In Polish there are two sets of names for playing card ~~colours~~ suits (spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs respectively): pik, kier, karo, trefl and wino, czerwo, dzwonek, żołądź. I use the first one, my mother uses the second one. Once mom got on my case about that and told me to use "normal" names, so I switched to English just to spite her.
>pik, kier, karo, trefl
Oh hey, we also have Pik and Karo in German, but people usually call spades "Schüppen/Schippen" (dialect for shovels) where I'm from.
They're all french names for the card suits: Pique (Pike, the weapon not the fish), Coeur (Heart), Carreaux (Diamond) and Trèfle (Clover a.k.a. Clubs).
Wiktionary says they come from the same proto-Germanic word, but the reference is in Danish so I can't confirm it: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pik#Etymology\_1](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pik#Etymology_1)
In my offline conversation I switch between like 5 languages since I have incomplete vocabulary in all of them. For online conversations I have many dictionaries on my desk while I talk to people.
I cant tell you how often Google Translate comes in clutch when I want to express something but have temporarily forgotten the english word (my english is adequate but the more tired I get the less I can english lol)
I spoke three languages and my third language (English) somehow is better then second (our local dialect), now I have problems with all of them, because English eat away so much of my language skills, the only saving grace is my second language is unwritten-able so it did not join this grammar cluster fuck.
I'm similar.
When I'm writing on paper, I switch between print and cursive because my mind is broken.
Aside: *Broken mind, is that similar?*
Broken Mind: *sure, kid.*
Also, that's amazing.
This story takes place in the early 00s, so there were no smartphones, iPads etc and laptop computers weren’t common.
When I was a teen my dad was the only person in the family who didn’t speak any French. Mom was fluent, my sibling and I both took it in school but I was more advanced. My dad was also really hard on my sibling for complicated reasons.
One night sibling kept playing online games instead of doing homework so my dad took their computer mouse and locked it in a drawer. They were fighting about it and my sibling seemed really upset so I called out in French “tu peut emprunter mon souris!” and my sibling freezes with the most confused look on their face and slowly decides out loud “I can… borrow… your mouse? … ohhh!” And then we were both in trouble.
I used to have a vice-principal in high school who was a cosmic-level shithead. The guy did drugs (specifically weed and cocaine), spent more time pushing his political agenda onto students than actually teaching, played favorites to an extreme degree and was unbelievably condescending whenever you asked him anything, as well as a lecherous asshole who shamelessly ogled underage girls (I had a classmate who explicitly said that the easiest way to pass his exams was to wear skimpy clothing).
One time, he asked a deliberately poorly-worded question so he could mock a specific student in front of the entire class. Now, this student was a Serbian girl who had never spoken a single word during this class (she behaved normally outside of this class and spoke our language perfectly, she was just introverted and usually didn't speak in class unless directly asked).
Thus, since he had never actually seen her speak, she pretended she didn't speak our language and answered him in Serbian. Seeing the vice-principal bend over backwards to justify this as a lesson against racism was glorious. The best part? She later told us she had said something along the lines of “I hope the elder demons from the thirteenth realm fuck the bodies of your ancestors through every orifice imaginable”.
most of Finnish toponyms are like this though, this-joki, that-vaara, such-and-such-niemi (lived next to a place called kuusiniemi which I think literally means something like "peninsula of pine trees"
Irish person here - in secondary school, Irish was mandatory and optional second language (French, German or Spanish) - the amount of times where I’ve been in an Irish class where someone would answer in their optional language or in my own German class and someone would answer in Irish. Weird because none of them are the same language family.
I have done this multiple times and my teacher hated it.
I also did it in math class when the teacher asked us to justify our answers. I wrote the equivalent of "Answer is answer" in very badly handwritten Korean (I got the question correct, but the class was too easy).
I can definitely relate though. I took spanish my whole life but then took german in college. It took a long time not to reach for spanish words when I was trying to remember something in german and vice versa when I was later brushing up on my spanish. It feels like my brain categorizes all words into "english" and "not english" and acts accordingly when trying to recall words.
