My Head Exploded!

Almost every day in my apartment building I cross paths with Vladimir. Vladimir is a contractor from Poland who, with a team of guys I believe are also from Poland, is renovating an apartment down the hall from us. (In Polish I am sure his name is written differently, but “Vladimir” is how it is pronounced.)

Every time Vladimir sees me, he says cheerfully, “Ellen! Jak się masz?” (How are you?)

And each time, I say, “Bardzo dobrze, dziękuję. A pan?” (Very well, thank you. And you?)

And each time he proclaims with great enthusiasm, “No accent! No accent!”

During My Break, I Organized My Language Shelves! (There Are More.)

This is all very gratifying, of course, but I have a confession to make: I am not going to return to my Polish studies right now. I feel bad about that. I really do.

But I lost Polish momentum after a break that stretched much longer than I had initially expected (from August 10 through the end of September), and I have already devoted more than two months to Polish, which is longer than I’ve devoted to some other languages during this project.

In addition, by late this summer, this project seemed to be taking a physical toll on me. Starting in July, I occasionally began to feel just plain weird when I was studying. Kind of nauseated. And then my back also started killing me, making it hard to write and type. (For two years straight I have done a huge amount of typing, because of all the notes I maintain, and the blogging, not to mention all the old-fashioned writing I do by hand in grammar books with a pencil. And that’s not even counting all the e-mailing and other typing I do for my business, Syntaxis.)

While on language vacation, I concluded that part of what was making me feel bad, besides the fact that I was starting to feel like a mole in a tunnel with all the studying, was that I was getting disturbed by all the forgetting.

Times Square in Fall, Full of International Tourists

I love starting a new language; each one is such a great adventure.

But each time I begin a new one—and this is especially true now, after more than two years of this undertaking—it accelerates the rate at which I forget what I have just learned of the previous one. There is a weird kind of grief involved in forgetting something that you care about and just spent a lot of time trying to learn.

I knew I would forget when I started this project. That didn’t bother me. It was the pleasure of the adventure that attracted me. I mean, I love the actual process of studying a language and am not particularly affected by practical considerations in my choices here (or in other life adventures, for that matter).

But the project kept growing, to the point that there was a lot more to forget than I initially expected. A one-year project turned into two years, and then ultimately three years. That’s a lot of grammar, vocabulary, etc., to be forgotten. And I kept adding languages.

One reason for the ever-expanding nature of this project is that I wanted to pay proper tribute to New York City and its language diversity. On my official schedule, in fact, I still have Hebrew, Dutch, Portuguese, and Chinese left.

Passing Through Grand Central This Week, on My Way to Teach a Grammar Seminar

The problem is, I don’t feel like doing four new languages right now. For one thing, there are only 30 Pimsleur lessons available for Dutch. Without Pimsleur, I tend not to do well (this was a big issue with Polish, which also had only 30 lessons). Studying on my own, I find that my progress in a language is highly correlated to the availability of Pimsleur lessons, even though those are just a part of my overall study program. 

As for Chinese and Hebrew, for which there is plenty of Pimsleur available, I currently feel just a little too tapped out in terms of my ability to deal with new writing systems and wildly different grammar. 

Now, Portuguese is another story. I am dying to study Portuguese. If it is anything like my Italian experience, it will be fantastic. Italian was far and away the most successful piece of the project from a language-acquisition point of view. In three months I went from knowing only a few words to being reasonably functional. (You can see my test results here.) And I am crazy about the sound of the language and the way it feels rolling off my tongue.

That’s why it really bugged me when I started forgetting it.

At Grand Central You Can Buy Your Metro North Tickets in Other Languages

So, keeping all the above considerations in mind, I have settled on a new plan for what I expect to be the final stage of this project. I can’t promise I won’t change my mind, but at the moment my new goal is: to get as good as I can in French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese, all at the same time I mean, by the the end of June 2012, which will be the three-year mark for this project, and probably, though not necessarily, its conclusion.

That means:

1. undertaking several months of intensive Portuguese study (I know only one Portuguese word now: obrigado/a), probably January through March 2012
2. studying however long it takes to revive my Italian (which, despite the blogging silence, I have actually been working on again daily since October 1)
3. refreshing and improving my Spanish, French, and German, which keep sagging to varying degrees when I am not supervising my skills in them properly
4. doing whatever it takes to keep the Romance languages from polluting one another, which I expect to be a huge—though I hope not insurmountable—challenge
5. coming to terms with dropping a few languages from the project, which is paining me greatly

I do feel bad that all the languages on my short list are Western languages, with many features in common with English. My apologies to speakers of languages from other language families. 

The reality—and this will hardly surprise anyone who knows anything about language learning—is that a language like Polish or Korean or Hindi requires a lot more study time of a native English speaker (such as me) than a more familiar language would. And they are much easier to forget. Now, I love studying really different languages…but right now I feel a powerful need to be able to communicate. And to stop forgetting. And maybe to work just a tiny bit less hard. 

On issue #4 above—the pollution—I don’t know how I will do. Over the past two weeks I have spent a lot of time on Italian, which activity has promptly carved into my French and Spanish skills. And adding Portuguese this winter will only make that language pollution problem worse. 

German is relatively immune, since it is quite different from the others, but four Romance languages could be deadly. I don’t know whether my brain can handle it. But I would like to see. I think it will be fun to try!

Now, even if I do manage to be competent in five non-English languages at once, I know these things require maintenance. If I don’t maintain, I will forget again. Fortunately, as I have already pointed out, practical considerations like that don’t really affect me. One can always relearn.

In a few weeks, I will be volunteering at the New York City Marathon, which has thousands of international registrants, and where I hope I will be able to use my German, Spanish, French, and Italian. We’ll see how I do.

I don’t have much time to prepare, and I imagine I will be confused and tired by the end of my six-hour volunteer shifts (by the way, I am pretty sure language learning burns extra calories, in case you are looking for a new diet). But I doubt the experience will cause permanent medical problems, and I think I have recovered sufficiently from the previous language-induced brain trauma to handle further assaults on my intelligibility.