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Old 4th December 2014, 05:28 PM   #21
kronckew
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Room 101, Glos. UK
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afrikaans is of course a descendant of old dutch. the dutch almost always seem to also speak fairly good english. english itself is very close to frisian, another dutch/german dialect.
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google translate and auto-spell can be a dangerous thing.

you might want to say 'those little sausages were tasty' and what comes out is 'i want to eat your baby's fingers'. which may not go over too well in some areas.

this video pretty much covers the subject:

Monty Python - the hungarian phrase book


(i had a hard time trying to render 'cookie monster' into portugese. 'monster of biscuits' doesn't quite have the same ring to it. why brits call cookies biscuits i do not know. back home biscuits are unsweetened crisp savoury baked things that we put cheese on. we give dogs biscuits. cookies are sugar based sweet crisp pastries hopefully with chocolate.)

anyway, i suspect you are indeed fairly proficient in portuguese. i bet you almost speak it like a native.

i speak baby german, that is, like about a 3-4 yr. old. have terrible time with masculine and feminine words and tenses. like you mention, i use google translate to cover a lot of sins and have a vague idea of what i'm trying to say coming out the other end. i apparently have an austrian accent, which proper germans find a bit redneck and country farmer-ish. being an american redneck/country feller, that's OK. it was amusing when some of my austrian grandmother's relative came visiting from vienna, they of course were tallking in (austrian) german, and my poor granny was replying in pidgeon german-english. for the german words she forgot after being in the USA for 60 odd years, she used the english one instead. they spoke english luckily, and by the time they left were also speaking the same patois.

... and english was always my worst subject in school. google does not have 'redneck' in the list of languages.

sadly, my hovercraft is still full of eels. (én légpárnás még mindig tele van angolna)
meu hovercraft ainda está cheio de enguias. mein Luftkissenfahrzeug ist immer noch voller Aale.

Last edited by kronckew; 4th December 2014 at 06:21 PM.
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