practicality

Just a bit of frustrated venting. Something Julie posted brought it out, but this has been simmering for a long, long time now. For non-ranty things, skip down to the next entry.


One of my handful of really deep-seated frustrations is that I really love languages, but I kind of fail at learning them. I've had five years of honors to probably AP-level Spanish, and while I could hear or read something and sort of be able to understand it, I can barely speak it, and could probably not actually write anything intelligable, inbetween my terrible spelling and my even worse grammar. I've also spent the four years trying to learn Japanese kind of on and off. The net result is that I can read hiragana and sort of write it, and know a handful of the most basic vocabulary.

It's like...nothing sticks with me. I'll learn something and then forget it right after. While programming languages aren't quite the same as real-world ones, I've learned both Scheme and Java in the last two years, and I don't think I could write a scrap of code in either at this point, although I might be able to look at someone else's and decipher it.

And its especially frustrating because a lot of my friends are at least proficient in a second language, and some more so. There are a few of you out there who are totally bilingual, even. *sigh* This was always a sticking point between me and Claudia - she spoke French, some Japanese, and was learning German, and never really got how much this bothered me.