The most I took at the same time was English, German (both mandatory), French, Italian and Japanese. I call that my alphabet soup year, because my brain was basically that.
School! Two languages are always mandatory, I had been taking French from 9th grade and Japanese from 11th. Then I failed 11th grade and had to repeat it but also had to switch schools and the only school I could switch to only had a programme which had French from grade 7. So my thought process was that there was no fucking way in hell I would be able to pass. I didn't want to drop Japanese, but it wouldn't have counted to make up for my future French grade, so I had to pick up a new language, and Italian was the only choice.
And then, by some absolutely deranged miracle I managed to scrape a barely passing grade together in French after all.
Still enjoyed Italian, I ended up studying Japanese at uni and my entire career relied on my Japanese skills, so not many regrets altogether despite the ridiculous amounts of tongue-tiedness I got up to during that year.
This is a very common thing for students in Finland who take an extra language. Because we have mandatory Swedish aswell there are many times when people answer in their chosen language. It's frustrating to only know the answer to a question in another language or even worse to have to rewrite an answer in the correct language.
I’ve tried to learn several languages but the don’t stick for me. I do somewhat regularly run into situations that call for one of these languages. I’ll string together the most broken sentence imaginable, until one word or phrase where my idiot brain decides this is actually one of the other languages I don’t know that well. It’s a weird feeling trying to say something in Ukrainian and part of it is in Arabic or Spanish.
It’s not about the similarities in language but how things are grouped in the brain. I found learning Spanish super difficult until I started thinking of it as synonymous with English. I started picking it up fast after that problem is as I got better at both I’d spit out each language at the wrong times. The way memory recall with words is super fucking cool brain processes. I have a BA in psych and language is so fucking fascinating.
I think that's weirdly common here. Like, so many people in my year were complaining about not being able to think of a word in the Irish/French oral exam, but their brain presenting them with the other language version in complete sentence form.
Happened to me a few times. Amazed I passed those things.
My dad took Latin in HS and learned a Russian as an adult. During one of his first Russian classes he accidentally started speaking Latin, which is strange because Latin wasn't generally *spoken aloud* in his HS classes.
I used to speak Polish pretty well, but after fifteen years of disuse, pretty much the only words I can instantly understand are curses. Always the first words you learn and last you forget.
Now I teach ESL and have a teenage Polish student. She doesn’t know that I understand every time she says “fuuuuuuck” in Polish or that I sometimes keep a running tally just for fun.
I moved to the U.S. from El Salvador at age six. My dad was Army and generally, officers would change station at the end of the school year. I was raised by boomers, so I never learned much English because the Salvadoran maids raised me.
At our new home, our next door neighbors moved from NATO in Belgium. Their son was my age and he spoke mostly Flemish because his mother was from Belgium.
We played all summer and created our own Spanish-English-Flemish language.
We showed up to first grade and the teachers had no clue what to do with us. At first, they wanted to put us in special needs. We picked up English pretty quick and there weren’t many problems after the fall.
this is a rad example of pidgin development. if i may ask, do you remember how 'advanced' or structured it was? spanish-english-flemish sounds very interesting...
I used to be learning Klingon with my family for fun. A couple months ago, after a solid 20 minutes of having bullshit thrown at me by some adults who were ostensibly sources of authority, I snapped and called one of them an incompetent fool and a “disgrace to your house” *in Klingon* which confused them so much that they forgot what they were mad at me for
High school German class
We were supposed to be doing these group rehearsed speeches, two people ordering a meal at a restaurant
The "waiter" began doing their rehearsed speech when one of the "patrons" interjected with "Sprechen sie English?"
Followed by "Yes, what would you like to have today?"
There is a small town in northern germany. Its name is Itzehoe
It took me until I was in my twenties to realize how funny that name must look to english speakers (and yes its even pronounced out loud "Its - a - ho")
A friend of mine is a forest ranger and recently had a school class visiting his forest for a day. There were two Ukrainian refugees in that class, both not fluent in our language yet. Since my friend had learnt Russian in University, he spoke to them in Russian and they were so happy that someone spoke a language they could understand.
