Recidivism

No, not the penal kind.  The French kind.

I am once again feeling stupid and incompetent about this language.  The proximate cause is a mostly-french text conversation i had this morning over skype, where I had to look up almost every sentence.  These were not particularly challenging sentences, either -- but I didn't know them.  The not-so-proximate cause is a task my French teacher gave me, to translate an article from Le Monde.  It's full of colloquialisms and whatnot.  I must have had to look up forty words so far, and thats just halfway through.  Plus none of this really helps me with my immediate goal of understanding the spoken language.  Yes, vocabulary helps, but if you don't realize that a spoken word is actually one that you know, where are you?

So at the moment -- again -- I'm frustrated.