The original thread is taking 5 decades to load so I'm continuing here.
Dúirt Anyse:
quote:One cannot just "go home and look up" a lot of words that they "heard" in an Irish conversation all that easily. I can't tell if a "bh" at the beginning of a word is due to some declension or is really a part of the "base" word itself!
I was talking about looking up words in your native language, for instance looking up "bread" before you walk into a shop to buy bread.
quote:Yes, I speak with Russians and I have to do the "raise the pitch on a word in askance of the proper one" a lot. However, if I spent a minute or two between each "questioned" word, how long would a 5 minute conversation last, were the "native" speaker kindly enough to bear with it?
I actually love it when someone uses me to practise their English. Today in the steam room at the local gym, a Lao man said "hot very" to me, and I knew straight away that he was taking a chance to use his English. Of course I like to use them to practise my Lao, but given I have the advantage of immersion, I always let them practise their English if it seems that's what they want to do. I'm also working on my polite
"didn't realise you made a mistake" way of correcting people, e.g. "Yes, it is... very... hot".
Imagine, if you were an English person in England and learning to speak Japanese. Imagine how disappointing it would be if, when you came across a Japanese man, he spoke English to you. Japanese people are so rare in England that when you see one, you'd be excited to speak Japanese with him. That's why I speak English here in Lao to people who first approach me speaking English. They see a white man and they're like hey I get to practise this language I've been learning in a classroom for 5 years!
quote:I spent 2 months before even learning the language at all just to make sure that all of the sound files that I would learn from would be in the dialect of Connemara (sp?).
After three years of doing 9 to 5 in college 5 days a week I've lost a lot of the patience I once had for learning things. For instance I'm learning to write Lao not by learning it properly, but by taking out a piece of paper and writing down sentences using a dictionary. The idea is that I'll memorise stuff and learn patterns. It's working well so far. There a few days ago I filled out the immigration form in Lao when I was going to re-new my Visa. To be honest though, now that I've got a bit of a
grip on it, I'm more willing to do some light study. I wonder if it'll ever get to the stage of the ridiculous amount of meticulous study I did on the Irish language :-O
