First Monday of class

I had to wait until I'd eaten dinner and taken some time to decompress before I started composing this. Whoa. That was a long, brain-draining school day... in the best possible way! Mostly just the last class of the day, since it's three hours long. More on that later.

Today was the first day of Language & Culture Acquisition. This is Mackenzie's and my only class that meets with the ling undergrads, so it's also the biggest: around 35 students and three TAs. The teacher seems really cool and has a great sense of humor - to illustrate what language learning is not going to be like, he played the "I would like to buy a hamburger" scene from the new Pink Panther movie. Hee!

This is the second class for which we'll be learning a language (either Ilokano - a Filipino language, Arabic, or Karen) from a Language Resource Person (sort of conversation partner). In this class, we're not analyzing the grammar of the language as much - that's Field Methods. But it's nice that the classes fit together so much and so well. And I'm really glad they want us to pick just one option to use in both classes; it'd be insane to try to do both Arabic and Karen, for example!

We started out the class by writing down four questions that we thought we could easily ask someone, other than "What's your name?" Then we were told to pick a partner who we didn't know very well, and attempt to ask them those questions without the use of language - only gestures or simple drawings. It was quite fun, and amusing to watch and listen to. :) But as is becoming usual, the courseload sounds like it's going to require a lot of effort, as well as time management. I guess grad school is a good time to learn that skill... heh.

Lunch was had in the CanIL common room again. I hope that stays a tradition! It's so fun to talk to classmates and program-mates about linguistics, and whatever other random topics we come up with. Mackenzie and I tried the instant kimchee noodle bowls that are for sale there (along with a lot of other food options, don't worry), and found them pretty good. It mostly just tasted like spicy instant noodles. I have no idea if real kimchee would taste similar!

While waiting for the next class to start (a few hours), we spent more time in the computer lab, making sure to mix in some homework with the general surfing the internet. ;) Greek started at 2:30, in the building right next to the CanIL building. It only meets once a week, for three hours in the afternoon, theoretically for people in the surrounding community who want to get seminary type degrees and may not have time to go to a course meeting more than that often. This particular class is pretty small, but there is one other girl in it other than Mackenzie and I who is pursuing an MLE, which is nice. She has an advantage over us, though, since she took classical Greek one year in undergrad, and M and I have not taken any before today.

The class was extremely fascinating and cool, though M and I both wished we'd read the syllabus online to see that we were supposed to have read chapters 1-4 of the textbook before today. It might have been nice to have been slightly more familiar with the Greek alphabet and whatnot before actually starting right in, but oh well. It worked out. And I can already tell how awesome it would be to be able to read the New Testament in its original language... and how useful that would be in translating it. However, we were both severely brain-drained after the class got out, so much so that I couldn't even bear to listen to the French language radio station on the way back because I couldn't deal with hearing another non-English language!

So I still don't know whether I'll be sticking with it. I'd love to - it's fascinating, like I said, and I don't think feeling that mentally exercised and tired one day a week would be too bad. But the thing is, I don't know that it would end up being just one day a week, once the other courses really reach their busy points. Can I memorize 50 vocab words and prepare for various quizzes each week, as well as doing the language projects for Field Methods & Lang. & Culture Acquisition, and the slightly smaller language projects for Syntax & Semantics? I think it's possible, and it has been done before. Need to think about it more.