Sometimes I ask myself why I don't just meet the girls at a café

Every Wednesday from 19:30 - 21:00 (which is far too late in the day for my attention span) for the last 2 1/2 years I have been pretending to "learn" Slovene with next to no success. In fact, I can not even order a meal in a restaurant without making at least 3 grammatical mistakes. On the other hand, I *know* (i.e. have scribbled down in my notebook) zillions of technical terms I will probably never need. Why is this, you might wonder and, more importantly, why does she still bother if it's such a futile activity?

For one thing I can't blame it on my teacher, a smart and impressively long-legged woman not much older than me, who's actually doing a great job and is very committed to trying to instill some feeling for her mother tongue into the 6 ladies sitting in front of her. She likes us and we like her. And pity her for having to put up with our obviously inborn resistance to remotely mastering the language.

It all started with me thinking, Let's learn a Slavic language. I was torn between Czech and Slovene and then opted for the latter because I simply had more affinity to it, coming from a region which not only is very close to the Slovenian border but which also has a considerable Slovene minority. When I grew up, bilingual schools and additional Slovene classes in "mixed" areas were a highly politically charged topic. Judging from the fact that the controversial head of the Carinthian government makes it his personal top priority to play hide-and-seek with bilingual signs it still very much is. I distinctly remember a heated discussion in the P.E. changing room when I was 12 or so and a classmate from Ferlach complained about her little sister being forced to learn Slovene at her primary school. Most of us tried to convince her that it would very much be to her sister's advantage if she learnt such a complicated (oooh, yes, little did I know!) language so early in life but she just stubbornly refused to see our point and said it was a disgrace that Austrians should be forced to learn the ugly languague of a people which should go back to Yugoslavia where it belonged. That classmate has since become a model and settled down in Portugal with her telenovela-star husband. I bet that in retrospect she wouldn't have minded some Portugese language classes at primary school. Ah, well.

Anyway, off I went to enrol in my Slovene class which in the first week had about 10 students, some of them, ta-dah! male even. Predictably enough, the men stopped coming after the second or so course when it transpired that learning this language wasn't going to be a piece of cake. Sissies! By the end of the first semester, we were down to two participants. Me, who hates giving up, especially when I paid for something, and U., a law student with loads of Croatian and Slovenian friends and the dream to work in Ljubljana after finishing her university degree. Although the minimum number of participants is actually 6, our teacher said she could get administration to agree to just 3 provided she managed to recruit another one of her regulars, a granny who had to give up some semesters ago when she had to undergo a complicated operation. At the beginning of the next semester, there not only were U. and said granny, R., but a new classmate, Novala, whom I liked instantly although I did find her somewhat scary and initially labelled her "German swot" when she told me on the subway home after our first session that she was so motivated after attending a summer course at Ljubljana uni that she vowed to speak Slovene fluently in 2 years and had taken to sticking post-its with the corresponding Slovene vocab to her furniture...

The next semester, we were joined by H., a very nice lady in her early 50s who has a Slovenian partner and the next one by E., a rather swotty and bossy lady in her late 50s whom H. hates but has learnt to put up with. The six of us are having great fun and always crack up laughing. We also seem to have a knack for scaring away any potential male students who never seem to return after the first session.

I am without a doubt the least motivated participant and very likely the one with the worst Slovene of all. On a good day, I can manage a pidgin Slogerman conversation like the one Novala so accurately illustrated here. Mind you, she was definitely embellishing my contribution and playing down her part. It's actually really funny: Everyone who knows me would agree that I'm the very definition of "talkative" and I do like to believe that I'm not entirely untalented when it comes to learning a foreign language with my very lazy approach (I was the only one at school who never wrote down English vocab and the only one at university who did not seem to own a big fat dictionary until her final year...) but in the 1.5 hrs. of my Slovene class I feel like a tongue-tied imbecile. That's why I like to call it the Slow course, you see.

Mind you, it might help if I actually did a bit of revision every now and then or started doing the homework and yes, I'd have plenty of time for that at the office but, you know, somehow...I just never seem to get round to it. Ahem.

Lunch-break purchases: Only some special shampoo for leather gloves (!), a birthday card and some tacky Mozart-tissues as a joke for my friend in Paris (we're visiting her next weekend, yippeee!) today but yesterday I bought 2 more "basic" shirts, one black, one white at H&M...