I know why I couldn't study the stuff formally. I'm somewhere between shouting hallelujah from the treetops and strangling the authors for snobby pretension. I can hardly read them with a straight face. It didn't help I was reading next to a mirror wall.
One brief, brief observation. If you're going to quote a full page of French, offering a translation would help. Lacking that, offering some citational direction more specific than, "This is the letter where Mr. Wigglesbottom talked to his glass of Chardonnay" would prove useful. (A fabricated example, since I don't want to go looking for it.) I was actually able to read most of it, but only because Rousseau apparently tends to write in big words with English analogues.
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This is a huge reason why I did not want to pursue graduate study in classics. Reading fluency in German and French is required. Blah.
I'm jealous that you could make some sense of the French passage. I need to get serious about learning another language!
"I'm somewhere between shouting hallelujah from the treetops and strangling the authors for snobby pretension."
When I first read this, I thought you meant the poets, not the essay authors. I was about to post that my feelings were the same, except without the shouting hallelujah. ;) Then my brain properly connected your title to the rest of your post.
Reading fluency is one reason why I'm at Emory and not Columbia. I'd rather only have to learn one language than three... though I'm starting to pick more up now.
Oh, I sometimes have a similar reaction to the poets. I'm blessed enough to find a way to like them, but this one German poet we read alongside the essays... all I could think of was a philosopher in a cupboard getting off on Nietzche. "Oh, how profound, the transcendental! Man is great! Look at my artful insecurity as I talk about nature and God pretentiously!" So, if you think Blake is bad...
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