Life-Long Learning

For too long, life has mostly been about studying (and now working), hanging out, rotting at home, and occasionally travelling. Then there’s Sammi and Hocc but I think there should be more to life than this.

I’m enjoying picking up the guitar again after a super-long layoff. I definitely still have much to learn! Don’t be lazy!

And I’ve been thinking of learning a new language for some time. My Malay by self-study got nowhere after two chapters, but now I’ve got a new target – French! Having to go to a French-speaking part of Canada (plus the influence of a certain Ms C, hohoh!) provides some impetus and I hope I can sustain it.

Ok, I finally got started by buying myself a French for beginners book with the help of Ht. I was desperately reading as much of it as I could before our first ‘lesson’ yesterday. We began with pronunciation, simple phrases and two very important verbs 'to have' and 'to be'. Basically stuff to get a conversation going. My question is, why are French nouns divided into masculine and feminine ones? (Who decided which is which anyway?!) It makes learning French a lot harder because you need to know whether things are masculine or feminine or else you may get the article wrong. Then there are the six conjugations of verbs, some of which are very different from one another. Arrrrrgh!

I will be extremely amazed at myself if I can get very far by struggling along on my own. Of course I have a great teacher in Ht but I will need to buck up myself. And I seem to be perpetually tired such that whatever I try to revise doesn’t seem to stick in my head for long. Perhaps a brain that has become used to working-life needs time to adjust back to student-life. Well, I have one month to cram in as much as I can!