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Monday 31 October 2016

When A Language Is Not A Love Match

French and I have fallen out again. I fear it may be terminal. This is somewhat embarrassing, since less than a month ago (on 8th October, to be exact), not only did I splash out a hundred and sixty bucks on a one-year-subscription to newsinslowfrench.com, but blogged excitedly about my fresh surge of enthusiasm for the language (see here). It didn't last. In fact, I've never been closer to ditching French altogether.

French, it seems, brings out the worst of my fickleness. The reason I started this tête-à-tête in the first place a year and a half ago was due to a sense of long-held, insidious embarrassment. Most people I know have at least a basic knowledge of French, because they were made to study it at school for a couple of years. Some took it further. Most didn't, but smattering of it stuck, and, in my observation, it serves them well.

Every time I delve into classic literature, I find it littered with French words and phrases. This makes sense from an historical perspective: In the 19th century, novels and other works were largely written by middle class authors for a middle class readership, and the middle (and upper) class(es) spoke French. Even today, these French fragments remain firmly on the pages of classic works, largely untranslated, and thereby inaccessible to me. (Or rather, inaccessible to the "Pre-May-2015-Me", which is when I started engaging with the French language for the first time in my life.) My primary motivation was to finally plug this gap in my education, and I assumed that love would slowly blossom, with a view towards making myself another linguistic home in the francophone sphere.

Unfortunately, it ain't happening. For all my willing it, I have not managed to turn, what was clearly a head decision, to resonate with me on an emotional level. The positive feedback loop I had been expecting to carry me forward through the sticky bits is gasping its last desperate puffs, like fish in a shallow pool of tepid water, ready to go belly up at any moment.

French and I just don't connect. It's a bit like growing weary of a house guest, who was exciting and fun at first, but who's now driving you round the bend with his idiosyncrasies and domestic ineptitudes. He ignores the dirty dishes in the sink, leaves the cap off the toothpaste, and never puts the toilet seat back down. AND he expects special treatment.

Endless lists of exceptions in grammar, vocab and pronunciation, which (on a good day) I find so endearing in Portuguese and which, to my mind, give a language its "character", irritate the hell out of me in French. There's a saying that goes something like this: "If you're fond of someone, you don't mind if they drop their dinner into your lap, but with someone you dislike, it bothers you how they hold their spoon". It feels like French is putting up barriers on purpose, just to annoy the learner. And me, in particular. It shouldn't be all that difficult - I'm already fluent in Spanish, my Portuguese is coming along just fine, and so a third Romance language ought to be a piece of cake on a silver platter! Yes, the whole thing is totally irrational, but whether someone takes to a language or not is rarely rooted in logic. Above all, you need chemistry, and that's what's missing between French and moi.

Despite this conclusion and all my whining, I don't consider my having invested effort into learning French a waste of time, not in the least. In fact, it has enriched my life, since I've pretty much reached my goal and can now immerse myself in the tomes of yesteryear without choking on turgid chunks of Français. I've even decided to spend a wee bit more time on it, at least until my command over this enfant terrible is on the same level as everyone else's "Bad French".

My long-term goal is to speak five languages "really well", and the only thing that has changed is that I now no longer think that French is going to be one of them.

Sunday 16 October 2016

Is Russian Worth Another Go?

I'm rekindling an old romance. I don't think it's serious... I'm just toying with him... but you never know. His name is Russian. We parted thirty years ago, after going steady for two whole years. I left him for English. Who was a lot less complicated.

Russian was so not my idea. We ended up together because of a school friend of mine. Actually, it was her mother's fault. She was a beautiful woman, my friends's mother, whose manfriends changed at regular intervals. My friend was forever competing for her attention, and the latest beau spoke Russian. So, as soon as she got wind that the neighbouring school was putting on extracurricular Russian classes and was looking for more students to make up numbers, my friend had to go for it. But not alone.
So, you want us to walk all the way across town to learn... Russian?! 
Yeah, it's gonna be such fun! 
On a Friday afternoon? You think I've nothing better to do?!?

And so, off to Russian we went. There were only seven of us. One of them was the teacher's long-suffering son, another one had long blue hair. As for the rest, I do not remember. We were taught by a flame-haired Hungarian woman who was all but four feet tall, but made up for it by sheer force of energy, killer heels and lashings of green eye shadow.

Every week, she made us take turns reading aloud from the textbook and I was terrified before each lesson because of that. I hate reading aloud. In any language. To this day. But I loved writing, and so I started writing my teenage diaries in Cyrillic script. I still have them, and I'm glad I do, because I can remind myself of how to write cursive Cyrillic. (Just in case it gets serious again.) It seems I was quite creative back then, using half a Cyrillic "х" (as in the word хорошо) to represent the letter "h", which doesn't exist in Russian. My invented cursive version looks like a back-to-front Roman "c".

