Tag: language study

The fear of a female tiger, and other language lessons.

The last two weeks passed in a blur of confusion and panic, as I pitted my wits against a somewhat-too-advanced Burmese course and won lost survived. It was very good for my Burmese and I learned an overwhelmingly large amount, although my biggest realisation is just how much I still have to learn. There has been a big shift from my “unknown unknowns” into my “known unknowns”.

And now I shall regale you with some things that I have learnt. Mostly in the “humorous literal translation” category.

Continue reading The fear of a female tiger, and other language lessons.

Burmese is hard.

As part of my ongoing quest to learn this language, yesterday I started a two week intensive course with the famous John Okell.*

If yesterday was indicative of the course as a whole, the two hours of daily lessons need to be accompanied by seven hours of study, and I am going to spend the next two weeks desperately struggling to keep my head above water.

The rest of the page is covered in my tears.
The rest of the page is covered in my tears.

 

*If you don’t recognise his name then you are probably not involved in the fairly niche world of Burmese language study. But he quite literally wrote the book on learning Burmese.