Sprechen vous svenska?

Let me guess.  You may be one of those who claim to never have been good at foreign languages, but I bet you know the meaning of each of the words in the title of this article.  Not only that, you probably know which language each is from.

Maybe the reason you are “not good” at foreign languages is that you didn’t care for the way you were taught a particular language.  Maybe you rebelled at the way it was taught and didn’t let it soak in and use it.

I myself have had mixed feelings about each of my language experiences.  For example, I forgot almost everything I learned in high school Latin, but I retained enough of my two years of college French to read books, magazines, and newspapers and to have simple conversations.

The first time it was really important was when I transferred to Europe as a Univac employee.  Supposedly I was to move to Italy.  I got an Italian grammar book and started studying from it.  “Oh, wait, before you go to Italy you will spend several weeks in Basel, Switzerland.”  So, I got a German grammar book and started studying German.

I had all my travel arrangements made for me.  The last leg was a train from Zurich to Basel.  When I got to Basel, there was nobody to meet me.  Where do I go from here on a Saturday?  I knew we were to work at Sandoz, the big pharmaceutical company, and so I looked up Sandoz at a public phone.  When I reached Sandoz the guard spoke only German and French.  As best I could I explained my situation in French.  He said he would look up the Univac people in the computer room.  Within an hour or so one of the hardware guys came and got me.  It was only once I was in the hotel that I met the software guys I was to work with.

I have many anecdotes about learning German (Hochdeutsch) and Schweizer Deutsch, two different languages.  Ja jo! Wie goht’s!

One, I learned enough German to read some of the newspapers and to read the directions on starting the computer - drucken… (push…)

Two, I didn’t learn enough German to get in and out of East Berlin on my own.  The end story is that I had ten East German marks I was not supposed to leave with.  My Swiss companions were in a discussion with the guard behind the counter.  I kept swiveling my head towards whoever was speaking.  Finally, the guard looked at me and said, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”  I replied, “Nein!”  That cracked everyone up.  After I put my ten marks in the Red Cross jar, we were on our way out through Checkpoint Charlie.

When I finally arrived in Italy, I slowly learned more Italian.  It didn’t help that our work language was English.  I did start reading Italian newspapers and books and speaking Italian where I could.  I spoke it to my barber and I think I bought my car using Italian.  One difficulty was at some office where I wasn’t getting across to the clerks.  One exclaimed, “Questi stranieri!” (“These foreigners”).  I understood her, but I don’t remember if I made any reply.

After two years in Italy, I requested and got a transfer to Sweden.  Again I bought a grammar book or two and started reading newspapers.  Newspapers are wonderful for learning foreign languages because of the names and events in the news and the large number of similar words.  By my second year in Sweden, I disappointed a small group I was to supervise by stating that we would speak Swedish.  My rationale was they had many chances to speak English, I had few for Swedish.  After a year, many of my colleagues said I spoke “flyttande Svenska” (fluent Swedish), even those who didn’t report to me.  On the other hand, there were many who disagreed.

When I came back to the States, I decided to take German at a community college.  I added a couple more semesters when I returned to Minnesota.  Darned if I can remember much of what I learned in class.

This same phenomenon happened when I took Russian long before I left for Europe.  I still had notions of getting a PhD, and one of the requirements was to have some familiarity with two foreign languages.  I took a year of Russian in summer school.  I did B or better work, but I didn’t enjoy it.  The basis for each lesson was a short conversation we were supposed to memorize and recite with a classmate.  I’ll never forget the first sentence of the first conversation: “Привет Нина! Куда ви идёте?”  “Hi, Nina!  Where are you going?”  I didn’t go back for a second year.  For awhile my Russian handwriting was better than my English handwriting.  I still do recognize many Russian characters, but I have made no real effort to study Russian anymore other than look at the headlines on some online Russian newspapers.

Over the years I’ve put a little bit of effort into learning some bits and pieces of Finnish, Ukrainian, Greek, Dutch, Icelandic, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Japanese.  I’ll finish this with my Japanese joke: “Watashi-wa nihongo-ga wakarimasen.”  I say it well enough that Japanese relatives laugh at the contradiction: “I don’t understand Japanese.”

If you’re over 50 and enjoy languages as much as Mel does, join him for “Jolly Polyglots” in the winter quarter of University for Seniors at UMD.

This was also published in the Reader Weekly, 2014-08-28 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/08/28/3970_sprechen_vous_svenska

How is this blog doing?

Probably among my loyal readers, pretty well, all 20-30 of you and maybe rising.  Among the rest of the blogs in the world?  How about 29,082,475 sites being more popular in the last three months?  I guess that's what I get for writing what I damn well please:)  And as the name implies, irregularly.

This ranking comes from http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/magree.blogspot.com.

This ranking probably accounts for my large Russian readership, often twice as much as my U.S. readership.  Supposedly there are a lot of reverse spammers in Russia who go to low traffic sites in the hope that the site owners will click on the link backs.  Нет, спасибо!  Пожалуйста, уходи!

For my more legitimate readers who like what they find here, please tell your friends or make references in your own sites.

Also you can give me an eyeful by taking the survey by clicking here.

So far I've only had one response.  Of course, I didn't help my cause by posting derogatory comments about surveys at Insecure corporations.

An interesting reference to this blog

Among the statistics I receive about this blog are the search words used to find it.  One recent one was "tundra lingon och chili"; "och" is Swedish for "and".  Whoever used it must have gone through many search items; I couldn't find this blog in the first fifty entries when I used the search terms in quotes.  I tried just the words without the quotes and found it - "You really are good at foreign languages".

It's interesting that the searcher used a Russian word, a Swedish word, and a Spanish word.

