Tonight we ended up in a familiar place, eating familiar things, with familiar faces. But some new faces too.

We were nine strong tonight, we couldn't just eat at any restaurant, they had to have room for us. We've been much more than nine before, but tonight 5 of the nine were not regulars, 4 entirely new. The language of the night was Chinese, even though most of our nine strong were Korean. They often feel comfortable enough to use mostly Chinese for conversation. I believe their Chinese is better than mine anyway, maybe better than Esther's too, I'm not sure. Esther and I fell into English often enough, I'm certainly not very good at being sarcastic in Chinese. But I'll work on it.

Esther has a German surname so we spent a lot of the time, over our rice and meat bowls and our seaweed soup, talking about German, all of us. I think I may have been dominating the conversation tonight, since I'm the one who took a year of German in high school, also because I did most of the talking. If you want to dominate a conversation, a form of greed and selfishness, sit in the middle. When I sit on the end I spend most of the time wondering what's going on and picking up on the punchlines of funny jokes. "What was the first part? What did he say before? ... oh never mind"

You never know what sounds are hard to say for others, and they think it's funny when you can't say their special sounds too. Not every language has a distinct 's' and 'sh' sound, for example Taiwanese and Japanese, or so I've heard. So you often hear the two sounds swapped in Chinese or English, which makes 'four' and 'ten' sound exactly the same, so '40', '44', '14', '10 10 10', and '4 4 4' all sound the same to those of us who are deaf to tones. And I, have a hard time with the u and u sounds, yes I meant to type the same letter. Also 'l' and 'r' are very hard for me to say in Chinese, they are backwards and overlapped sometimes, but not other times. I'm sure I've blogged about this not too long ago now, but I like to blog about things that are relevant to me at the time, and I'm still struggling with those sounds!

Pronunciation! If you can't pronounce it how can you remember it? There is a young girl in my congregation who's name I have been trying to remember for about 6 weeks now, I had it down (sort of) for a few weeks, but tonight she caught me. I had forgotten the last syllable. You might be thinking that there are probably long strings of difficult syllables making up a Chinese name. This is the opposite of the truth, they as a rule have a single syllable surname and a two syllable given name, and the syllables are always just common words. So you just feel like a piece of driftwood when you can't remember their name... for the 16th time. But after about 15 minutes of careful, patient, coaching by these two girls I was able to say something close enough to their names to satisfy them and get them to stop laughing in sheer amazement at my inarticulations.

But I'm far enough into this Chinese stuff that I wouldn't even know how to give up now if I wanted to. I'm addicted. (edit 484) Permalink