Giddyup

A month into Nepali language training, and the steep incline of learning has abruptly flattened to a plateau. That first month was great. I absorbed every drop the teachers threw at me. Learning a language full-time is much easier the second time around; I was miserable for most of Romanian language training.

I am the only student in my class. This is good for a few reasons. Namely, I'm only in the classroom 4 hours a day (but there's plenty of homework) and my teachers can customize the instruction to fit my pace and fluency. The other edge of that sword is that there's nobody else to take the heat for a while. It's all me all the time. And it would be nice sometimes to have another native English speaker in the class to help understand the grammatical explanations given by the non-native English speaking instructor. ("Did you understand when to use 'maa' in the post position and when not to?")

The other downside is that by the last hour of class on Friday my brain is slush. It just shuts down, like a stubborn mule that refuses to budge no matter how hard you kick it.

So now my stubborn mule brain and I have scaled the initial steep climb and have leveled off. I can see up ahead the rocky path of complicated conjugations, illogical verb tenses, and frustrating sentence structures. I'll need some sharp spurs in the next 9 months.