Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Stearns: Language confusion.1

A darling old man at the bus stop greeted me so happily today, it broke my heart to tell him I don't speak Slovak (Neviem po slovensky...). He carried on talking just the same, only loudly and slowly. Oddly, I still didn't understand, so he started talking in German. (I was able to make out that when he was a kinder, he could spreken in English.)

When we were getting on the bus, we had this exchange:

Old man: points at his eyes, then at his wife, shakes head sadly.
Stearns: translation to self, "how sweet, he looks after his poor old wife."
Stearns (aloud and enthusiastically): Dobre, dobre! [Good, good!]
Old man: Strange look, shakes head

So I watch them a little bit longer and it turns out she's blind.

1 comment:

Myrrh said...

Stearns: This is an excellent post. I laughed out loud, and then read it out loud to Warren. And then laughed out loud again.

Give my love to our Slovaks!