Studying Three New Foreign Languages
After completing a graduate diploma last year, I decided that I would continue with my education this year. I wanted to learn something for me, personally: not necessarily to support my work or my career in any direct manner. Having studied languages previously, and with a desire to travel more broadly once the globe freed itself from the pandemic, I landed on studying language – to support my plans to travel and to support my plans to broaden my mind and my experience.
In the past I had studied French, German and Spanish. I had studied Thai and Laos, and I had studied Japanese and Mandarin. I had dabbled in Bahasa and Arabic, and built a passing familiarity with the Greek alphabet. Each of these had yielded varying degrees of success, and each of these had been studied with varying techniques. Some self-teaching, some formal classroom. Some in-country face-to-face experience and some “remote country”. Some classroom-based and some one-on-one with a tutor.
In my home town of Melbourne at the start of 2021 there was a coincident lifting of the brutal restrictions of “LockDan” and the start of the language school term, and that meant that I could expect to attend classes, live, face-to-face, with humans made of flesh and blood, in the same room. That is what I sought. Now, which language would I choose?
What Did I Do, and Why?
I should speak more of my motivation before I speak of my choice. I recently articulated a dream, to myself, whereby I would “live out the remaining years of my life – one by one”. That’s pretty much about choosing a destination and going to that destination and living there for exactly one year, before moving on to the next destination. I said to myself that “I will live there like I live there”, by which I meant that I plan to live in these destinations as if I had grown up there; as if I were a “local”. Big ambition, OK, but I think about the number of what we used to call “New Australians” living in my home country: living with confidence and with familiarity and vitality and hope. I could do that in a whole bunch of places year after year. So my motivation for study is about travel and living in foreign countries and about the communication that’s necessary to facilitate that. But it’s also about education and knowledge and respect; and joy. It’s a great feeling to be able to make someone laugh by using a language that is not my native language.
Impatience coloured my choice. I chose to study Italian, Portuguese and Russian. After all: why not study three languages if I’m going to study one?
“Why not study three languages?” Now, there’s a question that not too many people would ask themselves. So I asked it. One appropriate answer might be that “It’s too difficult”, and I accept that. But I reasoned that I’ve already studied a number of languages, and that I have the ability to separate these languages in my head. So why couldn’t I separate new languages as I learn them? In the end I decided to accept that this might be an ill-guided choice and I decided to make a quasi-scientific experiment of it.
I presented a hypothesis: “Even if you have a demonstrated capability to learn foreign languages, then learning more than one language at a time will present some challenges”.
I’m a genius! What a ground-breaker!
OK, so maybe not such a genius. The hypothesis is pretty much a given, right? But what I wanted to do was to articulate what those challenges are. And so here I am, starting sentences with conjunctions. But (!) that’s for effect and not for grammatical showmanship.
Setting Up
Here I am in Melbourne, looking to enter the business of learning three foreign languages in the same school year. When I was a kid, it might have been a tough ask to find the resources to do that. Now, in the New 20’s, Melbourne is even more “multi-culchural” than it used to be in the 1980s. I was able to identify three private institutions that could offer me language lessons in Italian, Portuguese and Russian. There were some challenges with sequencing but in the end I wound up with classes in Italian on Monday night in Prahran, Russian on Thursday night in the city and Portuguese on Saturday morning in Southbank. It was the end of summer and the sun stayed up until after the evening classes and the air was warm and I was happy. I had the languages chosen, I had the schools sorted, I had the books and resources acquired. I was set to learn. I live in Yarraville, so this means that I had to travel at most 14 km to my lessons. Monday night was the furthest away and the latest start — I rode my motorcycle to that class. Otherwise, I rode my bicycle to the others, and on the Saturday morning I took my roller blades in my saddle-bags so as to do a few laps of Docklands Stadium on the way home, reflecting on my lesson and enjoying the unlimited time in the exercise yard after the brutality that had seen us allowed only one hour a day outside.
