用浪漫去款待 這個殘酷時代

[highways]

❦ I have started learning Taiwanese, which is a Chinese "dialect" that's actually a completely different language; they're probably as related as, hmm, English and German? Of course since all the printed materials I can find are actually written in Mandarin, the similarities here add another level of oh god why am I doing this to me why.

❦ It is pretty much impossible to describe in words the immense depths of my hate for Chinese calligraphy (書法). Seriously it's fucking awful and I have to take it until next July.

❦ I literally get up at around six every morning to study Chinese for about five hours before I have to go anywhere. I'm also probably going to see if I can add an additional two Chinese classes a week to my admittedly not very busy schedule, but that'll put me up to, hmm, sixteen hours of Chinese instruction a week? If I don't start seeing some serious progress soon I'm pretty sure it means I'm an idiot and this is hopeless.

❦ Not gonna lie, most of the time I think that I'm an idiot and this is hopeless.

Comments

[unicorn]

I AM IN A SCIENCE MAJOR I LOVE YOUR ACADEMIC LINGO

Do you think your method of second language acquisition is necessarily common? No one else I know picks up languages the way you do, no one

[highways]

I FEEL LIKE I'M SPEAKING ANOTHER LANGUAGE MAN, THIS IS NOT MY ~TRUE VOICE~

That is an extremely difficult question to answer, and one I can't really answer, tbh, because seriously if I knew the answer to How People Learn Language I'd be one of those extremely elusive FAMOUS AND RICH LINGUISTS. Nobody really knows man. I certainly don't feel like, all that special or unique or anything in this regard, and I bet you don't know a lot of people who are currently living in a foreign country and regularly spend hours watching Youtube videos of pop star bickering as a language exercise? There's actually a list of personality traits which they've found to vaguely correlate to successful language acquisition, and I have pretty much like all of them... So yeah, I think it's really likely that I'm not any better at this stuff than any other highly motivated extrovert?

[unicorn]

That makes sense! INTERESTING. Though you were always good at picking up language snippets while still in AMERICA, like Japanese.

[highways]

I watched a fuckton of anime, read a whole lot of comic books in Japanese and was roommates with a Japanese person for a year, and she then invited me to live with her for a whole summer in Japan. I HAD SOME ADVANTAGES.

It'd be awesome if I was some sort of super talented language learning person, it'd make it much more likely that I'll someday be able to get my Chinese to a high enough proficiency to be able to actually use it for something. But at this point such speculation is laughable, since I started Chinese like, the January before last? So almost two years ago, and I can't even order a pizza over the phone or say useful things like, "HELP, I AM CURRENTLY ON FIRE."

[unicorn]

LOOK THAT UP IMMEDIATELY

[highways]

ON REFLECTION I FEEL THAT THIS IS ONE SITUATION WHERE MY ACTIONS WILL DO MY SPEAKING FOR ME, AND I AM OKAY WITH THAT

[unicorn]

BUT COULDN'T MONKEYS GET ACROSS THAT THEY WERE ON FIRE ETC. ETC.?

[highways]

I DON'T REALLY EXCEPT TO BE MORE ARTICULATE THAN A MONKEY, YOU KNOW, IF I AM ON FIRE