Broken

It's hard to maintain a language when you live abroad, even if it's your mother tongue. My deteriorating Japanese is definitely one of the biggest complexes I have.

Where Pigs Fly and Horses Puke

Hello!

Just a little update about an illustration project I did at the end of last semester (I blogged about it really briefly in February). The course was called "Wildes Berlin" (Wild Berlin) and we had to illustrate animals in some relation to Berlin. I'm kind of obsessed with languages, so I decided to work with animal-related sayings/idioms in Japanese, English, and German. I selected sayings with similar meanings and visually combined them -- which is kind of what goes on in my linguistically confused head! You can check out the entire book here!

Boah Ey

"Boah (ey)!" is the "Whoa!" or "Wow!" equivalent in German. I've caught myself saying it to non-German speakers many times this year ... I guess that might have been slightly weird.

Jumbled

Practical Joke

It would be a pretty hilarious horrible one to pull.

Denglisch 101, part 3

This is kind of a new one I caught myself doing recently . . . pretty awful, I know.

Carp

I've never had carp, but I'm sure they're great.

Denglisch 101, Part 2

Denglisch 101

I've been catching myself doing this a lot lately, among other Denglischisms.

Breakfast?

So many people at my school know how to knit, and I kind of feel uncool for being absolutely clueless.

Out

Just another ordinary day.

You're Fired

Basically all of our conversations are like this.

I can speeks engrish

Where did I pick up all this? One time in high school I thought it would be funny to pronounce scissors "skissors," and it stuck until I asked someone at the office to pass me the "skissors." Yeah. Probably a sign that I should limit my purposely-bad English use.

Linguistic Identity Crisis

For my polyglot-friends.

Synonyms

Thought you should know.

Squirrels are complicated

Why's it so impossible to pronounce in every single language (except for Japanese)? Is it as weird-sounding in other languages too?

Eh

I spent about three years in Toronto for university, during which time I picked up the infamous Canadian "eh." I tend to forget how recognizable that habit is when I'm in Europe---most people think I'm just American because of my generic (well, whatever generic is) North American accent. But it was a dead give-away to the American girl that I was talking to the other day that I'd spent at least some time in Canada. It's really hard to hide it when you use "eh" like, 15 times in a matter of 3 minutes, eh.

The funny thing is, because I use "eh" so much, it's rubbed off on G as well. And G's British-pan-European English combined with the Canadian-eh-rubbed-off-from-Japanese-girlfriend makes for a pretty exotic combo.

Anyway, G and I are planning a trip to Toronto and NY in the summer, and I can't wait to go back to the land of Eh.

Linguistic Revelation

Grammers

Too many things wrong with that sentence for you to teach English.

Dingle

I can't help it.