Ellen Degeneres: So how do you say hello in Afrikaans?
Charlise Theron: Um...hallo?
Anybody ever saw that interview? I lol'd so hard - it's one of the biggest jokes we have with foreigners when they ask us to greet them in our language. The same goes for 'hi', we only spell it 'haai'.
Erm...anyway I'm sure most can tell English isn't my first language (there are grammar issues I like to ignore and am too lazy to fix that give me away) I'm Afrikaans, which is a language descended from Netherlands and German (so I might not be able to write German but if I read it fluently out loud and pronounce it right, I have a better clue of what they're saying than anybody else who isn't familiar with German) - well...that and our neighbours used to be German. Gosh, those people are hot-blooded, I picked up quite a few insults and swear words in their language over time.
I can speak some Zulu and North Sotho, and I know a few words in Latin and Moari here and there. I'm really interested in learning one of the Chinese or Japanese languages though, and I don't know which yet because I know there's different variations of the those languages. But...yeah. I'm rambling. Sorry, I blame the coffee!