The Importance of Double- and Triple-checking.
Oz over at KTR has posted his “5 things” and #3 struck close to home.
I also learned spanish to impress a girl. Mine wasn’t so successful.
Back in college, I roomed with a guy from Thailand that was attending an “Immersive English” program- he came to the states barely able to pronounce the school’s name & had one semester of intensive training to be ready for regular classes there. One of his friends was a lovely Mexican lass in the same program. Despite the language barrier, we were fast friends.
I quickly changed courses (to fulfill my language requirement, of course) Problem was: after 4 years in the Army- touching four continents in four years- I’d picked up a smattering of phrases in a number of languages… and my mind was a bit of a jumble. Heck, english still gave me trouble. At that time, the easiest way I had to remeber things was through word association. As an example, the American Sign Language gesture for “pretty” involved a hand passing across the face, so I easily associated “pretty => face.”
Remember that. It of course comes back to haunt me. So, as we struggled in one conversation in a mix of English and Spanish, I proceed to tell her how pretty she was. That stupid word association popped into my head and my mind immediately inserted the first spanish word that came close to “face” : facil.
Some advice: in any language, “you are very easy” is not usually taken as a compliment.
January 15th, 2007 at 6:55 am
Oh come on, man. That’s such an easy one to fix! You just act like you forgot the Spanish word that was supposed to follow the “you are very easy” part (ex: “…to look at”).
Of course, the worst part about those bad moments is that there’s usually no more than a split second to come up with a save or you’re screwed.
January 15th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Yeah, it probably didn’t help that when talking about places to get something close to real Mexican food, I’d mentioned ChiChi’s in a positive light. Apparently, “Chi Chi” is Mexican slang that’s basically akin to “Hooters.”
January 15th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
I used to know a guy nicknamed Chi-Chi. He was from Kenya, so the poor guy must have gotten the name from his mexican soccer teammates and never knew he was the butt of a bad joke.