Experiences
LEARNING LANGUAGES
Struggling to get the hang of Portuguese? Then you’re not alone! Marilyn Sheridan shares her experience with learning languages and some reasearch on why we seem to struggle!
I
have lived in this beautiful country for seven years now, and I am ashamed to say I still cant speak the language. I’d like to blame my age (in my 70’s), and that perhaps there is no more sponge left in my brain to absorb anything new, but I have a strong suspicion that learning a new language is something not all brains can handle.
Whilst in my late teens I had a boyfriend who was keen to learn a second language, and we selected German. Off we trotted to evening classes, pencils sharpened, clean notebooks and dictionaries to hand. We picked German because I was led to believe that you ‘say what you see’ easy-peasy. But it was much more difficult than I thought, and was relieved when the pressure of a new job (and breaking up with said boyfriend) forced me into giving up. In later years, I had holidays in Italy, and fell in love with both the country and the language – how romantic it sounded, how beautifully it flowed – and resolved to have a go at Italian. I duly turned up for evening classes, and hadn’t got in more than 8 lessons or so before the professor twigged that I was the dummy in the back row, and kindly selected the easiest questions for me when randomly asking round the class for answers. Oh, dear, I was in trouble again, and failed miserably. Then came the move to Portugal, and we fell in love with life here. I was affronted one day early on when someone intimated that I was a typical Brit who expected everyone to speak English abroad, and so resolved to have a go at Portuguese by joining a small group other Englishspeakers on Saturday mornings. It seemed quite easy, we had a children’s book to learn from, what could be easier? Every child I bumped into could speak fluently at age 2,
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so why couldn’t I? The book covered hundreds of nouns which I was just about coping with, but then the dreaded verbs appeared....and I was flummoxed again. On the few occasions I have braved it to speak a little sentence to someone, they either reply with the speed of a bullet from an AK47, which I fail to comprehend, or look at me blankly at hearing my appalling efforts and answer me in English. I have done a tiny bit of research on why I find this process so hard, and have found that children have a period for learning language that lasts until puberty, and during these years, certain parts of the brain are more developed than others. For example, they are adept at procedural memory which covers things that we learn unconsciously, such as riding a bike, dancing, or subtle language rules. Children learn from observing and from experience; circuits in the brain build a set of rules for constructing words and sentences by absorbing and analyzing information – such as sounds - from the world around them. Adults’ stronger cognitive abilities may actually trip them up. In essence, it seems adults may over-analyze new language rules or sounds and try to make them fit into some pattern that makes sense to them. But a new language may involve grammar rules that aren’t so easily explained, and adults have more difficulty overcoming those obstacles than children, who simply absorb the rules or exceptions and learn from them. That’s especially true with pronunciation, since the way we make sounds is something that is established early in life, and becomes second nature. So I was right, up to a point. But I will persevere. Maybe one day it will all fall into place and I will be writing in Portuguese about learning English as a foreign language instead.
January 2021
