Why I study languages I may never speak

Studying World Languages

The Holy Grail of language acquisition is the ability to speak another language.  And I have no quarrel with that.  Communicating in a new language is, I think, pretty thrilling.

But recently I was questioning why I continue to study Irish Gaelic, faithfully devoting time to it each and every day.

Maybe our family travels will take me to Ireland in the near future. Maybe I will be able to read a sign or two in the Dublin Airport.  Or maybe I will understand a snatch of conversation as I crowd in with other tourists to view the Book of Kells at Trinity University.

But my true motivation in studying Irish Gaelic is none of the above.  The truth is I like the effect that even a small amount of this Celtic language has on my brain.  Let me explain.  My daily routine is to practice four languages on my favorite web-based language program, Duolingo.

Duolingo Owl

When I practice French, Portuguese, and Spanish, which are all Latin-based languages that I have studied formally, I can answer Duolingo's questions pretty much on automatic pilot.  Sometimes I even daydream and make silly typing mistakes.  But I always leave Irish Gaelic practice to the end, because I know this language will require me to actually THINK.

The first challenge is the structure of the Irish sentence.  After years of thinking of a normal English sentence as a subject, a verb, and an object, in that order, I have to make a conscious effort to construct an Irish sentence with a verb, a subject, and an object, in that order.

English:  He loses his cat every night.

Irish (literal) Loses he his cat every night. (Cailleann sé a chat gach oiche.)

And this small change is not as easy to internalize as one might think. I can't tell you how many times I have been bleeped by the Duolingo Owl for an incorrect response by failing to put the verb first in the Irish sentence.

The same Irish sentence (Cailleann sé a chat gach oiche)  also presents another brain challenge - keeping languages straight in the mind.  The third Irish word, "a," meaning "his" is the same word as a word very familiar to me in Portuguese - "the" as in a gata- the cat. So Duolingo has another chance to bleep me for mistranslating "his," a possessive pronoun for the definite article "the."

An even bigger brain challenge in Irish that is new to me is the "prepositional pronoun," that is, a combination of a preposition and a pronoun.  An example is uaithi, meaning "on her." My mind is still trying to cope with the Irish translation of "She wants food" as Tá bia uaithi, literally, "food is on her."

One hears much talk these days about the importance of keeping one's brain active and flexible. Crosswords I enjoy; Sudoku I don't; but analyzing other languages, even if I never achieve fluency, makes my brain add new pieces of learning.  And that must be doing something positive for my brain health.