"Flim flam, gor shabba spoh." At least, that's what he thought to himself. The page he was taking notes on echoed those thoughts. Paging through the notes, he saw a lot of familiar and unfamiliar phrases. Unfortunately, the familiar ones were things that he had written without being prompted by the teacher, things that weren't exactly notes at all.

The teacher was circling the room, calling on students in random order and Josh was not at all prepared for his turn. He was never able to pay attention to class and to what the other students were saying because he was always trying to read one sentence ahead of the class and preparing that sentence in case it was his turn next time. And each time it wasn't his turn, he began feverishly working on the next.

To him, foreign language was just a series of nonsense phrases strung together by loose meanings that he had to remember. It wasn't like how he learned his own language. He didn't need to remember what the words meant; at least not actively. It seemed like for as long as he could remember, speaking was always something that was quite natural. He caught phrases of another student reading their, presumably prepared, sentence.

"Entautha dey tain pompain hor... horosi prosch... proschorou.. proschorousan. While..."

He drifted off into his dreamscape again. Foreign language was simply a series of nonsense symbols that he attributed some meaning to. He gave it this meaning because the books and the teachers told him to. In that sense, it didn't have any more meaning to him than if someone told him that the birds were synonymous with the term "lion." He'd call them lions and be wrong, but it would be all the same to him.

"Lisa, can you translate this next sentence for us?"

"Ho deh hi-erous tas kayras pros...."

He stopped listening to the student as he redoubled his efforts on the next sentence. With his luck, he thought, he was sure to get called on for this one. It's long, and long is difficult. Forcing himself through the rote procedure of finding the main verb, and then from there, trying to find the subject, he began unraveling the knot of a sentence. The trick of translating, he found, was to find the loose strand in the tightly bound knot and follow that deep in. Trying to tug that out of the knot only created a tighter knot. Burrowing deep into the knot, however, allowed him to see the knot from the inside, see how it worked. And in seeing how it worked, he would figure out how to translate it.

Skritching away with his pencil, he colored in the top of the page of his notes. There was more black marking in the borders, already, than in the white main of the page. While, turning the words over in his head, a blaring presence threatened to throw them into disarray again. Steeling his resolve, he tried to will the disrupting force from his head, but it became steady, ever persistent, and it began to break his concentration on the sentence.

"...sh? Are you paying attention, Josh? Will you please translate the next sentence for us?"

Looking down in controlled terror at the knot that stretched before him, he strained his mind to delve into the knot once again, only to find that the knot had been pulled tight. Furrowing his brow at the page, he gave a slight nod to show the teacher that he understood. He grabbed hold of the strand that he knew should be loose and gave a slight tug. Sometimes brute force was the only method. As he began to dissemble the sentence, he spouted out fragments of it until the whole thing was a mass of ropes at his feet. Attempting to put them in order, he sought help from the silence. In that silence, a few students chimed in, and eventually everything was in order.

The spotlight was off Josh and he settled into his reverie. He probably wouldn't get called on again, so he could be comfortable in his thoughts now. He stared at the blackened parts of pages and realized that most of them made no sense at all. Reading over a few of them he grinned. "If I founded a language, I would have made it sound cooler," he thought. "And all phonetic. None of this 'irregular' nonsense." His dream state was interrupted again.

"Josh, please pay attention. Would you make an attempt at this next sentence, too?"

"Clim-cham, chingi-chonka." At least, that's what he thought to himself.