HI

[feuervogel]

I went to DragonCon and even got most of my homework done before I went, so I didn't have to spend half the con in my room studying. I still mostly just hung out with friends and looked at costumes, but it was worthwhile, because I got to see people I hadn't seen in a year.

Grad school continues apace. I'm still enjoying my 2 linguistics classes (History of German and Languages in Contact), and I think Teaching College German is going OK (thanks, Goethe course!). I'm not overly fond of the literature seminar, but I like the second book we're reading better than the first (so far; I'm only on chapter 2.) It's by Günter Grass, so it's dense and complex, sentence wise, and it looks like it's about modern right extremism, which is always interesting.

My classmates are generally nice, but I haven't really Made Friends with any of them. We spend time together at school and sometimes out of it (which reminds me, I want to ask our facebook chat if anyone wants to get dinner this week after either seminar or History of German). Part of it may be because I live a little over a mile away (and not in the same apartment complex as all the Germans apparently) but also because I'm really boring and come home and do homework at night and go to bed at 10.

Thankfully I'm busy enough with homework that I don't have time to sit around being sad about my extrovert battery draining (though dragoncon helped that a lot).

On which note, since I got groceries, cleaned the bathroom, and did some prep for the class I TA, it's time for dinner and some homework so I don't have to do ALL THE HOMEWORK tomorrow.

Comments

[feuervogel]

Talking about what the literature means and what the prof wants us to get out of it would be super useful, but I don't even know how to start that conversation, because I am not a literature person (and we have 2 mandatory literature/culture classes next spring, whine whine) and everyone else doesn't seem very interested in figuring it out with me. On the same token, most of them aren't linguistics people, so they're flailing around in that like I am in the other one.

My scientific background really helps with linguistics (a science!)

I'm contemplating putting together a summary/review of chapters 2 & 3 of HOG based on what he covered in class and what's in the book if I have time tomorrow (though a lot of it is tables and charts), because it may be helpful for the midterm & final to have an organized bit of notes. (Though I may also make a poster with all the sound shifts and everything for my personal use.) I might offer to share it with them in exchange for literature help.

(Though two of them said the language in Grass was deliberately confusing to make you feel unsettled, and I was like "wat" because it's not that confusing? It's just non-linear and a braided story and frequently non-book-standard constructions that people use in talking and also a lot of references to other things. They're not native speakers. I'm not either, and I have to re-read sentences a lot because they didn't go where I was expecting, but I don't find it confusing. Just dense.)