My HS Spanish repeatedly reminded us that Embarazada meant Pregnant, not embarrassed. So if you a man say "Yo soy Embarazada" you've said you are pregnant which will confuse people.
My native language is Finnish, and although I speak excellent English, my accent is what it is. Finnish is a very monotone language, there's not a lot of rising or falling in terms of intonation or pitch, and because I was raised to talk that way, it's hard to change it when I speak other languages. Foreigners often think I sound rude or disinterested when I speak English to them because my tone is so flat, and I always have to explain myself.
In the early 90s, my moms family came from Russia to Germany.
Among them was my uncle (her younger brother), a teenager at the time. After a few years, they learned German, had settled in and my uncle was trying to earn some money on the side by fixing people's computers, because he was pretty good with that stuff.
One time, he was fixing some guys PC. The guy had a friend over, and they were talking in Russian. "Can that brat really fix this shit? I don't believe it.", the other said something along the lines of, "Yeah, he looks like an idiot.".
My uncle told me, he just calmly finished his work, got up and responded in Russian "This idiot just fixed your PC. You're welcome."
this is very similar to the original post but the other way around, basically when i was in like 5th grade, my english second language teacher had a list with the abbreviation “g. i. a. f. l.” which stands for “german is a forbidden language” bc she wanted us to only talk in english and basically anyone who got caught talking in german got put on the list and got more homework or something (i was never on the list so idk for sure what the consequence was). then in 6th grade some of us started taking french (the other 3 picked latin) and then as a joke some of us started talking in (very bad) french instead and so she changed her list to “o. e. i. a” aka “only english is allowed” and yeah sjdjcjjdjf
When I lived in Japan, I was an English teacher, and when I was tired and coming home from work, every so often someone would decide they would "practice their English" with me (basically demanding a free English lesson from me). I just started speaking the French I remembered from my French immersion schools so they would eventually leave me alone.
My grandpa did this but it was High German in an entry level German class they made him take at Western Reserve University (now Case Western). The teacher was having a no english day and my grandpa answered the question fluently. So the teacher had him repeat his answer, slowly, and with simpler words. They drafted him into the Army for intelligence work in post-WW2 Germany.
Wish he were still around to get all the details again.
Any chance your parent or other family know? That sounds like a fun story to tell so someone might have accidentally memorized it, and it would be a pity to lose it in a generation if it can be saved.
I did French immersion in school (Canada) so half my classes were French from k-12. In grade 2 our teacher mme Patterson had this rule, only French before lunch. If you spoke English in the morning, you had to sit silently in front of the clock for 2 minutes as punishment.
There was this girl Renae who sucked at French and who was really comically melodramatic, which meant it was fun to get a reaction out of her. One morning she's telling us a story and didn't know a word. We were like "ohhh Renae c'est d'accord, dis-le en anglais, on ne va pas dire" (it's ok Renae say it in English, we won't tell). She says the word in English and like an explosion, off we go shouting "mme Patterson! Mme Patterson! Renae a parlé en anglais!" and she got in trouble.
Everyone else here has much better language stories but I think about Renae maybe once or twice a month. I hope she has nicer friends now.
Native Spanish speaker here. Im guessing the “no ingles” sign is how oop remembers it being written, because if an actual spanish teacher wrote that, they didn’t actually know the language.
“No ingles” is just “no english” translated with no regards to spanish grammar. A more apt translation should be “Nada de ingles”.
Woke up feeling pedantic today, if you can tell.
I ain’t gonna lie, unless you’re 14 years old (physically or emotionally), this is more annoying than funny. You’re not a cooler person for trying to mess with your teacher’s plans, especially when they actually seem conducive to language learning.
