Monday, September 22, 2008

Zahlen ("Counting")

Often you can tell what the mother tongue of a person is by identifying the language they use to count out something. It's pretty interesting.

On a somewhat related and entirely remarkable note, I need to mention a few of our foreign exchange student tutors/program coordinators:
  • One of them comes from the Czech Republic. She fluently speaks Czech, English and German, plus what she claims is "just a little" Russian, but is a lie because I have heard her having conversations with the Russian students.
  • The next one is half Italian. She fluently speaks Italian, German, Spanish, and virtually accent-free English.
  • The next one is German. She studies literature, linguistics and culture. She fluently speaks German, English, Czech, Russian, and Spanish.
I could swoon over with the awe and inspiration I have for these amazing polyglots. When I say "fluently," I mean fluently. It is completely remarkable.

And they act like it's NOTHING.

5 comments:

S said...

On a completely unrelated note: can you please please please change the color of your links? They are currently very, very yellow. And I don't know if you noticed this, but the German flag also has a lot of... um... yellow in it. This makes those side links practically... well, impossible to read. A non yellow color would be much preferred. Danke.

Zhela said...

Hahaha, it's funny you mention this. I have been schlocking through color after color trying to find something that will work for the links. However, the problem is that for nearly all colors, what works on the right side of this page is invariably difficult to see on the left side of the page, and vice versa :D . Oh, German flag, you're being so silly.

Anyway, I'll continue changing it, and if it happens to land on something you like -- or don't like -- just leave me a comment again or something.

Zhela said...

(Update: Links in blue now. Better?)

S said...

Now THAT'S a lot better. Easier to read on the yellow part, a little difficult on the red, but you can scroll down and read it against the black... so yeah... I think that will work.

Zhela said...

Great. I tried my best with the blue on red...