At the risk of incurring the curse from polyglots and other magicians

 



Have you ever tried learning three languages at the same time? Do you think it's doable?

At the risk of incurring the curse from polyglots and other magicians, Ekaterina Kachalova shares her experience in this amazing post written in my "Write for Real" course.

✽✽✽

It was too much.

I could not reconcile the hordes of Spanish, English and German words that lived rent-free in my head. They refused to settle down. Quite the opposite, they acted as if they were squatters littering a once neat one-bedroom apartment reserved for language learning in my mind. They were living with the constant fear of eviction. Only, I invited them myself.

I was young and ambitious as many of us are. I would grasp at every chance to learn as much as possible, so I took a Spanish course on top of English and German that I was already studying. I was inspired by the all-too-talented classmates mastering five languages at once. I tried to be diligent, but I was exhausted. I tried to cram the words, but the meaning would elude me. The amorous Spanish señores would be vastly outnumbered by war-savvy Landsknechts and buttoned-up Queen's Guards in the battle to be memorized.

It did not take me long to realize that I couldn’t be the commander-in-chief of the three armies at once. Still, I could not bear the thought of giving up. The grind should never stop, I would tell myself and drag my feet to a Spanish lesson after a day spent in the worlds of Shakespeare and Goethe. I’m not a quitter, I would remind myself, as I toiled through the coursebook, patting myself on the back for not skipping yet another class.

My valiant soldados would fight till the last gasp, all while trampled with hoots of advancing Germanic cavalry of reported speech and conjugations. They would sacrifice hours of my sleep at the altar of recognition, only to be forgotten the next day.

It could not last long, and it didn’t. One might say it was the ultimate test of grit, and that I failed it. I lost the war.

At the risk of incurring the curse from polyglots and other magicians, I firmly believe that we, Muggles, should not attempt a circus trick of learning more than one language from scratch at once. Of course, there is no harm in maintaining the ones you know and discovering something new in the process. Nothing is verboten. But marching forward in more than one? Nah, I don’t believe that. And I’ve learnt it the hard way.

It was just too much. Evicted. The Sancho Panzas had to leave.

✽✽✽

I can totally relate. Can you?


Image credit: Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to tame your IELTS pie charts

Image
IELTS line graphs are easy to tame - you just go chronologically, so the description doesn't get out of hand. Information in pie charts, however, can be hard to organize because there are different directions you can go in. In this post, I want to share two IELTS pie chart answers I wrote for the same task. The task is from Cambridge IELTS 11 . The introduction and the overview are the same. As you read, pay attention to the organization and try to decide which description works better. ✼✼✼ Introduction  The pie charts compare the percentage of British students of one English university who knew foreign languages in 2000 and 2010. Main Body Version 1 The percentage of students in three groups grew. Speakers of Spanish formed the largest share in both years, rising by 5% from 30% to 35%. The increase was the same in the “Another language” and “Two other languages” groups. In 2010, the former amounted to 20%, while the latter comprised 15%, making up the second and third largest prop...
Read more

My Fulbright application or a teachable moment on essay writing

Image
I did it one day before the deadline. I submitted my Fulbright application on 30 May 2014. Now, 14 months later, I am going to the USA as a proud Fulbrighter! The program I am participating in is called Foreign Language Teaching Assistant or FLTA for short. As a participant of this program I will be teaching Russian and studying at an American university for an academic year. When my students heard the news, they asked, “What did it take to get this grant?” I replied, “Well, there were several stages. First, I had to write a lot of text. Then, I … .” And one student said, “I am curious to read what you wrote.” I suppose many are, so I am going to let you in on one of my application essays. One of the essays I wrote is called “Objectives and motivations.” What I wrote is too long to upload here (1274 words, no less!), so I am only going to share my introduction and conclusion . Oh, and I see a teachable moment here, which I just can’t help using. Introduction "Albe...
Read more

C2 Proficiency. Writing Task 2. Review (of a film I haven’t seen).

Image
I keep writing like crazy because I am preparing for the C2 Proficiency test (fka CPE). In my previous post, I shared my Writing Part 2 article . In this post, I want to share a review I wrote about a movie I haven't seen and give some insights into handling an unfortunate task. Task A film magazine has invited readers to submit reviews of films which are set in the future, but deal with themes relevant to today’s world, such as our relationship with technology or environmental problems. You decide to submit a review briefly describing such a film and explaining why its themes are relevant today. You should also consider how important it is for films set in the future to say something about contemporary society.   ( Cambridge English Proficiency 2 , Test 2, Question 4). This is a really unfortunate task for me because I watch very few movies, maybe 3 a year. But as I read it, I imagined myself sitting in the exam room not wanting to fail, so I had to come up with somethin...
Read more

Top 8 mistakes Russian learners of English actually make

Image
Due to the nature of my job, every once in a while I stumble upon an article about N most common mistakes that learners of English make. I look at them and go, “Who makes these mistakes? Russians certainly don’t.” (For example, Russians don’t confuse your and you’re .) In this post, I want to talk about 8 common mistakes Russian learners actually make. These mistakes persist on different levels, but are not usually addressed in EFL course books. The list is based on my personal teaching experience. The order is random. 1. I with I often ask students “What did you do at the weekend?” and what I hear is “ I with my friends went to the cinema. ” The right way to say something like this is “ My friends and I went to the cinema ,” or “ I went to the cinema with my friends .” In English, the word order is “subject+verb” and prepositional phrases can’t go in the middle. 2. How to say When students don’t know how to say something, they ask me or murmur to themselves “ How t...
Read more