Studying a foreign language can arguably be one of the most daunting tasks a student has to take on during their college career. At Smith, if you want to see that summa cum laude on your diploma, you bet your bright little bottom dollar that you will be taking at least a year of a foreign language. As a Japanese language major myself, I know that the life of a language student can be a crazy adventure. It can be so frustrating, but also so, so rewarding...right?
I start off each day super happy about my studies. Yes! East Asian Language! So interesting! So important to learn!
Then I sit down to do my homework (usually two hours before class, but hey, at least I'm doing it), and I open my textbook and see this:
I do some quick positive self talk and say, "It's OK. It's only two pages! I can totally decipher all of these words I don't know and translate this in two hours!"
An hour goes by. I work diligently, taking a tedious amount of time to look up the meaning of each word I don't know. When I check my progress, I see I've only translated four lines of the text.
I start blowing through it, getting just enough of the context from the grammar and the words I do know to skip figuring out the words I don't.
When it's time to go to class, I'm like:
I walk in and my teacher greets me, but I can't look her in the eye because she can smell fear. We start discussing the homework and it goes OK for a while, until she asks me a direct question about a direct passage. For some reason, I always feel shocked when she calls on me. But I try to play it off.
But then a classmate jumps in to save me and my relief is real.
Class actually ends up going OK. By the end of it, I've usually got all of the vocabulary from my friends sitting next to me, and I actually come to understand whatever we're reading pretty well. I leave feeling pretty good, validated that in a short amount of time I could relatively be an active member of the class. I always vow to myself that next time I will do the homework the night before.
Because even though it's hard and it takes a lot of time, I love learning a foreign language and I wouldn't want to spend my time studying anything else.
