There is a car on grounds that I often see that has a license plate the reads, in part "1MO..." Without fail, every time, I read it as "Emo..." and try to figure out what type of owner would put a musical genre on their car before remembering that "1" in America is pronounced as "one" and not "Eee."
Last week, I went to a Mexican restaurant - probably the best, most authentic food I've had in Charlottesville. The lady spoke minimal English and I spoke minimal Spanish. ("I only know like 10 words and 7 of them are numbers.") As I tried to tell the lady that out of the 6 tamales were ordered, four would go on one plate and 2 would go on another, I paused as I said "cuatro tamales y dos tamales." It felt odd to not put a number modifier between the number and the object, as you would in Asian languages.
A few weeks ago, my friend and I were talking about our views on some interesting topic. Excitedly, I spoke up. "Oh, I agrees completely." And then clapped my hand over my mouth in shock. Did I really just make a mistake on subject/verb agreement?
Did you know that you can give the past tense of Thank You in Japanese? ありがとうございました Now I have absolutely no idea how to say even the most basic of phrases. Do I thank you in past tense because you already helped me or in present tense because I'm currently grateful?
When I was at BYU, my Calculus credits fulfilled the higher languages requirement. Maybe I should just stick with math. It makes sense the world over. That is, when I understand it. :)
I thought that phrases like "hello" and "thank you" were the ones you could always count on getting right, even if you didn't know anything about a language. Now I'm hearing that I might get "thank you" wrong if I were visiting Japan? That's just stressful! Please don't tell me "hello" comes in multiple tenses, too. That would be too much. (Of course, in French, you really do have to change "hello" depending on the time of day, which is really the pits. I'm constantly looking at my watch to figure out if it's time for "bonjour" or "bonsoir.")
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