It was hysterical to hear the class try to make the difference the TH in THird versus broTHer. One is voiced and the other isn't. One is aspirated and one isn't. I gotta tell you there was no one in the class dissing on my Macedonian skills, I can tell you that!
Language is the achilles tendon of cross-cultural communications. I hate language study. Don't think for a moment that it ever ends, because it does not, ever. This is the bane of my existence, because no matter how well I speak, the tasks I am trying to accomplish are ever more complex -- and thus language needs to increase in it's complexity as well. There is quite a bit of difference between buying tomatoes and teaching a class on missiology.
And slang may very well cause me to commit suicide. Colloquial phrases are not as hard, because they are generally stable. You learn the phrase and use it. But slang is different with every second person you meet on the street. Slang for the college kids is totally different than the slang you would use with there parents. Slang that you use with their parents is wholly other than what you would use with their parents, and so forth.
Add to that a Yugoslavian phenomena of city accents and dialects and chaos results for my small brain and foreigner phonetics. The mission should send only pure linguists to this area of the world. Fortunately my wife is such a person. She loves and learns languages as naturally as mothering her children. I would rather have the hair on my body ripped out by the roots one hair at a time than learn another language. But I certainly felt tons of sympathy for the English students in my wife's class, but I snickered a few times too :-)
Language is the achilles tendon of cross-cultural communications. I hate language study. Don't think for a moment that it ever ends, because it does not, ever. This is the bane of my existence, because no matter how well I speak, the tasks I am trying to accomplish are ever more complex -- and thus language needs to increase in it's complexity as well. There is quite a bit of difference between buying tomatoes and teaching a class on missiology.
And slang may very well cause me to commit suicide. Colloquial phrases are not as hard, because they are generally stable. You learn the phrase and use it. But slang is different with every second person you meet on the street. Slang for the college kids is totally different than the slang you would use with there parents. Slang that you use with their parents is wholly other than what you would use with their parents, and so forth.
Add to that a Yugoslavian phenomena of city accents and dialects and chaos results for my small brain and foreigner phonetics. The mission should send only pure linguists to this area of the world. Fortunately my wife is such a person. She loves and learns languages as naturally as mothering her children. I would rather have the hair on my body ripped out by the roots one hair at a time than learn another language. But I certainly felt tons of sympathy for the English students in my wife's class, but I snickered a few times too :-)
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