I’ve written before about those “aha!” moments, or Threshold concepts when the “penny drops” and suddenly you can do something/understand something and there’s no going back. I’ve been dutifully soldiering on with Russian for some months now, wishing a few pennies (or kopek) would drop and, oh Joy, last week the realisation that I was no longer looking up adjective and noun declensions in my book but could remember them from the table in my head sent a shiver down my spine. I was empowered! I can do it! I can string sentences together without having either to stop halfway and check the ending in my book or stop halfway and look cluelessly at my teacher in the hope she’ll give me the ending so I can continue my utterings. Russian suddenly became a language I might be able to converse in with, if not the same ease as French, at least the same relative ease as German. And I was much pleased!
It didn’t last. No sooner had I experienced the satisfaction of being able to remember case endings than my teacher gave me 23 pages of a chapter on perfective versus imperfective in the future and I realised I had crossed one threshold only to stall at another..
But that’s how language learning goes -and how threshold concepts go. I’ll get there. однажды…