Dostoyevsky, and steps towards polyglotism

[saxonvoter]

I'm currently reading Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Let me be honest with you... I'm starting to get real tired of the dialogue in this book! People will start rambling and sometimes they go on for pages and pages without taking a damn breath and it becomes really hard to understand what they're trying to say. (And the names are confusing, but that's another matter entirely and has more to do with Russian culture than the book itself.)

Otherwise I'm enjoying it. The main character seems to be sweaty and delirious for most of the story, with an added 20% of "oh what's the point" and then sudden "no wait, i'm gonna make it!" moments. Something about that really appeals to me as a fellow human disaster.

Anyway... Couple of days ago I decided I'm going to learn Italian.

I don’t expect great leaps to fluency any time soon, since I’m really busy with majoring in Japanese, but at least Italian doesn’t require learning a whole new writing system. Even though I really ought to be brushing up on my Swedish, I’ve wanted to take up a new European language for a while now. French seems too difficult and I don’t really like German for some reason, but Italian at least seems relatively simple in pronunciation and it's very close to Latin, which is something I've always had a vague interest in.

Additionally, to an art & history geek like me, Italian is really tempting because of the cultural history, since so many notable Renaissance era artists were from Florence.

Look… I’m not saying I picked Italian because of Hannibal.

But I totally did.