jcannon

Definitely speaking, for me! While I can read French nearly fluently, and write it at a semi-fluent manner, speaking it likely makes me come off as a three year old. I stumble over my words; over the pronunciations, the order. I feel this may be because I am a more visual learning, so it is likely that I've memorized the way the words LOOK, so I can't just dump them out of my mouth. Some day!

I've recently traveled through some very French parts of my country, and while I'd heard various times that they would refuse to speak English to me, not once did I experience that. Moreover, if they did not speak any English, they seemed to almost be embarrassed at THEIR inability - which I thought was quite unnecessary, given that I was the foreigner! What about you? Have you run into any situations abroad that have had you running to the nearest language-dictionary store

I would absolutely love to learn Cantonese. I live in a very heavily populated area of Chinese folks (despite living in an English country) and most of our signage down here is in their language. I also feel like it would be great to be able to communicate more effectively with them. One time, I had an older gentleman try to ask me for directions -- and I couldn't understand him -- so he started pretending to be an airplane!

We do this constantly. We also frequently turn words into verbs. An example from just earlier today -- I told a friend I was going to "couch" a corner of the room. By saying this, I meant that I was going to take an empty corner of the room and put a couch in it. It isn't proper speech at all because it's becoming more and more typical for English users to speak this way in casual conversation.

Oh even just the words for bathroom alone.. ..bathroom, washroom, water closet, loo, toilet, can, john... I've been asked for the water closet a few times and that always confuses me. It sounds like it's right out of the 1700s! I prefer washroom -- as in public places you are not going to have a full out bath. I also like that it implies "oh I'm going to wash up" as opposed to "I'm going to go expel waste".

So nervous! I've never tested well. In fact, I have a midterm coming up this week and even though it's an open book test (and should be simple), I'm terrified! I'm even fairly sure that I know most of the content, yet I can't stop my nerves...

"Give it some razzmatazz!" -- This basically means to make something brighter and more outlandish -- think Liza Manelli; "I wouldn't touch him with a 10 foot pole!" -- This comes from a time of great disease when the rule of thumb was to stay at least 10 feet away so you wouldn't become infected. Items were given to these individuals on a 10 foot pole.

I never use it. I did use it when I was maybe 15 years old (okay, okay, maybe up to even 18 years old!) but now I just type "Hahah" or other onomatopoeia for the sound of laughter. I think "LOL" just because far too much of an expression - when we all know that, at least MOST of the time, we aren't actually heartily laughing by ourselves in front of our computer. Recently I saw someone suggest the fad should be "SALTS" -- "smiled a little, then stopped."

Oh wow, nice one, @sulayman ! Hehehe. My favourite quote is quite recent and comes from Conan O'Brien: "Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen." While it's not the most eloquent phrase of our times, I think it summarizes what we - as humans - are meant to do with our lives. We are rewarded by our outputs.