In which I continue to be baffled

I find if I squint my eyes and think real hard I can sound out the hiragana, but it's not coming very fast. Strangely, I find these little one-to-five-stroke squiggles far more difficult than a 25-stroke chinese character. It's because they don't individually mean anything, and so they all get muddled together.

Oh, well. Nothing to do but keep plugging away. Heaven knows I'm spending the next 48 hours doing more or less nothing but language: in addition to the midterm, for which I am roundly unprepared, I have this translation to pull off in French: a passage from a book by Georges Perec which, over 200 or so pages, does not contain a single letter E. You try translating the past tense without using an -ed ending. Or any third person pronouns. It's fun in a demented sort of way.

I just spent the week in Italy. About seven years ago I spoke Italian pretty damn decently (being bilingual in French helped). I never used it, however, and now all I have left are the rags and tatters of a language. So all week, when I had to do all the talking for my family, stray words of Chinese and Japanese would slip out and make my already brutal Italian even more incomprehensible. It was cruel and unpleasant, believe me. The hardest thing about languages, I used to think, wasn't learning them but keeping them. Then I started this misbegotten, insane language and saw how wrong I was.