The cockles of my heart chilleth over for Mrs. Jana has returned from her holiday full of vim and vigour, and smelling faintly of pine forests. Just in time to test my knowledge of the locative case and take up the challenge of the conditional.
While Ms. Ivanka favoured the "gentle introduction" which involved wading through the shallow waters of basic rules before slowly striking out for deeper water, Mrs. Jana prefers the "cold plunge" deep into the heart of Czech grammar. The over-riding principal is the survival of the linguistic fittest, and I tremble at the thought of failure.
Thus, her disapproval was manifest when she began her preliminary assessment of my progress over the last few weeks. "Use these words in a conditional sentence," she instructed. But apparently, I used the wrong kind. Ohhh nooooo… woe betide the hapless student that uses the easy conditional, the "I-would-have-done-my-homework-but-my-pencils-all-were-stolen-by-a-vengeful-elf," conditional tense. Instead, they must produce something else. Only I'm not entirely sure what it is, so I'd better start studying again.
3 comments:
Pain for you, joy for me. Let the Mrs. Jana stories resume! (cue angelic chorus)
I too am beside myself with excitement at the return of the formidable Mrs Jana. She makes me think of a combination of the Wicked Witch of the West, Fraulein Rottenmeier (from Heidi) and Nurse Ratched all beneath a complexion belying decades of Eastern European potato consumption.
But dammit, I suffer. Feel my pain... I have a vocabulary test tomorrow.
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