Imperfect

Not me, what a silly thought!

The verb tense -- "imparfait". It's driving me crazy this week.

I'm in school these days to try to improve my french. Yes, I can communicate, understand, read and write, but it's not pretty, not elegant, in a word, imperfect.

The first few classes were a breeze. Even though I'm at least twice the age of the next oldest pupil, I seem to be keeping up, even achieving at a high level.

Until yesterday. A worksheet was introduced. We had to read a long paragraph with a description of a person's choice of education and career, based on experiences as a child. Easy enough. I understand it all. We were asked to place the activities and occurrences in the order in which they happened. Since some happened at the same or almost the same time, this was a little bit challenging but I whipped through that exercise with flying colors.

Then, the XXXX started to happen. Below this activity, on the same page it asked us to put other events on a timeline, with the verb and verb tense below. I froze. All at once, I was reading Chinese. My mind was spinning, out of control. When this happens, nothing enters or exits, it's a free-fall. The teacher came to the rescue, patiently explained it, I pretended to understand but was still in free-fall.

She gave us homework, also incomprehensible. I've re-done it at least 10 times, I've gone through an entire eraser on the end of my pencil.

Out come the books. I've applied myself to the theory, the rules of this verb tense. Terry thinks it's easy. I hear others use it with ease. Of course, I don't know if they're using it correctly or not, since I don't understand it at all. I'll be studying this today, trying to make sense out of the imperfect.