So the school offers free Chinese classes to any of its foreign teachers. Free language class? Sign me up! So I have started going to one class a day of Chinese. The teachers are great, very patient, but the rest of the class are all people from Kazakhstan (and a few from Russia). I'm the only one for whom English is my native language.
All those languages came to a head today. The teacher was writing words Chinese borrowed from English on the board (in Characters, then pinyin) and having us guess what they meant. Safa=sofa, for example. (I won't reproduce the characters here.) We came to dinke (din-kuh) which she helpfully put up the English acronym it had been borrowed from: DINK. We still stared blankly. Then she explained "double income no kids." I was the only one who understood after she repeated it twice. The term refers to the Chinese social phenomenon of couples choosing not to have kids. So I re-explained with different words and slowly to Masha, who also speaks English, and she explained it in Russian to the rest of the class. The whole game went like this: I'd get it first (the words were borrowed from English after all) say it, and Masha would translate for the rest of the class.
Then the tables turned. The teacher played a song for us about Spring (I think), which someone had translated into Russian. She first showed us the song in Russian (the singing in Russian, and Chinese characters and Cyrillic Russian language on the screen). Then she played the original music video in Chinese. Fortunately she stopped occasionally the second time through to break it into small parts and give us partial translations into English, otherwise I would still be in the dark!!
Welcome to my multilingual life: Russian, Chinese, English, and soon Spanish all mixed together. Sometimes with Japanese or Korean thrown in just for fun, not to mention my French and Tunisian neighbors.