My sweaty-browed weekly stammerings culminated in a glorious reward: five days in Moscow, during a time when the iron curtain was still firmly drawn shut. We ate blinchiki topped with sour cream and red caviar for breakfast every morning. My friend managed seven in one sitting. I was in awe. She was severely bulimic, which I didn't know at the time. It did, however, get her mother's attention.

We queued up in a bakery for half an hour and came out with two carrier bags full of mini-bagel shaped things that tasted of nothing and had the texture of recycled cardboard.

You asked for 2000g instead of 200g, didn't you? 
Next time, YOU do the talking!

Russian and I are on cautious terms. So far, our dates have been limited to a daily ten-minute frisson on Duolingo - four days and counting.

I have a confession to make: I ditched Italian for Russian. Poor Italian didn't see it coming. We had a two-day fling back in early October. Yes, you could say I led him on. But it's just not gonna work out for us right now. I've already got plenty on my plate with his rambunctious brothers, Spanish, Portuguese and French. There's waaaay to much Romance in my life! It's their verbs that get to me the most: there's fifty different versions for each and every one of them; different tenses, different moods - I cannot cope with another helping of this nonsense, I just can't.

Russian, on the other hand, bypasses superfluous verbiage altogether. "She my mother." "Where Park?" "Your father here." "This not bus. This taxi". Nothing could be more attractive to me right now. Darn it, Russian is roping me right in with his seductive straight talk!













Wednesday 12 October 2016

Too Old To Learn A Language?

Instead of launching into long-winded cogitations on the topic of mature language learners, I'm going to share an article about British writer and translator Mary Hobson, whose story I find really inspirational.

The piece below was originally published in Russia Beyond The Headlines (RBTH):

‘Learning Russian has given me a whole new life’

April 22, 2016 YELENA BOZHKOVA
English writer and translator Mary Hobson decided to learn Russian at the age of 56, graduating in her sixties and completing a PhD aged 74. Now fluent in Russian, Hobson has  won the Griboyedov Prize and the Pushkin Medal for her translation work. RBTH visited Hobson at her London home to ask about her inspiring experience.

RBTH: Learning Russian is difficult at any age, and you were 56. How did the idea first come to your mind? 
Mary Hobson: I was having a foot operation, and I had to stay in bed for two weeks in hospital. My daughter Emma brought me a big fat translation of War and Peace. “Mum, you’ll never get a better chance to read it”, she said.
I’d never read Russian literature before. I got absolutely hooked on it, I just got so absorbed! I read like a starving man eats. The paperback didn’t have maps of the battle of Borodino, I was making maps trying to understand what was happening. This was the best novel ever written. Tolstoy creates the whole world, and while you read it, you believe in it.
I woke up in the hospital three days after I finished reading and suddenly realized: “I haven’t read it at all. I’ve read a translation. I would have to learn Russian.”
RBTH: Did you read War and Peace in the original language eventually?
M.H.: Yes, it was the first thing I read in Russian. I bought a fat Russian dictionary and off I went. It took me about two years. I read it like a poem, a sentence at a time. I learned such a lot, I still remember where I first found some words. “Between,” for instance. About a third of the way down the page.
RBTH: Do you remember your first steps in learning Russian? 
M.H.: I had a plan to study the Russian language in evening classes, but my Russian friend said: “Don’t do that, I’ll teach you.” We sat in the garden and she helped me to remember the Cyrillic script. I was 56 at this time, and I found it very tiring reading in Cyrillic. I couldn’t do it in the evening because I simply wouldn’t be able to sleep. And Russian grammar is fascinating.
RBTH: You became an undergraduate for the first time in your sixties. How did you feel about studying with young students?
M.H.: I need to explain first why I didn’t have any career before my fifties. My husband had a very serious illness, a cerebral abscess, and he became disabled. I was just looking after him. And we had four children. After 28 years I could not do it any longer, I had break downs, depressions. I finally realized I would have to leave. Otherwise I would just go down with him. There was a life out there I hadn’t lived. It was time to go out and to live it.
I left him. I’d been on my own for three years in a limbo of quilt and depression. Then I picked up a phone and rang the number my friend had long since given me, that of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London University. “Do you accept mature students?” I asked. “Of sixty-two?” They did.
When the first day of term arrived, I was absolutely terrified. I went twice around Russel square before daring to go in. The only thing that persuaded me to do it was that I got offered the place and if I didn’t do it, the children would be so ashamed of me. My group mates looked a little bit surprised at first but then we were very quickly writing the same essays, reading the same stuff, having to do the same translations.
RBTH: You spent 10 months in Moscow as part of your course. How did you feel in Russia?
M.H.: I hardly dared open my mouth, because I thought I got it wrong. It lasted about a week like this, hardly daring to speak. Then I thought – I’m here only for 10 months. I shall die if I don’t communicate. I just have to risk it. Then I started bumbling stuff. I said things I didn’t at all mean. I just said anything. The most dangerous thing was to make jokes. People looked at me as if I was mad.
I hate to say it, but in 1991 the Russian ruble absolutely collapsed and for the first and last time in my life I was a wealthy woman. I bought over 200 books in Russian, 10 “Complete Collected Works” of my favorite 19th-century authors. Then it was a problem how to get them home. Seventy-five of them were brought to London by a visiting group of schoolchildren. They took three books each.
RBTH: You’re celebrating your 90th birthday in July. What’s the secret of your longevity? 
M.H.: If I had not gone to university, if I had given up and stopped learning Russian, I don’t think I’d have lived this long. It keeps your mind active, it keeps you physically active. It affects everything. Learning Russian has given me a whole new life. A whole circle of friends, a whole new way of living. For me it was the most enormous opening out to a new life.
Source: http://rbth.com/arts/literature/2016/04/22/learning-russian-has-given-me-a-whole-new-life_587093
*   *   *   *   *   * 
Before I embarked on my multilingual project, my goal was to speak five languages "really well". I'm not all that far off with my Spanish, but my Portuguese  –  and most definitely my French!  –  still need A LOT of work. By the time I get those to a decent enough level and have reached my goal of five, I'll be pushing the Big Five-O, age-wise.
Thing is, I can't really see myself stopping there. I know I'll want to go on learning languages, and I'll most likely be wanting a change from the Romance ones. Although I had dismissed it as an option for the longest time, Russian may well be on the cards. Or rather, a return to Russian, since I studied the language at school for a couple of years (thirty years ago, oh my!). I can still read and write Cyrillic, but everything else has evaporated. Besides a smattering of previous experience, another factor in its favour is relatively easy access to both people and country. Russia is just a short plane ride away, and there are plenty of native Russian speakers dotted about Europe. 








