Because I am still struggling at times with Italian grammar, I have decided to radically change the way I learn languages. Tom said I’m taking in too much too fast and that it takes most people 2-3 years to become fluent in a language and someone like me about a year. But a year is still a year, as he pointed out, and I haven’t even been at it for 3 months. As he also says, I’ve been impatient and expecting too much of myself. I think that when we’re naturally good at something, we tend to be overly hard on ourselves, but when it’s something we’re not as good at, we tend to take our sweet time with it.

I agree that I not only have been going too fast but that I should’ve gone back and reviewed past lessons more often. I asked Tom if he thought studying a language once a week was too seldom and he said no. Yet I don’t want to have to wait forever to explore other languages, so that’s when I decided to study a different language each day of the week. Well, I’ll be learning 6 and reviewing one. The one I’ll be reviewing will be Spanish as that’s the one language I want to get as good as I possibly can. I just want a general knowledge of the others. So besides Spanish and Italian, I’ll be doing Portuguese, French, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Today’s Spanish day and I’m already through Unit 1 of Spanish 101 with a 99% accuracy rate.

Tom had to download Asian characters which kind of messed with my word processor. It’s a bit of a bitch to open now, and I have these little brackets at the corners of the pages that are part of a bug that Microsoft never fixed since not many people deal with Asian characters in the U.S.

Anyway, each time I return to whatever the language of the day is, I’ll go back and review the previous lesson before moving on to the next lesson. Since I’m going to finish the Spanish and Italian before the others I’ll just review Italian on Italian days, then replace the Spanish with another language.

Believe it or not, we had a little thunderstorm. It only rained for a couple of minutes, but it came as a surprise being that it’s June. It’s so much cooler today that the cooler didn’t come on till 2:00.

Since suspecting that for some strange reason I’ve been losing more weight in my sleep when I sleep at night versus the daytime, I’ve been paying closer attention to it. Yup, I really do seem to sleep off two pounds at night, and only half a pound when I sleep during the daytime. Makes me wish all the more I could keep a schedule!

Last night I dreamt I was lying on my back and could clearly feel my hip bone and part of my thigh bone. Is this a sign saying that I’m going to lose a lot more weight than I expect to? Well, I don’t need to get anorexic, but just right. Of course, Tom and some others would already consider me just right, LOL! As bad as I am compared to 20 years ago, I know your average 43-year-old would kill to look like this, even those who haven’t had kids. Ah, but I work very hard for it! Lots of hunger, lots of sweat.