Learning a New Language at 73

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may recall that my undergraduate major in college was Linguistics, with a specialization in foreign languages, which required me to minor in one language and study another to the "intermediate" level. My minor language was German, in which I'm conversationally fluent; my "intermediate" language was Russian, in which I can, sadly, no longer claim anything like fluency. Nevertheless, I remain fascinated by the subject of languages and enjoy studying them, if not always learning to speak them fluently.

Back in July, Agnes and I went on a cruise vacation from Boston up the New England coast to Québec, and in preparation for our planned stay in that francophone city, we decided to learn some French* ...

I signed us up for an online French course with Babbel, which we gamely struggled through for a few weeks before deciding we were not learning very much other than such useful expressions as Il y a vache dans le jardin (there's a cow in the garden), je veux travailler dans une usine de chocolat (I want to work in a chocolate factory), and votre poulet est sur mon pied (your chicken is on my foot)**. On the advice of our daughter Yasmin, we decided to switch over to Duolingo.

We found Duolingo to be superior to Babbel for the way we learn, although Agnes had a bit of a head start on me, having studied French many years ago. We thus arrived in Canada armed with a few weeks of survival French ... only to learn that pretty much everybody in the touristy areas spoke better English than we did. Agnes got several positive comments on her accent, and I thought my accent wasn't bad either, although I was reminded of my long-suffering college Russian teacher's comment that I spoke a perfect accent without a trace of Russian.

Once back from our trip to Quebec, we decided that since we'd paid good money for the Duolingo program, we should keep up with it. Agnes has continued with French, although I decided to switch to Spanish, which seems to be more useful in present-day America***.

I think I'm making reasonable strides in basic Spanish, although there are a few things that are giving me fits:

- The grammatical gender of nouns^† is not always the same in Spanish as it is in German, which can be confusing. On the plus side, Spanish only has two grammatical genders, while German has three.

- Spanish is spoken at a rate of 570,000,000 words per minute, making it a bit difficult for a beginner to follow. Of course, German is spoken rapidly, too, but I've had a lot more years to learn to follow it.

- As in pretty much all languages, the verb to be is irregular. But Spanish gives it a twist by making you learn two different verbs which both mean to be: ser and estar. The basic rule of which one to use is this: your first guess is always wrong^††.

So ...

Yo hablo alemán, y necesito estudiar mucho, porque español es muy difícil.

If that's wrong, I'll just check with my granddaughter Leya, who is patiently trying to help me out. After all, it's commonly known that it's a lot harder to learn a language when you're 73 than when you're 17.

Schön Tag noch! Weitere Meinungen folgen.

Bilbo

* I remembered the hysterically funny essay "French for Americans" by Robert Benchley, in which I learned (among other things) that French has five vowels - a, e, i, o, and u, pronounced ong, ong, ong, ong, and ong. You can read a summary of the whole essay in this Futility Closet post.

** In fairness to Babbel, the last one was helpfully offered by our friend Kathy.

*** Much to the horror of most conservative voters.

† I have a degree in linguistics and I still have no idea why nouns need a grammatical gender ... in German, for example, you eat your meals with a knife (das Messer, neuter), fork (die Gabel, feminine), and spoon (der Löffel, masculine). Whyzat?

†† Making ser and estar the linguistic equivalent of USB connectors.