Me and my sibling were tired of my mom eavesdropping whenever so we learned another language to communicate between us. It would drive her crazy but she never bothered to learn to speak said language, so that's on her.
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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I knew two girls who learned sign language just to gossip during class
A good number of years ago, I took a community college sign language class with a coworker so we could chat during meetings. It was fun, and more so because some of the others in the class were medical staff at a regional youth detention facility of some sort who specifically wanted to learn some of the “spicier” words so they could know what was being said to/about them by deaf teens and understand descriptions of physical needs. Definitely vocabulary not in the usual intro curriculum.
I’ve seen girls in high school do that
I fancied the opportunity, but there were no other speakers of the language at my school.
what’s your language?
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I went to an English speaking high school for a while being a native Dutch speaker. Sadly the teachers there were very aware of the Dutch students and would sternly bit politely ask to keep it in English. Now that I’m in the real world I use Dutch as a private language quite often.
Yeah always be careful with that. I worked with a White guy that grew up in a Chinese family (adopted) . We were in a restaurant in the Asian part of Seattle. Well according to him they were talking bad about us the whole time. White this Black that for like the whole hour we were there. Then as we are getting the check he spoke in perfect Mandarin no accent or anything. You could have heard a pindrop and the look on their faces. It was epic.
that stinks that the teachers were aware of them 😓
unfortunately, i speak a very common language: spanish, but i also know portuguese from my dad, which i literally don’t know anyone else in my area who speaks it.
There weren't many other kids who spoke Cantonese at my school (a couple, but not a lot), but I learned to be paranoid after one incident in English class.
My teacher at the time was like the most stereotypical looking white guy you could imagine. Being a school in a big city, we had a pretty diverse population of students, and in this particular class there were two boys who were friends and would often goof off between themselves in Spanish.
One day about 2/3 of the way through the school year, I have no idea what one of the two boys must have said, but Mr. "Grew up on a farm in Ohio" quickly turned around from the board and interjected in the most native-sounding Spanish my untrained ears could parse. That immediately put the fear of god in them—in all of us, really—to suddenly realize that he had been listening to and understood everything they were saying from the very beginning of the school year, and had just not bothered to say anything until then. I think we were basically an English-only English class from that point on.
Between that experience and other stories I've read online, I've learned to never, ever assume that someone doesn't understand what you're saying in another language. You never know what unlikely language someone picked up because they had a pen pal or their SO is from another country or they lived/worked abroad for a while. Even then, since it's so easy these days for anyone to subtly pull out a smartphone and let Google Translate provide the gist of what is being said with relative accuracy, you should never say out loud something you don't want someone else to hear.
Edit: a word
I personally find it hilarious when people have slanderous conversations en español, thinking that none of the non-hispanic people in the vicinity understand them.
Están equivocados. Lo aprendí como segunda lengua cuando mi hermano se casó, y agregamos venezolanos a la familia lol.
It's adorable that someone world think that the fourth most widely-spoken language on the planet is a secret code that no one in public would possibly have a hope of comprehending 😆
It's adorable that someone world think that the fourth most widely-spoken language on the planet is a secret code that no one in public would possibly have a hope of comprehending
Even if someone doesn't know a language initially, they aren't secret codes! Anyone can get a language learning app on their phone and practice it until they know enough to follow a conversation.
me recuerda a alguien en chicago hablando en polaco a pesar de que muchos polacos viven allí.
😂 especialmente en los estados unidos, solo hablaba español con mis amigos pq el maestro no lo entendía.
no. not many people spoke my native tongue.
when i finally did move and found more people speaking the language, we would speak our language not to hide from the teacher but just because it was more comfortable
that makes a lot of sense, what language was it?
portuguese. i was in the midwest as a child but moved to southern florida in the 2nd half of high school
i speak spanish, a very common language in the us. most of my friends were also spanish speakers, so we did this a lot, especially if we were discussing something personal between us, dirty, or talking about another teacher.
obviously, we didn’t do this around a spanish teacher or a spanish-speaking one, but we did this a lot most of the time.
i was usually the teacher's pet and they would ask me what you guys said, and i would only tell them the truth if i liked the teacher. lol
😂 do you speak spanish?
i'm an american; so it's more accurate to call it spanglish. lol
bueno, ¿cómo estás hoy?
estoy good ahora, y you? lol
jajaja estoy bien!
Never did that on purpose.
In fact it wouldn't even had occurred to me to try to do that speaking spanish - The school district I went to growing up is about 60% hispanic so most of the teachers knew at least some spanish.
Kind of, me and the other commo guys used a Morse code network to talk shit about our leadership in Iraq. Even when they were in the room, using ancient US military tech.
When we about 10 my friend and I learnt to speak backslang for this very purpose.
Incredibly, it turned out that the teacher had learnt how to speak it too.