In reply to:

I try to not I mock others' attempts to speak my language. After all, if somebody speaks with an accent or if they have difficulty writing your language then there's a pretty good chance they speak (and write) at least one more language than you do. So I salute them.

Amen! In my current job, one question we ask respondents is "In which languages could you hold a conversation about everyday things?" Although I have admittedly only interviewed some 20-25 people, the fact that only two have selected more than one makes me embarrassed about NZ's apparently valid reputation as one of the most monolingual places on Earth.

It sounds as if your Mandarin is about at the same level as my Hindi, stales. Happily, devanagari has a whole lot fewer characters to learn! I am being forced to learn the script because I got what I thought was a great deal on a dictionary from Amazon. It was only after it arrived that I realised the full significance of the fact that is a "Hindi-English" dictionary.


noho ora mai
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