Exhale

Well I'm currently trying to learn Spanish out of a Teach Yourself book because I can't bear to pay $300 to carry on with the Intermediate course. But I have to admit I'm not making any more progress. More like getting more confused. There are so many damn tenses! I think I took very much for granted those lessons in the nitty-gritty technical bits of the English language in primary and secondary school..and now I'm paying for it. All of a sudden things like pluperfect tense, imperfect tense, future tense, present conditional tense, past participles, gerunds, imperatives, prepositions and all that jazz are getting important. In that I actually have to know what on earth they are and when to use them exactly. Unfortunately I can't do what I did for English in all 18 years of my life which was basically 'if it sounds right, it ought to be right'. Big sigh. Who hammered out all the rules of language? Must've been one hell of a job. I'm going to start a phrase book too to expand my vocab.

Actually now come to it, I'm genuinely surprised that my English is still passable given that all I read when I was young were Enid Blyton, Sweet Valley (Kids! And then Friends) and Nancy Drew. And I'm not exactly very literary even now. I still have not finished Lolita and The Belljar which I bought last year in an attempt to read beyond my literature books. Lolita is surprisingly, and almost frustratingly, very PG. The narrator in Belljar is just annoying and nothing seemed to be happening. In any case both got dead boring after a while so I reverted back to old but highly amusing copies of Adrian Mole (which I have lost!! Have I lent them to anyone? Please return it.) and very engaging Hercule Poirot mysteries. Don't they say you have to read widely to improve your grasp of the language? I have to admit I hardly think Adrian Mole is very serious reading though it is far more entertaining and has more re-readable value than, say, The Great Gatsby even though the latter is a pretty fascinating novel. But its the kind I'd rather read as part of a school curriculum than on my own time.

So maybe I should start an English phrase book too.

I really should be improving my Chinese though but thats just procrastination on my part. I think I'm treating like a problem that will solve itself.

Japanese this friday! Excited! :D

posted by Jeanne @ 11:21 PM