It then buried itself in the back of my brain where it continues to fester. Admittingly, I don’t like to give much thought to things related to foreign languages considering i’m not very good at learning them. I have taken about 8 years of french and I can only be regarded as “partially-fluent” in the language. Yes, you can go ahead and say it – that’s sad, though I haven’t shed any tears over it. I find the grammatical aspects of acquiring new languages to be ridiculously overwhelming. It’s difficult enough to master ones native language let alone devote so much time and precious brain power to another language. However, if you think about it… shorthand (be it internet or otherwise) is its own foreign discourse, even down to cognates and contextual evidence as means for translation. The question then remains: is shortspeak easier to grasp for the non-native english speaker? Does its lack of complexity in grammatical structure make it a desirable mode of communication, at least to start with?

It takes me back to my own struggles in acquiring the french language. Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve had an easier time if I had just been given an assininely long list of slang speech to memorize… sort of like an environment created to mimick the natural pattern of language acquisition – just being thrown into the society to listen and learn by experience. I think it’s time that I use some social networking to my advantage, here – Myspace francophones, je viens ici!

Stay tuned.