Language lapses

Writing practice, in my cheap school notebook.

While I know intellectually that there will be times learning any language when it seems overwhelmingly hard, it doesn't seem to make it any easier when it happens.
Last Tuesday was one of those moments for me, when it felt like nobody could understand me, and I couldn't understand them, and I'd forgotten everything I thought I already knew up to this point. This wasn't true, of course, but at the time I just felt like crying. Fortunately there was no-one around to be sympathetic, so I was able to keep it all nicely bottled up inside!
The solution, as with all language-learning, is simply not to give up, so I made some time to hit the books, in between working on my thesis. As I read and write and listen, some of the little that I have learnt comes back to me, and I start to feel a little less overwhelmed. It is particularly nice when I come across a word or a phrase that I know I really need, such as the ever-useful, 'This one, please' (呢個唔該), for all those inarticulate shopping moments.
The other good moments come, when I am reading signs out and about, and a new word jumps out at me, that I realise I actually know, such as the other day, when I saw the word for bus, which is a simple transliteration of the sound, into Cantonese (baa1 si6), 巴士. Two lovely easy characters that don't mess with my head too much.
I guess one of the reasons learning a language is so hard, just like trying to learn a craft, is that no-one can tell you when, if ever, you will be any good at it. It would be so much easier if you could just think, 'well, in five years time I will have this all sorted!'
If I can get a bit geeky here for a moment, perhaps I should remember a question the character Data, an android, was asked (on 'Star Trek: The Next Generation') about why he tried to appear more human. His answer, and I will be paraphrasing wildly here, was that it wasn't whether he could succeed that was important, because he knew he would never be human, but that it was the fact of trying that mattered. A nice early childhood lesson that, about process and not product. So here's to the journey...