Competitiveness...

The day we got our first big test back in my Norwegian class, I was reminded of just how competitive I am. I did OK, but I didn’t get the top score. I struggled with putting the stupid verb in the second position for every sentence. I so want to say, “Can you do that?” rather than, “Can do you that?” It goes against every fiber in my being to make a sentence that sounds so ridiculous, but that’s how Norwegians talk so I’m the one that sounds like a fool when I speak with an English sentence structure.




When someone is talking to me in Norwegian (even now), I feel much like the dinosaur that gets its tail stepped on and it takes a complete minute for that information to travel to its brain before it can say, “OUCH.” Once someone says something, they need to stop and give me a minute to process all the words to see if I can figure out what they just said. But no, they just keep on talking and I’m lost in a blur of syllables that go up and down with such a sing-songy rhythmic pattern it could put a person to sleep. No one said it would be easy.



It killed me though because back in my school days, I was used to being the best student in class, but in Norway, not so much. There were young women in our class, fresh out of high school, so their brains were still in the soaking-it-up mode and they kicked my butt in terms of learning the language.



The student that did the best was from South America, and she’s sweet as pie but my nature is to not like her because she was better than me. My only consolation was that she has a horrible lisp, so I told myself no matter how much she knows this language, no one will ever be able to understand her speaking it. At least people understood me when I talked, even if my sentence structure was wrong.



The only good news that day was that I got a better score on the test than My Pal Vestina, and she was a most excellent student. So apparently the class was not so much about me learning or not learning the language, as much as it was about me being competitive and petty. Go figure. I still have a lot to learn.