Do you ever start thinking something so loudly and so profusely in your head that you swear people around you must be able to hear what is ringing so loudly in your head? Happens to me a lot, and as I start ruminating on those thoughts, I might actually start saying things without realizing it (happened in the middle of an econ class once, I was having less than savory thoughts about my professor and apparently I started muttering to myself, hooray for not being completely mentally healthy!). A trick I’ve learned to circumvent this is to write down what I’m thinking. However, this can go horribly wrong if someone asks to borrow your notes. So, I used to use an old military code to write things in that only a handful of people I knew could read, and I think I showed my math teacher in eighth grade how to decode it once we weren’t using it to pass notes anymore. The code was easy enough to crack, though, and I had moved on to college where the only pen and paper activities I was really participating in were doodling and occasionally taking notes if I forgot my laptop. I started taking Russian and all of a sudden I had this awesome new alphabet at my disposal. Granted, my Russian doesn’t extend far beyond Sdratsvoyche (Hello) and Spaciba (Thank You), so writing my complex thoughts in Russian was not going to happen. So, now I find myself writing English words with the Cyrillic alphabet to maintain the privacy of my thoughts that need to find some escape on paper.
So, question for all my language lovers: Do you do something similar to this when you’re learning a new alphabet?
