I have been rather lax in updating this since my burn-out with Arabic about a month ago. I am currently back to working on French. I have foregone Italian for the time being because my level in that language is rather comfortable at this point. Also, I need to bring my French and German level up because I am planning on applying to grad schools in the next year or so. For French, I am using Assimil and French in Action at this point as my only learning sources, with the exception of Ernest, my friend from Cameroon. I have seen my French skyrocket in the last month or so I have been working on it. I am able to understnad and have basic day-to-day conversations with Ernest without many hiccups and am finding that I can express myself pretty well. I have somewhat changed my plan (again) and am going to stick with French until I am "completely" fluent. I will define what I mean by this at a later date. I anticipate that this will take me at least until the fall, if not until the new year. After that, I will focus on German until it reaches a similar level, and then I will come back to Italian to bring it up to the other two.
On the vocal front, I have a lesson in the City this coming Tuesday and I am excited to see what is next. I had a moment of frustration, understanding and excitement all within about 15 minutes of each other today while practicing. First I was frustrated because I feel like my range is not increasing to include the "tenor notes" at all. Truthfully I know that I am progressing and that the path is long and slow, but every once in a while I get annoyed. Second, I realized today that I have to warm up my voice all the way to its top (F above high C) and then bring it back down through the passaggio in order for the voice to find its place where it needs to be so that I can sing. Finally after accomplishing this I sang through Di pescatore ignobile from Lucrezia Borgia and nailed a high Bb at the end that felt comfortable and somewhat released! If I was a..."lesser" person I would have just given up after the initial struggles, however I continued to work through and past them and was rewarded with a major victory for my vocal progress. Hopefully I can ride this momentum into my lesson on Tuesday!
