"Into each life some rain must fall." I'm okay with that, but I wish downturns in life didn't have such an adverse effect on my language study. So far I have managed to keep a month long bout with bronchitis from ruining a 1223 day streak on my favorite online language learning platform, Duolingo. Many of those days were earned by me lying in bed, bleary-eyed, fumbling for my cell phone and completing a quick set of exercises in Spanish, which I can pretty much do automatically, just to get credit for the day. Other languages I had been following on Duolingo were left by the wayside like sad unwanted pets.
And I don't think language study necessarily equates to the common wisdom about riding bicycles, for example, that once you learn how to ride, you don't forget. If languages are not practiced daily, they begin to fade in our brains, until finally, it is just too much trouble to go searching for them. I've got to get back to those other languages, TODAY!
Other bad things can happen to good language learners as well. Have you ever been stuck at what feels like a plateau of a new language?
You keep trudging along, but the scenery remains the same. You don't feel you are making progress in your language. You know a little; you want to know a lot more. How good it would feel to finally master a new language. (Note: You probably won't! Once you decide to truly learn another language, it will always be in progress in your life.)
The Irish language is my plateau at the moment. Shall I study a new grammar topic, practice pronunciation, or try to read a Facebook message in Irish? I need to give serious thought to what efforts I can make to take me across the plateau so that I can climb the next mountain.
Another pitfall for language learners is the very common phenomenon of loss of interest in a language or culture. A while back, I got very excited about studying Romanian on Duolingo, partially because it is a Romance language. I could readily recognize some vocabulary and grammatical features in the beginning exercises. Then it got difficult. I got impatient when I couldn't whiz through an exercise. So I started rationalizing, telling myself I will probably never have the chance to travel to Romania, and that I have other fish to fry. Now I have left this perfectly lovely language for so long that it will be just a memory, a fleeting moment of a peek into another culture.
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| Romanian Castle |
Then there is the case of Italian. Big plans were being discussed for a family trip to Italy next summer, complete with a rented villa, trains excursions in Switzerland, and an international motorcycle race. I can do Italian, I thought, and raced through the Duolingo exercises. Plans change, as life does, so we may now be going to the Netherlands or Germany. Duolingo makes it so easy to add new languages without deleting old ones, which appear like ghost icons on my start-up page. I'm resisting the urge to click on Dutch or Germany until travel plans become more concrete. but I hear the siren call of a new language.
We all start out with the best of intentions of being good language learners. With a little more discipline and a little less complaining about the vicissitudes of life, we can get back on the track and enjoy language study every day of our lives.
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