Geographically Difficult
I am translating the Aeneid in Latin class. I do not enjoy it.
The Latin language and I have always had a love-hate relationship. I was literally press ganged into studying it by my sister and mother. At that point in my life I was determined to stay within the ranks of the academically apathetic. Boy howdy, has that changed.
After my first year of Latin study I had decided that I was going to drop it as soon as I could. Still, my school requires that you take two years of a language if you are going to take it at all, so I had another year to slog through. I was struggling with it - nouns were petty snobs, adjectives vague annoyances and verbs a whole tangled jungle of uncertainty and pain. I could only memorize things for a few hours at most (actually it was probably more like minutes), and unfortunately being able to remember things is kind of key when studying Latin. My sister is incredibly good at Latin, and my theory of her success is that she absorbs information like a very smart sponge.
So my second year of Latin was rearing its ugly head, and I settled down to my doom. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as year one, or maybe I had actually gained some skill, but I found myself enjoying it. I liked how the words sounded, and the satisfaction from piecing together a sentence. It happened very rarely that I managed to do that all by myself, but I liked it all the same. So I decided to go ahead and jump into Latin III, called Latin Literature and focused primarily on great Latin poetry.
To make a long story short (I seem to have written much more than I intended to), I ended up enjoying Latin class and am now in my fourth year of study. I’m planning on dropping another class to make room for it next year. So why did I stick with it?
I think it was because in my second year, a new, incredibly cute young male Latin teacher arrived at the school. He began teaching the Latin III class, and having him as a teacher seemed to be very enjoyable.
You might think I’m intellectual for continuing to study Latin, but I’m really just in it for the men.
