Thanksgiving...

[icarus]

Just got out of a painful Sanskrit exam. Very little sleep studying, though it doesn't seem to have made any difference.

It's hard not to write fanfic right now, I'm bunnied like hell, but my resolve is firm: until Sankrit is is done for the quarter, no fanfiction. The teasing bits of Out Of Bounds will have to wait. The little hints of the next part of Last Port Of Call, forget it, I'm not even writing anything down. If the story ideas are there still, later, fine. If not, I still do not have time.

This is the hardest class I've ever taken, bar none, and I feel like a ship going around Cape Horn -- battered, tired, and still in for more. I'm not the star in this class, and that hurts. Last Friday was the single-most humiliating day of my academic career.

Two more weeks and then the final. Do I have a vacation coming up? No, I'll be studying my ass off.

The substitute Sanskrit teacher the past few days was, with few exceptions, universally disliked. Personally, I don't think he was arrogant or dismissive. He was just a little... well, he's in the middle of teaching second-year Sanskrit, so first-year first-quarter Sanskrit students came as something of a shock. You could almost see him down-shifting.

That said, last Friday, even the classics major clung to her desk with the miserable look of a wet puppy.

All the regulars skipped Monday (I joked there was "one and a half people" in class that day) and as a result the class is far behind and has only a sketchy concept of the 10 verb classes. Study this weekend will have to make up for what we didn't get from him, and I also have to review chapter six because in theory I get relative and correlatives but in reality, no -- I don't understand. There's a conceptual leap that just hasn't happened. (Sanskrit experts, please hold off on the advice. I'm really too tired and stressed to take it with any amount of grace.)

As for my creative writing teacher, I decided I do not want the drama (and distraction) of fighting, and I don't want to do damage to him either. If he dings me on my grade for personal reasons, I can challenge it later but I'm not going to deal with it now.

My sense is that not only am I getting nothing out of the class, but my writing has actually been hurt by it. I tested this. For my last assignment I gave him something I wrote back in 2004. Sure enough, according to him it's far better than anything I've turned in so far. He probably thinks that I've improved when in fact I'm going to have to unlearn everything he's taught. *gets out the memory eraser*

The very idea of cleaning house all day and preparing Thanksgiving dinner... I hate to be uncharitable, but I wish wildernessguru hadn't invited his friends from work for Thanksgiving. Normally Thanksgiving is just us, or people we know, long-time friends.

*face in hands* I can't believe I agreed to this.

Comments

[thereallyle.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, that makes Japanese sound very very easy. Three writing systems? PFFT! (Actually, I am finding it fairly easy, because it is nice and consistant, unlike some of the other languages I've studied.)

[venivincere]

I second that.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I've studied one quarter of Japanese, and while learning Kanji is difficult, Sanskrit's grammar is far more complex. I actually liked Hiragana and Katakana.

Sanskrit is one of the most "inflected" languages in the world, which means that it builds the meaning by tacking on little case endings.* Imagine if you will:

"I go to the store-am."
"The store-ha is closed."
"The stores-ini are crowded."
"The stock offering included store-na options."
"I gased up the car on the way to the store-ya."
"Store-t were first invented in the 3,000 B.C."
"That is my uncle's store-sya."
"He is at the staure." (vowel change instead of an ending)
"The poet begins: stor-e!"

Those are the singular cases. Now for the dual (two or more):

"I go to the two stor-ey."
"The two stor-ey are crowded."
"The stock offering included two stor-bhyam options."
"I gased up the car on the way to the two stor-bhyam."
"Two stor-bhyam were first invented in the 3,000 B.C."
"Those are my uncle's two stor-yoho."
"He is at the stor-yoho." (vowel change instead of an ending)
"The poet begins: stor-ey!"

Now for the plural (three or more):

"I go to the stores-e."
"The two stores-en are crowded."
"The stock offering included stores-au options."
"I gased up the car on the way to the stores-bhya."
"Stores-bhya were first invented in the 3,000 B.C."
"That is my uncle's stores-naam."
"He is at the stores-shu." (vowel change instead of an ending)
"The poet begins: stores-e!"

There's a different set of endings depending on whether the noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter.

Then there are also different declensions for demonstrative pronouns ("that," "those") as well in masculine, feminine, neuter.

When you get to correlative and relative pronouns ("If I go to the store then I will buy butter," "when I go to the store, then will buy butter" -- you can probably tell I have shopping to do), these also are declined.

Then there are the verbs, for which you need to memorize the roots, whether or not they're conjugated according to the Active or Passive form, and....

It requires huge amounts of memorization. I'm told that Greek is even harder but Sanskrit beats Latin hands down for complexity.

Icarus


*P.S. mad_maudlin tells me Russian is similar but it has fewer cases (5 as opposed to 8), and it only has singular and plural, not singular, dual, and plural.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

*cries*

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I read the textbook before I started the class, so I knew what I was in for. I just didn't expect my memory to start spluttering after a certain point.

Icarus

[thereallyle.livejournal.com]

OH MAN. Call me weird, but that almost makes me want to try it! ^—^ If I did, though, it would just be for the challenge, though...

I'm actually having a lot of fun with the kanji, and the class is awesome, but it isn't much of a challenge. I mean, the grammar doesn't really resemble English, but it's consistant and there aren't too many rules to learn. And we have so many vocabulary quizzes that by now I've figured out how to memorize about twenty new words in twenty minutes (it used to take more than an hour).

You know what language sounds scary? Estonian. Apparently kids spend ten years learning how to say "Oh, so you're learning Estonian!" without bursting out laughing. ;)

[enname.livejournal.com]

Nope, but Japanese's grammar is.. bizarrely close to Latin in some ways. :P