Over Our Heads

My sister has a natural talent for languages; I don't think anyone who knows her really well would deny that fact. It's a natural talent that my brother and I lack; I don't think people would deny that either. But it's interesting how dramatically my sister's Chinese has improved in the 6 months that she's worked in Taiwan. She somehow has the ability to pick up words and phrases from around her, as if they were a direct feed into her head. That's a neat thing to have. I want that!

This past weekend, we were Skyping -- wait, is Skype popular enough to be a verb yet? -- with our parents for Mother's Day and she had the headset mic. She updated them on recent events and whatnot. (That isn't the interesting part.) And every other minute, without fail, a word or phrase came out of her that just prompted Kevin and I to trade looks of ...

"Uh, what was that word? Where is she pulling this stuff out of?"

Phrases we could derive the meaning of from their context, but usually just glean over when we hear the general gist, and would definitely never be able to pull out of our mouths during normal use.

What? No, nothing; that's all I had to say about that. What, you were expecting me to set a goal to work harder on improving my own grasp of this Asian language? No, that's it. Go on about your business.