I am currently taking French 2 as one of my mods. If you take language mods, you will realise that there are always going to be people who are so very darned good at it. Especially if you are taking Japanese or Korean, where there are plenty of dramas for you to get used to the way it is spoken and to familiarise yourself with the language.
But when the language in question is French, you really wonder how some people just seem to be so fluent at it. Like they are able to answer all the tutor's questions, and really fast. Some of them even know how to use words they have just learnt and apply them straight into the question instantly. They made me wonder if they had a gift for language I didn't have.
There is this foreigner in my class who is like that. He is able to answer just about any question the tutor throws at him, and often, he does it so well the tutor is like tres bien! Which means "very good" in french. It has become so commonplace that when the tutor calls him, I just prepare to copy because I know he will give a perfect answer. I used to wonder if it was because he had learnt french in his home country.
Today, I learnt the real reason why. Having a long break before my french lesson at 1230, I went for an early lunch at 11am and ended up at the corridor outside the french classrooms at like 1210. Having nothing to do, I started reading the notices outside the french classroom.
A few minutes later, the door of the classroom opened, releasing the previous batch of students from the previous tutorial. I hid at the side, pretending I wasn't there, because I didn't want the tutor to see me so that I had to go into the classroom and face the her alone.
Guess who I saw coming out of the class. Yes, that foreigner. I was like hmm he went for makeup lesson today. Maybe he's not going later. But I was super wrong. The worst was yet to come. It was what he did next.
If you take language classes, you will know the classroom corridors have two ends. What he did was, he walked out of the classroom facing the far end, walked straight to the far end without looking back, and reappeared miraculously behind me 5 minutes later from the near end. He made it look as though he had just come for my tutorial.
I don't think he saw me, so he probably didn't realise I knew about what he just did. I was seriously like WTF. He went into the class as per normal, and so did I. And as usual, he was able to answer all the questions, but I no longer felt the same sense of awe because I knew his secret.
That's what it takes to be the very best. You have to be so kiasu you go for 6AUs worth of lessons for a 3AU class. And you have to be so sneaky you have to make sure no one knows about it, about what a crazy shit you really are. Well, now I know. And sometimes in life, you realise you can't beat them all. Not the ones this crazy. That's where your SU comes in.