Language Learning Update

❝Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.❞
-Chinese Proverb

 

Since embarking upon my adventure of learning a new language at an advanced age one year ago, I have a report:

 

So, to update, around this time last year, I start learning a whole new language.  Swedish. Exactly one word of which remains in my vocabulary as directly passed down from my ancestors of four generations ago, "jah". It means yes.

 

Every day I say yes to a little Swedish. It is so easy to do on my ipad, what with apps, radio stations, free utube lessons and so on. Maybe five minutes a day, but I try to be consistent. I manage most days.

   

Slow going. Shockingly slow. At first I fear I'm just too old to learn! (What was it? I must have listened to that conversation phrases lesson a hundred times!)

 

But now, a full year later, jah. There are indeed a few conversational phrases taped to the inside wall of my cranium. I know some new vowels, which are written with funny little circles above them.

 

 I understand a lot more than I can speak still.

 

And oddly, unexpectedly, and completely effortlessly, another language, Spanish, a long dormant second language from my childhood school days, is magically returning to me as well!

  

 Seems that far from interfering with my learning a new language, once I start climbing around the brain tree of language, the whole thing powers up.

 

This project is a little competition with a child born into the family a year ago. Right now I seem to be ahead in the race! I speak more words of Swedish than this kid speaks of English. Today. Something tells me the competition will be much tougher next year....

 

I wonder how far I will have gotten with the Swedish another year from now? I'll let you know...