It turned out that my first week of uni was busier than I’d expected. Well, okay, Monday wasn’t very busy and was in fact rather anti-climactic — one linguistics lecture. But Tuesday was busy. Wednesday was even worse. By Thursday I was exhausted, and although I had the day off on Friday (linguistics tutorials only start in week 2), that was when my family went away for the Labour Day weekend.

Because universities suck they don’t actually give students (or staff) the day off for Labour Day (nor any state holiday), which means I missed this week’s Monday’s linguistics lecture. Luckily, I can listen online!

Anyway, I spent a large part of my weekend studying a list of 26 Spanish words. I have a vocabulary test next week (er, this week) on a bunch of words that are NOT the words we learned in class. (We learned how to say useful things like, “Mi carrera es ciencias sociales,” and “Estudio historia.”1 The test is on useful things like, “Es un lápiz.” CLEARLY everyone needs to know what pencils are called.)

I’ll try to write a more detailed post tomorrow, but basically, international studies has been AWESOME because the lecturer is awesome, my tutor is awesome, and the subject matter is the latter half of the twentieth century which is self-evidently awesome. Judging by this, I chose an excellent major. Linguistics has also been extremely interesting. History looks interesting but we’re doing the French Revolution this week and I am still thoroughly sick of it from VCE, and I haven’t read anything for it yet, and I have a lecture at 9am tomorrow. However, the unit is on the role of wars and revolutions in creating a national consciousness. Funnily enough, this is the same theme as half my Spanish unit, which (unbeknownst to me until last week) is a history unit by stealth. I have to read this book by some extremely annoying historian for Spanish. She does not know how to write a sentence and seems to enjoy rambling about how awesome “the state” is. At least the book is in English…?

So that’s all for now. And sorry if the title of this entry is incorrect Spanish. I will just invoke the point I learned in linguistics last Thursday: prescriptive grammar was only invented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the satisfaction of people with more money (to spend on dictionaries and grammar books) than sense. Linguistically all grammars are equal, not just the ones written in grammar books. And if my title is all correct, no worries then!

  1. The unhelpful book did not list the Spanish terms for “linguistics” or “international studies”, so for the purposes of the class I said I studied history. Which I do. But you know. That’s not all.