But yeah most of my flight was SecFo trainees like that guy And it wasn't lost on me how fucking batshit most of them were They weren't the kind of people I really wanted to roll with
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When I was in language training after boot camp, one of the things we were constantly threatened with was that of being "reclassified" if we couldn't graduate from our language program on time Usually to a much less prestigious specialty, that needed people
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So if you know me at all, you can imagine how this was kind of a Scylla-and-Charybdis moment for me I was given the task of learning Mandarin in a year and told that if I couldn't hack it, I might either be separated into the military or forced to become Security Forces
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I'd either be sent back to the suburban wasteland of Illinois and forced to live with a family that made me want to kill myself, or be sent to the military wasteland of central Texas and forced to live and work with cops who wanted to kill me Unsurprisingly I just learned 普通話
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Replying to @Nymphomachy
I read that in Japanese as "normal speech" before correcting my brain to read it as Mandarin Chinese
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Replying to @Nymphomachy
"unsurprisingly I learned to speak like a normie"
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Replying to @life_minutiae
Honestly it strikes me as D&D as fuck that the word for Mandarin dialect in Mandarin is just "the Common tongue"
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @life_minutiae
It is ironic that the communists originally picked that term over 國語 ("national language"), the term Taiwan still uses, in order to be less culturally imperialistic, and now Taiwan is the one moving to protect indigenous languages while the PRC is aggressively attacking them
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I guess it makes sense because "mandarin" is itself kind of an odd word to be the name of a language, since it very specifically reflects a class and not an ethnic group.
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Not that weird, that's the old term, 官話 ("guānhuà"), "officials' speech", both referring to officials (mandarins) as a class and meaning "the official language"
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Oh yeah - it's not that weird on its own, except that the common usage ended up sticking with the word for 'official' rather than 'language' (and at that, a foreign word for 'official.'
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
"Urdu" appears to be somewhat similar, though; "Urdu" means 'army' or "camp" since it spread through soldiers, so it was "Soldiers' language" (Urdu Zaban).
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