Classes at La Católica

Since it's almost time for midterms, I should probably tell you which classes I'm taking.  But first a short word from our sponsors:

My host mom came into my room this afternoon and offered me some gummies.  I'm fairly certain they were Listerine-flavored (as in the mouthwash).  My mouth felt quite fresh afterwards... maybe she's trying to tell me something??

I already talked a bit about the 2-week intensive Spanish class I had before the official semester started.  Then we got to pick our university semester classes.  The foreign students didn't officially register until the second week, so we basically had the first week of classes to check out ones we were interested in- did it look interesting?  How was the workload?  Can you understand the professor?  I was looking at taking chorus, but it wasn't quite how I'd expected it to be, so I didn't.  I needed a literature class, so I'm taking Comtemporary Peruvian Narrative; I'm taking Quechua (an Andean indigenous language); and two CIEE program courses- Peruvian Social Reality and a writing course.

Peruvian Social Reality is the class I've been posting blog assignments for.  This class aims to look at social and cultural issues facing Peru today.  Juan Carlos is a good professor; I've found the class interesting so far.  The writing class is meant to help us improve our writing and grammar skills, and help us with whatever we might have to do for our classes.  Jorge, the professor I had for the 2-week course, teaches it... which means, between the group of students and the professor, it can be a very entertaining class.  It's been a fairly easy class- which is what I was looking for, though this kind of material is always good to review and work more with (like the subjunctive tense).

In my literature class, we're focusing on works by two well-known Peruvian authors:  José María Arguedas and Mario Vargas Llosa (who was the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature winner).  We'll be reading four novels (two by each), plus a lot of supplementary material (critiques and commentaries of the works we're reading).  This packet of supplementary materials- just for the first half of the class- was huge and daunting at the beginning, earning it the title of "Packet of Doom, Death, and Destruction, Complete with Wrath and Pestilence".  It's just a lot of reading, especially because it takes me so much longer to read things in Spanish than in English.  We've finished the first novel, Los ríos profundos ("Deep Rivers") by Arguedas and are now starting the second one, called El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (something like "The Fox from Above and the Fox from Below").

I have found Quechua interesting so far, though I find languages in general very interesting.  Quechua was the language of the Incan empire and is spoken by 8-10 million people today in South America, with the highest numbers in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia.  Whereas learning Spanish was a little easier because, in many ways, it is structurally and grammatically similar to English, as both have Latin roots.  Quechua, on the other hand, is a language of suffixes and is structured differently (and sounds very different).  I think you can add up to 10 suffixes to one root.  For example, to say "I have a professor", it's Ñuqa yachachiqniyuqmi kani, literally "I am the one who has the one who makes know."  (Though this looks complicated mostly because there's no direct way to say "I have".)  And sentence order is Subject-Object-Verb, like Japanese or kind of like Yoda, though he might put the object first...  Why take Quechua?  Why not?

Both of these direct enrollment courses (quechua and lit.) are four credit courses and meet two days a week, two hours each.  I'm not used to the 2-hour time blocks, so these can be tough to sit through and focus in for the entire time, especially without a break.  Most courses at UW-L are one hour or one and a half. 

I should go to sleep, I decided to take the quechua section that meets at 8am Tuesday and Thursday.  The theory is that after the class, I'm up and awake and can be more productive than I would be if I didn't have something to get up for.  I should to leave around 7:15 to ensure I get there on time- my micros are packed at this time in the morning and a lot don't even stop.  I had to wait 15-20 minutes and 6 or 7 micros once before one stopped.  My rule is that if it stops, I'll get on because I need to get to class... even though we're usually packed like sardines standing in this little bus.