Languages

Today I picked up a Korean audio CD and booklet from Barnes & Noble. I immediately started listening to it in the car and I felt this wave of ethnicity wash over me like I have never felt before. This is the first East Asian language I have actually tried to learn and it excites me so much to the point that I am almost giddy about it. The problem is that I am so used to the Romance languages (I speak Spanish, limited French, and enough Italian to get by) that jumping into a region that has completely different rules for grammar, syntax, and, well, most things, has been difficult. It doesn't help that I'm taking a Slavic language as an actual class (ojej, Polski, mój mały przyjacielu) and I'm beginning to mix everything up.

Tonight as I was listening to the woman say 'excuse me' in Korean over and over again all I could think of was 'przepraszam.' It clouded my mind to a point that I had to take a break, clear my brain of thoughts of languages other than English and my target language, and then begin again. Even now, I'm thinking in Spanish as I type out this post. I turn my head to the right just slightly and I see French phrases either on my calendar or posted to the wall behind my computer. Polish is ruling my tongue at the moment and my ears are filled with music from Japan. I am on a language overload and I absolutely love it.

I doubt that I will be able to continue what I am doing for much longer unless I find a way to expand the capacity of my brain. I have parts of 10 languages (English, Spanish, Polish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, and Japanese) floating through my head at the moment, and, like I said before, they are all getting jumbled up.

Yesterday I said a sentence that combined Spanish, Polish, French, and English into one conglomerated mess that sounded like a dying cow had been hoisted up as a piñata in Nice.