Julian does not feel better after a good night's sleep. The absolute last thing in the world he wants is to wake up at 6:30 in the morning and work out while simultaneously trying to explain himself to a bunch of people whose opinion of him has major implications for his continued survival.
He's gonna get so much mana from this.
Julian peeks. "That's not a bad idea. Every time you learn a new noun you should write down its gender anyway, that's just good practice."
"Better practice is using gender for ability to bear children!" But on the next page she writes "things that are FEMALE according to FRENCH."
"You could also put gender on your flash cards, when you make those, after you finish the worksheet. Probably best to finish the worksheet first, though, so you can be sure you're not behind."
"It could be worse. I think there's a Bantu language that has 27 noun buckets."
"Tu es up chat. You are a cat? Tu manges une pizza. You mange a pizza. Manger is 'nursery', according to my dictionary, but I am assuming it's not 'you nurse a pizza'. The pizza is a girl pizza."
"...okay, something is up with your dictionary. Or the way you're using your dictionary."
"It's just the first one I could find, I doubt it's gone bad already?" She hands over her dictionary.
Julian looks up the entry for manger. "See, right here? It says 'to eat.'"
Hmmm. "Annisa, are you looking up words on the French side or the English side?"
"Right, that makes sense. Okay, so if you look up manger on the second side it says 'la crèche: creche, nursery, manger, day nursery' and if you look it up on the first side it says 'to eat' which is way more reasonable as a thing to do with a girl pizza."
"It's a good thing the Scholomance still gives out dead languages or I'd be tempted to solve my language problems with nuclear weapons." She writes down "pizzas" under THINGS that FRENCH thinks are GIRLS.
"Honestly, it sounds kind of ridiculous, but I'm not convinced that calling it a girl pizza isn't a good way to remember that pizzas are girls."
"Next one is comment tu t'appelles, which is what is your name, and then Je m'appelle Paul, my name is Paul, Marc est anglais is Marc is English..." It's not really even that hard aside from how it's horrible.
She doesn't actually get tripped up again because there aren't that many left and they're more variants on 'what's your/his name'. She bruises her knuckles but only sort of by habit.
"See, that didn't even take that long. All right, I think you should make flash cards for all of the words - uh, codewords? - in this lesson, and then go through them twice. Maybe don't even test yourself on right now if you're not feeling up to it, but at least make the cards so you can practice them again before you go to bed. And now... I'm gonna work ahead on Conflicts before lunch hits, do you wanna split the questions again Malak?"
Annisa can spend the rest of the time until lunch working on flashcards, sure.
By lunch Naima is done with everything due on Monday and Wednesday except for History of Artificing, and sets a private goal of being at least one week ahead on Conflicts, Alch, Artificing, and Mal Studies by the end of the weekend.
But it's not time for that, now; too much studying in a row dulls the excitement of learning and hampers recall of information later. Also, she has a lot of artificing stuff she wants to grab for personal projects, and today seems like as good as good a day as any to grab it. So after lunch, she asks if the others still want to head down to the shop and raid the supply cabinets.
"I'm down. It'd be nice if we could round up a few more people, if you know anyone?"
"I know... a couple of the kids from Cairo enclave, sort of, but I don't know if those count? Oh, and Shannon, I met Shannon. Briefly. I think other than that it's just Bella."
"We can ask Bella and I can ask Daria but I think it's actually not a good risk calculation, if you're an enclaver. ...possibly we are transitioning away from exploration too early and should make ourselves meet more people."
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