Can Brad do it? Not unless they've discovered a way to pump CO2 into his ego.The sun has been out this weekend so we ventured downtown to look for traces of the Climate Conference. They were not particularly hard to find, but nor were they all that interesting. But once we got away from the main squares it was actually fairly quiet, with a couple of cameo appearances by the sun:
The big demonstrations were over by the centers of government, about a kilometer away.
It’s been a peaceful few months for us here—not a lot to blog about. We’ve been working pretty hard on the Danish lessons. For our weekly lesson, my assignment is usually to try to read a newspaper or magazine article in Danish; last week I read one of the Hans Christian Andersen’s fairly tales. I read at a snail’s pace, marinating in each sentence for several minutes and flipping through the dictionary ever 30 seconds. Google translate is also useful in some cases, though it can embarrass you if you trust it blindly.
When I hear Danes conversing my level of comprehension is like a dog’s—I pick certain words out of the flow (the way a dog can pick out “walk” and “eat” when people are speaking), but it’s only occasionally that I can even determine what the subject of the conversation is. I can understand perhaps 75% of the words when I read, but maybe only 40% when I hear people speak. But then I have to try to link the words together and recreate the meaning of the sentences, and since the world doesn't have a "Pause" button, I usually give up after a few seconds.
Commercial transactions are always interesting. You have the advantage of being able to plan your initial presentation, and you can often anticipate possible answers. When all goes well it’s quite a rush —like the time I went into a music store and ordered a 150 kroner gift card, without using a word of English. It made my day.
But more often than not the salesperson will ask a question that I haven’t anticipated, and I won’t be quite sure. Sometimes you guess: “Nej.” And sometimes it works. But sometimes it doesn’t and you have to bail: “Taler du engelsk?” I hate that moment.
So why bother? Indeed, some of our colleagues don’t. But we do. The desire to understand what people are saying around us is our privilege, and the fact that we will never actually be able to speak Danish is unfortunate but not fatal to the exercise. And despite all the drudgery and futility, we enjoy do it.
