A language learners’ forum

....when you have just a few hours to go before your holiday flight*, and spend an inordinate amount of time reading TripAdviser reviews in the target language of your destination when you should be packing your bags.



*Leaving for Gdańsk in 30 minutes.... now where did I put my passport?

You study your target language for an hour after a bad day at school to de-stress.

When you get stressed because you have been writting in different languages today and you continuously have to change the current IME (Input Method Editor) selection in your computer. (And you forget to do so beforehand, so you end up with a lot of gibberish written in the wrong language before you realize that and finally select the actual language you were trying to write in. And, of course, you have to delete what you had written so far and start again )

AndyMeg wrote:When you get stressed because you have been writting in different languages today and you continuously have to change the current IME (Input Method Editor) selection in your computer. (And you forget to do so beforehand, so you end up with a lot of gibberish written in the wrong language before you realize that and finally select the actual language you were trying to write in. And, of course, you have to delete what you had written so far and start again )

This reminds me of when, a few years ago, Win10 on my desktop bugged out after a big update because I had so many different keyboard layouts/IMEs installed and the update caused Win10 to randomly flip to one randomly whenever I restarted the PC. Absolutely drove me nuts until I figured out what the problem was. I had to delete all of them and then install them again.

Likewise when you're frustrated that Macs don't support the same international keyboard layouts as every other OS.

When you tag your wife in an article that’s in a language she can’t read because you know she’d be interested in it (if she could understand it!)

When you could take the direct bus from the city where you study to your hometown but you choose the one that stops at the airport so that foreigners get on, only because you want to hear them speaking in their native languages.

When you sincerely display your love by playing a French phrasebook CD in the kitchen while your wife is cooking dinner

YKYALN: When you normally talk French during a bureaucracy oriented week, but you switch naturally to Italian while ordering in a pizzeria, due to hearing the waiter's accent (me: "hey, it was more natural than mixing the two up", my bf: "yeah, right" ). And on the way back from France, you order your Bratwurst in basic but understandable German and then are nervous for the whole time in the restaurant, trying really hard to not look like eavesdropping, as the neighbours speak Spanish and Italian (a Spanish tutoring session in the restaurant), not to laugh at their jokes, and not to answer the student's questions the teacher didn't answer

When you discover a big notice written in Japanese in a hotel foyer. And excited to show off your recently relearned kana in front of family and tourists, you end up translating an advert for a hostess bar.