Learning is Fun!

It's bittersweet to be taking this graduate summer language program in the weeks before the semester begins.  I just started this French class on Tuesday, and the objective is to learn to read quickly enough in French to rapidly comprehend and translate articles toward a scholarly purpose (i.e. making sure some scholar in some French speaking country hasn't already written the dissertation I plan to write).  It's been fun and challenging to get back into French.

What's been unexpected about the class -- besides my incredible inability to identify the subject of an inverted sentence in French -- is the professor's deep understanding of many foreign and ancient languages.  Yesterday he took us on a 20 minute tangent to explain that the French word "tête" ultimately comes from the vulgar latin (popular latin) for the word scrotum.  It's a pretty long story, and he was able to tell us just off the cuff.  I love the classroom for this reason!  You can't replicate that in book learning, ya know.

Anyway, another fun thing happened today as he went around the room and asked us to guess how many words there are in the English language.  I didn't have a guess...but I'm not going to lie, I think I might have guessed something like 50,000 if he had asked me directly.  One guy came close by guessing 800,000.  Well, folks, it's old news, but there are a million words in the English language!  WTF?!  I had no idea!  Of course now I'm wondering, how many of those million do I know?!   I don't dare to ask.

I'm pretty sure my rusty French vocabulary is only somewhere near 100, but that is definitely increasing by the day!