Hello! My name is Chanaia and I have a language addiction. Some would say I’m a weeabo (someone obsessed with Japan), a Koreaboo (obv) , a Chinophile (obv). These derogatory labels are just that-labels. Do I watch anime? No. Do I like sushi? Hell no. Do I want to run away and marry a Korean oppa? Maybe lol.

What I DO know is that i really enjoy Eastern languages, specifically the asian ones. Why? I’ve no clue. I go to language meetups and we all ask each other the same question: Why are you interested in [ insert language]? They always have reasonable answers, or deep ones, such as; My spouse is from [insert foreign country] so I wanted to learn his/her native tongue, I want to watch anime without subtitles *barf*.

I have no answer. At least not a good one.

Honestly, I’m nosy AF (as f**k, for our non internet savvy readers). I just want to know whose talking smack at any given moment. At least, that’s how it began. I was twelve, and I went to the Dominican salon with a friend of mine. I lived in one of the many projects of the Bronx, and the only hair salons were run by Dominican women. Sooo we went to get $15 wash-n-sets, when I overheard a stylist call my friend a horse. Granted her face is longish and she has these big beautiful eyes that she grew into, at the time I was not amused.

I wanted to make sure I wasn’t overreacting. So I waited. Lo and behold, there it was again “caballo”. I literally had a spanish vocabulary of five words: feo/fea, dame, sientate, comida, y caballo. Ugly, give me, sit down, food, and horse. Freaking horse. I glared at the stylist and she squinted at me , wondering if I spoke Spanish or not. A week later some called called me “fea” on the bus, and that was all she wrote. I was determined to never have a language barrier again.

More on why/how I became interested in languages in my next post n_n.