Saturday, April 05, 2014

Uphill battle

i fucking hate conjugating verbs

Three types of verbs in the Ukrainian language, with three different types of conjugations. Does the stem end with a vowel? A consonant? Is it irregular?

Fuck. Me.

I’m trying to remember if it was this hard with French and Latin, and all my memories are that they were easy. Of course, they used Roman letters. I’ve been banned from using transliteration, which means I’m pretty well fucked. I can’t remember how to pronounce the letters without a cheat sheet and it’s easier for me to use transliteration to do that.

However, that doesn’t fly in the ‘real world’ now, does it? The odds of finding transliterated official documents - like those needed to get a copy of my grandfather’s birth certificate - are slim to none. In fact, I know that they don’t exist… I already downloaded the forms I need.

Making matters worse—my idea for the different keyboard was BRILLIANT - however, I’m back to hunting and pecking. The Cyrillic ‘O’ is the same as a Roman ‘J’ on the Mac keyboard. The ‘T’ is on the ‘N’ and so on… This is impeding my forward progress and that is not cool.

This would be so much easier if I could lean on transliteration.

But.

I’m a big girl. I’ll put on my big girl panties and deal with it, but I’m definitely going to bitch about it. I need to vent or I’ll explode. I know this is a choice I’ve made, and I’ve invested a lot of money, so I’m going to do this right… but wow.

Difficult language is difficult.

To put things into perspective for myself, Latin is difficult, and I never got anything less than a B in that class. (Of course, I got As in French, but I actually had French speaking neighbours at that point.)

Maths is difficult. I still struggle with it, despite the fact that I work with it every single day. Being an accountant is about logic, more than it is about being able to add, subtract, multiply and divide. I was told, point blank, by my father to never become an accountant… well, guess who graduated with a 3.89 and loved all her classes?

(And, apparently, I’m learning British English… but that’s more by osmosis. ‘Maths’ looks so weird, but I know it’s correct.)

So… this shouldn’t be that hard once I get out of ‘what the fuck did I get myself into’ mode.

I just hope I get past this soon.

Posted by Matty on 04/05 at 12:36 PM
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