Sunday, March 30, 2014

Diminishing Returns

when you come back home you might forget words in your native language

"Yeah, right. He forgot the word 'food' but not 'refresher class?' Whoever made this has never lost a native language." -You

28 comments:

  1. Gosh....this is so true!! :D
    Remembering my friend who forgot to speak native language after studying many years in Japan......

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  2. Lately, I find myself forgetting the simplest things and conjugating English verbs incorrectly... "arriven" instead of "arrived"? ¡Que vergüenza!

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    Replies
    1. Hah! My brother lived in Honduras for a year and when he came home he did that all the time. Once he said he had "contested" the phone..."contestar" being "to answer the phone"...

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    2. Yeah, my daughter and I are forgetting our Danish, because we live in an English-speaking country now :S

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  3. Great comic! soooooo true! A friend who learned the same language (russian) told me not to worry about it though, because all those words are still floating around in the back of your brain somewhere and they will eventually come back. seems to be true

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  4. my god, i can finally expalin this phenomena with a comic lol! with every passing day i feel like i need like to check the dictionary for more and more english words' spelling. my friends think i'm retarded

    but damnit i'm merely just trying to learn spanish and french!!

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  5. Omg, that's so true!! I studied in China for 1 Semester and when my friends came to visit me I had a hard time speaking my native language. XD

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    1. I think it's also hard to switch languages when you're in that context...

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  6. Standpunkt and Lebensmittel, LOL.

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  7. If you have a small language as a native one, it is very easy to forget words at home! Since internet, movies, university courses and whatnot is in English, we tend to do this. In Dutch (both in the Netherlands, as in Belgium) the English word 'awkward' is a thing now. But the new Dutch sentence 'Dat is awkward' is... awkward we just say the whole thing in English now: 'That's awkward'. Btw, the native Dutch word is 'ongemakkelijk', which is way to long to say ;-)

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    1. "Ongemakkelijk" doesn't look so much like the word for "awkward", rather some sort of hideous primal god-beast hiding in the swamps somewhere.

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    2. True. It became a word to describe the feeling you had when you met the Ongemakkelijk. Now, we are to secularized to believe in it anymore, so the meaning of the word got generalized. (gemak=ease, gemakkelijk=easily, ongemakkelijk=uneasily)

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  8. Nach nur einer Woche in Ungarn habe ich ständig "igen" anstatt "Ja/Sim/Yes/Да" gesagt, vor allem im Russischunterricht...

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  9. Stimmt. Die Alltagswörter gehen anscheinend leicht rein, aber irgendwie schwerer wieder raus: Nach zwei Wochen Frankreich hab ich noch einige Tage "ouais" statt "ja" gesagt ...

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  10. I love this comic! I don't even live abroad but I find myself doing that with German all the time, because it's my second language and I speak/read/write it often. Sometimes when I get a cold I want to say "I have colded myself"!

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  11. My favorite after returning to the USA from two years in Chile: Your English is very good. Where are you from?

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    1. When I first arrived in California for college, someone actually said that to me when they learned I'm from New Mexico.

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  12. Funny - but how did they remember the word 'refresher'????

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  13. When I'm trying to speak my native English words, but my brain is trying to use Korean grammar, I end up starting sentences that I can't finish correctly, like 'The milk is... (없어)...no? absent?'

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    1. Funny, I do the same with German. "Can I the milk...uh, have?"

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  14. Hi Malachi,

    Greetings from Integra!

    I am Srikanth, working in Rights and Permissions department of Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd and I am contacting you on behalf of Hodder Education, UK. We want to use this above for which copyright owned by you, in the forthcoming publication by Hodder Education;

    We believe that you hold the copyright for this image. So please let me know if you could provide us with the hi-res image with full permission (without any extra clearance). Else I would be so thankful if you could direct us to the person who holds the copyright for this image.

    This image will be used inside a publication “English for the IB MYP 2 9781471880612 & 9781471880667”.

    Do let me know if you have any questions. I will be glad to provide you with the required details.

    I Can e-mail you complete details, so please give your e-mail ID.

    Thanks,

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    Replies
    1. Hi - you can email me at itchyfeetcomic@gmail.com. Thanks!

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