The Danish language is trying to kill me and I am divorcing my head

Danish is trying to kill me. Yesterday I took part one of my test, the reading and writing bit, and came home emotionally and physically exhausted. There were hysterical tears and I'm well past PMS! Next week I have to do the speaking half and I expect to take to my bed in horror afterwards.

Language is NOT my thing. It just does not stick.

Take for example Tirsdag and Torsdag: Tuesday and Thursday in Danish. Tuesday comes before Thursday and I comes before O so it should be a simple matter of remembering which comes first. Added that I know Torsdag is named after Thor and from which we English speakers also derive Thursday. It even SOUNDS like Thursday for crying out loud.

And yet, every time I see Tirsday or Torsday I get them confused. I stand there and gape and say, what day is that?

Honestly, it's like I'm missing a link in my head.

It doesn't help that I don't really want to speak Danish. I didn't grow up thinking, "you know what would be great? Living in Denmark! Yeah! I want to learn a language that sounds like a throat disease that only 5.2 million people speak, but not to the extent that they can actually understand each other if they grew up in different regions! Cool beans, sign me up!" This lack of desire for Danish language may cause some to say, "ah, see, it is because you are so opposed to it that you are creating a mental block that keeps you from learning it, you horrible Danish hater you!"

What I say back to those people is unpublishable.

So I drag myself though Danish language classes. Pushing myself to learn the grammar rules, trying to pronounce the unpronounceable, and continually repeating to myself "this stupid language is NOT smarter than I am."

My husband, trying to be helpful, asked me why I was learning Danish. Because your stupid country told me to! I cried. But there is also:
- I hate being left out of conversations because I don't understand
- I will not (if we end up raising children here) have my children speaking in a language I don't understand
- I would like to tell people who piss me off exactly why they are pissing me off IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE (because they just don't take you seriously if you don't)

But I just don't think that learning a language should include making a person cry from frustration and misery. That just doesn't seem right.

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In other news, I'm divorcing my head.

It's been quite a while now since we've gotten along. Last week my head tried to trick the rest of me into a sinus infection. Inflamed sinuses, aching head and face, neck pain, and a runny nose. I was not fooled however and I have continued to be fever free and my snot is still clear (gross? Yeah, but see it's the color of your snot that will tell you what you have, clear to white is allergies, yellow is a cold or the start of infection, green is VERY BAD). Now my head has decided to clog up my right ear. The pain is immense. Radiates down from my ear to my jaw and my teeth. Is it an ear infection? Probably not, I still have no fever and my ear is not red. It's my head again stuffing up the sinuses in some evil attempt to make me stay in bed and read (which my head likes to do) and not go out and about doing the things that need to get done (like photocopying a vastly overdue interlibrary loan book, which my head does NOT want to read) and enjoying the little sun there is.

My head is also refusing to learn any more Danish until I make more space in my memory and, sorry, but I still need that French and German, thank you very much.

I tried beating my head into submission by continually standing up quickly in the wrong half of my bedroom, where the ceiling slants down to a measly 2.5 feet of head space, but this only resulted in a loss of equilibrium that culminated in stubbed toes as I fought for balance. (Anyone seen the movie "The War of the Roses" because it's like that.)

At the moment we are not speaking to each other, except when I told my head I was out of here and it told me to get a good lawyer because I'd need one. If you could pass along a message to my head, since I am NOT speaking to it AT ALL, could you please tell it that I MIGHT be willing to do some couples therapy, but only if it would stop filling up my sinuses because I am sick and tired of going to the store for more tissue paper.