Hello, Department of Useless Information?
If y’all don’t have the Google Translate plugin, I recommend. Wherever you are on the web, you can highlight some text and a little blue translate button pops up next to your cursor. Magic.
That’s how I accidentally discovered the Cebuano language, which is spoken in the southern islands of the Philippines and is called Bisaya or Binisaya by native speakers. For most of us, I can’t imagine a language we would less need to learn conversational phrases in, so here you go.
Sometimes, I just like to hear people speak to me in another language.
None of it sounded at all familiar until we got to kumusta? And I thought naw, that’s got to be cómo estás – and it is. Turns out, the Philippines were a Spanish colony for 300 years. *shrug emoji*
Hey, did I ever tell you about the faulty soundcard I had in my first computer? Or was it a modem? I forget. It picked up a local Portuguese radio station and happily chattered to me in Portuguese all day.
The only words I remember were an ad for el Mundo de los Licores – Liquor World – but confusingly that’s in Spanish.
I am not good with languages.
April 22, 2021 — 7:39 pm
Comments: 7