acknowledgements and reflections

so... is this when you look back at the things that were the bane of your existence in middle school and realize maybe something about them was somewhat worth it? maybe?

Today was sort of my last day or Czech class. We all took what could be a final test today, but if we didn't do well enough to satisfy ourselves she would consider it a practice and we could take another one next week. I finished mine up and let her grade it then so I could see how I did and if I'd want to take it again. There were some things that I wasn't especially confident about, like I usually forget to check whether the masculine word is inanimate or not and I end up conjugating it like it's animate, and I also wasn't sure about the third person past tense, whether I dropped the "je" and "jsou" for every verb or just for byt... But it turned out I remembered most of it so I won't have to retake it again next week.

As I was going to leave Lenka, our teacher, talked to me a bit because she said she didn't know if she'd see me again and wanted to say I had done a very good job and seemed to have a gift for languages. I still am only at a point where I can translate things from English to Czech if I sit down and write it out and spend a few minutes thinking about it, and going over my most common mistakes to make sure I'm not doing them. Put me in front of a store clerk who doesn't speak English and wants to know where and how long and what we are studying, and I blank out (that happened last week, all I could say was "nemluvim cesky moc dobre" I don't speak Czech very well). But Lenka said it was because the class was so big (big being maybe 8-10 of us at most) that she couldn't practice verbal exercises with us individually without boring the rest of us, so she taught more of a basic understanding of how the language works. I said I was glad I had taken it though, just for a chance to learn about it even if I don't foresee it becoming applicable in my immediate future. And I am glad I learned it some, though it still frustrates me that I can't really speak it, I can only write a little of it. She said it would be useful also if I ever need to learn another Slavic language, like Polish or Russian, or another language that's structured in the same way.

Then I commented that I had taken Latin before (see, here comes the bane of my existence part; it just took me a bit of explaining to get there), even though I don't really remember any of it. She seemed impressed and said that it probably helped a lot, having a foundation in that kind of language. I was probably still familiar with the structure even if I couldn't remember any of my Latin beyond amo, amas, amat (I believe that was taught that first day of Latin in 3rd grade, by the way). So even something as despised as Latin was, especially towards those last few years in middle school have apparently come in useful. I am exaggerating, I didn't despise it, but I didn't really like it. I was very happy to get a chance to learn french in high school, a language people actually currently speak. And I hoped and still hope to never have to study it again, (beyond perhaps some botanical classifications).

I must confess there is one more bane of my middle school existence that proved itself somewhat useful in Czech class: the horror of diagrammed sentences. Not the actual diagramming itself, but what I learned from it. I learned what is an object, direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition, etc. I learned it whether I wanted to or not, based on what sort of diagram you put it on. Because Czech uses declensions and endings on nouns and adjectives to tell what's happening in a sentence, knowing what those things are did help. The first case we learned was accusative, the case a noun (or pronoun and any adjectives describing it) is in when it is the direct object. Lenka first explained it this way, which, when given a little thought and an example or two I understood from all those sentences and lines and bars and slanted lines I had to draw. But the rest of the lesson was spent explaining what a direct object was in English, because apparently a lot of English classes hadn't gone so specifically into grammar. The same sort of situation occurred when we covered personal pronouns that differ if the "him" or "you" in question is the direct object or object of a preposition, and also in the locative case, using objects of prepositions denoting location. Diagrammed sentences and grammar workbooks... who'd have thought that stuff would actually come in handy?

I am taking no credit for knowing or remembering or even ever learning all this grammar or Latin in the first place. It was very much against my will that I did all those silly worksheets and exercises and studied for the tests, but I did them. I know I have no right to take pride in knowing something I really didn't want to know and saw no point in learning (and probably complained way too much about, sorry, Mom!), originally, even if it did turn out to be applicable somewhere...

So I hope this entry isn't coming across as a patting-myself-on-the-back-for-being-so-smart, but more an acknowledgment that even some of those things I really didn't like have actually proved themselves useful, and were (possibly) worth it to have learned.

Now my math on the other hand... I'm still waiting for that to come in useful.