Awesome Sauce.

Alright, I gave up. My roommate was fixing his computer and installed Linux/Ubuntu on his computer and I tried to pay attention. Apparently, computers just aren't my thing, at least on a very fundamental level. I just don't have the patience (or rather the drive) to sit in front of the screen for a couple of hours, trying to make something I could have drawn out by hand in about 5 seconds. Computers have thier place and I do not have the mindset for dealing with them. Apparently.

Instead I spent yesterday painting. Not anything in particular, just sort of shading and tinting and using a couple of different brushes to acheive different effects. Nothing ground breaking.

My reading isn't going as fast as I'd like. I know nothing about the basics of language cognition, so I'm having to spend a lot of time looking up simple concepts while reading literature. I've decided that, for now, I'll conduct some experiment involving the topic of conversational code-switching using memory as a measurement. I have no specific methodology yet. The wonderful thing about this is, in the spring, I can add my evolutionary component. This will make me a little more attractive to cognitive science programs and (knock on wood) I'll get into a grad program that is more bio based than psych. I've always wanted my main research to be in evolution and language is something that has always interested me. Granted I am horrible at picking up languages... well, not horrible.

I'm horrible at being fluid with social conversation. As soon as I learned the rules for French, Spanish, and German I was alright. Vocabulary isn't bad either, as it usually requires extra memorization. I think my problem is I don't talk to much around people in English; why would I think talking to people in another language would be easier?

I do believe I've heard that there's two types of people who pick up languages easily; there are those who are artistically minded and those who are mathematically minded. Art or math-mind doesn't reflect on if you're creative or good at math. It's just some way of thinking (i.e. the ways your brain processes and memorizes and organizes the information). It wasn't until last semester in GER 102 that I picked up on what my problem with languages is: despite my curiousity and interest and competancy for learning new languages (I doubt talent is a good word to describe my relationship with languages), I constantly struggle to make conversation. I know how to conjugate verbs and how to memorize vocabulary and all the ins and outs and dos and don'ts. The basics of my conversational skills are rudimentally and childishly simple. And it's always frustrated me.

However, like I said, my German instructor picked up on my type of language learning when I said something after a pop quiz. I had mixed up one word with another and said the mix up was caused because I displaced the two words that were next to each other on the vocabulary list in our book. He responded quickly, "You have a photographic memory?"

Well, huh? I'm not sure I've ever thought about it like that. Is my memory good? Yes, unusually so. But only because I actively find new ways to store new information (i.e. relation to something I already know or anagrams or acronyms). But photographic? I'm not sure what that even means. I've never met anyone with it so I wouldn't know who to ask.

Despite if I am or not (which, to be honest, I highly doubt), it does say something how I learn language. I began to pay attention to the ways I looked at language and the kinds of questions I asked about it. Mostly my questions were related to linguistics rather than, "How would one say this in conversation?" And that led to the idea that I should possibly get into language research.

And that's a very brief explanation of my research and why I'm interested in the topic. I don't want to bore anyone with pre-college influences. Anyhow, off to more reading!

Cheers!