Language

  "I'm getting used to a slower pace. I have found within myself a deep well of laziness. Or perhaps it's peace. Yes, let's call it that."
-- Louise Penny (a favorite of mine, author of the "Gamache" murder mysteries set in Quebec)

My days have definitely slowed substantially. Just thinking of how I used to go to work, spend the whole day engaged with complex ideas and difficult people, and then take care of two houses and three kids exhausts me, I have to sit down and rest for a bit. I move calmly through my days, with a few routines that rise almost to ritual level at the beginning and end of each day. It is not unusual for me to have a day when I don't talk out loud to anyone else except the dog. (I'm not lonely, I'm in contact and connected as much as I want to be, but that is not the point of this post.)

My house is rarely silent. I almost always have music or a podcast or a book playing, either background or foreground depending on what else I'm doing. I am sometimes very engaged mentally with what I am reading or listening to, sometimes challenged. But I feel that most of my time is not spent on things that mentally challenge me. My focus has been on dealing with physical challenges, working out, walking, home improvement and gardening projects. Got to exercise and tend my mind as well.

I am somewhat involved with a couple of local civic and environmental organizations, and that draws me into using those old skills, of reading, analyzing, synthesizing, and writing / saying what I think about it all. It feels good to get into it! But, I'm not prepared to step up to doing anything like this full time, or even more than the very little I'm doing. 

I've never been a fan of word games and puzzles. I have never clicked with crossword puzzles, or scrabble. I've not jumped on the Wordle craze (though I enjoy how others enjoy it, especially the sharing). I've finally settled on foreign language learning, at least for the present. I do Duolingo every day!

Duolingo is a very popular free/premium app that offers many foreign languages to learn (including English as a foreign language). I downloaded it years ago with the idea of brushing up my French before a trip. I had French classes from fourth grade through college, and then studied it again for several years while my sister was living in a Francophone country. I achieved what felt like basic reading fluency, reading some Jean-Paul Sartre in the original, occasional technical documents at work. For speaking, I needed a few beers in me (always available when visiting my sister overseas) and French seemed to trip lightly off my tongue, and I caught the gist of other's conversations. But Duolingo started at the very beginning, and it quickly became boring to me and I didn't persist.

I tried Duolingo again a few months before a trip to Italy. I was starting Italian from scratch, and for about three months I gamely plowed on, doing just a couple of lessons a day. The result from my trip was I had enhanced my reading vocabulary with a few specific words and phrases that helped a bit in navigating, but I had no listening or speaking ability. 

When I got home from a trip last summer, I was physically beat and was sitting around the house much more than before. I re-downloaded Duolingo and picked up French again - it remembered me, and I picked up where I had stopped years ago. I found the gamification of it very satisfying - the nice little beeps and the characters that pop up to cheer you on. It also had an option to test out of lessons, skipping some of the tedium of things I already knew. I quickly got to levels where I might already know something, but the progression was not mapped to what I knew, so every day there would be something new as well as drills that made me recall old words and grammar learned years ago but not used since. 

Duolingo has both gamification and social aspects, that are not dependent on what language you are studying.You get points, and little beeps and trumpet blasts when you do well - I am amazingly fond of the tiny positive reinforcements, silly as they are. Some friends of mine are using Duolingo daily as well, and I enjoy the casual camaraderie of seeing what milestones they have crossed, and sometimes working together to knock off, say, 50 perfect lessons in just a few days, in a friends quest. In addition, you are automatically put into leagues with competition among the members to earn the most weekly points and advance to a new league. 

The lessons, which I do on the ipad, have written, listening, and spoken aspects. There might be a written sentence in English, for example, and you have to either sort through a gallery of possible French words to translate it, or fill in a blank in an otherwise complete sentence, or, hardest of all, type out the whole complete sentence in French. Did you know that there is a French keyboard, with the letters in a different order that our querty keyboards? Since I'm using a screen (software generated) keyboard on the ipad, when I'm in French lessons in Duolingo, it automatically switches! That slowed me up for a while! Other lessons include translating from English to French, and listening to spoken French and translating to English or replying in spoken French.

