I recently picked up a pair of eyeglasses at the local
optometrist and was amazed by the administrative staff as they effortlessly
shifted from English to Portuguese to Spanish and, in one instance, to Russian
in the course of their customer interactions.
I was surrounded by polyglots.
This ability to speak more than one language mesmerizes me, since English is my
one and only language. I struggled with two years of Latin in high school and
three years of French in college, yet still felt unmoored and linguistically
helpless in my two trips to France a few years ago. I’ve always believed that
learning multiple tongues, or just even one other than your native language, is
a sign of higher intelligence, or at least a different type of intelligence.
My
mastery of English is fairly strong—why can’t that “translate” across different
tongues? I know people who pick up languages like dog hair on a sweater—so
what’s the trick—is it just a knack available to certain brain types? Now, according to this website http://www.fluentin3months.com/how-to-become-a-polyglot/,
polyglot-ism is actually the norm rather than the exception in different parts
of the world, so I must be wrong about the difficulty of learning a new
language. I don’t do much international travel, but when I have visited other
countries, I feel a little guilty that I can’t communicate in the local patois
and instead depend on the English-speaking skills of the natives.
I’m not
particularly adept at the STEM disciplines, but I can sooner hold my own in the
sciences and math than in the linguistic arena. Is there any hope for me, at
age 60, to conquer a language that is not English?
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