So that’s what Hell is like.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been pretty much agnostic to borderline atheist most my life, which by and large means I don’t care a great deal for organized religions (probably due to my Catholic upbringing), but after this evening, I can unequivocally report there is indeed a Hell… and it appears to be full of Latin.

Now, I am a not exactly an unaccomplished student.  I have completed more than my fair share of coursework, assignments and exams over the two degrees I have completed so far.  But nothing, and I mean NOTHING prepared me for the nightmarish experience that was the Latin exam I took tonight.  And this is for LATN1110… a first year undergrad course studying an ancient, and presumably dead, classical language.  For the life of me I can’t figure out a situation where any of us will be needing to read/translate any Latin without being well armed with text books and dictionaries, but our lecturers (God bless their cotton socks) obviously feel otherwise and are desirous that we learn the language by rote.

And herein lies the rub.  Because dead though it may be, Latin appears to be exceedingly convoluted.  There are 36 different ways to say ‘mine’ and 36 different ways to say ‘yours’… and here is one that’s been doing my head in since we learned of it a couple of weeks ago – there are 36 different ways to say the number ‘one’.  Half of which are fucking plural!  FUCKING PLURAL NUMBER ONE!!!  Figure that one out.  Grrrr.   So we are all learning out tables, some are making flash cards and attempting to rote learn verb conjugations, noun declensions and shit like that.   I spent most of last week pulling together tables of the learning vocabularies for each section we’ve done so far to use as study aids and spent all of yesterday writing and re-writing interrogative pronoun and demonstrative adjective tables, and reading through several weeks of translations to gain a working familiarity with what we are told will be expected of us.

Only to get in the exam room tonight and suffer a more than a few total brain farts.  Seriously, I’m only just recovering now and the exam finished three and a half hours ago.  I mean I completely pooched about half a dozen words we learned in the first few weeks that I suppose should be second nature by now.  But I’m hazarding a guess that this is the nature of the beast.  You try and cram this shit into your head so you can regurgitate it on demand, and you think (futilely hope) that you know it, but then you’re faced with that bit of paper, you find yourself staring at it going “WTF is that?”  Like you’ve never seen it before.  :S

Oh well, the upside is that it’s all over for the semester and now I can get stuck into my own research during the break.  Massive downside though… by the time I’m lining up for LATN2120 next semester, I will have totally completely and utterly forgotten absolutely every little iota of information that I did manage to retain.   Sigh… I’m such a goldfish.