it's faroese to me

Learning a new language is difficult. I spend my days alternately feeling guilty for only speaking English in a multi-lingual world, saying sentences in Faroese like "I am do not understand it," and rushing home to fall into Ben's arms, muttering slang terms in my fastest English, knowing that he will understand. First, a few notes about Faroese. I don't know a lot about the language, which is one of the challenges to my learning. There are very few texts for foreigners who want to learn Faroese. In fact English to Faroese dictionaries have not been printed in almost 20 years and are extremely hard to acquire. It has been explained to me that Faroese is a verb-based language as opposed to English, which is noun-based. An example of this could be the concept of withdrawing money from the bank. The Faroese designation for this might be single word meaning "withdrawing money from the bank," where English speakers string together a sentence of five words. The sentence structure of Faroese is not dissimilar to English, but the conjegations blow my mind. The language the most like Faroese grammatically is German, and having never studied German, and never gotten past "to be" verbs in my Spanish education, nothing in my life has prepared me for the mind boggling ways to alter words to address their gender, scope, tense, etc. Another challenge for me is the lack of index cards available at stores here. I am serious. I do not know a lot about linguistics, but what I do know is that if a person is going to learn vocabulary words they need index cards to put the word in English on one side, and the memory word on the other. No index cards, no vocabulary. If anyone would like to send me a pack to help with this dismal situation, I can give you my address. You can write it off on your taxes as, "Charity for a desperate language dweeb". (No, really.) But it is not all gray skies for me. I have learned a lot of Faroese in the three months I have been in the country. I know how to greet people, ask for things at the dinner table and make positive exclamations. No one has volunteered to teach me the naughty Faroese words, so all my cursing still happens in English. Thus far the easiest way for me to build my language base has been to learn useful sentences by rote memory. This includes, "Can you say that again?" "Do you have . . .?" and "How many/much . . ." However, I am moving on to more complicated tasks. This week I started reading a children's book called "Mamma" with the help of Ben's cousin. I go through the book, listen to the audio recording, and translate as much as I can. She then helps me fill in the gaps and quizzes me on what I have learned. An excerpt: "Mamma er tjúkk. Bumbutjúkk. Og hon luktar ein pylsuvogn hundrað metrar burtur. Og hon vil ikki eta gularøtur og verða kløn." Which means: Mamma is fat. Explosively fat [literaly "bomb fat"]. And she can smell a hot dog stand 100 meters away. And she will not eat carrots and be skinny. Although words like "bumbujúkk" will probably not get a lot of action in my future Faroese banking career, Ben and I are having a lot of fun with it. And I think that is the key. The biggest problem I have with language learning is that I get scared and I get embarrassed, and I am a bad liar. I arrive at the check out counter at the grocery store in a cold sweat, knowing that everyone will know I am a foreigner if I speak, with a terrified expression behind my forced smile. There is no end in sight to my current existence of public terror, but with every word I learn and new sound I master, it gets a little easier. And someday I think I will get beyond obese women, and it will be one of the biggest accomplishments of my life.