Monday, February 1, 2010

Monday is not my friend... and other realizations

I decided that mondays are the worst they've been for me in a long time. At least I have no classes on wednesdays and 1 class on thursdays that only meets 2 or 3 times a month. But still... Today I woke up at 7:00 and this is what I saw
I don't like being up before the sun is. Then I was at the Fac for 9 hours straight today. I had 4 classes with about an hour or so in between each. All of them were pretty good EXCEPT my last class, which was medieval literature, that I was going to try to take so I could get the requirement of taking FR 317 (medieval lit) here instead of at home. I was told it was easier to do it here. But those people must have taken a lit class that was for exchange students. This class was a regular class for actual french students, and I tried so hard to understand and take notes, etc. But by this time I was tired and my comprehension level had gone wayyy down. Basically the teacher went on and on about the stories and the types of prose we would be reading, with a ton of what seemed like technical vocabulary I didn't know. Towards the end she started throwing out all these page numbers and apparently there's a book I would need to buy and I honestly didn't catch what exactly we had to do for homework. The teacher seemed nice and everything, but I just don't think I can survive in this class. I know this would be the one class I would absolutely loathe throughout the entire semester. I hate literature classes like this anyway. So I think the final verdict is just to take it at home. I'll hate it equally as much, but I'll have to do a lot of reading either way, and I'd prefer to not be clueless. I feel kinda bad because I happened to sit next to a girl from Canada, who obviously wasn't from Quebec, because I totally thought she was american. If I drop the class, I'm pretty sure she'll be the only foreigner in the class, but she seemed to have a handle on it. She was taking all these notes on her computer and wasn't scared to ask questions.

This all being said, I've come to another conclusion. After 8 thorough years of study I can neither understand nor speak french as well as I thought I could. And I feel like a idiot. I can speak and understand retard/baby french. Where it's slow and uncomplicated. Not everyday conversational french between two native speakers. Not such an awesome feeling after you've devoted so much of your time and energy into it. It's very depressing.

And my last conclusion for the day: my degree in french will be practically useless, because I am realizing more and more that i could never do professional translation for a living. I enjoy doing it, but I don't believe I possess nearly enough grammatical/lexical knowledge to do it right and trust myself in doing it. I've never been good with either of these things. And teaching is out of the question because i can't do that either.

It's kinda sickening knowing that everything you depended on for your future success has practically been annihilated.

2 comments:

  1. haa YES!! thats the awesome part. and it just got one class shorter too

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