Learn a new thing a day - Pig Latin

I learned so many things when I was at Drake over the weekend. See, I told you, college is the best place to learn. ;)

I was introducing a new language learning website to C. My Gung Fu brothers J and M founded MangoLanguges so that people can learn all kinds of languages for free. While I was browsing the list of the languages they have, I found Pig Latin for English speakers. Out of curiosity, I clicked on that and went through half of the lesson.

Of course they also have other more serious languages like Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese etc.

So now I can tell people I speak 4 languages: English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Pig Latin. ;)

ifay ouyay avehay imetay, eckchtay itay outay.

Why I have to slow it down

When I was younger, whenever I had something exciting happening in school, I would tell my mom about it at the end of the day. Because I was so excited, I talked faster and faster. My mom said, "Slow down, nobody can catch everything you say if you talk that fast."

When I first arrived at Drake, I noticed my American classmates talked very fast. I thought, that's the normal speed of speaking in English here and I wanted to speak faster too. Somehow, I thought how fast one speaks reflected one's intelligence. (Maybe I watched too much TV drama of lawyers and doctors. :))

My boss, whose first language is French, once said, "If you think I talk funny now, you can imagine how my English was like 15 years ago." I can totally relate to that. 4 years ago, if I spoke just a little bit faster, almost nobody could understand what I was saying.

So I learned. I learned that as an ESL person, to communicate, it's not about how fast I talk, it's about the ideas I want to convey. In order to say the same idea with fewer words, I have to learn to be precise.

It's actually a good idea to slow it down, especially in your speech class- you can write fewer words. :)

Thanks K for bringing up this topic!

Season's Greetings

As you can see, people in my office are from all over the place and can write in many different languages. After I wrote my "Merry Christmas" in Chinese, I thought I'm supposed to sign my name in bracket. Indeed, within the bracket, I was supposed to put down the name of the language. Since I'm the only person who can write Chinese in the office, I called it a new language "Yukkish" ;)

Happy December, everyone!