Speaking Czech & First Quiz

The past few weeks in class, I've spoken more Czech than I have in the previous eight years.

 
Dmitri (his "Russian" name), also comes to class a bit early and we talk, he's my classmate from Czech.  Dmitri's younger, 21 to my 31, but he's taking the class for a very similar reason - he's homesick as well.  It's amazing to me that within a couple weeks my Czech has gone from almost forgotten to...well, not back to normal, but the grammar is almost as if I had never stopped speaking.  My vocabulary is sadly lacking, but I'm not translating in my head, I'm still reacting with the ease I once did, until, of course, I run out of words.  One could argue that this would make me more homesick, this taste of Czech, but in fact, having Dmitri in my Russian class has helped tremendously.  Perhaps just a sense of  knowing Czech is still a part of me, a part that won't ever leave me, despite the fact that I thought maybe I'd lost it because it had been so long...

In other news...I'm still getting A's on my homework, yay! Three so far, although, it looks like she gives them out pretty easily.  On one paper I had no corrections and I got an A, and another student had multiple corrections and he had an A- *shrug* I'm just glad I'm doing well.  If I had a lot to correct with my cursive, I would be busy practicing instead of writing this blog, lol.  We turned in our last alphabet cursive homework on Wednesday, so now our homework gets much harder, suck.  Instead of just copying letters, we're actually making sentences.  Joy!  That's due Monday, so at least I have a few days to do it, but then on Monday she'll give us homework for Wednesday and I'll have one day to do the same amount that I'd had four days to do before.  Love that.  And my cousin wants to come over to play RockBand on Tuesday night.  I'll just have to figure stuff out...sometime...

Also on Wednesday - we had our first in class "test."  It was a short quiz - the teacher gave us all of the Cyrillic letters printed and we needed to write them in cursive and we needed to not only write them in Cursive, but lower, upper case and then write out how it would sound in English, approximately.  This is important for example: д = D, g in cursive.  The printed version of the first letter is an uppercase D in Cyrillic cursive, but when writing it in lower case, it's written as a g.  The sound?  It's a "deh" or like our letter "d."  Don't worry, that's the only one I'll share with you, for now.  So how did I do on the test...?  I know I didn't  bomb, but there are a couple ones I could have improved on for sure.  And for the "silent letters" I put the sounds in Russian instead of in English - ie I wrote "mekky znak" instead of "soft sign" - hey, I know what it means, but she doesn't know that I know what it means.  I'll get my grade back Monday, probably and I'll tell you how I did shortly afterwards.

Verdict is...so far I'm extremely glad I signed up for this class and that I'm back in school.
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