Been learning Spanish for some time now. Actually probably the best part of six or seven years. So I started on the cusp of fifty or so. I've been using Duolingo but I read how other apps are better or how immersive courses are best. And it's true. Duolingo has its virtues - it's fantastic for vocabulary, but if you're eager to learn the underlying grammar it isn't very clear. Nor does it really assist in enabling conversations, and the old problem with any such approach to learning language is that you're not engaging with someone else.
In some ways the Gaeltacht approach is the best. Across three summers in the late 70s and early 80s and perhaps ten or eleven weeks in total by going to a Gaeltacht which was particularly strict about not speaking in English (a full sentence and you were sent home, and people were sent home) one got to learn a good bit of the language, enough survived to this day to allow me to use Irish reasonably well in speech, though my reading ability isn't great.
Whereas the opposite is the case with Spanish where I can make a good stab at understanding written text but a conversation is largely beyond me. Unfortunately the Gaeltacht option with Spanish is not practical at this point - maybe later. Also, and this is a basic truth, perhaps it's just me, but learning a new language is an uphill task. What I'd have picked up easily in my teens is a mite more difficult. I was never great with languages back in the day, I did okay at French in school but actually speaking it, conversing in it, was way beyond me - and I've mentioned before how in the early 2000s I was in a restaurant in Paris and the person at the next table (who was French) rather than hear me butcher their language offered to help me order.
Still, Spanish hasn't been wasted. I'm able to go into a tienda de ropa or musica and not disgrace myself. Or wind up at a hotel check-in or a restaurant and at least be clear. Or get a bus cross-country and communicate reasonably well. Though one facet of interactions in Spain I've found is the willingness, shading to eagerness, for people there to speak English. It makes sense, they want to speak as fluently as possible, not have to put up with people like me with (at best) broken Spanish.
The thing is though that I came to the conclusion in the last few years that really what I wanted was a higher level of comfort with being in Spain - a place I'm very fond of and which I already felt comfortable with. Part of that is simple respect for Spanish people - being able to knock around reasonably easily and have a good sense of how to have basic interactions is fundamental to that. Part of it was curiosity, how much could I learn, part of it being able to walk along a street and be able to read signs on shops or whatever. So it's not about being fluent, or reading technical documents, or even having detailed conversations with people in Spain, but rather having enough to get by. I'm keeping at learning it with this in mind, if it does improve over the next six years brilliant, if not, nothing lost and probably the mental activity is a positive in itself.
Anyone have similar or different experiences learning languages in their forties and fifties?
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