My basic questions for getting through conversations when I don’t understand the language is: yes or no? good or bad?
I picked this method up from reading novels by Jeremias Gotthelf where the main narrative language was standard German (my daily language), but every time the characters spoke, or even when Gotthelf was describing them so you could practically feel or hear them thinking, it was in the Berner dialect, which was new to me.
Unlike (or like??) real life, the plot progression showed me whether I had figured out the basic questions or not.
My daughter lived in Israel for six years and worked at WIX, where most business was conducted in English. Her Hebrew is pretty good and occasionally, there were meetings in Hebrew. I asked her whether she could follow the meetings in Hebrew and she replied, yes, "probably 95%, but I'm worried that the 5% is the important stuff."
My basic questions for getting through conversations when I don’t understand the language is: yes or no? good or bad?
I picked this method up from reading novels by Jeremias Gotthelf where the main narrative language was standard German (my daily language), but every time the characters spoke, or even when Gotthelf was describing them so you could practically feel or hear them thinking, it was in the Berner dialect, which was new to me.
Unlike (or like??) real life, the plot progression showed me whether I had figured out the basic questions or not.
Lovely and I especially love your final sentence.
Thank you, friend 💜
Thanks for this! I keep telling my son’s girlfriend, who is getting her MA in linguistics, about you…going to forward this to her…חג שמח!
Oh, that's so exciting! I hope she's enjoying it. חג שמח!!!
My daughter lived in Israel for six years and worked at WIX, where most business was conducted in English. Her Hebrew is pretty good and occasionally, there were meetings in Hebrew. I asked her whether she could follow the meetings in Hebrew and she replied, yes, "probably 95%, but I'm worried that the 5% is the important stuff."
Hah! Yep that sounds about right :)