Just limiting ourselves to the linguistic here (otherwise we´ll exceed the Email limit):
As I often do, I find mistakes after I press send. I never checked my work in school either. Finish the test? Turn it in! I suffered often for it, mistakes I could have easily caught, but didn´t beause I was rash, was foolhardy, was impatient.
I was reading Asterix and Obelix to my kids last night, and got to the line “Wir suchen den besten Kapitän der Gegend.” (We´re looking for the best captain in the area.)
Me: “Is it pronounced Kapitän or Käpitan?”
My 6 Year Old: “Kapitän.”
My 3 Year Old: “Kapitän!” Then he jumped around.
Me: “Oh.” I´d always thought different. Maybe I just can´t hear the Umlaut? Now Mandarin is a tonal language, and differentiating among tones is very important to make sense of the language. Cantonese is even more tonal. As in, I once tried to pick up a listening course on Cantonese, and I gave up because some of the tones? they just sounded the same to me. I listened, but couldn´t distinguish. Instead of Mandarin´s four tones, Cantonese has six, and that´s apparently two too many for me, so the Cantonese on Tape from the public library went nowhere.
But it got me thinking, I think, even having the correction from my children and from Asterix und Obelix, I still say Käpitan in my head instead of the correct Kapitän. I think it´s because in English captain´s ca sounds like the German kä, whereas the German a sounds like the English ah, as in cah-pi-taen.
I started to remember other words I used to get wrong. Like the classic youth in Asia instead of euthanasia. And I used to say Encyclopedia Britan-NI-ca instead of Bri-TAN-nica. Only pretty recently did I get that it´s lingua franca instead of — what I thought — lingua fraca. I like a lot the idea of lingua fracas though, instead of a common language, a Towel of Babel language of noisy confusion, a fracas.
Every time I leave a place, I lose its language, in a drip, in a stream, in a flood.
I find myself saying “in the Near” meaning simply near, because in German it´s “in der Nähe”. And I´ve given up and accepted that my kids “drive” their bikes instead of “ride” them, because in German you just drive everything, from bikes to scooters to the bus (even as a passenger!). Just like how you “make” everything (like make a photo), and “get” the symbolic (like get six years old).
Maybe Mandarin to Cantonese is like English to German: supposedly related, supposedly from a proto-source, supposedly haha-so-close but totally mutually unintelligible. Or is that just me? Is the Sinitic and Germanic language groupings just a jest of god, a cosmic joke, a glitch in the matrix, and I´m just Neo, plugged into these life-force-sucking tentacles called grammatical cases and declensions and umlauts and the Guttural R?
Where´s the amazing technicolor dreampill?