Selah // Something Witty

A bit accursed, a bit aged. Bit by bit, they last forever.

Date: 10.03.18 -- Day 89 ("30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  -- Day 3)
Music: "Paradis Perdus" / Christine and the Queens & "Heart of Flame (Xin Zhi Yan)" / G.E.M.

Prompt -- Do you speak a second language? If so, what inspired you to learn it? If not, what language are you interested in learning?

Does singing count? My first introduction to a language besides English was my first choir at five with a hymn in Latin. Over two decades and several choirs later, I've had to sing in over a dozen different languages including Hebrew, Tagalog, Swahili, and Gaelic. The songs and the words I remember. Beyond that, I have no sense of meaning. If I could sing about people to communicate with them, I'm set.

I know a smattering of phrases in different languages. The language I grew up with most besides English was Spanish. There was no way to escape it really in southern California. Most of my exposure was to Salvadorean, Puerto Rican, and Mexican Spanish. Once I moved to PNW, I realized how much I missed it when walking down the street or hanging out downtown. My reading of it is decent. My speaking it is atrocious. But my understanding of the language has saved me a time or two, so that's definitely something.

I also have bit of French from my paternal grandfather who was a translator for the Cameroon during the 1988 Olympics. My grandparents, my uncles, and my father were fluent once upon a time, but it slowly slipped away once they moved back to the United States. I tried to pick it up for myself the summer before last when my best friend, who is fluent, was mentoring me in it. We were just beginning when things kind of fell apart with tutoring sessions. However, it's definitely something I like to pick up again when my brain are less finicky.

There are a few words of Visayan and Cebuano sprinkled throughout my lexicon, a holdover from my maternal grandfather. When he came here in the 1920s, speaking anything but English was heavily frowned upon. He taught himself English, but his accent never went away, which bothered him for decades. Because of this, especially during WWII, he opted not to teach my mother and my uncle for fear they were be further bullied. However, that changed during the 1970s, when they moved from Detroit to San Francisco. The Filipino community helped my mom find her way around the language, which she passed down bits to us young ones. If there is a language I would love to become fluent in, it's Visayan.

The current languages that I'm tinkering in are Norwegian, Korean, Farsi, Mandarin, Thai, and Taiwanese. Norwegian has popped up because of my mom. She's learning as a fun hobby, so that means I'm inadvertently learning too. Which I am definitely cool with; it's an intriguing language. Farsi, particularly the dialect Dari, came about because several of my students speak Dari as their first language, and I want to be as helpful as possible, including being able to speak with their parents. I'm learning Korean along with my niece who would like to go to Seoul on her 21st birthday. So we have three years to get this down, lol. Mandarin, Thai, and Taiwanese came about from the television shows I've immersed myself in this past year when I accidentally gave up watching anything in English. With most Chinese TV series running 50+ episodes in one go, I've become a heavyweight. Nothing daunts me anymore, especially when trying to keep up with the nuances of a very complex language.

So there ya go. I know a very little about a lot of languages. Such is life.

(This is the outro song for a Chinese TV series called "Princess Agents" (Chu Qiao Zhuan). I would not recommend; I rage quit about halfway through. It was a thing. However, I do highly recommend the soundtrack. It was one thing the show did right. Everything else, not so much.)