Been a while huh. It's currently the middle of the summer break here, however I'm spending the entire break taking summer classes at university. One of the requirements for my Bachelor of Science degree is three semesters of a foreign language. Yes, three (not that it's even remotely related to my major). There are two summer semesters of 5 weeks duration each, as opposed to the usual nearly 4 month long Spring and Fall semesters, so it's very intensive as we're covering the same workload in a much shorter period (so obviously we have longer and more frequent classes).

So I'm taking Spanish - or attempting to at least. I would have preferred Russian since my other half is a native Russian speaker, however the university only offers advanced Russian literature classes, so that was out of the question. Since I have absolutely zero prior experience in Spanish, it has meant spending an additional 6 hours or so at the library every day (and some in the weekends too) to try to get up to speed, as almost everyone else in the class already has at least 2 years of Spanish from high school prior to attending university.

I completed the final exam for Spanish 1 last week and somehow managed to pull off an A grade for the semester, which surprised the hell out of me. I'm now one week into Spanish 2 and feeling completely clueless, as it seems about 90% of the class are already reasonably fluent in Spanish. As a result the professor seems comfortable speaking very rapid Spanish while teaching, with the occasional bit of English to clarify some points, so I really have little idea what's going on - I catch maybe one in every five or six words he says. We have our first exam for it on Monday morning. Joy.

I attempted to take Spanish 1 last year during a normal semester, however was forced to drop out as the professor refused to speak a single word of English whatsoever, so sitting in the classes was a complete waste of time for me as it was just gibberish. I tried to teach myself, but it started dragging all my other classes down, so I just dropped it. It is for this reason that I have taken the summer classes instead of working, as it is the only way I'm going to get through this language requirement - by working on it 24/7 without having other classes to worry about. Fortunately the Spanish 1 professor I had for the first summer semester spoke English as well, so I could actually ask if I had a question. I still will have to do Spanish 3 next semester along with all my other classes, so that will be fun.. assuming I don't fail Spanish 2. That's all.