I’m fluent in English. Or as close as you can get to fluent with a high school education, a love of reading and a penchant for writing.
I’m hesitant in four languages: German, French, Spanish and Polish. When I say “hesitant” I mean that I can speak a little of each of those languages. Quite a bit of German, a little French, a scant amount of Spanish and and not much Polish. Since I’m not fluent in any of them, I have favorite nonsensical phrases that I like to use so I can say, “I speak a little X!” and spout the goofy saying, which will usually gets me a laugh. For example:
French: Voulez-vous couchez avec les hippopotames? - "Would you like to sleep with the hippopotami?
Spanish: Palabra a su madre! - “Word to your mother!”
Polish: Dah mye boozhyee! (<— Not spelled correctly.) - “Give me a kiss!”
Anybody else do this? Anyone have a phrase I can use for their language of choice?
I have a tiny grasp on French. I live with a French guy, and one of my old roomies is French, so I picked up a lot of slang. Most of it is NOT MPSIMS material. It does not help that I took 5 years of French in high school and college.
I learned a little Spanish in high school, but my teacher sucked. I used to work with a Cuban guy who taught me some stuff. My favorite expression is “Su madre trabaja en la calle”, which means “your mother works in the street”. It’s a literal translation that I looked up in high school, so I’m sure there’s a better way to say “yo, your mom’s a ho.” Not really a good conversation starter, but it’s fun to yell it at people when they say something nasty to me.
I was hesitant in Portugese for a while, I worked with a bunch of Portugese guys for a couple years so I learned some basic action words and some more… colorful action words.
Taking French in HS resulted in a period of hesitancy that lasted about a week into the summer after I graduated. The only French words I can still understand are the ones that are in the script for the movie my friends and I made as our final project in our senior French class.
3.5 years of college Russian courses in my first two years there resulted in a hesitancy that approached fluency during the periods I was taking intensive courses in it and quickly reverted to hesitancy that actually lasted a good while, almost a year after I stopped studying the language I could still understand native speakers almost perfectly, although I was totally unable to respond in kind. Even that has since evaporated, however.
I acquired a degree of hesitancy in Spanish in my youth that related solely to soccer conversation, some of which is still accessible (for instance, I could holler at you to “pass me the ball!” at a moment’s notice if I were so inclined), and which I hope to build on to utilize in my new job which features a large Spanish-speaking population.
On the whole, I love the application of the term ‘hesitant.’
My former stepfather, who died about a month ago, had a brother-in-law who once told me an equivalent phrase in German: “Spazieren mit mir?” (“Walk with me?”)
White Lightning, gladya like the term. Stuck “fluent” in the ol’ MS Word Thesaurus and out popped this (sorta) antonym.
It’s amazing to me that, at one time, I was pretty close to fluent in German… and now it’s gone. I love listening to my dear friend and neighbor speak it to her family members. One time I begged to listen to her end of the conversation on a transatlantic phone call… She was talking to her mother and asked, “Wo ist meine bloete Schwester?” I thought she said, “Wo is meine blumen Schwester?” When she got off the phone, I gushed over her cute nickname for her sister. “Blumen Schwester” would mean “Flower Sister.” She laughed at me: “I said bloete Schwester, silly! DUMB sister!”
Doh.
dougie, what a sweet little post. It produced for me a vision of an idea for a book or movie… Wouldn’t "Spazieren mit mir?" make a great romantic foreign movie title?
In my First year russian class we used to make endless Russian “yo’ mama” jokes which quite frankly, didn’t make a whit of sense in Russian but amused us anyway. Examples:
Tvayoo Mamoo stroyityel = Yo’ mama’s a construction worker
Tvayoo Mamoo rabotaet v oolitzee v Moskve = Yo’ mama works in the streets of Moscow.
Followed invariably by the ultimate comeback:
Tvayoo Mamoo rabotaet v oolitzee v Akademgorodok= Yo’ mama works in the streets of Akademgorodok (a small city in Siberia).
Hello Again, my trademark phrase in Russian was “eto da.” I used it with such frequency and such assuredness that after a year or two I even had our professors saying it as if it was at all meaningful.
Sorry to nitpick, but I so rarely get the chance: I think it would be more natural to put the name of the city in the genitive rather than use “B” and the prepositional. Tvoya mama rabotaet v oolitse moskvi ?? I don’t remember my case endings. Oolitsa would take prepositional plural and Moskva feminine genitive, which I think is … er… the “bi” letter.
I know it’s silly to be talking about making such an expression sound “natural,” but it was fun to indulge myself for a moment there. I do wish I could still speak it.
When we invented the “Tvayoo mamoo” joke, we hadn’t yet learned of the genitive case. We were in our first semester! Or perhaps we knew of it, but we feared it greatly. A greater knowledge of Russian grammar didn’t lead to corrections cause… well, you know, tradition.
Tvayoo mamoo egraet shakmatey! = Yo’ mama plays chess!
“eto da.” … “it’s yes?” How do you use it?
I learned Portuguese when I lived in Brazil. When I came back to the US, people were always asking me to say something in Portuguese, but I never knew what to say. Finally, I asked someone what he wanted me to say, and he answered, “Say ‘The dog has a hairy butt,’” strangely enough.
So I said, “O cachorro tem uma bunda peluda,” and I always say this now when someone asks me to say something in Portuguese. It’s very handy.
Anywhere and everywhere. “it is yes” or “this is yes” is universally applicable because it is universally meaningless. Loopus, the first phrase I learned in Portugese was eu no queiro sair sequestrado, for similar reasons as you’ve outlined. Sorry for the spelling.
C’est la vie
C’est la guerre
C’est la pomme de terre!
(sorry about spelling errors)
(That’s life, that’s war, that’s a potato!)
Am I fluent yet?
…a fellow I knew in college knew how to say “your mother prostitutes herself with goats” in Arabic. I’ve forgotten how, which is certainly a good thing, but it’s one of my favorite creative insults of all time!!
“Ruce vam k posteli svazu” is one of the few phrases I remember from Czech 101 (it was the first line of a rather bizarre song I had to translate). It means “I will tie your hands to the bed,” and I expect it would be quite the conversation stopper if I actually had the courage to use it.
It does not help that I took 5 years of French in high school and college.