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.

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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.

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I can totally relate. Can you?


Image credit: Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

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