When we left for Spain, we had two things: an arrival ticket for Barcelona, and a departure ticket from Sevilla two weeks later. We had no hotel reservations, no rental car, no pending Couchsurfing requests, no train tickets. No schedule. No plans. No friends, family, or acquaintances. We didn’t even have language fluency. What we brought was a guidebook and a tent. This is what we call “the wing-it method.” It comes with its own gesture: flapping elbows. Four years ago, we went off on our three-week trip around Iceland. I spent months planning every last conceivable detail. I had a two-page spreadsheet listing bus departure times for each city and what sights we would see there. I emailed backup copies of it and carried a printout with my passport. This was “the spreadsheet method.” For the most part, it worked fairly well, considering that I had been a skinflint and bought a four-year-old guidebook in order to save $12. The main problems we ran into were finding plant-based food, museums and tours that were closed the day we were in town, and random seabird attacks. The spreadsheet method is effective, but highly labor-intensive, and it can induce a false sense of security. Certainty is the enemy because it’s so often misplaced. I had vague plans to put together a spreadsheet for the Spain trip. The problem was twofold. First, I decided to “upgrade” by coming up with some gorgeous design template that would look good on Pinterest. Then I could offer the template to my readers! Great idea, but perhaps not immediately before a long and complicated trip? Also, I have no design expertise whatsoever. Second, I was trying to preload three weeks’ worth of material on the blog while still being available to my clients and working on my novel. I was working through a stack of guidebooks and saving things to TripAdvisor, but the official fancy-dancy itinerary never got made. My husband was okay with this; we would be in Spain no matter how much or how little advance planning we did. The point was to see the country, meet people, learn about their culture, try the food, and see some birds (hopefully without being attacked by them this time). The wing-it method [are you flapping your elbows?] has little middle ground. At its best, it allows for fabulous moments of serendipity. At its worst, it can be a real killjoy. Not every problem can be solved with money. If you don’t have money or feasible plans, a wing-it fail can get you into trouble. Each of the following factors is a force multiplier. Any of them can spoil an otherwise nice day. Each additional factor can make it feel exponentially worse. An ATM eating your card. Being stranded. Being hungry when all the surrounding stores and restaurants are closed for at least three hours. Having even a minor injury, or mosquito bites. Carrying 35 or more pounds of luggage. Being jet-lagged and sleep deprived. Having a headache. Getting a stern lecture in a language you can barely understand. Finding out that your journal got wet in the rain because your daypack isn’t waterproof. What worked on this trip? We made every single one of our transportation connections. We were charged fairly on all our transactions. We slept pretty well. We only got caught in the rain on three different days, when we were prepared for more. The recommendations we picked up from TripAdvisor and the guidebooks were reliably accurate. We had fun and took a couple thousand photos. What didn’t work? We had to make three separate stops and spend $50 on the first day because I forgot a charger cable, and my entire bottle of deodorant leaked into my entire container of melatonin pills. We used up our data allowance on the phone plan only halfway through the trip, couldn’t upgrade, and then figured out only after we got home that the expiration date on the payment card needed to be updated. An ATM ate our debit card and the error message was in Catalan. I was cold almost every day. Twenty mosquitos got into our tent one night. Both my pens ran dry at inopportune times. Part of my toenail came off. I spent four hours of the trip trying to read bus schedules in Spanish and figure out amended itineraries. We lost an hour at one of the sites we liked best because the location dot on TripAdvisor was 10 kilometers off. We almost wound up going to Gibraltar on a Sunday, when everything would have been closed. We had a few not-fun “NOW what do we do?” moments. We learned. We learned that what’s true in one country or city may not be true elsewhere. We learned to cross-check site locations through independent sources. We learned to take screen shots. We learned that for us, the most important research to do in advance is how to find a grocery store and how to get to the camping. We learned that guidebooks don’t always include the types of sites that interest us the most. We did a status meeting on the flight home and wrote a two-page “lessons learned” report in preparation for our next trip. We learned to rely on each other more and to be more open about our moods and qualitative experience. We’ve been lucky in our travels. We’ve never been involved in a riot or a transit strike. We’ve never been mugged. We’ve never had food poisoning. We’ve never left behind anything important. I haven’t even been street-harassed, something that happens to me at home on a near-daily basis even though I’m 40. Generally speaking, we feel safer on the road than we do at home. That’s why we go. Other parts of the world are much cleaner, nicer, and more civilized (whatever that means, exactly) than where we live. The wing-it method involves trust, and a lot of it. Trust in the goodness and altruism of ordinary people. Trust in commerce. Trust in government. Trust in animal behavior. Trust in our equipment. Trust in each other. Trust in our own powers of situational awareness, grit, stamina, and flexibility. Trust in our ability to turn any event into at least an interesting story. We just got back from Europe. Technically, at least one of us was gone for over three weeks. I’ll be writing about our trip over the next couple of weeks, sharing photos, and talking about our continuing quest toward more experiences and less gear. Part of this quest includes language learning.
