"An hour a day, every day, for a year": that's how I answer whenever anyone asks me how I've managed to learn so many languages--and how they might start. It's a good start: having that kind of relationship with time over the past twenty-five years is part of what has let me learn roughly a dozen languages. After English (my mother tongue) and French (which my mother had studied and which I started in middle school), I've studied Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew (and a bit of modern), Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Old English, Icelandic, and--to try my hand at a translation contest--Swedish.
Pictured here--because who doesn't like a nice picture of books?--are some of the relevant dictionaries I keep next to my desk at home:
Like the dictionaries on the shelf, the languages aren't all the same heft or style in my mind: Latin and Ancient Greek are my areas of professional expertise; alongside French, Italian, and Spanish they're great for reading; French and Spanish I've translated for publication; French I'm also pretty good at speaking, a bit less so Italian, a lot less so Spanish; Biblical Hebrew I return to a few times a year, mainly for stories behind Jewish holidays; Icelandic and Swedish take a hold of me like seasonal blooms or phases of the moon; and so on. I love that they're not all the same and yet speak with each other in my bibliothèque-ish brain.
In other words, I love how each language is a beautifully different result from basically the same approach: "an hour a day, every day, for a year," or--no matter the amount--'having a good relationship with time.' Some people might call it, after Herrick, 'making much of time'; although I dislike how that can shade into--pernicious--images of valuation (e.g., 'time is money'), there is a value in feeling that time gains meaning against mortality.
I'm writing about this now because a lot of people are finding themselves faced with a lot of time that is suddenly structured differently or seems not to be structured at all. For people whose lives have previously been thoroughly scheduled from outside, that kind of change is deeply disorienting: in the Latin, 'losing track of where the sun rises,' as if daily life--day-by-day sunlit life--has become a dim and doldrous-feeling twilight.
There is no simple or single 'solution' to that 'problem,' and each person's experience will be particular. But the situation in general--there is too much / too unstructured time--is similar to traditions of long-term practice and learning. In such traditions, students (Latin, 'the dedicated') approach dauntingly, even impossibly large projects not all at once but a bit at a time, the bits distributed evenly over long periods of time.
That's probably unsurprising, and pedagogically it's well demonstrated: regular (evenly spaced, periodic) units of time are better for learning than time given irregularly (picking it up now and again); and that's true even when--in my experience, I would say especially when--the regular times are shorter than the big occasional chunks might have been. This is why academic courses usually take place regularly over stretches of time. Or ...
... think of Bill Murray as Phil in Groundhog Day. Once he realizes--because Andie MacDowell's Rita makes him see--that living the same day over and over means having regular units of time, he fills them with learning: reading every book in the library, learning French, playing the piano ... All of that comes from letting a whimsical passion (here, for Mozart's sonata no. 16 in C-major, K.545), a passing spark, start a lifelong fire.
"An hour a day, every day, for a year": I don't mind saying that this general approach was made more concrete for me when I first saw Groundhog Day. (I was sent down the path to ancient languages by a movie the very next year, Stargate.) It's a depiction of how dedication to something--practice--can be a joyful response to passing time. It's on that basis that, over the preceding twenty-five years, I learned my dozen-ish languages so far.
And on the same basis, over the weeks and months of social distancing to come, more: more languages, of course, but also music; the work I have to do, of course, but also the readings I've wanted to do (exhausting whole authors, the history of alternative history, etc.), the music I've wanted to try to play or sing through (I specialize in parodies ft. Jenny's cat), and more. And you? What will you do with your emerging good relationship to time?
In a future post, I can say more about language-learning in particular. Here I want to end by acknowledging that this post seems pretty bougie--and yet I think there are ways in which 'bougie' is under pressure, too. I have the impression that a lot of people are faced with differently structured time, and I've tried to speak to that as I can: by noting that, although the context is novel, the situation resembles long traditions of learning. Of course what anybody chooses to do with that is up to them, so I hope this post has been useful to you.
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