Every time I see my friend Miguel, I know I’m going to wake up the next day with a headache.

It’s not his fault. I just can’t switch languages fast enough. Every time I see him, it means I’m speaking three languages in one day.

Miguel is a Spaniard and fluent in Italian, so I usually try to speak as much of la bella lingua with him as possible. Now that there’s a group of Venetian girls studying in Dalian, I’m getting more practice, since some of them don’t speak English.

I’m not tri-lingual by any stretch. My Chinese is starting get somewhere, but I’m losing Italian vocabulary by the minute, and the slop I’m making of both languages is getting uglier. Yesterday in class, I caught myself saying: 我家有六口人：妈妈，爸爸，一个妹妹，两个弟弟，e io (There are six people in my family: my mother, father, a sister, two brothers and me). For some reason, that sentence just sounded better with the last two words in Italian. I suspect the more three-language days I have, the more of a mess my Chitaliano is going to become.

With all this in mind, I’m a little apprehensive these days, because at the moment I feel like I’m learning three languages: written Chinese, spoken Chinese and everything that goes into web design, since Wordpress is a bit more manual.

Now, technically, Chinese is one language with one very complicated writing system (if you don’t count pinyin or traditional characters, which frighten me). And technically, web design is not a language but a series of interconnected tools (not tubes, Senator Stevens). Then again, I’m what you might call, technically retarded, and I can’t seem to get a real home page working or sketch a real Chinese character.

All this is making my head spin.

For anyone in Dalian reading this, apologies in advance if I start swearing at you in Portuguese for no reason.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 2:14 am and is filed under mess of a language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.