Tuesday night tally

Language acquisition

Gaaaaah. I hate Romance languages: what the hell do you need all those conjugations for? My brain is not processing all the irregulars, subjunctives, so and so ons that drive me batty. I sometimes wish I had the chance to continue with Mandarin or start with some language that doesn't use conjugations. I miss the simplicity of changing verb tenses with a simple character or two.

I like Portuguese: the curriculum here is pretty easy and I ended up skipping a year, something that's not uncommon. Maybe having another year to drill myself on verb memorization would have been a positive thing; however that meant I would have to sit through another year with egotistical athletes who do the bare minimum to get their language requirement out of the way. But last semester's professor made me want to quit and take up something else becuase she was terrible at teaching. I saw her three times last Thursday at Van Hise and then around the Union when I was milling outside the Campus Center. It was horribly awkward because I was the fumbliest speaker in class and wrote all my papers (in Portuguese, no less!) the night before, so my papers were even more incoherent and ratty. Still, when she saw me she said she liked my final paper...so why did I get a B?!?

I enrolled in Mandarin for my freshman year instead of the preferred Japanese becuase I still had horrible hangups about being an illiterate and mute jook sing. My professor was old but energetic and computer literate. He was also pretty traditional on characters; insisting on the gender-neutral character for he/she/it, for example. He also created supplementary programs with VB to encourage us to come up to the Chinese floor on Van Hise and get our learning on. Despite all of this though, I was still a little resistant about liking my choice and thought of it more as a duty to my heritage or something like that.

Second year was pretty interesting becuase we had a new professor who hated Professor Chen and his traditional (read: Taiwanese) ways. We got real books instead of a pretty thorough packet written by Chen, differentiated between our third person pronouns, and listened to him rant about our previous education in Chinese. Ironically, this was the semester that I began to actually like learning Chinese and then promptly lost the opportunity to learn for the spring semester becuase my Intro Soc class broke into two out of eight meeting times for Chinese per week. I found out earlier this year that I could have continued Chinese if I had gone to my TAs instead of hardass old Zhang. He wouldn't even let me go to the remaining six classes (three lectures and three discussions) and do extra work for four credits - as opposed to six - as an alternative. He basically told me, "Unless you are majoring in Chinese or need to fulfill your language requirement, I don't have the time to help you." What the fuck; I wouldn't have even bothered going to his office hours anyway.

"Open the door to knowledge!"