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I have a new plan, which is exciting and only slightly ridiculous! I'm not going to reapply to Cambridge next year - I'm going to apply to KU Leuven instead. And yes, I know I said a couple of posts ago that places like Edinburgh and Glasgow were Too Far, but it turns out that it's actually slightly quicker to get to Belgium, and there are other significant advantages.
The course looks really really good, and very much aligned with the areas I'm more interested in. It's clearly heavily subsidized even for international students, so would save me a mid five figure sum compared to the Cambridge degree. And I've been saying for ages that at some point I'd like to go and spend a few months living in France so as to be able make the shift from conversational to actual fluency, and whilst Leuven is Dutch-speaking, it's only a short hop on the train from Brussels, which is offically biligual, but in practice mostly Francophone.
I do seem to have found myself with a thoroughly unexpected special interest in languages over the last few months. I picked up Robert's old New Testament Greek textbook over Christmas, and although I'd done so on a couple of occasions previously, this time I didn't put it down, and have now worked my way through the textbook. I managed a (halting, clumbsy) translation of 1 John, and am now several chapters into his Gospel. And then a few days ago, since reaching the conclusion that applying to KUL was what I actually wanted to do rather than just an absurd fantasy, I started learning very basic Dutch as well. And of course when I actually start the degree (or possibly a bit before, if I can get my Greek a bit more solid first) I'm going to be learning Hebrew as well.
And omigod you guys, I'm having so much fun! I have always had a perception of myself as not very good at languages, but now I'm starting to wonder if some of that was just bad teaching, or at least teaching that didn't suit my way of thinking. I mean, not all of it - I'm not good at auditory processing, and that's always going to make the listening and speaking bits difficult, and it has taken me a very long time to get my French to the mid-high intermediate level I'm at now.
But I'm still slightly astonished by how much easier it seems now that I've already got a bunch of meta-skills for language learning under my belt. It does help, of course, that for the Greek I don't need to worry about the audio processing stuff. And that Dutch grammar is simpler than French, and /much/ simpler than Greek. But I think that a lot of it is just about having developed the flexibility of thinking so that even whilst I'm still having to mentally translate individual words into English and then to actual meaning, I don't feel the need to translate into English shaped sentences.
The course looks really really good, and very much aligned with the areas I'm more interested in. It's clearly heavily subsidized even for international students, so would save me a mid five figure sum compared to the Cambridge degree. And I've been saying for ages that at some point I'd like to go and spend a few months living in France so as to be able make the shift from conversational to actual fluency, and whilst Leuven is Dutch-speaking, it's only a short hop on the train from Brussels, which is offically biligual, but in practice mostly Francophone.
I do seem to have found myself with a thoroughly unexpected special interest in languages over the last few months. I picked up Robert's old New Testament Greek textbook over Christmas, and although I'd done so on a couple of occasions previously, this time I didn't put it down, and have now worked my way through the textbook. I managed a (halting, clumbsy) translation of 1 John, and am now several chapters into his Gospel. And then a few days ago, since reaching the conclusion that applying to KUL was what I actually wanted to do rather than just an absurd fantasy, I started learning very basic Dutch as well. And of course when I actually start the degree (or possibly a bit before, if I can get my Greek a bit more solid first) I'm going to be learning Hebrew as well.
And omigod you guys, I'm having so much fun! I have always had a perception of myself as not very good at languages, but now I'm starting to wonder if some of that was just bad teaching, or at least teaching that didn't suit my way of thinking. I mean, not all of it - I'm not good at auditory processing, and that's always going to make the listening and speaking bits difficult, and it has taken me a very long time to get my French to the mid-high intermediate level I'm at now.
But I'm still slightly astonished by how much easier it seems now that I've already got a bunch of meta-skills for language learning under my belt. It does help, of course, that for the Greek I don't need to worry about the audio processing stuff. And that Dutch grammar is simpler than French, and /much/ simpler than Greek. But I think that a lot of it is just about having developed the flexibility of thinking so that even whilst I'm still having to mentally translate individual words into English and then to actual meaning, I don't feel the need to translate into English shaped sentences.