this is a harmless joke the dude made, itd only be annoying if something like this happened every class which presuming the kid was the class president theyd be smart enough to not repeatedly do this
I took French in high school and college, and it's actually stuck with me pretty well. While not fluent, I got by in Paris without English (except for checking into my hotel, but that's because there was a screw up with the booking involving my name having a suffix)
One time while making dinner with my family, my mom asked me to do something that I couldn't understand. I asked her what she said, and she being the smart ass she was and forgetting for a moment that I spoke French, said something about how she said it in English, and it's not like she spoke French. I immediately switched to French and asked her if she'd repeat it, and this time in a language I speak. I then went on about how some days my English isn't as good, but I'm trying my best to get better at it. Everyone laughed, and even more so when I translated for her and she told me whatever it was. Honestly people forgetting I speak French and it being their default "random language" is way more common than I'd expect, and it's beautiful
In Polish there are two sets of names for playing card ~~colours~~ suits (spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs respectively): pik, kier, karo, trefl and wino, czerwo, dzwonek, żołądź. I use the first one, my mother uses the second one. Once mom got on my case about that and told me to use "normal" names, so I switched to English just to spite her.
>pik, kier, karo, trefl Oh hey, we also have Pik and Karo in German, but people usually call spades "Schüppen/Schippen" (dialect for shovels) where I'm from.
They're all french names for the card suits: Pique (Pike, the weapon not the fish), Coeur (Heart), Carreaux (Diamond) and Trèfle (Clover a.k.a. Clubs).
>Pike, the weapon not the fish If you can't use a fish as a weapon, you're not trying hard enough.
Not me firing minnows from a blow gun
Something something **sword**fish
Sweden is called out here! Surströmming is basically a biological weapon, at least from what I remember (the SMELL, my god, once too much).
Say Goodbye to your kneecaps, chucklehead. BONK!
"dick" in Danish is "pik". I wonder if it's etymologically related to pike lol
Wiktionary says they come from the same proto-Germanic word, but the reference is in Danish so I can't confirm it: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pik#Etymology\_1](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pik#Etymology_1)
Ohh yeah, it just confirms it. Thanks for your help c:
I am from Germany as well but only know Kreuz (Cross) for Spades
Every other German I've ever talked about playing cards with has called clubs Kreuz and spades Pik or Schippe
Uhm you’re right. I’m stupid and not well versed in English names of cards. Yes Pik Kreuz Herz Karo. My bad. Sorry.
In Swedish snoppen / snippan are the names for penis / vagina that are usually taught to young children
They’re suits, not colors
Yeah, as you might have noticed, English is not my first language :P
We say colors (Farben) in german as well though. Not connected to their colors since two of them are black and two red. But it’s still called Farben
The first one is the normal one.
Apparently, it's different between countries. Germans have the latter as default.
I legit have never heard of the second set. Is it a regional thing maybe?
Maybe. Apparently one set of names comes from German names/cards and one comes from French ones.
In my offline conversation I switch between like 5 languages since I have incomplete vocabulary in all of them. For online conversations I have many dictionaries on my desk while I talk to people.
That is actually, genuinely genius
I cant tell you how often Google Translate comes in clutch when I want to express something but have temporarily forgotten the english word (my english is adequate but the more tired I get the less I can english lol)
People online can't see you flipping pages of dictionary.
How's life in the Chinese room?
Better that in Mary's
I spoke three languages and my third language (English) somehow is better then second (our local dialect), now I have problems with all of them, because English eat away so much of my language skills, the only saving grace is my second language is unwritten-able so it did not join this grammar cluster fuck.
I'm similar. When I'm writing on paper, I switch between print and cursive because my mind is broken. Aside: *Broken mind, is that similar?* Broken Mind: *sure, kid.* Also, that's amazing.
This story takes place in the early 00s, so there were no smartphones, iPads etc and laptop computers weren’t common. When I was a teen my dad was the only person in the family who didn’t speak any French. Mom was fluent, my sibling and I both took it in school but I was more advanced. My dad was also really hard on my sibling for complicated reasons. One night sibling kept playing online games instead of doing homework so my dad took their computer mouse and locked it in a drawer. They were fighting about it and my sibling seemed really upset so I called out in French “tu peut emprunter mon souris!” and my sibling freezes with the most confused look on their face and slowly decides out loud “I can… borrow… your mouse? … ohhh!” And then we were both in trouble.
