BAWO NI

I remember Puisan trying to teach me Mandarin and giving up rather quickly. She said I didn't speak Mandarin; I squeaked it. Fine, so I don't have a deep voice, sue me. As long as I can remember I've never been particularly good with languages. I took up some Japanese classes a few years back and hell, of course I've forgotten most of the stuffs. All the curse and bad words you're interested in, never to be learnt from classes but always the internet anyway. I can't even recall 1-10 in French which Isya struggled to teach me.

And you can forget about German.

And then there's someone like Michael who's been picking up Malay very quickly. He went from apa khabar to umur saya 23 tahun in just a few days and he didn't even have to write them down. It drives me up the wall a bit. In turn, he tried to teach me Yoruba but I gave up after good morning, how are you, I'm in good health and thank you. I figured I could probably mime the rest.

I think it's a shame not having the ability to quickly pick up another language. I try to compensate by learning about other cultures but it's just not the same.

It's very nice dropping a few Malay words here and there and refusing to explain them to my boyfriend so he has to google them. This is how I fight back.