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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Bienvenidos, Croeso and Welcome
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…
ANOTHER LANGUAGE REFRESH?
Did you notice the extra greeting at the beginning? If you’re not following me on YouTube, you won’t yet know that at the beginning of this year, I started refreshing my Spanish, which I hadn’t used for several decades. That’s much like your French, you might be thinking. Well, yes. It is. I hadn’t used French since finishing my studies. But, also, no, as I continued to use Spanish in work for about 8 years.
The weird thing is, I’ve found it easier to relearn French than I’m finding it with Spanish. There may be several reasons for this, but I’m going to start with the one that I think is the biggest.
When I went onto further education, so university level, although it was a polytechnic, my course was Foreign Languages for Business. This, obviously, made sense at the time, because I wanted to be able to use my languages in work. The only alternative was a course that would focus on literary subjects, which I had no interest in, at all. But why does this make a difference? Because I was only using business language, for a full three years. I wasn’t using general conversational language and words that were related to everyday life. I was learning how to talk about economics and offices and other businessy stuff. This meant that my ability to converse about general things, which wasn’t ever that great, given I’d learnt my languages the traditional way at school, atrophied. Can a language atrophy? Well, you know what I mean. I gradually became less and less able to talk about normal things.
With French, that stopped after the three years of the course, but with Spanish that continued into my working life - and, yes, you’ve probably cottoned on by now - where I was using it for business purposes. That’s about 11 years in total. I was mainly typing in the language, but it was all presentations about industry and development and … other stuff that I really can’t remember. My brain was flooded with language that I might never use again, drowning out all the things that would, arguably, be more useful.
So, my French was potentially still closer to general language than my Spanish was, is. It had had less time to be subdued.
But, that may not be the only reason. Whereas I find French quite easy to keep separated from Italian, because although many of the words are actually identical and a lot more are extremely similar, it isn’t pronounced in anything like the same way. So, the words feel different.
Now, let’s think about Spanish. Again, some words are exactly the same and others are extremely similar, although it feels like there are more differences, like verbs that are completely different. But the pronunciation in Spanish is far closer to Italian and because Italian is now my dominant foreign language, that makes it more difficult to remember the Spanish. I am much more likely to forget something I’ve just learnt in Spanish than something in French, have a complete blank when a sentence comes up on Duolingo.
Perhaps, this will change as I progress, but I do want Italian to remain dominant, so perhaps a bit of that hesitation and blanking is a good thing.
What’s the moral of this story? Perhaps, don’t do a business course in a language if you want to converse easily. Maybe those kinds of courses don’t exist anymore, or they’re better structured to keep everything going. But, thinking about it, would doing a literary type course be any better? Unlikely.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, adiós, hwyl and bye for now.