To my readers from around the world for the past week

Thank you!
Danke!
Спасибо!
Terima kasih/谢谢/Nandri
Thank you! Merci!
Terima kasih
תודה רבה
धन्यवाद
Дякю!
If you can't guess all the languages above, see the labels for some hints.

Computer translations

Some of you may have heard the joke about the first computer translation from English to Russian and back. Supposedly "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" came back as the "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."

We have some Russian guests and one of them used www.translate.ru, which translates whole sentences rather than just words. Almost everything I asked it to translate into Russian I asked it to translate back into English. If I didn't like the result, I reworded the English and tried again.

When I tried "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." the back translation was weaker but still close: "The spirit wishes, but the flesh is weak."

Note: You don't have to read Russian to use this translator. Use http://www.online-translator.com/Default.aspx?prmtlang=en instead.

The wonders of computers

Many of our computers nowadays will flag spelling and grammar errors. I've found that the Macintosh OS X operating system corrects French and Swedish spelling.

We will have a Russian guest later this month and I sent her a short welcome message, with a little bit of Russian. I was quite surprised to see some of the words underlined in red. For one of the words my computer gave some choices and I selected the one I thought was appropriate. The other I had to look up on Google to get the correct spelling.

Oh, for my Russian readers, the words were русский and извините in Извините! Не понимаю русский язик! (Excuse me! I don't understand the Russian language!) I had an й where I shouldn't and didn't have an й where I should.

Phishers are phools, but the phished are bigger phools

Most of us have heard that phishing and other scams are big business.  Given many of the errors of grammar, errors of spelling, and so on, it is hard to believe that enough people take them seriously.

I just started getting phrench phishing, and I think it is because at least one of two French speakers I've recently exchanged email with have had their address books hacked.

Even though I generally recognize spam from just the title or sender, I often take a peek at the contents.  I was surprised to see that one email supposedly in French may have had a Russian sender; it had securitй instead of sécurité!!

P.S. I did a search on securitй and got 598 hits.  It seems to be common usage in Russian to use this blended spelling of Latin and Cyrillic characters, both in a French context and a Russian context.

You really are good at foreign languages

How often have you heard people say, "I never was any good with foreign languages!"  But any of us who read a lot or listen a lot, know lots of foreign words and phrases as part of our own language.

Consider the following:

Oui, non, savoir faire, coup d'état, menu, restaurant, merci beaucoup, la plume de ma tante, père, mère, soirée, bon jour, monsieur, madame, mademoiselle, garçon, parlez vous français

Si, gracias, señor, señora, señorita, taco, burrito, chili, sombrero, serape, fiesta, siesta, madre, padre, muchacho, muchacha, piñata, guerrilla, mesa

Ja, nein, Blitzkrieg, danke, sprechen sie Deutsch, guten morgen, auf Wiedersehen, angst

Da, nyet, troika, glasnost, perestroika, tsar, soviet, sputnik, vodka, tundra

Smörgåsbord, fjörd, tack, Viking, ski, lingon, orienteering, ombudsman, moped

Judo, karate, karaoke, sumo, sushi, tofu, miso, manga, sake, kimono, samurai, futon, tsunami

Si, no, italiano, spaghetti, opera, pasta, forte, piano, ciao, arrivederci, buon giorno, vino

I bet you know over 90% of these words and can identify each of the groups.

Interestingly, Apple's TextEdit only flagged five words as not in its dictionary; these were burrito, chili, serape, nyet, and fjörd.  TextEdit was happy when I spelled fjörd as fjord. In fact, TextEdit insisted on changing it as I typed.  Microsoft's Word is a bit fussier; it didn't recognize any of the words that contained diacritical marks, like in garçon, señor, and smörgåsbord.

See, you're also smarter than a computer.  You could recognize all the words.

Next time somebody says they have never been good at whatever, reply that they just haven't spent enough time and interest learning that whatever.

Ciao, amici miei!

Simple simply ain't simple

Because a University for Seniors luncheon next week is at our Russian class time, we decided we would try to sit at the same table. I volunteered to make a table tent

Русский Стол
Russian Table

As you can see above, the Russian is no problem with my computer. The big problem was rotating the text so that it would be right-side up on each side when I folded the paper.

I could find no way of rotating the text in Word. What I could find in the help files was not on any of my palettes. I tried Excel instead. I did find Text Box in the Insert Menu and I could rotate the box with the text in it.

The next hard part was getting the "two sides" balanced on the paper. It seemed each box was on a different page or somehow otherwise badly balanced. I finally would click print, look at the thumbnail, cancel, readjust the boxes, and repeat until I was happy with the result.

I had printed one copy a plain piece of paper with much grinding of the printer. We had cleaned it once recently, but kept putting off doing again.

I put in a sheet of matte photo paper for heavier stock and clicked print. Grind, grind, and then grind again. "Load paper in main tray" Darn it, there is paper in the main tray. Adjust paper carefully. Grind, grind, same error.

OK, OK! I'll clean the printer. With a bit of searching, I found the generic instructions for cleaning the printer on HP's website. I unplugged the printer, turned the back towards me, and opened the back access door. There was a little piece of paper peeking out at me! I couldn't pull it with my fingers and went downstairs to get needle-nose pliers. That did the trick but the little piece of paper was a quarter sheet of paper.

Neither of us could remember printing quarter sheets recently. How long was that in there causing all the grinding? And why did it choose this job to position itself to stop all printing?

Once I put everything back together, the paper fed properly. It still made noise, but nothing like the awful racket before.

Some two hours after I started, I finished the ten-minute job.

I also put the result in a protected space in my backpack. That should ensure that I will have it at the luncheon to "reserve" our class table. Is that Murphy I see peeking in the window?