If you’re learning English, don’t read this!

Ok. I’m kidding. Well sort of. For those of us, such as myself, whose first language is not English this would be a very confusing thing. When I was 3 years old, I already knew and spoke three languages being Kayapo, Portuguese and English. English was my last language to learn and I speak it perfectly without a trace of an accent (I have some Vimeo videos on this WordPress blog where you can hear me talk-I believe it’s a blog called “Let’s Watch a Sunset together”). I spoke Portuguese better when I was living in Brazil, but I now speak it with a slight accent that Brazilians either think I come from Southern Brazil (I’m from Northern Brazil) or a foreigner. Even in Brazil, there are many regional accents like we do here in the USA. The purest Brazilian Portuguese dialect comes from the Northern State of Para where moi comes from. You should see the look on their faces when I say I was born in Brazil because then I see the weird look on their face as if they are thinking “Then why do you have a Portuguese accent?”. Kayapo is my native language as I learned that first and spoke it fluently, but I only know two words now. Anyways, when I was learning English I wasn’t aware of all these fun English sayings that seem to contradict themselves. For someone much older and learning English for the first time, you can totally understand why they would be so confused to why we say one thing when we mean another that sounds opposite. If you know of any other confusing phrases, please write them below. Even now, living here permanently since 1993, I still don’t know all the traditional sayings, but I am also aware of the prodding head of another lingo which I have to look up every so often known in the Urban Dictionary and now deciphering the text message abbreviations! For the longest time, I had no idea what “Natch” meant whenever I would read it in magazines or when my coworkers would say, “Oh we’ll put it in the kitty” (funds for something in the future) which I assumed was some type of savings, but saying it was a “kitty” was beyond my understanding as I understood it to be a mammal. Gotta love the English language! Hope everyone is having a fabulous Cinco de Mayo today! I also hear tonight the moon will be 16% larger than usual. If it’s not cloudy, check it out.

xoxo