Getting Used to it

I was reminded this morning of a post I wrote here some while ago, in which I told of my first attempts to learn Welsh some 50 or more years ago.  I was planning a holiday in north Wales and thought it would be a good idea to learn something of the language.  That's always a good policy when preparing for a foreign holiday, of course.  My plans changed, however, and the study went into long-term dormancy.  When I retired, I decided that a worthwhile - or perhaps more importantly, mind exercising - project would be to revive this study.  

After a while, I gave up following the 'Teach Yourself' book I had used all those years ago.  A chance acquaintance introduced me to Duolingo, a free comprehensive online system providing tuition in a great number of languages.  I've now been working at their Welsh course for coming up to 600 days.  I find that advancing years has had an adverse effect on my long-term memory and it's hard to remember the vocabulary learned in some lessons a few months ago unless the same words have occurred more recently in a different context.

A couple of weeks ago I discovered that, immediately after my second Covid vaccine injection, either memory or concentration went completely to pot.  A day's exercises - even the most recent ones - were taking anything up to an hour to complete, compared to about half that time normally.  Happily this phase only lasted a few days.

I recently volunteered to work as a 'keyboarder' (their term for copy-typist ... no, I don't know why.) for an international Christian Missionary charity.  Their overall operation is quite complex, but the section that I'm involved with provides the service of converting printed text into a digital form so that it can be used in a twenty-first century technological environment.  The obvious solution to this need would seem to be OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, but they work with an obscure selection of languages, often involving rarely seen characters, and the amount of time required to correct OCR output is said to be in excess of that involved in typing the text from scratch.

My expression of interest was very swiftly followed up and within two weeks I was already engaged in a training exercise copying the same set of Bible chapters first in the Ndebele language, and secondly in Umiray Dugamet.  Now, just eight weeks after applying, I've just completed the second 'live' task working in the language of the Dakota American Indians.  Although, of course, I'm familiar with the English version of the same text, I have no idea of the meaning of the actual words I'm typing, nor of the construction of the sentences they form.  However, this far into the project, I now recognise many of the more common words as they occur - sometimes as often as every other sentence - and this makes the task easier.

And what, you may well be asking, was the reminder today mentioned in my opening comment?  How did it relate both to a long-term retirement project and also to what is as yet a completely new adventure?  In my work at the warehouse of the local hospice organisation, I scan unwanted books for sale; today I found one written in French that looked quite interesting.  

Since passing my GCE in the late 1960s, I've been exposed to the language 'in the flesh', as it were, for no more than about six weeks in a small number of foreign holidays.  Yet, as I browsed through the introduction to this book, I found that I'd understood, not every word, but enough to tell me what the book was about and why it had been written, and also that it was fiction although set in a very definite and dramatic period in recent history.

And the moral of the tale? Simply that the most useful time to learn a foreign language is early in life: something that adult readers of this blog would do well to pass on to their children and grandchildren before it's too late!