So Tired

I realize I run the risk of sounding like the kind of whiny creep I usually despise, but oh well. I'm tired. And I'm bored.

For the past few months, my language training schedule has been -- An hour or more of conversational speaking. A speaking at length exercise and/or interview, with a critique. A reading in depth and an authentic reading exercise, with line-by-line analysis. Every day.

Every day it's the mentally exhausting equivalent of taking the dreaded test (without the emotional stress, fortunately). I'm tired. The strange thing is that I feel like I'm more advanced in Nepali now than I was when I reached a 3/3 in Romanian. But my instructors are making me feel like I still have a long way to go.

A little more than a month to go.

Straight or On the Rocks?

A strange thing happened in class today. I had a strong urge to drink a shot of whiskey. This is strange because A) I don't like whiskey, and B) it was 10:22 in the morning. "What happened at 10:22?" you might ask. I was in the middle of reading an in-depth Nepali article and it was at 10:22 that the futility of this task became more than I wanted to bear.

I just wasn't getting it and my instructor wasn't explaining it in English very well. I began counting down the minutes to the end of class at 10:40 (today was an abbreviated admin day). 18 painful minutes seemed like forever.

I keep telling my instructor that mimicking the in-depth reading exercise that is used in the test is not a good teaching tool. The test is meant to discover what you don't know. The classroom is for developing reading comprehension. But what do I know?

I'll take my whiskey straight, please.