German, Spanish and Italian!

The other day, I made reference to a book by a Mr. Stevick that dealt with learning strategies for effective adult language learners. One of the interesting bits that I didn't get into was the difference between learning and acquiring language - does an adult master and implement processes or pick up and internalize them in order to learn a new language? Clearly, it's both, but to what degree makes a difference. When I lived in France, life on the streets, in the shops and in a home exposed me to tons of language. School helped me make sense of it. But the French that stuck is the French I acquired - French that I first absorbed and then understood later.

For some people - smart, gifted and dedicated people - it is possible to more systematically learn language. What I find for myself, however, is that I can remember words and structures when I've made sense of them, but building in the other direction is problematic. The other day, I wrote about language-learning-tips.com. A lot of what they have to offer has helped me in terms of staying on task, and keeping up my language exposure, etc. But the tools for learning, as opposed to interfacing with, a new language haven't taken me as far as I would like. That is, I just can't push myself to do the vocabulary lists and grammar exercises. So what I'm thinking about for Uzbek now is learning lines from songs that I've managed to decode. These stick with me because they have some meaning outside of being Uzbek.

Uzbek is more of a long-term project, but it's nice to build on languages you already sort of have. I've been reading my dual language Siddhartha, which is delightful for German because the structures are straightforward, enabling you to decipher even complex vocabulary without recourse to a dictionary. For Spanish, I've stumbled upon the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, which can be trickier conceptually but for which vocabulary decoding is a breeze. For the moment I'm sticking with these, though I hope to find something for Italian soon. But desiring not to get to scattered, I shall work all the way through Siddhartha before I return to Italian.

Thoughts for this week: Learning language ideas are only truly helpful if you'll actually make use of them. Douglas Adams often remarked that he liked having written novels much more than writing them. I think it's similar for languages. Yes, when you start there is that thrill of something brand new. But then comes that rough period between having learned one-hundred words and knowing enough to understand short stories, pop songs or the introductory paragraphs of newspaper articles. If there were some technique - even painful, like hitting your thumb with a hammer repeatedly - that would get you through this stage in a week or two, I'd love to find it! Instead, I shall return to my German lit and Spanish poetry in order to reinforce and build on those two languages and remind myself how exotic Uzbek seems as a prelude to getting to the next step with that language.