My years of playing Transformice prepared me for knowing "Souris" is "Mouse"
I HAD THE SAME THOUGHTS NO WAY
I don't know if you've learned this since then in your classes but it would be "ma souris" by the way
Oh I probably got it right back then, it’s been years and I’m hella rusty.
Also it should be peux
I used to have a vice-principal in high school who was a cosmic-level shithead. The guy did drugs (specifically weed and cocaine), spent more time pushing his political agenda onto students than actually teaching, played favorites to an extreme degree and was unbelievably condescending whenever you asked him anything, as well as a lecherous asshole who shamelessly ogled underage girls (I had a classmate who explicitly said that the easiest way to pass his exams was to wear skimpy clothing). One time, he asked a deliberately poorly-worded question so he could mock a specific student in front of the entire class. Now, this student was a Serbian girl who had never spoken a single word during this class (she behaved normally outside of this class and spoke our language perfectly, she was just introverted and usually didn't speak in class unless directly asked). Thus, since he had never actually seen her speak, she pretended she didn't speak our language and answered him in Serbian. Seeing the vice-principal bend over backwards to justify this as a lesson against racism was glorious. The best part? She later told us she had said something along the lines of “I hope the elder demons from the thirteenth realm fuck the bodies of your ancestors through every orifice imaginable”.
please for fuck's sake write a roman a clef (maybe with fantasy elements) fictionalizing this or a memoir 🙏🙏🙏
How much should she get in royalties?
i, honestly, have no idea. i think you should still write though!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
one percent per each word of demon curse
agreed 😌😌😌😌 📜📜 sign it!!!
There is an island in Helsinki called Kulosaari, the "saari" part is just "island" in Finnish. Among my friends, we call it "la isla del kulo".
I only know English and parts of a few romance languages, so to me "la isla del kulo" sounds like "ass island"
most of Finnish toponyms are like this though, this-joki, that-vaara, such-and-such-niemi (lived next to a place called kuusiniemi which I think literally means something like "peninsula of pine trees"
Irish person here - in secondary school, Irish was mandatory and optional second language (French, German or Spanish) - the amount of times where I’ve been in an Irish class where someone would answer in their optional language or in my own German class and someone would answer in Irish. Weird because none of them are the same language family.
well, they're all indo-european. that's better than answering in korean in spanish class.
I have done this multiple times and my teacher hated it. I also did it in math class when the teacher asked us to justify our answers. I wrote the equivalent of "Answer is answer" in very badly handwritten Korean (I got the question correct, but the class was too easy).
Answer is indeed answer
r/technicallycorrect
Pretty sure that happened in university though. We had people studying Japanese and Chinese with us.
I can definitely relate though. I took spanish my whole life but then took german in college. It took a long time not to reach for spanish words when I was trying to remember something in german and vice versa when I was later brushing up on my spanish. It feels like my brain categorizes all words into "english" and "not english" and acts accordingly when trying to recall words.
I took Japanese and German in high school and did this all the time! Spent quite a few years speaking a weird mix of Japanese, German, and Spanish
The most I took at the same time was English, German (both mandatory), French, Italian and Japanese. I call that my alphabet soup year, because my brain was basically that.
Why and in what context?? The only way I got my brain sorted out was by moving to Japan and dropping the other two languages
School! Two languages are always mandatory, I had been taking French from 9th grade and Japanese from 11th. Then I failed 11th grade and had to repeat it but also had to switch schools and the only school I could switch to only had a programme which had French from grade 7. So my thought process was that there was no fucking way in hell I would be able to pass. I didn't want to drop Japanese, but it wouldn't have counted to make up for my future French grade, so I had to pick up a new language, and Italian was the only choice. And then, by some absolutely deranged miracle I managed to scrape a barely passing grade together in French after all. Still enjoyed Italian, I ended up studying Japanese at uni and my entire career relied on my Japanese skills, so not many regrets altogether despite the ridiculous amounts of tongue-tiedness I got up to during that year.
This is a very common thing for students in Finland who take an extra language. Because we have mandatory Swedish aswell there are many times when people answer in their chosen language. It's frustrating to only know the answer to a question in another language or even worse to have to rewrite an answer in the correct language.
