Language(s)
I have long been a linguaphile. From the day I first started taking Spanish in high school, I found something interesting and charming about language and learning to speak in another culture’s tongue. My high school Spanish, while fun and ultimately enjoyable, was stunted. My third year teacher was infuriated by the lack of progress made in the previous two years. She prescribed a near starting-over. I was saddened by this situation, but I didn’t try to advance any further than she got with us at the time. I wasn’t sure what good would come from being better at Spanish. By senior year of high school, I was sure I’d be doing something unrelated to languages (true), and didn’t really see the need to get verklempt learning too deeply. I didn’t expect or especially want to find myself in the middle of Little Havana needing to know Cuban dialects of the Spanish language, so... I let it go.
However, the opportunity arose, even in our little town, the capital of West Virginia coal mining country, to learn Russian. A little Ukrainian woman came along, offered to teach interested kids Russian for an hour after school every day. There were eleven of us at the beginning, and in short order, we dwindled to five, and ultimately, finally, just three. She decided she’d stop working with us at the school--the drive was just painful enough for her--but if we wished to continue, we could come to her house and learn the language there. The three of us decided that we would do it.
It wasn’t long until one of us decided he was just too busy. So it was down to a girl and me. And after a while, the girl got too busy, too, and it was me versus the Ukrainian woman. (I have unfortunately long since forgotten her name.)
I appreciated the lessons, coming to her home, drinking the чай (tea) she brewed, eating the хлеб (bread) she baked. I didn’t get very far in my lessons, but I knew the Cyrillic alphabet that the Russian language used now, so I could at least read the words when I saw them on television or in pictures. I couldn’t translate, but I could at least identify Russian.
At some point, my parents knew an encyclopedia salesman, and bought an edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica which included an addendum volume on different languages and how to pronounce some of the sounds. I would spend hours pouring over that volume, trying to understand just what sound that Ich was supposed to be in German, or what the hell was going on in French when you saw -euille at the end of a word.
A few years ago, one of my kids introduced me to the Duolingo app on iOS, and, being that my employer had just been bought by a French company, I started to learn French in Duolingo. I hate French. Hate it.
The first movie I can recall watching that was all in French was an action spy film from the late ‘80s. I thought the movie was fine, interesting to watch. But the language: a horror show! While learning French, I discovered that while French and Spanish may derive their roots from the ancient Latin, neither were at all relevant to the other in any way.
In Spanish, more or less, each letter is pronounced and is pronounced in one or two ways depending on the immediate context of the letter. In French, what’s pronounced how is, while not a complete crap shoot, confounds me even now, into Unit 13 on Duolingo. I do not understand how or when to enunciate the ‘le’ at the end of a word. Whether the ‘s’ at the end of a word gets pronounced or not is, I believe, described by a higher mathematical equation that Fermet couldn’t calculate, and do not get me started on how or why or what sense it makes that the present third-person plural conjugation of a verb looks completely different from its present singular first-person conjugation but may sound EXACTLY the same. It’s a mystery to me.
Not too long ago, I started trying to learn Portuguese. It’s an interesting challenge. Not quite as oblique to me as French, but nothing nearly as simple to look at and grok as Spanish. During World Cup 2022, I decided to add a long list of languages to my daily Duolingo lessons. I am not slowly managing to love and hate things about:
* Dutch
* German
* Ukrainian
* Polish
* Japanese
* Arabic
Bringing my Duolingo language lesson list to eleven (the six listed above, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, Russian, and Ukrainian for kicks).
I divvy my languages into styles per day. One day is Germanic (German & Dutch), two days are Romance (Spanish & Portuguese one day, French & Italian on the next), one day for the Slavic tongues (Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish), and one day for my two randos, Japanese and Arabic.
I’m sure my learning any one of the languages is limited by introducing so many other languages into the mix. I’m not trying to speak any of them fluently; I’m just interested in the sounds and words.
I’ve discovered that for me, Polish is the hardest of the Slavics to grok because, while using all the Slavic sounds that I’ve come to associate with the Cyrillic alphabets used in Russian and Ukrainian, it uses a modified Latin alphabet, the one I grew up with but strange tiks, tails, accents, and marks. I feel like I’d better feel my way through Polish if it weren’t using a Latin alphabet. Alas...
Japanese in Duolingo is far and away the toughest and possibly least well taught. I don’t get it AT ALL.
Dutch is intriguing because as I’m reading it and able to intuit most of the pronunciation from looking, it sounds, to my ear, very much like English. I’d always heard “German is easy because English is Germanic and it came from there.” That’s not right. English may be a Germanic language, and it may owe many of its linguistic “genes” to German, but the English we speak in the United States: it’s modified Dutch.
English: I drink.
Dutch: Ik drinkt.
English: I am.
Dutch: Ik bin.
English: That is an apple.
Dutch: Dat is een appel.
Sure, I’m not far into my Dutch learning, but those phrases above: they sound pretty much the way you’d think as a standard English speaker. Get drunk, say the Dutch, what you get is English, more or less. Of course, I’m simplifying. But, come on, look at it. Those Dutch lines are just English with an extra sound (except for the last one, which is pronounced just as you’d say it in English, with the slight exception of ‘th’).
Today is a Slavic day. I struggled through a lengthy lesson in Polish, and my tongue and brain are twisted pretty tightly after. There’s a little mental release from taking up Russian in the immediate aftermath, because my mouth is still Slavic-sounding from the Polish, but the brain reading Cyrillic and making those sounds still, because I’m old, because I’m accustomed to thinking different sounds when looking at different symbols; the Russian happens much more easily. I’ve taken a break, and will run through a Ukrainian lesson later, when my brain and mouth are less tired by the effort.
Take this as it is: the first entry in which I investigate from a complete linguistic novice’s point of view the learning of languages, the intrigue of specific sounds and letters across language (the letter ‘R’, I think, is the most interesting letter in all of language, bar none), and words across the spectrum as they coalesce into something that makes sense, once you’re confronted with a word in eleven different tongues.
Which brings me to my end and a complaint about Duolingo. I do come at languages with a grammar nerd’s vantage point. I am sure I committed several grammar crimes in the writing above; I don’t care. Language is flexible and some language is easier to read and speak than it is to be correct about (sic). So, I will go back and forth in my preposition-ended sentences, because I know the rules, and I am willing and able to break them as I damn well please. But, Duolingo, for me, teaches absolutely no grammar. They present you with various constructions which, usually, are reusable across varieties of verbs, phrases, etc., but not always. I really wish that they had whole grammatical rules sections for all the languages. Perhaps they do, and I just don’t know. But... that’s my Duolingo complaint of the day.