering… it is in Chinese using the Pin Yin pronunciation (the romanization of Mandarin) for 99 Balloons.

Dual NOT… what languages can you speak or want to learn AND/OR balloons, yeah or nay? Or whatever pops your spy balloon.

I can speak Canadian English (duh), Profane Rural Canadian, a little bit of Korean (to my parents shame), a little Japanese, French (7 years schooling + supplemental lessons and one year in university so I damn well should), some Spanish, some Italian and a tiny bit of Russian (my Russian professor told me never come back and I didn’t.) If I had the time I would want to learn a bit more Chinese and German… because it seems I like to hurt my brain (neither language is easy.)

Balloons don’t bother me unlike clowns.

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

13 Comments

  1. American English

    Southern American English

    Conversational Spanish

    My friend who died last spring had been close to me long enough that we would could have a conversation in code without trying – like nothing intentionally structured so much as we could have a conversation with completely different meaning than the nouns we used. I miss her.

    • 😢 I’m sorry you lost your partner in crime. You must have spent many years together. I only have that shared language/code with my sister.

      I speak English, standard French (as we Montreal anglos were taught in school), and enough German to get by in Germany. I dabbled in Latin for a couple of years but have forgotten most of it. I wish my family taught me Khmer. I used to somewhat understand because in happier times (early childhood) there was always family over at our house or on the phone with my mom. Together they speak/shout a mix of Khmer and French.

      • Absolutely.  I think it’s because cursing is the most satisfying way to communicate.

        And make no mistake, certain languages do it better than others.  My brother-in-law is an artist at cursing in Serbian.  They have one phrase that translates to “I fuck your God” and that one always makes me want to stand up and cheer.

  5. You guys all know about my whole deal by now, right. . . ?

    ETA: I can parse shit in Portuguese, Italian and French, probably. And I taught myself to read the Russian alphabet from a book in the school library when I was in third grade, and my mom also enrolled me in kind of a survey class that taught German, Russian, Spanish and French, to get me out of the house the summer before fifth grade. Of course, with the American educational system being as cutting-edge as it was back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I had to wait until seventh grade to start studying an actual foreign language in school. And since I could only pick one, I just went with the one that seemed easiest to me at the time. . . .

    • Learning a new language is tough, but I learned to just gauge by tone (and some English words thrown in) to get the gist of the discussion without really knowing the language.

      I used to freak out my Hindi coworkers by commenting in English what they were talking about.

  6. fluent in dutch and english..i can get by in somewhat broken german and french

    and years of dealing with truck drivers from the east block,turkey and morocco have made me fairly adept at a sort of pidgin/sign language mash up thats fairly effective at getting across what you need people to do

    (edit) im not bothered by balloons or clowns…tho i do avoid clowns…they tend to be surrounded by kids and the kind of parents i dont want to hang out with

Leave a Reply