Monday, February 16, 2009

Lost in translation

I think that 5 languages in the head at the same time is a it too much to handle. Everything starts just spinning around and you're able to speak only a strange language nobody can understand.

Today I've been doing my homework for an italian class I'm taking here in Paris. It's actually a course för beginners so it should be a bit too easy for me since I've already studied italian for one and a half years in Helsinki. But it isn't. Because now that I'm here and forced to use french all the time, it's really, really hard to get your brain to think in italian in stead. So the homework that should have taken me only about... well, I don't know, a half an hour, maybe? actually took me at least one and a half hours to finish. And I think I've made a lot of mistakes anyway. And the translations from italian to french is even harder, because my french just isn't good enough for that yet! Luckily, my teacher said I didn't have to do that right now, maybe later on during this spring. Phew!

Today I also went to the bookshop and bought my first french history-book. And I even started reading it! At first I looked up like every word I didn't know but then I got a bit too lazy and just started reading while looking up only the most important words. It actually went surprisingly good! I can almost remember what I read! *lol* The book is actually pretty thick (600 pages) so I know I won't have time to finish it, but I will try to read at least most of it. Thank god it's a very interesting subject (History of women in the Middle Ages), otherwise I think it would be very hard to motivate myself to do something this tedious.

Then I've also been writing e-mails and chatting in both finnish and swedish today. So along with this blog, I'm using my fifth language within 9 hours. Therefor I hope you will understand and forgive my bad english. In fact, I don't know if I should be happy or sad. Because the longer I stay here and the more I speak mostly french, the harder it gets to produce something in english. It means my french is getting better, but on the other hand, I didn't come here to lose another language in stead! And I noticed that it's actually affecting finnish too. Not much, but still. The only language that seems to be ok is swedish. *sigh*

Well, well... I just have to wait and see where this takes me...

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