4/19/13: In Which I Contemplate Linguistics

I was lucky enough to attend one of the few public high schools I've ever heard of that offered more than two or three foreign language classes to its students. I don't know how it is anymore, since my youngest sibling has now graduated from the school and my connection to it has almost completely evaporated, but in my time at Greenfield-Central I was lucky enough to dabble in two languages: Spanish for my freshman and sophomore years, and Japanese as a junior and senior.

I was not the best student a teacher could have hoped for. I was lazy and irreverent, and when I did pay attention and know what was going on I tended to play the know-it-all. That's not to say I was the worst kid in class, just that I was a B-student who caused a little more trouble than necessary and who honestly should have been acing it. But to get to the point, I didn't make good use of my time in my high school language classes. As a result, by the time I've graduated college and moved out to NYC, I've effectively forgotten almost every lesson from both languages.

This realization hit me hard today as I was... Well, I'm not entirely sure why it hit me today. I haven't spoken I a Japanese person, I haven't needed to know Spanish, I haven't even really watched an anime in a year or so... I'm not certain where the feeling came from, but I decided that it was time to actually, truly do what I've been meaning to do since my junior year of high school and learn another language for real, no matter how hard it gets. The only trick is that now I don't have easy access to classes and teachers who will help me for free (or at least no additional cost over my tuition). It's all on my and the Internet now, and whatever I can buy and borrow. But that's not meant to be the point of this post...

Or maybe it is. This just became a journal update. I was going to talk about linguistics in general, but that can happen tomorrow, or later tonight if I'm feeling particularly adventurous. For now, I have a poker game to get to.