The Heat Is On

The heat is on in school now that I'm in C class, which pretty much takes the fun and sucks the life out of school. The schedules have changed which means that I now have afternoon classes for 3 of the 4 days of school each week on top of my morning classes. To be honest, I really wouldn't mind that so much if I liked my teacher more. I really don't like Anita. She's intimidating, very strict, never really understands when we ask questions and pretty much only hears what she wants to hear.

Anita got really frustrated today with one of my classmates, Muhammad. He's from Iraq and has trouble with his pronounciation especially with the vowels cos most of them sounds so alike that sometimes one can't really hear the difference. Of course when one is just starting out to speak the language and speaks it slowly and in broken sentences, the teacher can catch bad pronounciation a lot better. And catch she did! She spent a good 10 minutes just trying to get him to pronounce between 2 vowels to the point where you could tell she was getting so frustrated with him.

And it all started with an innocent question posed by oh so silly Muhammad of what that particular word (that he couldn't pronounce right) meant. After the 10 frustrating minutes, Anita asked him 'Förstår du nu?' (Do you understand now?). And Muhammad smiled and said, 'Ja, jag vet. Jag vet. Men vad betyder det?' (Yes, I know. I know. But what does it mean?). And we burst out laughing cos those 10 minutes didn't really affect Muhammad as much as it frustrated Anita. Plus the fact that the word was bloody difficult to explain. What's the word you ask? Well, it is RÅKAR which means IT HAPPENS in English. You know, like when someone drops a plate sending it crashing to the floor and all you can say is, it happens. Yeah, how does one explain that to another who doesn't speak any language you speak?

Ha ha! Serves that wicked witch from the West right!

And I just got bad news from her. It appears that we most likely have to attend about 10 weeks of C class before we can move on up to D class. Damn...9 more weeks of her...ugh! But a large part of me knows that it is for our own good and I accept that. I'm even relieved that I have so much time before moving on to the final level of school. At least I'll learn more and get more used to the language. But in C class it is more about building up our vocabulary and understanding longer pieces of text which is great but one gets so so tired of flipping a thousand times through the book for every piece of text. I really do feel mentally and physically exhausted when I get home from school.