Bleeding Fiction

My first two classes today were language classes. Japanese in the morning, Russian in the evening. My Japanese fucked me up the add with a knobby baseball bat and left splinters behind when it pulled out. It was, in other words, a bad experience. When I got into class, there was something written on the board. It turned out that it was our homework assignment, but I know that only from inference because I couldn't read it. It was in Japanese, you see. I wrote it down, to try and translate when I got home. No such luck. The kanji she used are in the first-year Japanese book. I understood pretty much nothing of what was being said in class today. Nothing.

I am, for the record, screwed. I can't take second year Japanese. But if I can't and have to move down to first year, there's the very real possibility that I'll get booted from my program. I'm not entirely sure I care. Watch as depression sets in!

That said, I owned my Russian class. It's a pity I'm not in school to study this shit. Now, admittedly, I have something of a leg-up in Russian, what with the intense exposure to the language over the past four years and my already knowing how to read Cyrillic. That made it very easy to handle today's class. That advantage won't last.

It's interesting the way they teach language here, by the way. They opt for total immersion from day one, not speaking English if it's at all possible. It's pretty cool, I think, and likely to be much more effective in the long run. But it's also a reason that I'm so tremendously far behind in Japanese.

Yeah, I'm screwed. Pity me.