Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Complete lingual confusion

I have reached complete lingual confusion. I know this because I started speaking broken Norwegian to a British customer today, promtly turned around and spoke broken English to my Norwegian colleague. Needless to say, neither really understood what i was saying.

Add to the mix a blending of german, spanish, japanese and dutch speaking customers. I am stuggling to pull up a few basic words in German that I remember from school. Basic, such as zwei and danke shonn. It´s crazy how much german I have forgotten in just a few years. Hopefully I´ll start picking some up again.

Well, tomorrow I have my first horror day. 9am to 3.30 at the flower shop, then 4 till 8.30pm at the bakery. 12 hour day. Lot´s of money though! And i get a free dinner at the bakery. And a free loaf of bread to take home so I´m not complaining! And tomorrow night should be fun. The 16th May. The day before the Norwegian national day. The last day of "russ" celebrations. A night of partying, drinking, and foolishness. I´m quite looking forward to watching the russ on their last night. It should be, well, interesting to say the least!

Wish me luck....

4 comments:

John C said...

Jeg have ungen ide hvorfor you should lingually confused. Ja woll, det er klart that du have a masse talent for learning sprog. Grazie mille and can I have chips with that.

Unknown said...

jeg hadde planned aa do akkurat som what papa did og skrive a melding with mixed spraaks. men but, han beated meg til det! nei vel - great minner tenke same the! :p

i know akkurat what you are going through jam!! the worst thing is when you can't even remember words in english anymore! and you just stutter and stumble around and then some kind norwegian comes along and helps you out by expressing your sentence in perfect english for you, far more eloquently than we could ever have hoped to do! may sissel and asgeir used to do that to me all the time - i'd be bumbling along and then they'd just say 'oh, yes, you mean......' and sum up all my mumbling in one, perfect, concise sentence!! grrrrr :)

Jamie said...

hah! i never really thought of the expressing thing in so many words, but it is completely true! maybe that comes with learning a language as a second language, that you learn a special technique to express yourself elequently. or maybe we´re just silly

Unknown said...

You'll soon be correcting Norwegians when they speak Norwegian, Jam!!