Is Your Significant Other A Foreigner? Do You Speak His/Her Language?

[Gary A.]

My wife and I both grew up in Southern California and English for both of us is our mother tongue. But I still don’t understand her.

 

[weepete]

When I was living in Istanbul, I went to see Acid House which depicted several loosely-connected vignettes set in Glasgow. I did eventually get the rhythm, but it took me half the movie to do so. In the meantime, I had to read the Turkish subtitles in order to follow the English-language dialogue

The Acid House (film) - Wikipedia

Edit: Forgive me, I misremembered. They were apparently set in Edinburgh.

Yeah, and don't worry, you are forgiven! Irvine Welsh has some fantastic stories. An easy enough mistake to make. I remeber when Trainspotting first came out I was at school and picked it to do my Report on Personal Reading (RPR as it was known then), much to the chargrin of my English teacher . It's a hard read, even for me as most of it is written phonetically, and it's pretty much as spoken and the differences in Scottish accents and different areas having their own words for stuff still meant I had to infer a lot from the context. Took me a good 5-10 minutes of reading to be able to get into a decent flow. Difficult subject matter and hard, graphic themes of sex, drugs and violence. At the time it was hugely groundbreaking now is iconic for my generation. But even though it's fiction there is a strong element of truth there. I've known people in my life that could have fitted in quite easily to those stories. But yeah, I really rate Welsh, and I can't think of a contemporary author who's been more at the forefront of groundbreaking Scottish literature. Kudos for having seen Acid House.

Small Faces was an earlier Scottish film dealing with teens and gang culture, worth a watch too if you are interested. It's not nearly as harsh, but features Kevin McKidd who played Tommy in Trainspotting.

 

[shadowlands]

My wife is from Mexico. She speaks English and Spanish. Mostly speaks Spanish around her family and English with myself and our kiddos. I only know a little Spanish.