Thursday, August 31, 2006

Thoughts on learning Swedish...

I think my degree has made me very bad at learning languages. I can't learn to count to ten, without stopping to initiate an involved discussion about phonology or to introduce myself without heavy morphosyntactic analysis. I find myself asking: is there a case system? how rich a verb inflection system is there? And if that weren't impediment enough, the level to which I now speak French, means I find any lesser degree fluency in a language highly irritating. Memorising simple phrases is so frustrating compared to discussing politics and poetry, especially as I am clearly not a nice enough person to find common courtesy a more compelling reason to learn a language than reading gloomy literature.

Stansted at 3, oh joy...

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