Learning Languages
Learning languages is not easy and I’m speaking from the point of view of a bi-lingual dog. As you know, I’m Swiss by birth so spent the few weeks of my life having Swiss-German spoken to me. It’s confusing. Sometimes it’s the same as German, but most of the time it’s not. It also changes by region. I was in the canton of Schwyz until I was around nine or ten weeks old, but then moved to Berne for the next few weeks. Thankfully, at that stage I started to learn some English so I’d be able to understand Mum when we met.
Learning German
Both Mum and Dad have been learning German for the last few years. They approach it very differently. Dad looks at it as an academic exercise and wants to understand what the rules are and why words are as they are. Mum starts from a very different perspective. She has no confidence in her ability to learn a language, so learns it more like a child. She accepts what she’s told and reproduces it, but has no illusion that she will ever understand why. They both get it right about fifty percent of the time, just not the same fifty percent.
No language is easy
Dad thinks German is harder than English. I think they’re probably all as bad. Yesterday Mum said she was doing some editing and checking her work for consistency. I asked for examples. Now, where is the sense in half-time in a football match needing a hyphen between the two words and full time not needing one? How is anyone from another country every supposed to understand things like that? I’m sticking to my native tongue. You really don’t need hyphens between barks, however many you string together.
Love
Wilma