Most of my posts to this Language Lover's Blog are filled with enthusiasm about studying other languages. I have published 155 posts over the past five years extolling the virtues of foreign language acquisition. I promised readers they would fall in love with languages, develop a lifelong fascinating hobby, and perhaps even ward off dementia for a few years.
Now I find myself in the embarrassing position of not being excited about languages anymore. Yes, I have said it. Just like my favorite major league baseball team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, I am in a slump.
And just like the hitters who can't connect with the ball like they used to or the pitchers who can no longer throw strikes, I can't put my finger on what the problem is or how to solve it. I wish I had Yogi Berra's philosophy.
The problem of maintaining motivation looms large in the field of foreign language acquisition. You may have experienced it yourself. As you start to learn a new language, you are on an uphill trajectory. You promise yourself to study every day, sign up for a course, use online apps, and plan a trip to use your new language. Ah, I remember those innocent days! Reality soon makes hash of your good intentions, and to paraphrase Yogi Berra, you aren't in a slump, you just aren't acquiring the language of your choice.
Take my desire to learn Italian, for example. With plans for a summer trip to Tuscany with friends and family, I felt fairly confident that I could learn a lot of Italian before the trip. After all, I have degrees in foreign languages, I have taught foreign languages, and Italian is a Romance language similar to Spanish and Portuguese, which I know fairly well. What could go wrong?
I signed up for a six-week Italian class at an institute on a local university campus. The details are irrelevant, but suffice it to say that the only thing I learned about Italian was that "ci,","ce," "gi," and "ge" were going to give me lots of trouble. I did not sign up for the second six weeks.
My next effort was to sign up for Italian on Duolingo, a popular online language learning course, available on the web or as an app on mobile devices. I had been using Duolingo for several years to study a variety of other languages and thought it was great fun. About this time, though, Duolingo made a significant change in the program. In the old version, you were allowed to make mistakes and keep trying to answer correctly with no penalty. It was a relaxing way to learn.
The new version of Duolingo allows only a certain numbers of errors before your "health meter" runs out of segments.
 |
| Note health meter in top right hand corner |
Unless you can buy back your "health," you have to wait more than four hours to regain it and continue practicing. Needless to say, I found nothing motivational about the new rules.
Another change in Duolingo that I missed was the absence of "bots." At one time, you could hold an actual conversation with a bot by typing or saying your answer. I loved talking to the bots and learned a lot about conversational language in Spanish, Portuguese and French. Sadly, though, I did not have this opportunity in Italian.
You probably know where all of this complaining is going. We had a great trip to Italy, but I spoke virtually no Italian and understood less. I found myself gesturing and pointing like a first year language student to even order a gelato.
What do baseball players do when they hit a slump? They keep on swinging and pitching. I'll keep studying languages on Duolingo because I have a 1561 day streak going, and I hate to be a quitter. Maybe, just maybe, the thrill of language learning will return to me one of these days.
