One Last Library Rant and some Random Stuff About Japanese Roommates

Went back to the library today to check out the Finnish and Synesthesia books. The Finno-Ugric language section blew me away. I'll be honest - I was expecting a display half the size of the Scandinavian one. Instead, it was easily twice as large. For a few minutes, I'll admit, I kept my hand on it as if I was touching earth, I almost couldn't bear to take my hand away and not touch them, afraid they would stop being real. They even had a few very, very poor books (by poor I mean very small and falling apart) on Sami. One was a sort of dictionary arranged in some non-alphabetical way that translated Finnish into four dialects of Sami. One would have to be really desperate to work with that.

But the Finnish books were much nicer. I picked a big huge volume, fully half the size of my Unabridged English Dictionary back home. It barely fit in my backpack. It's called a Basic Course in Finnish, but it's absolutely humongous. I giggled a bit to see that I could flip to the end of the book and still get the main idea of many of the readings. That's what even the tiniest slice of immersion does to language acquisition, I suppose. Still, I can learn A LOT from it, I can already tell.

Another surprise - I went looking for books on Sami culture and I found a big section and, here's the kicker, on the way through the eastern stacks I realized that I was staring at a whole block of encyclopedias in Scandinavian languages. ENCYCLOPEDIAS! That's the most glorious thing, which I haven't even begun to tap yet... the fact that here the books in foreign language extend far out of the foreign language section and into the main stacks! Oh, the awaiting fun! :D

And it occurs to me that the tight fear I've lived with for a while, that I would run out of materials, that I had to ration myself... all of that is over now. I no longer need to grasp at fragments, at anything. A few years ago I would carefully fold and save a candy wrapper if it listed the instructions in anything less common than Spanish. Of course in todays world it was always a little silly, because there's so much content available online in different languages, but there was something oddly respectful... almost venerating about it... a sort of waste not, want not attitude, that even this wrapping paper had worth... I could use it to learn perhaps two or three new words... like corn syrup or hazelnut.

It would be lovely if I could keep this sense of desperation, as ludicrous as it is now and has ever been, and apply it to the almost guilty excess suddenly available to me. I would tear through that library like no one has before. :D I seriously feel my mouth water a bit just thinking about it. I'm such a lazy little child polyglot, though... if I had more discipline I wouldn't even be taking the time to sit here and salivate and fantasize about it, I would be eating the books right now.

Unfortunately my brain does have it's limits and I spent 3 hours in class today, 4 hours studying stuff from class, 1 hour learning Arabic letters, 30 minutes smashing my head against the Faroese pronunciation guide, and 20 minutes chatting in Swedish-Norwegian. And at the Arabic lesson today Ashley seemed to have some sort of emotional bond with every letter... she couldn't let us move on without saying it again and again and cuddling it in her mouth like it was something precious or something sweet or occasionally (take Ain) something deliciously dirty. Given my reading material lately I almost felt like she had some sort of personality synestesia about the whole thing. Mah interdisciplinary erosion!!! But soon to bed, soon to bed. ^^ I am happy now and it's almost too much, it's too good for me and makes me feel a bit desperate. Let's be honest, I can't have all of them, ah, life is so finite...

Enough with that. Not that again. XD

In other news I love the Japanese roommates and how they constantly feel like they have to apologize and not only that but they are always asking me for help translating these bizarre apology phrases. Such as the traditional Japanese thing to say when, for example, you are at a friends house and the friend's husband or wife comes home and you say something bizarre to him/her like "I am sorry and grateful for intruding".

And I'm still trying to help them figure out the difference between a tan and a sunburn. I thought I made it clear but they keep arguing that both are bad for you, which is true but it's about the connotation and denotation damnit! :P

Funny Mispronunciations: Room - Loom, Rice - Lice.

I have too much imagination, see, I keep imagining Mayumi and I sharing a loom or they all eating lice out of each other's hair when they say the obvious things. :P There are a few others too... it's the kind of thing you can never think of when you want to but every time you hear it you giggle again. ;)

I totally <3 living with foreigners. And books. So far other than feeling slightly like a loser for really, truly, madly, and deeply not giving a shit about parties/drinking, I'm loving University.


P.S. - It was a strange feeling to find that they had an entire WALL in the library devoted to books about poultry. There was one huge shelf easily the size of the Scandinavian and Finno-Ugric shelves combined, perhaps even as much as 50% bigger, devoted to a series called "Poultry Science". And there were more "Poultry Nutrition" books than Icelandic, Faroese, Old Icelandic, and Old Norse combined.

It's none of my business, of course, why should I begrudge the poor student who is obsessed with feeding chickens as I am with languages his jollies? I shouldn't, of course, that's the easy answer, and of course agricultural science and stuff are actually majors here unlike all but the most famous of European languages, so they really have more of a right to be on the shelves, but it's also at once hilarious and a bit sad. :P