blog

Yesterday after­noon I took a break and wan­dered through the lan­guage sec­tion of the library. They recently moved the books to a dif­fer­ent set of shelves, so it was like explor­ing new ter­ri­tory in a way — very fun. :) I haven’t spent much time on learn­ing lan­guages since my Old Eng­lish class last semes­ter came to an end, and it’s a pity. For my major (Eng­lish Lan­guage) I have to take one more Latin class, so I’ll need to brush mine up in order to sur­vive a 300-level class. And my Old Eng­lish is already fading away, sadly, and so I’ve got to start read­ing Beowulf. Anyway, back to the book­shelves: I (re-)discovered the Celtic lan­guages sec­tion, and sud­denly I found myself with an almost irre­press­ible desire to learn Irish Gaelic and Welsh. Yum. :) Oh, oh, I forgot to men­tion that before I got to this sec­tion, I mean­dered through the place the books used to be, and I found that our library has sub­stan­tial Welsh, Nor­we­gian, and Arabic hold­ings. Fas­ci­nat­ing. So what I think I need to is set aside a cer­tain amount of time each day (10-30 min­utes), prefer­ably in the morn­ing, and apply myself rig­or­ously to study. My senior year in high school I woke up at 5 every morn­ing to study Latin for half an hour each day, and it worked. For some reason I find it immensely harder to wake up before 5 now (which usu­ally requires get­ting to bed by 10 or so, an even harder task, and I don’t even have much of a social life! :)). But self-​discipline is good, and I am fond of waking up early. There’s noth­ing quite like the air at dawn — fresh and rich and reju­ve­nat­ing. Well, it’s almost 11 now and I’ll never start waking up at 5 if I keep stay­ing up this late, so adieu for now.

[tags]Latin, Old Eng­lish, Beowulf, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Nor­we­gian, Arabic, languages[/tags]