Cantonese and Mandarin are my languages. It’s what I speak at home… so lacking these words make it hard to exptess my thoughts to my parents whose primary languages are Cantonese and Mandarin. Mom speaks English but doesn’t really know any vocabulary unrelated to like everyday life stuff and doing business, money related words…
My native languges are Cantonese and Mandarin, but my primary language is English since that’s just what everyone speaks here in the US and its the langua franca of the internet… so most thoughts can only expressed in English… so now I realize that some ideas can’t even be translated even if I tried…
So yeah… its kina weird to be in an immigrant family… having language barriers with your own parents… I struggle to have like a “deeper connection” with them.
Fokeu@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Oh, okay. I assumed that you are one of those self entitled English native speakers who think that they are more important than the others just because English is Lingua Franca lol. I use English and Polish everyday and a bit of Japanese and there are in fact words that cannot be literally translated, but it was never that big of an issue for me. It might be an issue for immigrants, I don’t really know :/