My roommate Aidana and I always do our best to speak in Chinese- it's easier since she speaks Russian and I speak English. Aidana is knows much more Chinese than I do, but is just half a level ahead of me in the Chinese courses here at Lanzhou University, so there are tons of words that we don't know how to say. Chinese grammar is simple, but I'm sure we make many mistakes.
Also, we have this bad habit of not looking up how to say the names of objects. Instead, we use an adjective and then the Chinese word for "thing." Sometimes we add hand motions. At one point we didn't know the word for hairdryer, so we said (translated) "hair-dry-thing." The actual word for hairdryer translates to "blow-wind-machine," and I think our description is much better. The thing is, though, if we used our made-up word for hairdryer in a store, they would think for a second and then point us to the hairdryers, so I think it works just fine.
Maybe it's not really Chinese, but our own dialect. Our "Roommate Dialect" has English and Russian accents, odd grammar, and objects usually don't have actual names.
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