It's not all wine and roses, y'know

I'm going to come clean: I'm finding it tough being a student.

I know, I know - you think I'm sitting about in cafes, drinking endless cups of espresso and ambling idly off to school for a couple of hours, don't you?  I can relate to this, because that's pretty well what I envisaged for myself.  I'd just put in a little bit of effort and somehow, miraculously, the language would just wash all over me.

This is emphatically not the case.

For starters, every weekday, for three and a half hours, I sit in a schoolroom listening to, or talking in, italian.  No breaking into english.  No sneakily using the internet to translate a tough sentence (though trust me, Google Translate does not translate; neither does Babelfish).  No opening your dictionary and checking out a word.  And its rapid-fire italian too.  Don't know, or can't differentiate, the difference between ho sbagliato (I made a mistake) and ho svegliato (I woke up)?  Well, avanti! Work it out and move on!

On top of that, there's about four hour's study a day, to get through the set revision and prepare for the next class.

On top of that, there's the need to read as much as possible, talk as much as possible in everyday situations, and watch the news, documentaries, sit-coms, commercials - in fact anything that will help with the spoken word.

When Friday evening comes around, I feel quite liberated.  I excitedly plan the walks I'll take through Rome, the museums I'll visit, the shopping I'll do and the leisurely coffees I'll drink.  I don't do Friday's revision because I'm planning my weekend, chatting with Jim on Skype, or messing around on the internet in a devil-may-care, hey-what-the-heck-it's-Friday sort of a mood.

So I spend Saturday sitting in cafes, smiling at everyone, strolling down to Trastevere or over to the Campo de' Fiori, and having a bit of social time.  Then I realise it's Sunday and a) I haven't done my laundry or any shopping and more importantly, b) I haven't done my homework and it's all a mad scramble again for Monday.

Sometimes I feel like this:

When I want to feel like this:

Despite which, I have to say, I'm loving it. My brain is engaged, and sometimes I can grammatically make myself understood. I actually get a kick out of having a conversation with the cashier at my local supermarket, or an even longer conversation with one of my language exchange buddies. Just today, I talked for half an hour about the concept of dumpster diving, and the adoption of food-scavenging, by the X- and Y- generation middle-classes. I might just nail this language yet.