"sayonara, boku mo dô ni ka yaru sa / sayonara, sô suru yo"

[larryhammer]

As I biked to work the other day, I was spinning out an imaginary conversation in another language, as one does, this time in Spanish because it had been a while -- and I found myself stumbling not just out of rustiness, which I expected, but because I kept reaching for methods of indicating politeness that aren't there. "No, all you have is Usted," I had to tell myself. "The verbs stay the same." (Or rather, "No -- Usted solamente. Verbos, ah, quedan lo mismo. ... quedan? estan? ¡ay ... !") It's been a while since I've had a language collision with Japanese. It fact, it's been very rare compared to learning European languages.

Español no es Japonés. Mata, Nihongo wa Supaingo ja nai yo -- or in that politeness form I wanted to use, Nihongo wa Supaingo de wa arimasen.

May you all have a safe and happy Passover -- just watch out for wayward angels.

---L.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm quite serious. 本は赤いです。 Libro wa . . . crap. How do you do this, again?

[larryhammer]

I believe you -- there's a large difference in how to conceptualize a sentence between subject-verb-oriented languages and topic-oriented ones. I haven't tripped over the problem of una frase sin tema (?) nearly as often as placement of modifiers.

---L.