What it’s like to live and work with 6 people of 5 different nationalities and none of you is a native English speaker
- desperately trying to explain to another coworker that your Bangladeshi flatmate is saying “pea shells” and not “bee shells” (“pea pods, du ved, ærte… skræller..? Ærtebælge!“)
- Tunisian guy says a French word. Everyone understands. French guy says “it’s the same in English”
- you forget the English word for strainer. You know it in German. Only your Austrian flatmate understands what you’re talking about.
- “according to my high school diploma I speak B1 French”
- Austrian forgets the English word for fork, but remembers it in Danish.
- “I don’t have the name in English” *tells us what an animal is called in Latin*
- 0 out of 6 people can remember what broom is called in English
- “fucking… she’s trying to kill me” – our Frenchman after tripping over the dishwasher
- *accidentally speaks Danish to non-Danish flatmate* *starts to say something in English to my family* *is spoken to in English by Danish flatmate*
- I tell the Frenchman to write leverpostej om the shopping list. He looks at me like he’s dead inside and writes pâté
- no one knows how to spell
- “what gender is apple in German?” “is book neuter or common gender in Danish?” *calls an inanimate object he or she* “what’s the plural of hus? Huser?”
- What are gendered genitive pronouns? I mean, who really knows? Not the French speakers, that’s for sure!
- everyone speaks 2 languages, most at least kind of speak 3.
- my English gets worse for every day that passes
-translating jokes from your native language to English makes for the best anti jokes. “A dwarf walks into a bar and the bartender asks him ‘Do you play cards?’ ‘No, I was born this way,’ the dwarf answers”
- Austrian: “ti, tyve….. uhhhh….. fyrre, halvtreds, tres, halvfjerds…. fjers?? ….. …?????? hundred.”
- “can you hand me the… Uhh… You know the, the thingy!” “The what?” “THE BOWL!”
- “You can’t name your child Valdemar, that’s the guy from Harry Potter!”
- I try to speak German and my Austrian roommate tells me that my accent is cute because I speak the hard German sounds so softly
- Frenchman imitates really bad French accent and it’s hilarious
- someone thought the Austrian was Scottish because she rolls her r’s
- “Share a coke with… Vendire… Veninerere…” “Veninderne” “Please tell me that’s not a name” “It’s means female friends”
- Høkeren -> hookeren
- *French speakers forget to pronounce an h*
- there’s a heated discussion about whether or not some penguins can fly. The argument immediately dissolves as it is revealed that in French auks are called penguins.
- you learn to never correct people unless they ask you to or you literally do not understand what they’re saying
- you translate an idiom from your own language into English. It’s the same in one of the other languages, but not in English. No one questions it.
- you borrow a flatmate’s Netflix. All the titles are in a language you don’t speak. FRIENDS is dubbed in German, so you turn on sous-titres. They’re in Bangla.
- “Santa Claus surprise”, the Frenchman cheerfully says about secret santa
- you try to talk about knitting with your roommates but you don’t know any of the proper terms in English. They try to talk about crotcheing in turn, but they don’t even know what that’s called.
- you have to disassemble the couch, so you send your roommate to get the tools for doing that. You never talk about the tools of which you don’t know the names, but she brings the right ones regardless.
- you say a sentence and someone repeats it back to you, mispronouncing one of the words because they’re certain you mispronounced it
- you somehow manage to hold a conversation in two languages at once
