Listening to: I Don't Care - Ed Sheeran and Justin Beiber
Mood: In a fish fry mood
For those whom I haven't mentioned it to, I've been working on learning Hindi for the past.....10 years or so. Now you might think that hey, she probably is quite fluent. You dear reader are wrong. So very wrong. I try, very hard, but getting things to come out in the correct fashion is still eluding me beyond interactions with the vegetable market. And I suspect they find it cute and just control their laughter.
My best friend is a native Hindi speaker (as well as a few other exotic languages like Pahadi and Punjabi I think). We tend to joke around a lot and there's a Hindi phrase that gets tossed around quite a bit. I'm not going to share that phrase because it will not translate well and I don't want to explain the whole inside joke. Moving on. I decided today that I was going to take that phrase and turn it into a double meaning limerick type rhyme.
Now, I'm no English genius either. However, being musically inclined has made me have an ear for rhythm and well, dear readers, double meaning items (poems, songs, etc) just make me insanely happy. So I banged my head for a while coming up with rhyming words for that phrase. Think you know another language readers? Try to rhyme in it. Oh. My. God. Then try to make the grammar work out in a way that isn't horrifying. Then take out your shotgun and pray because it probably didn't.
Anyhow, I did this, and apologized in advance for any butchery. But to be honest, I was very tickled with the fact that it rhymed and did a decent job with the meter and double meanings. Until my *very tactful* friend, in the very nicest way possible said, ".......how about you translate for me."
Oh God damn it readers. When someone says that, it means whatever you were trying to say has been butchered beyond belief or redemption. I just started laughing because I knew I had completely fucked it up.
I put him off for a while because things don't always translate back well and it would destroy the rhyme to see it in English. He insisted, so I translated the poem that I had to translate into Hindi, back into English. And reader it was gruesome. To sum up this whole story, only I thought it was funny and I cluster bombed a language I've been learning forever.
Ew. After learning for this long, I'm continually impressed with people who pick up languages quickly, especially languages that are not in the family of their mother tongue. Hats off to you.
~Becky~
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