Today's text is a translation of a Russian text written by CocoPop. As I don't speak Russian, I used DeepL to translate the text from Russian to German, my mother tongue, then I translated it myself to English. The text is written in the first person singular and as I want to stick with the style, keep in mind that the story's protagonist is CocoPop and not me.
A Conversation Overheard in an Elevator
I'm originally from Cuba, but I can pass as an American because of my green eyes and light brown hair. I live in South Florida, where 85% of the population have their origins in the Caribbean or Latin America, so I'm kind of a square peg here. This leads to Spanish-speaking people sometimes thinking they can speak their language in front of me and assume that I won't understand anything, and they often say things that make my jaw drop. This morning, for example, I was in an elevator with two Argentinian women. When I walked in, the conversation was in full swing, but I arrived just in time to overhear the best part:
- Do you at least go out on the weekends? To a restaurant or something?
- I'd love to, but every day it's the same: Victor comes home from work, opens his usual beer, plops down on the couch and waits for dinner, which he greedily wolfs down and then falls asleep. That's it.
- In other words, no romance anymore...
- Yep, that's what I get for marrying a man that only has one ball!
Needless to say, I could hardly hold back my laughter. As soon as the doors slid open, I ran out of the elevator and laughed my head off, and behind the closing elevator doors, Victor's wife shouted in my direction: "You degenerate!" ... well, in Spanish of course, so I could understand it.
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- Image by Suppadeth wongyee on Pixabay
This is so cool! You did a great job, Linda. Sometimes, when we learn a foreing language, we get so tied up writing about how we're learning and what we're learning, and blah blah blah, that we forget why we decided to learn it in the first place — to just communicate with people. And what can be more communicative than telling a story in relaxed, everyday language, as if you were telling your roommate what happened on the way to work this morning. Additionally, it gives you a chance to use colloquial turns of phrase and learn to express yourself in an informal register, which you don't usually learn in textbooks, but make you sound so natural when you actually talk to people in the real world in your target language. Again, great job!)))
Hahaha great story. Unfortunately this doesn't happen to me in Germany. There could be tons of funny little stories like this one!
Haha yes funny story indeed! A coworker once told me something similar, but in a professional context. He is belgian and the customer assumed he wouldn't be able to understand french xD, because they thought he was german. Thanks for sharing that to Uly and for translating it of course to Linda :).
Glad you enjoyed it, Dustin!
Hi, Linda! I think you did it really well, considering @CocoPop used a lot of Russian idioms and very conversational phrases in his original story like белая ворона (a square peg), нести чушь (say bullshit/talk nonsense), неизменное пивко (usual beer) :D. Unfortunately, "usual beer" doesn't convey all the refinement and subtlety of that Russian phrase, ha-ha. Some English phrases were new for me, and I added them to my arsenal. Thank you and everyone who left their comments and corrections!!!