Who Cares Where Those Notes Are?

I woke up at 7 a.m. today. Since beginning Italian on November 1, I haven’t slept a full seven hours—my usual minimum requirement for well-being—more than a couple of times. I just keep waking up early. Weirdly, most of the time I feel okay.

I did VocabuLearn for the first half of a seven-mile run, then switched to disco. I can’t do too much VocabuLearn at a time or it becomes overwhelming.

I also did Pimsleur today, but it was tough. All I managed was one lesson, and I had to do it twice. I have been getting hung up on a particular construction that keeps popping up in these lessons; it relates to the totally boring phrase “my notes.”

That it recurs so frequently is irritating, because I don’t think I am going to need to say this particular thing any time soon, and it has been hogging a large percentage of my language-learning efforts over the past couple of days. There have been numerous Pimsleur questions about “my notes,” which translates as i miei appunti, literally “the my notes.” Such as where they are, have you seen them, that kind of thing. Then there are all the variations on that phrase, such as “your notes,” which is i tuoi appunti or i suoi appunti, depending whether you are being informal or formal. Plus, I have been struggling to cough up—in the allotted time—correct translations of longer Pimsleur sentences such as “I think your notes are next to the book under the table.”

As always happens with tough language challenges, I feel as though I am never ever going to get this.