... And they were both due to lack of motivation on my part in junior high and high school. So:
(A) I wish I had made more of an effort to learn French. Tabernac! We never should have tormented that petite Mademoiselle Quelque-chose, straight from Paris and nervous as one of those little Farside dogs that had consumed too much espresso. Twenty-some 13-year olds, probably doomed to pay off bad karma for (rumour had it) causing our rather delicate teacher to have a bit of a melt-down and eventually quit. CAVEAT: I wasn't one of the top culprits; the worst I ever did was pass notes to the kids around me, but I never went out of my way to annoy the pauvre petite. I didn't need to -- a few other kids were exceptionally gifted in the mind-fuck arts. Sheesh! You couldn't pay me enough to teach teenagers!
(B) I wish I had taken my road test and tried to get a driver's licence in my teens. Now the thought of driving in Vancouver scares me more than diving 90 feet to explore a shipwreck. (Well okay, that doesn't scare me at all!)
At the end of the day (and the weekend, for that matter), I have to admit, two regrets in life for a woman of my, um, advanced years is actually not too bad. Anyway, I'm more interested these days in learning Spanish than French. It's easier to learn and widely spoken in the countries we travel to. ¡¿Y ahora... qué hago?! I guess the smart money says take classes, huh? I've tried the self-teaching thing with CDs and books, and behold! I could actually understand some of the people in Bogota. Whether or not they could understand me is a different issue entirely. And when we travelled to the Caribbean coast, where everyone talks so fast you'd swear they were on speed (or maybe a more obvious substance, considering the locale), well, I was hopeless without my trusty little phrase book, which really should have had the Spanish version of "Please excuse me. My IQ is only twice as big as my shoe size." But I digress...
Hope everyone who reads this has a great week. I'm going to have one even if those mofos, er, I mean those nice, nice people don't let me into their stupid, elitist club, err, I mean their dynamic and productive networking group. So THERE. :-)
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3 comments:
i went through a couple of years of learning french in school, mainly to get an idea of what some of my relatives were blabbering on about. i ended up only understanding a quarter of it, partly because i was a C student, but mostly because they were speaking cajun french, not french french which is apparently different, maybe. i deduced that i wasn't that curious after all.
Hey raindog,
Funny you should say that, because one of my coveted travel destinations is Barcelona, where the official language is one called Catalan. I wonder if having learned Latin American Spanish will serve me at all if (no, scratch that -- I mean when) I go there? Sigh... I wish there really was such a thing as a Babelfish, like in the Douglas Adams books!
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