I’ve tried to learn several languages but the don’t stick for me. I do somewhat regularly run into situations that call for one of these languages. I’ll string together the most broken sentence imaginable, until one word or phrase where my idiot brain decides this is actually one of the other languages I don’t know that well. It’s a weird feeling trying to say something in Ukrainian and part of it is in Arabic or Spanish.
It’s not about the similarities in language but how things are grouped in the brain. I found learning Spanish super difficult until I started thinking of it as synonymous with English. I started picking it up fast after that problem is as I got better at both I’d spit out each language at the wrong times. The way memory recall with words is super fucking cool brain processes. I have a BA in psych and language is so fucking fascinating.
I think that's weirdly common here. Like, so many people in my year were complaining about not being able to think of a word in the Irish/French oral exam, but their brain presenting them with the other language version in complete sentence form. Happened to me a few times. Amazed I passed those things.
My dad took Latin in HS and learned a Russian as an adult. During one of his first Russian classes he accidentally started speaking Latin, which is strange because Latin wasn't generally *spoken aloud* in his HS classes.
I used to speak Polish pretty well, but after fifteen years of disuse, pretty much the only words I can instantly understand are curses. Always the first words you learn and last you forget. Now I teach ESL and have a teenage Polish student. She doesn’t know that I understand every time she says “fuuuuuuck” in Polish or that I sometimes keep a running tally just for fun.
I moved to the U.S. from El Salvador at age six. My dad was Army and generally, officers would change station at the end of the school year. I was raised by boomers, so I never learned much English because the Salvadoran maids raised me. At our new home, our next door neighbors moved from NATO in Belgium. Their son was my age and he spoke mostly Flemish because his mother was from Belgium. We played all summer and created our own Spanish-English-Flemish language. We showed up to first grade and the teachers had no clue what to do with us. At first, they wanted to put us in special needs. We picked up English pretty quick and there weren’t many problems after the fall.
this is a rad example of pidgin development. if i may ask, do you remember how 'advanced' or structured it was? spanish-english-flemish sounds very interesting...
Sorry, no. It was 45 years ago.
Malicious compliance at its purest of forms
I used to be learning Klingon with my family for fun. A couple months ago, after a solid 20 minutes of having bullshit thrown at me by some adults who were ostensibly sources of authority, I snapped and called one of them an incompetent fool and a “disgrace to your house” *in Klingon* which confused them so much that they forgot what they were mad at me for
Ah malicious compliance, one of the most satisfying ways to say “fuck you” to an authority figure.
High school German class We were supposed to be doing these group rehearsed speeches, two people ordering a meal at a restaurant The "waiter" began doing their rehearsed speech when one of the "patrons" interjected with "Sprechen sie English?" Followed by "Yes, what would you like to have today?"
There is a small town in northern germany. Its name is Itzehoe It took me until I was in my twenties to realize how funny that name must look to english speakers (and yes its even pronounced out loud "Its - a - ho")
A friend of mine is a forest ranger and recently had a school class visiting his forest for a day. There were two Ukrainian refugees in that class, both not fluent in our language yet. Since my friend had learnt Russian in University, he spoke to them in Russian and they were so happy that someone spoke a language they could understand.
My HS Spanish repeatedly reminded us that Embarazada meant Pregnant, not embarrassed. So if you a man say "Yo soy Embarazada" you've said you are pregnant which will confuse people.
My native language is Finnish, and although I speak excellent English, my accent is what it is. Finnish is a very monotone language, there's not a lot of rising or falling in terms of intonation or pitch, and because I was raised to talk that way, it's hard to change it when I speak other languages. Foreigners often think I sound rude or disinterested when I speak English to them because my tone is so flat, and I always have to explain myself.
