They say that if you keep your brain active and alert, it will slow down or prevent the onset of dementia.
As a retiree, I find the eventual possibility and onset of dementia worrying. I therefore keep as active as I can, I read copiously, I undertake puzzles and games on my iPad and I complete jig-saw puzzles.
All of this (hopefully) helps to prevent my memory from deteriorating too quickly.
It is also suggested that learning a new language can help to slow down the process of age related memory loss – or brain ageing.
Well, bully for me – because I am desperately trying to learn Spanish.
However, I’ve never been good with language classes.
At secondary school, French was a subject only accessible to the top class (class ‘A’). It took me a few years to reach that level and once I started to move up through ‘B’ and finally to the ‘A’ class, it was not accessible to me because I’d missed those early years. Later, at catering college, French Language was offered on Friday afternoons but it was not interesting and made no sense to my sixteen-year-old self. Yet, the ‘kitchen’ French I learned in normal catering classes WAS interesting and I devoured that. I have always been able to decipher menus during the (roughly) thirty consecutive years I have visited France.
As a young adult, I attended evening classes, to learn German. I enjoyed those as they were aimed at grown-ups and Jill, the teacher, was fabulous. I passed my Institute of Linguists ‘preliminary’ exam – no worries. The second year didn’t take off however and my interest lapsed.
I picked up French again when I began teaching, but by now it just seemed very hard and my progress was very slow. I tried lunchtime courses, evening courses and – just a few years ago I attended an inclusive course in Sancerre. I can get by in French. I can get by in German. But I cannot converse in either language. Anything other than travel requisites (food, drink, fuel, rooms, tables, directions) and I begin to flounder.
I do not want that to happen with my Spanish.
I want to communicate socially and conversationally.
To be fair, I am probably already at the stage it took me thirty years to reach in French, but it seems to be SO DIFFICULT.
And yet, I’m still avoiding formal classes.
Formal classes haven’t worked for me so far, so I’m undertaking some self-directed learning for now. I’m using Duolingo as my base and have just recently completed ninety consecutive days of learning. Each ‘day’ has a minimum of 10 minutes – I set that up at the beginning. I often do far more than that, but on busy days the minimum is 10 minutes. I’ve found that online learning works ok for me, but that it does still lead to some confusion. I therefore back up my learning on other sites and dictionaries. Google Translate is a Godsend.
Because Duolingo is available on the computer, as well as on my iPhone and iPad, it is constantly available. If I stop for a coffee, instead of simply reading Facebook posts, I can complete a five-minute lesson on Duolingo, or its sister App Tinycards. As time passes I find myself going over lessons more and more because the new words are taking much longer for me to process.
And that’s the thing: How much more vocabulary do I need (do we need, as Sharon is also trying to learn Spanish) before I start to think in Spanish? Some words and phrases come immediately to mind, without thinking what I need to say and, to be more fluent/competent, this needs to happen more often.
I have recently been given some children’s crime/adventure books, in Spanish, which I am beginning to wade through just now. I know about 20% of the words on the page and understand about 40% of what is going on – but I have to stop and translate whole sentences to get the full gist. I’m enjoying doing that – so perhaps all is not as bad as I think.
After all I studied for and achieved a Masters Degree – how hard can this be?
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