A question about my language learning.

Like a month ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one new (college -age) (Thai) (immigrant) coworker was asking me about the different languages I knew, and if I could speak them.

And, I said that many of them were dead, and the living ones, a lot of those were for reading, so you can maybe speak a little, but you have academic vocabulary to read an academic article, but you don’t know how to order in a restaurant or say that you have a problem with your cell phone and need to shut it off and charge the battery.

“Oh, I understand,” she was like. “I think I was like that, when I first moved here.”

“I can see that,” I was like. “Like, you probably didn’t know all of the vocabulary around beer pong.”

And, she laughed, and was like, “No, I definitely did not.”