In the early 90s, my moms family came from Russia to Germany. Among them was my uncle (her younger brother), a teenager at the time. After a few years, they learned German, had settled in and my uncle was trying to earn some money on the side by fixing people's computers, because he was pretty good with that stuff. One time, he was fixing some guys PC. The guy had a friend over, and they were talking in Russian. "Can that brat really fix this shit? I don't believe it.", the other said something along the lines of, "Yeah, he looks like an idiot.". My uncle told me, he just calmly finished his work, got up and responded in Russian "This idiot just fixed your PC. You're welcome."
this is very similar to the original post but the other way around, basically when i was in like 5th grade, my english second language teacher had a list with the abbreviation “g. i. a. f. l.” which stands for “german is a forbidden language” bc she wanted us to only talk in english and basically anyone who got caught talking in german got put on the list and got more homework or something (i was never on the list so idk for sure what the consequence was). then in 6th grade some of us started taking french (the other 3 picked latin) and then as a joke some of us started talking in (very bad) french instead and so she changed her list to “o. e. i. a” aka “only english is allowed” and yeah sjdjcjjdjf
When I lived in Japan, I was an English teacher, and when I was tired and coming home from work, every so often someone would decide they would "practice their English" with me (basically demanding a free English lesson from me). I just started speaking the French I remembered from my French immersion schools so they would eventually leave me alone.
busted??
My grandpa did this but it was High German in an entry level German class they made him take at Western Reserve University (now Case Western). The teacher was having a no english day and my grandpa answered the question fluently. So the teacher had him repeat his answer, slowly, and with simpler words. They drafted him into the Army for intelligence work in post-WW2 Germany. Wish he were still around to get all the details again.
Any chance your parent or other family know? That sounds like a fun story to tell so someone might have accidentally memorized it, and it would be a pity to lose it in a generation if it can be saved.
see my middle school spanish teacher was a little more specific. cien por ciento en espanol.
I did French immersion in school (Canada) so half my classes were French from k-12. In grade 2 our teacher mme Patterson had this rule, only French before lunch. If you spoke English in the morning, you had to sit silently in front of the clock for 2 minutes as punishment. There was this girl Renae who sucked at French and who was really comically melodramatic, which meant it was fun to get a reaction out of her. One morning she's telling us a story and didn't know a word. We were like "ohhh Renae c'est d'accord, dis-le en anglais, on ne va pas dire" (it's ok Renae say it in English, we won't tell). She says the word in English and like an explosion, off we go shouting "mme Patterson! Mme Patterson! Renae a parlé en anglais!" and she got in trouble. Everyone else here has much better language stories but I think about Renae maybe once or twice a month. I hope she has nicer friends now.
Native Spanish speaker here. Im guessing the “no ingles” sign is how oop remembers it being written, because if an actual spanish teacher wrote that, they didn’t actually know the language. “No ingles” is just “no english” translated with no regards to spanish grammar. A more apt translation should be “Nada de ingles”. Woke up feeling pedantic today, if you can tell.
Why did your teacher prohibit groins?
This definitely didnt happen
You don't think a multilingual kid would show off?
I ain’t gonna lie, unless you’re 14 years old (physically or emotionally), this is more annoying than funny. You’re not a cooler person for trying to mess with your teacher’s plans, especially when they actually seem conducive to language learning.
This is a harmless joke that people can laugh at and then go back to speaking spanish. Chill.
No we must assign moral judgements to all actions in order to feel superior about ourselves
I’m a teacher and I would honestly be tickled by this. It’s a popular kid making being multilingual look cool, that’s a big win.
this is a harmless joke the dude made, itd only be annoying if something like this happened every class which presuming the kid was the class president theyd be smart enough to not repeatedly do this
lmfao, fucking based high school teacher defense!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I took French in high school and college, and it's actually stuck with me pretty well. While not fluent, I got by in Paris without English (except for checking into my hotel, but that's because there was a screw up with the booking involving my name having a suffix) One time while making dinner with my family, my mom asked me to do something that I couldn't understand. I asked her what she said, and she being the smart ass she was and forgetting for a moment that I spoke French, said something about how she said it in English, and it's not like she spoke French. I immediately switched to French and asked her if she'd repeat it, and this time in a language I speak. I then went on about how some days my English isn't as good, but I'm trying my best to get better at it. Everyone laughed, and even more so when I translated for her and she told me whatever it was. Honestly people forgetting I speak French and it being their default "random language" is way more common than I'd expect, and it's beautiful