The First Term
I really enjoy new stuff. Novelty. Stuff I’ve never done before. So, here’s me: first class of term, new book, new teacher, new classmates, new language. Grinning like a fool to give my classmates and my teacher a first impression of me that I, myself, never saw. I had three first classes like that — three first impressions grinning like a fool and so keen to learn. I tried to read my classmates; I tried to read my teacher. That was just for fun, of course, because I had no hope of getting any real insights into my fellow travellers from that view. My classmates ranged in age from 18 to, um, well, I think there was one temporary classmate who was older than me: I’m 56.
I like to watch skilled professionals do what they love to do. That’s my teachers. I like to watch them take the material that they have (we students), apply the skills that they possess and use the processes that they know, with the resources available (that’s the teaching and the curriculum) and see what they can produce. There’s style in there as well, and charisma, and the ability to engage and to motivate. I look at all of these things when my teachers are doing what they love to do. I got three good teachers this term, and I tried to work with them to bring enthusiasm and fun to the classes. I was also prepared to get things wrong and not take it too seriously when I did get things wrong; but to try my hardest nonetheless.
The mechanics of physically attending the classes presented some challenges. I had to work, I had to travel to class, I had to travel home. Sometimes I was hungry and tired. Sometimes on Saturday mornings I was hungover. Sometimes I was preoccupied and sometimes I had to sacrifice social invitations. During first term I only ever once cut class to attend a special event with a friend. On one other occasion I had been invited to a “work function” in the afternoon and I felt compelled to attend class that evening whilst intoxicated. (Am I allowed to admit that?) Whenever a class landed on a holiday, I made sure that I attended the make-up classes. I always did my homework and I always made sure I was prepared for my classes — except for that one time that I forgot my reading glasses. I made an effort: for every single class.
Motivation Keeps Me Going
This is hard. Finding the time to attend class, to do homework, to study. To exercise, to work, to eat, to sleep, to see friends and to hang up and to sit down. Well, I need at least one reason to do something, and I have more than one reason to keep doing this.
Here’s some of my motivators: curiosity; accumulation of knowledge and gaining skill; self respect; respect for others; my vision — my plan; curiosity; connecting with people; gaining stories to tell; gaining the ability to tell stories to more people; curiosity; the prevention of boredom; the engagement of my imagination. Along with those reasons, I can also work in some exercise and some seeing friends and sometimes some eating if I string them together with my class times.
The Mechanics of Learning
Here, I can talk about some challenges of the specific languages I’m learning. Learning languages allows you to recognise patterns: patterns in individual languages, and patterns in language in general. A familiarity with some of those patterns helped me get ready to learn. But also, just getting ready to learn helped me to get ready. Studying a new script (Russian alphabet) helps you get prepared so you don’t walk into a class cold. Trying to learn how to greet your teacher in your first class helps you get prepared to pronounce your first words incorrectly. Listening to some podcasts to hear some sounds, listening to some music, flipping through a dictionary: all of these things break your linguistic ice.
Patterns are just patterns, though, and I can assure you that the similarities in things like numbers did not help me. In my first term, how many times did I stumble because Italian and Portuguese counting is so similar to each other and so similar to Spanish, which is my “native foreign language”? Are the same nouns always feminine or masculine in Latin-based languages? I reverted to French as a reference point for genders of nouns and got it wrong often enough. The first person singular pronoun can twist here or there and be, basically, the same, but not enough-the-same. Animals, adjectives, foods all pursued me with nuance. Nuance. Nuance. Isn’t that French?
And Russian pronunciation. And Russian genders. And Russian cases. Cases are like German cases, right? And Latin cases? And the genders in Russian follow the genders in the romantic languages, right? Or German? And suffixes for Russian plurals and genders — those suffixes changing with Russian cases, how do I do that? Do they change? Answers to these questions, I am yet to discover; for in second term my Russian class didn’t achieve the desired re-enrolment rate so I have to wait until third term, or continue my study self-guided.
