My Husband Goes Thirsty

It is March! I can’t believe it. This is so exciting.

I woke up a little after 5:00 and promptly got to work on Pimsleur. As I went through my lesson, I watched the sun rise, and felt glad to be free of February.

I am finding that in these Korean Pimsleur lessons I am often repeating syllables without much comprehension of the underlying grammar. It is not good.

I should be way further along than I am, but over the past couple of weeks I have had a ton of other work to do, and my Korean efforts have suffered. I still haven’t missed a single day of language study since the project began July 1, but whereas I had consistently been doing anywhere from two to eight—sometimes even more!—hours of study a day, in recent weeks there have been days where I haven’t squeezed in more than half an hour: the paltry equivalent of one Pimsleur lesson.

I feel sad about that and will try to catch up this month so that Korean is not a total bust, relatively speaking.

Anyway, I am encountering some stumbling blocks in my current Pimsleur lesson.

Hmm, as soon as I wrote the previous sentence, I realized I had no idea what a “stumbling block” really was, so I looked it up. According to American Heritage, it originally meant “a tree stump over which one trips.” Funny! Well, that sounds about right for what I am experiencing.

A very large tree stump for me right now is the series of sentences Pimsleur keeps asking me to translate regarding the beverage wishes of my spouse. For example: “As for my husband, he would like to drink water.” Although I admit I am confused right now, I think the Korean translation works out to something like, “My husband as for, water drink would like.”

The mind rebels.