Foreign language study for dual citizenship purposes.

The notoriously hard language that I’m intensively studying for dual citizenship purposes is such a little bitch.

There’s so few cognates that even most news articles are impossible to read. If you know a language with cognates, you can fill in the gaps if you don’t know one word or maybe two, but what happens if you don’t know four or five?

Like, that's the situation that I've been facing. 

So, basically I’m using an online flashcard app to memorize simply thousands of vocabulary words, and I can already see how much more I can understand when I come across a previously largely unintelligible sentence that I had read months ago, but still, it’s tremendously discouraging when you get a new text and you realize that you don’t even know a fairly standard, important word like “estimate” or “improvement” and you can’t even identify a part of speech because so many of the endings look alike and because so many of the words at play are unknown.

My father’s one cousin writes once or twice a year around Christmas or Easter to give “greetings from the whole family,” and I usually used to write her back a few short very ungrammatical lines in reply, but with this latest round of contact around Easter, I really rolled out the language study and I told her that I was studying it again.

She immediately replied back with a longer email, and it was good to have so much text from a native speaker in an authentic communicative situation.

(Unlike her kids, I think she never really studied [English] as her foreign language, she did something else like [German], I believe.)

She wanted to see family pictures, too, so I had to gather some together, and then it took me several weeks to write back, and this email of like 7-8 short paragraphs explaining the pictures and giving news took TWO HOURS to write and edit, including making sure that I had all of the right little accent marks over everything, since the keyboard on my laptop isn't set up for that.

Like, wtf.

I did tell her when I apologized for the delay, though, that I was not only gathering family pictures, but the language is hard, so for me this isn’t an easy, friendly email, but rather homework.

And, I inserted a “laughing with pinched eyes” emoji.

I do hope the humor came through with that.