2024-04-01
- Ying Reinhardt
(from US general21)
After a decade in Germany, I was still anxious talking to native speakers – then I realised my language skills weren’t the problemI have prefaced every conversation with, “Entschuldigung, mein Deutsch ist noch nicht so gut” (“I’m sorry, my German is still not very good”) since I moved to Hermsdorf, a little village in east Germany in 2015. Its purpose was to act as a disclaimer upfront so that the German person I was talking to wouldn’t expect me to articulate complicated ideas or respond promptly and accurately to everything that was said. But mostly, my opening line was a plea for mercy, a signal that I was still learning the language and would greatly appreciate it if they spoke more slowly and clearly. They would always graciously reply: “Ja, Deutsch ist eine schwere Sprache.” German is a difficult language, they all agreed. And for the longest time, that was true.Growing up in Kuala Lumpur as Malaysian Chinese, I speak English almost natively, given that Malaysia was once a British colony. I also speak Malay, Malaysia’s official language, and Mandarin and Cantonese because I needed to communicate with my grandparents. Before moving to Germany, I already spoke Italian after working on board cruise ships for years alongside Italian officers, and conversational French after dating a Frenchman. Then, I met the man who would later become my husband in a bar on the 63rd floor of a building in Singapore and a thought occurred to me: “Wouldn’t it be funny if I have to learn German this time?” Continue reading...
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[USA]
🌎 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/01/language-skills-germany-native-speakers
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[🧠] [v1/3] summary_embedding_description: {:ricc_notes=>"[embed-v3] Fixed on 9oct24. Only seems incompatible at first glance with embed v1.", :llm_project_id=>"unavailable possibly not using Vertex", :llm_dimensions=>nil, :article_size=>2005, :poly_field=>"summary", :llm_embeddings_model_name=>"textembedding-gecko"}
[🧠] As per bug https://github.com/palladius/gemini-news-crawler/issues/4 we can state this article belongs to titile/summary version: v3 (very few articles updated on 9oct24)
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I have prefaced every conversation with, “Entschuldigung, mein Deutsch ist noch nicht so gut” (“I’m sorry, my German is still not very good”) since I moved to Hermsdorf, a little village in east Germany in 2015. Its purpose was to act as a disclaimer upfront so that the German person I was talking to wouldn’t expect me to articulate complicated ideas or respond promptly and accurately to everything that was said. But mostly, my opening line was a plea for mercy, a signal that I was still learning the language and would greatly appreciate it if they spoke more slowly and clearly. They would always graciously reply: “Ja, Deutsch ist eine schwere Sprache.” German is a difficult language, they all agreed. And for the longest time, that was true.
Growing up in Kuala Lumpur as Malaysian Chinese, I speak English almost natively, given that Malaysia was once a British colony. I also speak Malay, Malaysia’s official language, and Mandarin and Cantonese because I needed to communicate with my grandparents. Before moving to Germany, I already spoke Italian after working on board cruise ships for years alongside Italian officers, and conversational French after dating a Frenchman. Then, I met the man who would later become my husband in a bar on the 63rd floor of a building in Singapore and a thought occurred to me: “Wouldn’t it be funny if I have to learn German this time?”
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