I saw something on the Internet the other day that a study found it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at new skill. After some quick math, that’s 27 years if you practiced your new skill for just an hour a day, which might explain why my childhood piano lessons never paid off.
It made me think about my bedtime obsession with the Duolingo language app on my phone. A few years ago, I thought it might be fun to learn a second language and for some reason, I picked French. It made sense to me because I am married to an actual bilingual Canadian I could practice on, even though he claims his French skills have rusted away from lack of use. This could be true because when I’d say things like “où est ma valise” (where is my suitcase?) and other useful phrases, he’d shrug and say “I don’t know what you’re asking.” But I didn’t give up. After a few more months of practice, I asked him in French if he wanted to take the train to visit an old church in the city and then take a taxi to the hotel. He still didn’t seem to understand me. Or maybe he was concentrating on the racing game he plays on his tablet before he sleeps. Once in a while, he would correct my pronunciation, so deep down, I knew he was listening more than he was letting on.
My initial goal was to see if I could do this for a whole year. I figured it was more useful than scrolling social media and more relaxing than reading the headlines before bed. I’d be stretching my brain, and someday maybe I’d even be able to have a real conversation in another language.
My one-year challenge has now crossed the three-year mark. I know this because every night, when I log on, a little green owl named Duo tells me I’ve achieved a new milestone or streak. And if I play for the next 15 minutes, I’ll earn double points. So I do. And while I can’t say I’m proficient enough to carry on much of a conversation, I do feel like I can read and understand more than I would have imagined when I installed the app and trudged through basic phrases like “I eat apples” and “she drinks water.”
One night as I was dutifully reciting back phrases into my phone, Mike asked me why I was so focused on French, especially since we lived in Arizona. Wouldn’t Spanish be more useful? I think part of it was stubbornness on my part. Years ago, I had taken a semester of beginning French in college, thinking it would be easier as a language credit than the two years of German I had in high school. It wasn’t. Turns out French has a lot more silent letters than German does and you can’t just sound it out. I barely scraped by. Humorously, I moved to Canada eight years later and married into a family where my in-laws spoke French first, English second. If you’ve ever sat around the kitchen table at a holiday gathering with people who speak a language you don’t know, it’s a strange kind of loneliness. Mike would translate for me, but jokes and stories are never as good secondhand.
But he has a good point, so I added the Spanish module a few months ago. And now I’m back to square one, with conversational phrases about eating apples, drinking water and asking people their names. But it’s coming along and I have to admit that Spanish is a lot easier than French because they pronounce all of the letters in the words, for the most part. I have also noticed that Mike is secretly listening in and sometimes tries to guess a few of the phrases when I say them back to the phone. Maybe we’ll both be learning Spanish soon. And I don’t think it’s going to take 24 more years to do it. Until next time! Au revoir! Hasta luego!