Number 3 came in threes.

Since learning another language is a long, frustrating, sometimes dull task, there are very few moments of glory along the way, always more to do and more to learn. And sometimes we need a really big win come our way. Today I had that big win.

I think the first big win was when I realised that I was spontaneously conjugating and thinking in Spanish. The second big win was when I got 100% on my oral exam. I was walking on air. But that was November 2007 and I haven't had much luck since. So finally, today, I had number 3. I was in a lecture covering pragmatics (it may be English pragmatics, but 98% of the lecture was solely in Spanish), and the lecturer spoke damn fast, but clearly and loudly, and I understood every word and every meaning to the point where I started to second guess myself, but then realised that I was in fact right. After doing that for a whole lecture I felt pretty damned good, so I went to check my results for an exam that I did last week and did exceptionally well. This was an exam I was confident of failing (and not the sort of "anything less than 90% is a fail by my standards", I mean a fail by the uni standards and that I'd have to repeat it in another semester). I was lost in all of the lectures, my notes were haphazard and random, I understood nothing, and yet I did so well on the exam that I stared at the marks for a good long while and even walked back to make sure that I wasn't reading someone else's results. Last week I was also struggling with Sherlock Holmes, having to write down every word that I didn't know. I'd get through 10 pages a day of the book and have a list of a hundred words (this has been going on for months, not just with Holmes, but every book), which is too much to learn in a day. Today I started my new Holmes story and somehow actually enjoyed reading it, got through 40 pages and came across 20 words that I didn't know.

So I had three good things happen to me and I'm shaking my booty!