Where did we go? Germany: Hamburg Spain: Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid train station, Ronda, Algeciras, Tarifa, La Linea, Sevilla Gibraltar (England? Spain? You decide) Morocco: Tangier France: Paris Airports: LAX, LHR, HAM, BCN, MUC, CDG, ORD, LAX again Modes of transport: plane, train, bus, subway, light trail, taxi, walking, SO MANY STAIRS How many languages did we try? Technically 5: German, Spanish, French, a few phrases of Arabic, and some sign-reading in Catalan. How many different places did we sleep? Ten in 18 days. Will there be monkeys? Yes. How much did we walk? 141.35 miles, averaging 8.31 per day. How many flights of stairs did we climb? 327, averaging 19.24 flights per day. About those monkeys…? You’re just going to have to wait. I read this book as part of the massive data-gathering and synthesizing that I always do when I embark on a new quest, or even a relatively minor project. I’ve coined the term “loremonger” for myself. This time, the quest is to turn my lifelong interest in linguistics into the more practical skill of becoming a conversational polyglot. Fortunately, reading Michael Erard’s book on polyglots was a real pleasure. The book was published in 2012, meaning that Erard’s research happened before the first Polyglot Conference and before Fluent in 3 Months was published. It seems that all the best-known polyglots who are active online now must have been flying under the radar just a few years ago, because none of them appear in this book. None of the websites or TED talks or podcasts or how-to programs are discussed. Can all these materials really have popped up so quickly? It’s like trying to remember life before Google or Wikipedia, even though all that came along well into adulthood for me. The premise of the book is to get at the truth of multilingual ability. How many languages can one person learn? How many alleged polyglots are actually frauds? How is linguistic ability best evaluated? Is it nature or nurture? I learned that knowing more than one language would have been a drawback in many cultures throughout history, because it would make that person look like a spy whose loyalty could not be trusted. I learned that it’s quite common for people in many parts of the world to know anywhere from 4-7 languages, and use them routinely in daily life. ‘Polyglot’ is to ‘multilingual’ what ‘expat’ is to ‘immigrant.’ I learned that polyglots can be regarded as a “neural tribe” of people with similar neurochemistry, and perhaps measurable neuroanatomical differences. That was all I needed to know. If I feel a thrill when I hear foreign voices or see foreign script, that’s enough indication that I will probably find socializing with polyglots to be fun and interesting. I won’t worry so much about my relative lack of expertise because everyone has to start somewhere. This book is fascinating and even suspenseful. I recommend it for the casual reader, whether you have an interest in language study or not. Mt. TBR is a term of endearment. If you haven't heard it, the acronym means “Mount ‘To Be Read.’” It's the stack of books that accumulates on the nightstand. It's the shelf of books in the living room. It's the book on the dining table. It's the book in the bathroom cabinet. It's the list of books to be read in the future. It is the spreadsheet with multiple lists of award winners and other books to be read in the future. It probably amounts to more inches in height than you do. (64" in my case). [Digression: The photo shows me standing next to the stack of unread books in my house, not including virtual reading commitments or books I intend to keep but not read]. I haven't read most of the books in my house. Once I read them, I lose my attachment and let them go. My intention has always been to read everything that I own. I just can't seem to manage it. I've set a resolution to change my relationship with books, and I've spent all of this year so far trying to climb my personal Mt. TBR. I've got the oxygen canisters and the dehydrated meals and the crampons and everything. The trouble is that I seem to have two personas, who are both interested in lots and lots of books. There is the me who buys books, and then there is the me who goes to the library for books. Neither seems to be aware of the other. What happens is that I always read the library books, and never finish the books that I buy. The result is that I read during all the time available, spend money on things I don't use, and fill up my house with unread books. Then there is the third me, who is constantly saving links to articles to read later. I could read for eight hours a day, and perhaps finish my backlog in three weeks. What I am doing is making commitments for Future Self. It appears that I think Future Self will be more likely to find the time to read these things than I will today. Present Self is already listening to audiobooks and podcasts on 2x speed. Present Self is already using the ReadQuick app. There is no margin here! Present Self seems to think that nothing interesting to read will ever be published again, and we can somehow catch up to the present date. The funny thing here is that I have been writing a book for the past four years. My available reading time is about 20% of what it used to be. I seem to be choosing reading material based on my prior quantity of free time. The other funny thing is that I am very interested in learning foreign languages. It is the nature of the beast that I will have to give up at least some of my English-language reading material to make room for this. If I don't have enough time to keep up with my English-language reading material now, it will be that much more difficult when I am also trying to read everything in several other languages. There are several approaches to my dilemma: 1. Stop going to the library. 