my innermost sanctum

it's so funny it hurts. not

please allow me a wee bit of self-indulgence.

which i'm sure you's would as it is not often i talk about meself. and meself only.

anyways, a wee funny episode happened yesterday before the start of a brekkie briefing for a customer at this posh hotel. i got chatting with this young german lassie who's here for an internship, and the conversation inevitably turned to languages since she doesn't speak english with much of a gerry accent.

as per the usual, yers truly engaged one of her "tryin my darnest to impress em johnny foreigner's with their respective tongue" routine's. and said lassie was gobsmacked.

and then she queried if i studied german in school. no, it's all self-taught i mumbled. she went on to say i speak it without any trace of an accent.

yeah, and my vocabulary is only limited to good morning/day, thank you and goodbye. can't even count 1 to 10 in that language - woeful. nor cobble a decent sentence together whatsoever, unlike spanish which i could manage with a handful [like, "excuse me, how much does that stamp cost?"].

must admit though i had a very brief interest in german whilst in primary school, and was wanting badly to take it up as a third language when entering secondary school. but if only i did brilliantly in both english [as first language] and mandarin [as a second language].

dodgy requirement, that innit? like as if those who's super fluent in mandarin in all aspects would make a brilliant german, french or japanese [the latter being two other option's] speaker as well.

nonetheless, i'm quite rather chuffed with meself all the same.