For my PhD, I had to pass a written translation in French and Italian. I had had 5 years of French and took a French class in college as a senior. I passed the French exam right off the bat.
Because so much music analysis and theory (not much related to what we call theory on the forum) was in German, I should have learned it, but went with Italian, a kin of French. I learned it on my own, written only. Following the advice of a friend in anthropology (they had three language exams), I bought a medium hefty Cassell's Italian dictionary and made small tabs for each letter of the alphabet. That made it much easier to navigate using the tabs. Believe me, that was extremely useful, although may be antiquated by now.
At one point in my graduate studies, I answered an ad for a roommate. The other two new roomies were from Taiwan, a mother and her daughter, also a college student. We got along really well, and I tried to interact in Mandarin only. The mother was enthused about this, and said that as a child, she was used for demonstrations of the spoken language, which used tones (a kind of pitch inflection of vowels). Learning to speak with a tonal language like Mandarin was difficult if you weren't used to the technique. Anyway, the mother was a great teacher of tones.
We tried to speak only in Mandarin in the apartment. I got good enough to take basic phone messages. After a while, I noticed that the speaking voice was a little higher in pitch. Once I began answering the phone using a higher-sounding voice, bingo. One time I told the caller that I wasn't Chinese and had trouble with comprehension, especially when spoken quickly. Since my tones and overall pitch had improved in our apartment life, I started sounding more like a Taiwanese guy. Anyway, this called, and at one point I said (in Mandarin) I couldn't everything he was saying. This confused him, so I just took his phone number. Later, one of the roommates told me that the caller had been confused by my telling him I didn't understand. He thought that a Chinese guy was putting him on. Another time, the wife of the head of Wang computers called. I tried to say something in reply, but struggled to do so. Anyway, she just hung up. I told my roommates later about what I had said. It translated as, "she's not tall. She doesn't have any feet."
Later, I was visiting the campus for a job interview. The head of the area and I attended a student recital. What I didn't know at the time, was that the area head was known for years as being able to speak some large number of languages. So, sitting there before the recital began, he decided to speak in Mandarin, regarding the title of a piece or something. I really did not understand a word he was saying. So, I told him in Mandarin that I did not understand what I was saying. But it went completely over his head, and he confessed, "I don't speak Chinese. I just liked to make the sounds." This was an emperor's new clothes situation. Naturally, one wonders about all of the other languages that he pretended to speak. It was kind of sad, as part of his reputation a man of the world was based on faking the sounds of languages he purported to speak. Needless to say, I didn't tell too many people my story, out of respect or pity.
Because so much music analysis and theory (not much related to what we call theory on the forum) was in German, I should have learned it, but went with Italian, a kin of French. I learned it on my own, written only. Following the advice of a friend in anthropology (they had three language exams), I bought a medium hefty Cassell's Italian dictionary and made small tabs for each letter of the alphabet. That made it much easier to navigate using the tabs. Believe me, that was extremely useful, although may be antiquated by now.
At one point in my graduate studies, I answered an ad for a roommate. The other two new roomies were from Taiwan, a mother and her daughter, also a college student. We got along really well, and I tried to interact in Mandarin only. The mother was enthused about this, and said that as a child, she was used for demonstrations of the spoken language, which used tones (a kind of pitch inflection of vowels). Learning to speak with a tonal language like Mandarin was difficult if you weren't used to the technique. Anyway, the mother was a great teacher of tones.
We tried to speak only in Mandarin in the apartment. I got good enough to take basic phone messages. After a while, I noticed that the speaking voice was a little higher in pitch. Once I began answering the phone using a higher-sounding voice, bingo. One time I told the caller that I wasn't Chinese and had trouble with comprehension, especially when spoken quickly. Since my tones and overall pitch had improved in our apartment life, I started sounding more like a Taiwanese guy. Anyway, this called, and at one point I said (in Mandarin) I couldn't everything he was saying. This confused him, so I just took his phone number. Later, one of the roommates told me that the caller had been confused by my telling him I didn't understand. He thought that a Chinese guy was putting him on. Another time, the wife of the head of Wang computers called. I tried to say something in reply, but struggled to do so. Anyway, she just hung up. I told my roommates later about what I had said. It translated as, "she's not tall. She doesn't have any feet."
Later, I was visiting the campus for a job interview. The head of the area and I attended a student recital. What I didn't know at the time, was that the area head was known for years as being able to speak some large number of languages. So, sitting there before the recital began, he decided to speak in Mandarin, regarding the title of a piece or something. I really did not understand a word he was saying. So, I told him in Mandarin that I did not understand what I was saying. But it went completely over his head, and he confessed, "I don't speak Chinese. I just liked to make the sounds." This was an emperor's new clothes situation. Naturally, one wonders about all of the other languages that he pretended to speak. It was kind of sad, as part of his reputation a man of the world was based on faking the sounds of languages he purported to speak. Needless to say, I didn't tell too many people my story, out of respect or pity.
