Uphill, word by word

I used to be good at languages: French, Latin, ancient Greek. They seemed so easy back when my brain was young. I was an A student all the way. So, when we first planned a serious trip to Italy when I was in my late 30s, and I decided to pick up Italian, I was in for a shock. French plus Latin equals Italian. Easy! Er, actually, older brain plus little time equals constant struggle. I'd start a sentence in Italian, and end up in French. But I was game, and I managed to ask several things in Italian, and even understand a few of the answers.

When we lived in Slovenia for five months back in 2008, I tried to pick up the language, but we were living in our own little family unit, homeschooling and travelling, not immersed in day-to-day society. And Slovene is notoriously hard, a highly inflected Slavic language that hasn't bothered to modernise to a simpler version as most European inflected languages have. I ended up with a lot of nouns, a few adjectives and phrases, but few verbs and no sentences. I could, for example, go to the deli and say, "turkey, two hundred grams, please." Everyone spoke good English, since it's taught in school from the beginning - and Italian, since we were on the border, so I muddled along with a mix of three languages.

But now I'm going to be living there for around 20 years, and I know I have to learn, old dog or not. I started the way that makes sense to the academic me, step-by-step through the grammar. But, if not the proverbial two steps back, it was a continual retracing of my footsteps. Then I took a leap of faith (for a nerd) and decided that I'd just learn. Anything, anyhow, any way I could, because something is better than nothing. I also committed to five minutes a day. Just five. I can do more if I feel like it, but that's all I have to. I downloaded the 50 languages app and started skimming through the lessons, over and over. And gradually, it's sticking. I've deciphered a couple of news headlines on the university media pages: "UP teden 2018" - ah, university week. The Innorenew Center does something "prvo leto" - hey, that's for its first year.

Whatever I'm doing, I keep going over words in my head, and sometimes there are breakthroughs. For weeks, I couldn't learn the words for "granddad" or "uncle". Then, the other day, I was playing with my toddler, and he mentioned "grandad". "Dedek!" I thought, then, "Can I remember 'uncle'...'stric'!" Woo-hoo!  I have useless phrases, like "Peti dan je petek" (the fifth day is Friday), "Jem sendvic" (I'm eating a sandwich - in case you didn't notice) or slightly more helpful ones: "To je moj sin" (this is my son - useful when you're a geriatric parent!).

Some days I'm excited and confident about eventually speaking a new language, some days I'm terrified and doubtful. I'm probably still a "D" student, which is disheartening, but also strangely freeing for someone who's used to being that A student. I just I tell myself that's "D" for "dedicated" and trudge on.