linguistics is fail
I should be working on my computer animation homework or my transfer applications, but I'm going to bitch instead. Please ignore.
My linguistics class is moving at an annoyingly slow pace, given that I already know the majority of what she's telling us (in some cases better than she does), but the class isn't structured such that I can actually contribute all that much beyond answering her questions and occasionally attempting to correct her. Yes, there are tidbits of new knowledge sprinkled in amongst the stuff I already know (I am now significantly less likely to forget what a "rime" is), and yes my research project is a chance to learn new stuff, but OMG I hate sitting in class for 3 hours every week and getting out of it "a syllable final /n/ is often dropped in Hebrew, similar to {in} + {legal} => illegal in English " and that my professor is skeptical of the idea that native Hebrew speakers actually think of "friends" as "people one is joined to" despite the word being derived from the root "to join" (she as of yet has no evidence either way, she's just skeptical of it).
Also, I can't really blame her for failing at Hebrew, because she had expected to have someone who actually knows Hebrew to help her out with that class and they weren't there, but OMG it was a disaster. She was so incoherant. And I think that she knows that? But still. Showing us pictures of letters that are so small and at such a weird angle that we can barely see them, and then saying "you know the alphabet now, right?" just doesn't work. It doesn't even pretend to work. She kept getting the letters confused and presented things in a random, nonsensical order. ("Oh, btw, the letters have sofit forms, which you use at the end of a word, and they look like this" interjected randomly into an explanation of I-don't-remember-what and the most confusing explanation of what a dagesh does that I have ever heard.) Also, she can't read fluently enough to read her example words out loud to us, which obscured any points she might have wanted to make about morphology. There's a big difference, at least for me, between "you replace the l with a y" and "the word changes from 'lisgor' to 'yisgor'", and an even bigger one between "you add an n to the beginning" and "the word changes from 'sagar' to 'nisgar'".
And it's not the first class where she's been a mess about what she's trying to teach us. I'm pretty sure she knows a lot about morphology and psycholinguistics (that being her specialty), but she's trying to teach us phonology, history (both of the language and of the culture), and the basics of two foreign languages, and she keeps getting stuff wrong or being confusing/misleading. Yeah. Not getting much out of this class, beyond practice exercising skepticism.
I need to come up with a knitting project to work on during class, since I think writing would be too involved and reading would be too blatant.
On the other hand, my other classes are going quite well. Computer animation is going to kill me and it's incredible, even if I fail at coming up with simple, short stories. ASL is just relaxing and fun, and I'm happily ignoring our term paper until I get some actual guidelines for it. Chemistry would be better if it weren't at 9am, and I've been zoning out during class recently, but I'm still glad that I'm taking it. I'm currently putting off starting my various final projects, which is dumb, but fuck it I don't care. And uhm, aikido is pretty great. Except that importantish things keep happening in the evenings and I can't go.
LKP finally bit the bullet and asked me out a few weeks ago, and I turned him down, and he's been vaguely awkward and weird ever since. Which I understand, but it's still dumb.
I will go do homework now. Or try to write. Or something.
My linguistics class is moving at an annoyingly slow pace, given that I already know the majority of what she's telling us (in some cases better than she does), but the class isn't structured such that I can actually contribute all that much beyond answering her questions and occasionally attempting to correct her. Yes, there are tidbits of new knowledge sprinkled in amongst the stuff I already know (I am now significantly less likely to forget what a "rime" is), and yes my research project is a chance to learn new stuff, but OMG I hate sitting in class for 3 hours every week and getting out of it "a syllable final /n/ is often dropped in Hebrew, similar to {in} + {legal} => illegal in English " and that my professor is skeptical of the idea that native Hebrew speakers actually think of "friends" as "people one is joined to" despite the word being derived from the root "to join" (she as of yet has no evidence either way, she's just skeptical of it).
Also, I can't really blame her for failing at Hebrew, because she had expected to have someone who actually knows Hebrew to help her out with that class and they weren't there, but OMG it was a disaster. She was so incoherant. And I think that she knows that? But still. Showing us pictures of letters that are so small and at such a weird angle that we can barely see them, and then saying "you know the alphabet now, right?" just doesn't work. It doesn't even pretend to work. She kept getting the letters confused and presented things in a random, nonsensical order. ("Oh, btw, the letters have sofit forms, which you use at the end of a word, and they look like this" interjected randomly into an explanation of I-don't-remember-what and the most confusing explanation of what a dagesh does that I have ever heard.) Also, she can't read fluently enough to read her example words out loud to us, which obscured any points she might have wanted to make about morphology. There's a big difference, at least for me, between "you replace the l with a y" and "the word changes from 'lisgor' to 'yisgor'", and an even bigger one between "you add an n to the beginning" and "the word changes from 'sagar' to 'nisgar'".
And it's not the first class where she's been a mess about what she's trying to teach us. I'm pretty sure she knows a lot about morphology and psycholinguistics (that being her specialty), but she's trying to teach us phonology, history (both of the language and of the culture), and the basics of two foreign languages, and she keeps getting stuff wrong or being confusing/misleading. Yeah. Not getting much out of this class, beyond practice exercising skepticism.
I need to come up with a knitting project to work on during class, since I think writing would be too involved and reading would be too blatant.
On the other hand, my other classes are going quite well. Computer animation is going to kill me and it's incredible, even if I fail at coming up with simple, short stories. ASL is just relaxing and fun, and I'm happily ignoring our term paper until I get some actual guidelines for it. Chemistry would be better if it weren't at 9am, and I've been zoning out during class recently, but I'm still glad that I'm taking it. I'm currently putting off starting my various final projects, which is dumb, but fuck it I don't care. And uhm, aikido is pretty great. Except that importantish things keep happening in the evenings and I can't go.
LKP finally bit the bullet and asked me out a few weeks ago, and I turned him down, and he's been vaguely awkward and weird ever since. Which I understand, but it's still dumb.
I will go do homework now. Or try to write. Or something.