Now I've been doing Duolingo for more than 200 days in a row! But I have to caveat that - you can earn or buy a "streak freeze" where it automatically bridges (forgives) a day or two missed. I've missed a few, but not many. I've currently got five days worth of bridging in the bank, which will come in handy when I take my offshore sailing trip, with no cell phone coverage available for as much as two weeks. Lessons can be stored and taken offline, but I don't actually know how that works, since I haven't tried it. 

I discovered back in my youth that a default setting in my brain is to process words as normal (ie English) or foreign. It is very easy to mix up different foreign languages, and so I decided to stick with French at the outset, worried that my brain was too old to distinguish a new foreign language from French. I very briefly tried Greek before going to Greece this fall, and quickly gave up with the extreme foreign-ness of it. It had a completely different alphabet to add challenges. I tried downloading a basic Greek language learning audio lesson, but after several days in my car not getting farther than "Hello" "How are you?" "Thank you very much", repeating over and over, I gave up. 

I think I have audio processing issues, related to my hearing loss. When I was first diagnosed, I was especially bad at distinguishing speech with background noise, exponentially worse when the background was other speech. I even asked my team of peers and subordinates at work to make sure they never whispered in my ear in a meeting - I totally lost the thread of both the main conversation and what they said, and got irritable. My audiologist told me that is classic, including the high level of irritability for what is really a minor annoyance. (I was able to process written notes passed to me during meetings, it was the audio processing that didn't work.)

So my expectations about learning enough French to be fluent in a conversational way is very low. I really enjoy the lessons, but they are more puzzles to me than conversation. I will think about the word order, clues to conjugation from other words in sentences (plural? feminine?) and it feels a bit like coding / decoding, rather than smooth flow of language. But there is a great deal of repetition - so some sentences start to roll off my tongue more smoothly, and perhaps there is hope for me talking "il faut partir a l'aeroport vers quel heure?" (around what time should we head to the airport?). But understanding the answer will be hard!

I've sampled some podcasts labelled "slow French" and they are sometimes understandable. If I really wanted to become more conversational - if I thought I was going to be in a Francophone environment for a while - I think that would be really helpful. I remember once going to a church service at Notre Dame, and understanding the the slow and clear sermon. I could sometimes follow French speech at technical conferences, when the speaker was making an important point and so slowed down and put more weight on the words. I also believe that deliberately exercising my audio processing faculties, rather than retiring them, might be a good idea. So I do very occasionally listen to the slow French news.

But I've added more puzzle challenge by starting up another new language, Norwegian! I have absolutely no illusions of ever becoming even slightly fluent in Norwegian. But it's actually a very easy written language for me to learn, so far. (I'm on Unit 3 in Norwegian, compared to Unit 52 in French. Every unit is many lessons, maybe 50?)  I was intrigued to see the Duolingo characters and personalities they use are the same (Lily is still a violet-haired disgruntled teenager), though of course the voices are different, but the building of the vocabulary and sentences are very different! "Ulven spiser anden" (The wolf is eating the duck) "Bjornen drikker noe" (The bear is drinking something). So funny! I do miss having a reference to look some things up. I learned the difference between "a wolf" and "the wolf" by context ("En ulv" versus "ulven"). But some words use "en", others use "et" or "ei" and I don't know what the difference is, I'm just memorizing which to use when a new word comes up. I will eventually find a way to figure it out, but leaving the app to research it is annoying.

But I am learning, stretching my mind and my memory so that I didn't need to look up those Norwegian sentences above! Hopefully, I'll never need to say those particular sentences, but I have the words in my mind. I know what an enormous luxury it is to have the time to do this, from five to fifty minutes a day, averaging around 15 minutes. It makes me feel I'm doing something. Let's call it peace.