2. Delete the entire reading queue and start from scratch. 3. Donate every book I own and have not read for at least a year. 4. Read only foreign-language news sources. 5. Don’t read anything at all until my book is published. 6. Estimate how much I can read in a week and accumulate only 80% or less than that amount. 7. Realize none of these things are going to happen in the long term, and maybe aim for the short term? We took this photo and went to a large bookstore a couple hours later. I came out empty-handed. Maybe there’s hope for me yet. I feel frantic when I contemplate changing my ways. My reading habits are the core of who I am. I tried giving up reading for a month once just to see what I would do. It was SO depressing. I cheated. I read the newspaper during my lunch and I started playing audiobooks. I finished a lot of projects and did a lot of cooking, and my apartment was never cleaner. But it was sad. Did I then start reading through my backlog of books? What do you think? The paradox is that I want to read what I want, when I want. Yet I keep assigning reading homework to Future Self. I don't want to shut down the possibility of ever reading a particular book; I just don't seem to want to read it right at this very moment. The longer a book sits around, the less appealing it seems to be. It's like stale bread. Stale Unread. A confluence of events has caught my attention. I just learned about the Berlin Polyglot Gathering, which is from April 30 to May 4 this year. My husband happens to be in Hamburg for a trade show. There are two weeks between the end of one and the beginning of the other. I have been fascinated by foreign languages since I was nine years old. I studied several languages from middle school through college, but quit as a working adult. Two years ago I dreamed that someone called me on the phone and said, "You should speak French as often as possible." Ever since then, I have been studying and trying to make up for lost time. I am actively studying French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Dutch at varying levels of competence. I can still read Greek letters, hiragana, and katakana. I could probably fake my way through a 60-second conversation in Japanese, all that's left after three years of study in high school. I mean, I'm not fluent in anything, including English, but I could probably pass among a group of polyglots. I assume they won't throw me out for using the wrong diacritical mark. Okay, so, to sum up, I want to be ready to speak multiple languages by the Berlin Polyglot Gathering next year. Whether we go or not is not the point. The point is that if my husband gets sent on the same business trip next year, serendipity may occur. If I went now, the plane ticket would put me in debt for the rest of the year. I would be kicking myself and wishing I was better prepared. Waiting until next year gives me a chance to save the money and study like a demon. Going now would be sort of dumb. Going next year qualifies as a true Quest. CAN one nerdy girl become conversational in six languages? CAN it be done in a year? WILL she even blurt out one word? OR hide behind a potted plant and eavesdrop? In third grade, my teacher explained the concept of foreign languages to my class. She asked us to imagine that we were going on a field trip to Holland, where everyone used different words than we do for common things like bread. I was so captivated that I didn’t understand it was only an imaginary trip. I asked her what we should pack and when we got our plane tickets. A year later, I was wandering around the public library when I discovered the foreign language dictionaries. An obsession was born. I studied French in junior high; Japanese in high school; Spanish, Greek, and Latin at university; and now I’m working on German and Italian. I feel about Fluent Forever like I do about the Harry Potter series: Where were you 30 years ago?! Fluent Forever has a more academic approach to language learning than Fluent in 3 Months. An interesting tidbit is that Gabriel Wyner and Benny Lewis, the respective authors, are both engineers who became polyglots. My husband is an engineer who does not believe he has a strong natural ability with languages, and I’m trying to convince him otherwise. Fluent Forever has a solid foundation in linguistics, and some discussion of how the physical mechanics of correct pronunciation can be learned and transmitted using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). I fell in love with the IPA in college, where I stumbled into a senior-level neurolinguistics class as a freshman. It is impressive that this book makes advanced linguistic concepts practical and accessible for a lay audience. Anyone who has studied a foreign language in the classroom has probably walked away frustrated and unable to conduct a basic conversation. There are so many resources available now for language learning that almost anyone could get further in a few weeks with self-study and Internet access than in a year of schoolwork. Gabriel Wyner has a terrific companion website loaded with resources. Despite my years of language study, I had never heard of several of the tools he discusses, including pronunciation trainers and frequency dictionaries. He also brings in concepts from mnemonics research. Learning a language is a bucket list item for a lot of people. What I hear from them is that they feel they have to wait until they have the time to go back to school or the money for Rosetta Stone. The message of Fluent Forever is that we don’t have to wait. We can start today and we can take a lot of research-based shortcuts. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
Categories
All
|