I enjoy Mental Challenges.

I am attracted to things that challenge my brain. I remember that before I studied French in high school I was afraid of studying foreign languages. I believed this , because I had had teachers before then who had said that foreign languages were difficult. I thought they must be really hard if my teachers thought that. Then when I had a choice between choosing French or Spanish I chose French, because I had heard that it was more difficult. Studying French was the beginning of my learning that what is difficult for one person may be easy for someone else. French just came naturally to me. It was also the beginning of my love for languages. I started studying Spanish my last year in high school. One of my Russian professors spoke several languages, and he was studying Polish. He said that it was a hard language to learn. I was too timid to attempt to study it. but I should have learned from previous experience that I might not find it as difficult as some others do. I do want to make time to study it more. I tried studying by the Pimsleur approach, but that did not work for me. It only has Cd's. They discourage looking at the language in print. When learning a language I find it easier to remember how to say things if I hear them and see them at the same time. It might work for other people but not for me. I had a couple of problems with how we learned Russian in college. We did not learn the names of the letters, like a, bee, cee dee, etc in English. We did not learn the alphabetical of the letters. We could read the letters and write them in script, but we could not spell them orally. If it had been taught differently it would have been easier for me to learn. I do remember some things though.  I have heard that Slovenian is a difficult language, but I have learned not to listen to other people when they say tat something is difficult to learn. I enjoy things that are a mental challenge, but I do not like for tasks to be made more complicated than necessary. I enjoyed learning math until I got to calculus. It seemed that calculus could be taught in a way that would make it easier to learn. I got bored with it. I was tutored by a friend. I understood the concepts and how to do the things he helped with, but I barely passed the course. I enjoy mental challenges that serve a purpose. I do not like things that are made more complicated than necessary. I do enjoy reading books that stimulate my brain, like the writings of Slavoj Žižek. I do like some brain games, but I have to be in the right mood.