Language classes on board/Carlos Pueblo

Language classes on board/Carlos Pueblo

One of my interests to cruise is the language class on board provided

by the cruise director’s staff. It gets me started and continued by my

daughters from Philippine and some male Indonesian staff on board.

I keep their notes along with the handouts from classes to my trips and

practice them whenever I can. Now, I can handle some basic greetings

on both Tagalog and Malays on board especially at the end of the trip.

There are four basic language classes offered by the cruise staff, the

Mandarin, Tagalog, Portuguese, and Afrikkans. Learning foreign language

has become my life time hobby which making my senior life time occupied.

I have had a good command of my native tongue Amoy, Mandarin Kanji

and English followed, and now I may have a small breakthrough of

Japanese and Spanish after several attempts more than 15 years.

I walked into a Brazilian Portuguese class right after a latitudes drinking

party on the first sea day afternoon. The instructor was on the page of

instruction of 1492 and mentioning the Pope divided the American into

two, Spanish and Portugal. I didn’t catch very much; however, I did keep

his notes. My daughter Christine at O’sheenhan’s reminded me the Taglog

classes and I was the only student on the lesson 2 class. Taglog has some

influence from Spanish as I notice and I am very sure that I’ll make good

progress.

There are about 10 million Afrikaans speakers in South African nations in

total. It is the third large language in that country. Afrikaans is a language

derived from 1600 Dutch language. I learned Boer War when I was at the

study of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s speeches and later in the 90’s when I read the

story of Cecil Rhode. Now, I know that many parts of South African territory

have adopted such language in practice. Two of my daughters on board

reinforce me some greeting after the class. I am getting into German language

system now such as Dutch, current day Prussian German, and English, etc.

It is amazing.

I always feel interest of the human movement or immigration around the

world by the tract of language similarity. My Japanese professor Nagamoto

mentioned that Japanese language was from Asian Hindu which I should

discuss more about it with him, the proof. I am not in argument yet I can’t

let my interest of learning language skid away from me.