It's All Greek To Me...

Or Spanish I guess.

I finally figured out why I'm so terrible at learning foreign languages. I'm good at memorization, I've been exposed to Spanish (or Spanglish at least) my whole life, I should be picking it all up pretty quickly. But no. Why is this so hard?

It's the grammar.

I am lousy at grammar.

All of you already know this, but I mean it, I have no idea what the rules are when it comes to grammar.

I never learned any of it in school.

So when the lesson goes into the grammar it's: This is the past participle of blah blah blah woof woof so you have to use the blah blah blah woof woof version of the verb/noun/preposition/whatever part of speech to coincide with the what the fuck are you talking about?

I can remember having to diagram sentences in middle school and HATING that portion of the year. I could not see the reason for it. WHY do I need to know any of this? Why do I need to know parts of speech and weird tenses? And then by the time I got into high school I was in honors English so I didn't have to. Which I get is ironic, being lousy at English in honors English. But we didn't study spelling lists and grammar rules, we read books and wrote papers. I know what sounds right, and what looks right but I cannot tell you why it's right.

Now I understand that learning those parts of speech and tenses and all that jazz would have made learning other languages easier. Because not only is the Spanish a foreign language, the grammar rules that are written in English are too. The best I am going to be able to do is give you a close enough sentence. And my reading is always going to be better than my speaking.

Which is fine. I mean, I'm not doing the cute little owl lessons to become fluent, I'm doing them to challenge my brain. And it is challenging for sure. Because I don't know what present past future participation trophy verbs are. Kind of like the first time Corrie melted down when I said the car needed washed. She kept saying the car needs TO BE washed, and I was like, right, the car needs washed. TO BE. To be or not to be that is the question, whether tis nobler to drive a muddy car and not waste the water or to protect the finish of the paint job and... and then she'd get REALLY mad. But I honestly had no idea that I needed a "to be" in that sentence. And I cannot bring myself to add one at this stage in my life. Laundry still needs done, dishes still need washed. Sorry, Corrie.

But I do wish I had realized that it was a building skill. That I'd need it to add other languages to my repertoire. Sort of like how we made Katie learn all the steps in math even though she could tell you that answer just by looking at the equation. We knew that at some point she would need all of that base knowledge to build upon. She wasn't happy about it at the time, but appreciated it later. Though, honestly, I'm not sure I would have learned it all even if you had told me I'd need it. I probably would have stubbornly said I'd just stick with English then where there aren't grammar rules.

I mean, there are, but who follows them?

Not me. That's for sure.

Sorry about that. Just keep telling yourselves that when I make a grammar mistake it's a style choice and it will be much easier for both of us.

Now if you'll excuse me, the dishwasher needs unloaded.