Russian
Off to Russian class in a bit here...
It's kinda sad that each week there's another person or so gone. I think the class started with 35 people and it's down to like 7. I wonder how many people will be there tonight.
Dan was telling me that his mother's German classes do the same thing each quarter, that it's common for people taking a language "for fun" in community/night/junior college to realize it's too much work or not interesting enough and quit early.
I might be considering quitting too, were it not for my brain starting to do those magical language-acquisition things that I find so cool about studying a language: when your brain starts to formalate words/sentences because "it feels right" and you can't logically say why, you didn't explicitly learn it, etc.
But really, there's no practical reason for me to learn Russian... it's just fun to learn a language, and Russian seems to be different enough from other languages I've studied to be interesting. It is a lot of work, though. I'm kinda stressed because I probably only study the minimum amount to do well on the tests (and not seem stupid in class), but when I study much more, I'm bored in class, the pace of which I can't control. So I'd rather be a little stressed (by studying lightly) and thus be engaged in class.
I've been speaking/writing German a fair bit lately with Angela (who I met in Belize, and is majoring in German at Berkeley), and it's painfully obvious how much better my German is than my Russian (naturally), but that's further discouraging, because a) while my German is pretty good, it's not fluent, which is a reminder that my Russian never will be great, and b) I want to be that good in Russian a lot sooner, but I know that it's probably 2-3 years away, at minimum, probably more.
I'm not sure this post had a point.
It's kinda sad that each week there's another person or so gone. I think the class started with 35 people and it's down to like 7. I wonder how many people will be there tonight.
Dan was telling me that his mother's German classes do the same thing each quarter, that it's common for people taking a language "for fun" in community/night/junior college to realize it's too much work or not interesting enough and quit early.
I might be considering quitting too, were it not for my brain starting to do those magical language-acquisition things that I find so cool about studying a language: when your brain starts to formalate words/sentences because "it feels right" and you can't logically say why, you didn't explicitly learn it, etc.
But really, there's no practical reason for me to learn Russian... it's just fun to learn a language, and Russian seems to be different enough from other languages I've studied to be interesting. It is a lot of work, though. I'm kinda stressed because I probably only study the minimum amount to do well on the tests (and not seem stupid in class), but when I study much more, I'm bored in class, the pace of which I can't control. So I'd rather be a little stressed (by studying lightly) and thus be engaged in class.
I've been speaking/writing German a fair bit lately with Angela (who I met in Belize, and is majoring in German at Berkeley), and it's painfully obvious how much better my German is than my Russian (naturally), but that's further discouraging, because a) while my German is pretty good, it's not fluent, which is a reminder that my Russian never will be great, and b) I want to be that good in Russian a lot sooner, but I know that it's probably 2-3 years away, at minimum, probably more.
I'm not sure this post had a point.