The thing is, I’ve found, that to learn a new language you have to take your tuition, and you have to take your time. The more tuition you get, and the more time you devote to it, the more comfortable you’ll become. Also, your tongue is a muscle, and just like any other muscle it gets better with exercise. Your tongue will adopt “muscle-memory” if you use it for the same thing often enough — by which I mean if you can get your tongue around pronouncing words, stringing sentences and orchestrating phrases, and if you can get positive visual feedback from listeners who know what you’re talking about and listening to you, the words and sentences and phrases will come easier each time.
My Outcomes So Far
I mentioned about the similarities in Portuguese and Italian that have me a little flustered. The thing is, I think this is about practice. I just need to settle down, get mindful, and repeat my basics to solidify them. I have a firm belief that language comes to us in a stream. I’ve seen little kids in bilingual families that never get their two languages mixed up and interspersed after a certain age. I think that the words in a particular language just “go together” once you get on a bit of a roll. They sort themselves out somewhere in our language cortex. I’m a bit of an “accent ham”, as well: I figure that if I exaggerate the accent that my teacher uses then that will pull the stream together a bit tighter, as well. If I really ham the Italian accent, or the Portuguese accent, or the Russian accent, I will know for sure that a word doesn’t fit.
Can I speak any of these languages well, yet? Well: no. However, I can say “I don’t speak Russian very well” in Russian, and I understand why that phrase is the way it is. I can say “I don’t speak Italian very well” in Italian, and “I don’t speak Portuguese very well” in Portuguese. Only one teacher disagreed with me when I made these statements in each class at the end of term one. I like all of my teachers, but that disagreeing teacher gave me a bit of a particular personal boost that day.
I have available to me now, in each language, the obligatory greetings and introductions and functional questions. And counting. And days of the week and months. And some other bits and pieces. The most important thing for me, though, is that I now have the capacity to learn faster and better in each of these languages. My linguistic ice is broken. Even though I face the standard challenges of learning any language — pronunciation, rules, exceptions to rules, alphabet, phonetics, false friends — I can look at these things and form the patterns that I need and build the anchors in language that I so enjoy making.
I have to admit that I don’t get my information and my tuition from only one source. I use DuoLingo and I use LanguagePod101 for each of the languages I’m studying. I have set myself a goal to touch at least one language resource every single day for at least 15 minutes. Yes. Every. Single. Day.
I stay motivated. I made a commitment to myself and I figure that if I can’t maintain a small commitment like this then I can’t possibly hope to maintain any larger commitment. I put language learning in every single day, and I refuse to let any word be a stranger to me.
Moving Forward
I plan to maintain my commitment this year, and complete as much formal and informal tuition in these languages as I can. At the end of the year, over the summer months, I will start to address a couple of goals that will help to start putting my achievements to use.
One: I want to be able to read Paulo Coelho’s “O Alchemista” in the original Portuguese. I read that book in English, and enjoyed it immensely. I think the original language will add another dimension to it.
Two: I want to be able to sing along to “The Barber of Seville”. Just quietly, just for me to hear. I’ve never been a great fan of opera but I would like to understand it, and I shall ask Rossini to help me get there. I do hope I don’t end up preferring the Michael Maltese version.
Three: I don’t really want to read “War and Peace” over summer. That’s an over-commitment, Mark. I would, however, enjoy picking up some short stories by Chekhov or Pushkin, or maybe challenge myself with a shorter Dostoevski.
I can see myself doing a lot of dictionary work over the summer.
So, coming out of this year, I will be in an excellent position to learn more about Italian, Portuguese and Russian languages, and about the cultures that each describes. I wonder if the level I achieve in each of them will be the same level as the others. I wonder if I will have an affinity for one or another reveal itself. I wonder if the skill that I develop in all three will sum to a greater value than the skill that I would have developed if I studied just one.
I will have a level of skill in these languages that I never had before. I will have knowledge and experience that I couldn’t have gathered without making this journey. I will have assumptions that I need to validate or discard, and I will have perspectives that I need to sharpen or blur.
Coming out of this year, I’ll have more time on my hands. I wonder if I’ll choose another three languages next year.
My thanks go to Song Xue for review and feedback on the creation of this article.
