Evening musing

Still on the subject of school, I was back at language school last night. I must confess to having been a little derelict in my formal language study duties of late. But I had a major project to finish off at work, we'd moved house, I'd been sick. Yaddy yaddy yah. I remember one of my school masters telling me that one should never have an excuse, one should always have a "reason for". So, those were my reasons for. Anyway, I must have been away for a bit longer than I had realised. As I discovered last night, 2 of my classmates had gotten married, and 3 more were pregnant. I must have missed one hell of a party. I have missed them all, it should be said. Who would have thought, 18 months ago, that I would yearn for the company of a classroom full of people from every corner of the planet. It's rather surreal at times. The teachers are great, and that helps a lot. They treat you as an adult, and not as an idiot. Even though we all feel like idiots at times. My evening class runs twice a week. Which is obviously long enough for marriages and pregnancies. One night focuses purely on grammar. That can be a bit draining after a full day of work. But essential. The other night is spent practicing listening and spoken (uttal) skills. That's always been the hardest part for me, understanding what people are saying to me. So having 2 hours a week doing just that is invaluable. I read somewhere, that the SFI language school teaches to the equivalent level of a Swedish 6 year old. I have even heard the teaching staff say that. That's a bit of an unfair statement. What they mean is, that the number of words they teach you directly, the vocabulary, is about the same number that a 6 year old Swede knows. But we're not 6 years old. We're adults, and we've been speaking for 20+ years. Some of us more than that. So we know how to use language, how to look for the root of words, how to break apart compound words into their simple forms. I might suck at Playstation games, but I can beat a 6 year old any day at learning and applying grammatical rules. Give me a Swedish verb and I can tell you by looking at it what the other forms of that verb will be. Well, most of them. Being taught just one word, you can create another 5 from that word. So don't be fooled by that "dumbing down" of the course description. it does the staff and pupils a bit of a dis-service. Oh, and it's snowing a shitload right now. How cool is that.