Oh, yeah. It's all coming together...

Further Adventures in Language-Learning

I’m having a lovely time studying Croatian, and today managed to tell my teacher what I did this morning, what I was doing at the time, and what I will do the rest of the day - past, present, and future tenses off the cuff, with a little subjunctive (which we just went over today) mixed in.

It’s always nice when grammar, syntax and vocabulary start to come together, because that’s when you can begin having real conversations. So today’s lesson was very satisfying, but it also reminded me of my Arabic studies way back when I was in the Air Force.

At DLI (the Defense Language Institute), being able to use those tenses to talk about your daily life was one of the things that pushed a student into the territory of a score of 1 on the oral proficiency interview (OPI), as I recall. After 18 months of dedicated language learning and optional additional speaking practice a couple times a week, I got very used to this part of the exam.

By happenstance, I took a peek in one of my journals from my time in service today, and randomly flipped to a page that commented on this very thing:

[DLPT = Defense Language Proficiency Test.]

17 February 2010

Something great happened today: I passed my DLPT!! :) I took the OPI last week and I predict that I got a 2 on it (only need a 1+ to pass). On the listening and reading DLPT we need a 2 to pass. I got a 2 on the listening which we took yesterday; got a 2+ on today’s reading test. Not as high as I wanted . . . I just don’t do well on these tests! But that’s okay.

Almost done here.

I wouldn’t want to learn a language in a DLI-like environment again (I think I only got a 1+ on the OPI, btw), but the stress of that experience didn’t take away my love of languages, and I’m having a blast learning Croatian. :D