Spanish

I may have mentioned in a previous blog post that I'm studying the Spanish language. I've used Duolingo every day for the past 410 consecutive days. I studied Spanish for two years in high school, but that was so long ago that I can remember about ten words of Spanish from those years.

I'm learning more these days but I feel like a glass that is full to the brim, and the new knowledge is spilling out the top of my head like water spills out of an overly full glass. They can pour new knowledge into me but I can't retain it. My brain is too full of Spanish. (Not to mention it has a lifetime of other stuff crammed inside it.)

One thing that makes Spanish difficult for me is that the sentence structure can be very different from Engish. For example, the English sentence, "Where did Juan buy his new coat?" is translated into Spanish as, "¿Dónde compró Juan su abrigo nuevo?" And that Spanish sentence, if you translate it to English word by word, would read, "Where bought Juan his coat new?" Even worse, any of the pronouns can be translated different ways. The word "his" can be translated:

• su
• sus
• suyo
• suya
• suyos

But the Spanish word "su" can be translated:

• his
• her
• its
• their
• your

It just depends on what you want to say.

Trying to use Spanish reminds me of an experiment I read about many years ago. There is a special kind of prism, silvered on one face like the back of a mirror, that you can hold in front of your eyes and the world looks upside down. (Years ago I had one and it was pretty cool to hold it to my eyes and see everything upside down. Of course, the novelty wore off quickly.)

So scientists took volunteer subjects and affixed these special prisms in front of the eyes of each subject. At first, they (the volunteer subjects) were very flustered because their world looked upside down. But after a period of days their brains adapted to their new vision and the world looked normal again even while wearing the prisms. As you can probably guess, when the experiment ended and the volunteer subjects removed their special prisms, the world looked upside down again. This was because their brains had adapted to the prisms and was automatically turning visual images around, and without the prisms their brains continued "correcting" the already-correct images by turning those images upside down. Fortunately, after a few more days, their brains adapted again and the world that the subjects saw was right side up (normal) once more.

(A side note: the image of the world that is projected onto the retinas at the back of our eyes is, in reality, upside down! So our brains are always turning our worldview to right-side-up!)

Speaking a foreign language is like putting on the special prisms and turning our view of the world upside down (this is an analogy, of course). Reverting to one's native language is like taking off the special prisms. There are people who speak several languages and I don't know how they do it, but I suppose they were young when they learned their languages and their brains were more "flexible" and able to adapt to the new way of speaking. 

I've learned a little Spanish, but not nearly as much as I think I should have learned in 410 days. I've got some Spanish language courses from Pimsleur and I plan to try that system next. I'll need to buy an MP3 player so I can listen to Spanish lessons while I do other things. 

One day I was walking around my neighborhood and a female jogger passed me. She wore a headset and I heard her uttering foreign words. I thought that was great. If you're walking or running for physical exercise, why not exercise your brain at the same time and learn a new language? Or something. Multi-task, that's the word people use. It's hard to multi-task your brain; the brain is really good at doing one thing at a time. But training the body while training the brain shouldn't be a problem. There is much to think about. Hay mucho qué pensar.