So you disarm a door with a desarmador....screwdriver. Had to look that one up. Picked up a bit of
Spanish in Puerto Rico, working there in the 70s for a few weeks. I had some Italian from the 60s when
we lived there....and now the two are seriously tangled together, too similar and too many decades, have
to think hard which word is Spanish and which is the too similar Italian word.
OK. If they haven't disarmed me, I better not be around if they are disarming my car door.
I picked up a bit of Rooskie, but after a bit of study of the fully populated case, gender and tense grids, I decided
that I didn't care enough to get beyond a few key phrases, like "Schto eta pa Rooskie?" (phonetic Russian) [What
is it in Russian?] and then the normal, stuff about how are you doing, good morning, good evening, thanks, you're
welcome, and a few other simple things. Just too busy with the tech part of the projects to get really serious
about a difficult complex language.
And as to the "could almost read" German - yeah, clearly English has a whole lot in common with German. Basic
sentence structure is pretty similar and a whole lot of root words and fundamental words are clearly from the same
basic language history. I was able to pretty quickly get to ask direction in Germany when hitchhiking many years ago.
Vo ist der campinplatz, bitte? And then get them to repeat the directions again, very slowly.
But most of their tech words are pretty much normal English roots "Russianized" by transliteration and adding their own
endings. A lot of tech acronyms come right through.
Bill