There weren’t many other kids who spoke Cantonese at my school (a couple, but not a lot), but I learned to be paranoid after one incident in English class.
My teacher at the time was like the most stereotypical looking white guy you could imagine. Being a school in a big city, we had a pretty diverse population of students, and in this particular class there were two boys who were friends and would often goof off between themselves in Spanish.
One day about 2/3 of the way through the school year, I have no idea what one of the two boys must have said, but Mr. “Grew up on a farm in Ohio” quickly turned around from the board and interjected in the most native-sounding Spanish my untrained ears could parse. That immediately put the fear of god in them—in all of us, really—to suddenly realize that he had been listening to and understood everything they were saying from the very beginning of the school year, and had just not bothered to say anything until then. I think we were basically an English-only English class from that point on.
Between that experience and other stories I’ve read online, I’ve learned to never, ever assume that someone doesn’t understand what you’re saying in another language. You never know what unlikely language someone picked up because they had a pen pal or their SO is from another country or they lived/worked abroad for a while. Even then, since it’s so easy these days for anyone to subtly pull out a smartphone and let Google Translate provide the gist of what is being said with relative accuracy, you should never say out loud something you don’t want someone else to hear.
Edit: a word
I personally find it hilarious when people have slanderous conversations en español, thinking that none of the non-hispanic people in the vicinity understand them.
Están equivocados. Lo aprendí como segunda lengua cuando mi hermano se casó, y agregamos venezolanos a la familia lol.
It’s adorable that someone world think that the fourth most widely-spoken language on the planet is a secret code that no one in public would possibly have a hope of comprehending 😆
It’s adorable that someone world think that the fourth most widely-spoken language on the planet is a secret code that no one in public would possibly have a hope of comprehending
Even if someone doesn’t know a language initially, they aren’t secret codes! Anyone can get a language learning app on their phone and practice it until they know enough to follow a conversation.
It’s like the kids who would learn basic sign language to talk to each other across the classroom.
I went to an English speaking high school for a while being a native Dutch speaker. Sadly the teachers there were very aware of the Dutch students and would sternly bit politely ask to keep it in English. Now that I’m in the real world I use Dutch as a private language quite often.
Yeah always be careful with that. I worked with a White guy that grew up in a Chinese family (adopted) . We were in a restaurant in the Asian part of Seattle. Well according to him they were talking bad about us the whole time. White this Black that for like the whole hour we were there. Then as we are getting the check he spoke in perfect Mandarin no accent or anything. You could have heard a pindrop and the look on their faces. It was epic.
I fancied the opportunity, but there were no other speakers of the language at my school.
no. not many people spoke my native tongue.
when i finally did move and found more people speaking the language, we would speak our language not to hide from the teacher but just because it was more comfortable
Kind of, me and the other commo guys used a Morse code network to talk shit about our leadership in Iraq. Even when they were in the room, using ancient US military tech.
When I was at school (UK) there was a German girl and a Swiss girl talking in German and one of them said “Scheiser” really loudly, the teacher turnes and glared at them and slowly they realised why and had to apologise to the teacher, as they hadn’t really thought that while he couldn’t understand, he still knew the swear words!
Wasn’t a big deal was just funny and everyone laughed (incl teacher), needless to say they were a bit more cautious after that.
Me and my sibling were tired of my mom eavesdropping whenever so we learned another language to communicate between us. It would drive her crazy but she never bothered to learn to speak said language, so that’s on her.
When we about 10 my friend and I learnt to speak backslang for this very purpose.
Incredibly, it turned out that the teacher had learnt how to speak it too.
Well, I didn’t, as the teachers all spoke both my languages (Norwegian and English), but my kids do it all the time, with me and at school: they go to an international school (English/French) and often use Norwegian or Bosnian or even smatterings of Arabic just to mix things up, depending of who they want to understand.
Som en hvis far er norsk, jeg elsker å se mer folk på Lemmy som snakker språket (jeg lærer fortsatt 😅)
Jeg kan snakke norsk på ut- og innpust, jeg:)
du kommer fra norge, jeg antar?
men det er så kult!! Hvordan lærte de bosnisk og arabisk?
Ja, men har bodd litt rundt i verden. Barna har lært bishops av sin bosnisk-norske mor og arabisk da vi bodde i Marokko 2018-2021 (men alt glemt mye).
Ooooooooo!!
det er veldig kult, jeg har bare bodd i USA 😅
