Went to my local study spot (the KFC) today and spent a good 6 hours there studying…after 3 cups of coffee and after rounding out the 6th hour there today, I began to get impatient with my translations…they ended up going as follows:
Hour 1: Meticulous attention to characters and clean crisp English translations (both literal and the general meaning)
Example: Mary goes does not go Nanjing? (Did Mary go to Nanjing?)
Hour 3: Pretty good attention to characters, the English translations on the other hand looked like 2-year old scribbles. Also begin to write “ghetto”
Example: Your cold get better or don’t? (I think…my handwriting sucks at this point)
Hours 5-6: Chinese characters look like stick-man drawings. English translations include “shit” “damn” and “fucking” every other word.
Example: What it really says – Let’s go watch TV.
What I wrote down: Fuck it, let’s go. We’ll go watch the damn T-fucking-V.
—Alberto