Sunday 9 October 2016

Hoping For Fast Progress With Slow French

Last night, very late last night, I decided to startle my credit card by shelling out $159. Now, I'm usually quite stingy when it comes to throwing cash at language resources, especially since there's so much free stuff out there - and ESPECIALLY in major languages like French. Ah, but there is a caveat: although the interwebs are awash with free material, it usually caters for two groups: bare beginners and the very advanced, i.e. those who can watch films or listen to the radio without weeping in frustration. If you're an intermediate learner, though, it's a completely different ball game. You need input that challenges you, while, at the same time, being somewhat intelligible. And at that level, at least in my experience, it's a desert out there. Unless you're prepared to pay.

My hard-earned money went to newsinslowfrench.com. There's a new episode every week providing a selection of news & analysis (spoken slowly or at normal speed, you get to choose), plus a new French expression, a grammar lesson and quizzes for testing yourself. I paid for the premium version that includes everything, but there are a number of more economical options. If you just want the audio of the news section for listening practice, for example, it's something like fifty bucks a year. The back catalogue is so enormous that I won't get through it even if I managed to "process" an episode every day. Not such a bad deal for 13 bucks a month, methinks.

I didn't buy the cat in the bag, you understand. I am, in fact, a repeat customer. I subscribed to the Spanish version (newsinslowspanish.com) years ago, which created a little problem for me when I first moved to Spain. I knew so many Spanish sayings and expressions that people assumed I had a much higher level of conversational Spanish than I actually did.

I should probably also mention that I took out a six-month subscription to the French version a year ago, but it turned out to be too early - I was still very much a beginner back then and deciphering just a single news item was too much of a chore.

So, the plan is this: I want to get from upper beginner's to upper intermediate level within the next eighteen months or so. When I wrote a post last week about how much I was enjoying my Portuguese, I suddenly felt the urge to go there with my French. I shall let you know how it goes...




Sunday 2 October 2016

Today, I Write About my Portuguese

"You never write about your Portuguese," says my Portuguese teacher, with a palpable hint of accusation.

I had to think about that. Maybe it's hard to write about things you're quietly enjoying. Like a box of chocs or a glass of wine at the end of a fraught day. It's easier for me to write about French, because we're still at war with each other. Or German, because it's such a big part of who I am. Or Spanish, because a third of my life happens in that language.

Portuguese is more of an indulgent escape. It's a silly kids' cartoon I watch while unwinding over lunch, a novel I retreat to when I should be working, a chat about the events of the week with teacher (and pal) while I'm fussing her cats.

Don't get me wrong - I've still got a long way to go, but I've left behind the agonising stretch of frustration that wedges itself between the beginners' honeymoon period and the point where you can actually do something enjoyable with a language.

And talking of enjoyable, Teresa (my teacher), just got back from a visit to her home town, Lisbon, with this goodie bag:

Deliciously sweet queijadas, a hunk of cheese from the Azores and a new book with grammar exercises . she sure knows how to stoke my motivation!

So, in short, all is well on Planet Portuguese :)