Babel Fish

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

― Nelson Mandela

I have an ear for languages. I rarely progress past a certain level of fluency - around the point when the grammar starts to get really hard, and I have to put a whole lot more work into it, I usually fall down. I don't always find the time or energy (or money!) to take classes, and I've never been someone who studies well on my own - I much prefer the structure of school to distance-learning, even if I only go to class once a week.

Common wisdom has always been that if you want kids to find languages easy, then raise them speaking more than one, because they're much easier to pick up as a child. I don't know how true this is for everyone, but it's certainly been that way for me. The surprising thing, though, is that some of the languages that come most naturally are ones I had little or no exposure to as a child.

I grew up in Menorca, which means I had to know Castilian (regular) Spanish and Catalan - schools teach in both, switching back and forth between, and businesses use both or either. (Government changed from Castilian Spanish to Catalan in the last eighties and early nineties, much to the horror of many of the island's inhabitants - even in 2014 it's still common to find road signs defaced and the Castilian spelling of things written in. Frankly, I don't blame them. I don't like Catalan either.)

In addition to Catalan and Castilian Spanish, many inhabitants of Menorca speak a dialect called Menorquín or Menorquí, which is spoken nowhere but the island. Kids don't want to be left out, and the town kids spoke it while playing, so I learned it too, though never as well as I'd have liked.

After moving back to England, I attended a private school for a while, where they taught Latin. Classics are avoided in state schools in England (though some let you take them as extras, after school), but my little private girls' school taught Latin as part of the general curriculum. I only took it there for a year - the school closed the year after I started learning it - but it's something I'd like to go back to at some point. I enjoy the structure of Latin.

In 1992, I had an au pair from Northern Spain, who gave me daily lessons in Basque. The uninitiated might think this is just another Spanish dialect, easily learned - wrong. Basque is what's known as a language isolate - it's not related to any other language on the planet - and I found it brutally hard, and never continued.

All English school kids learn some amount of French, or at least they did in my day. My school made you take French from Year 7 until the end of Year 9, and then a second language (Spanish or German; I took Spanish because I was lazy) for Year 8 and Year 9. In Year 10 you can carry on either or both, but you have to do at least one (I dropped French - there just weren't enough hours in the week. I needed Hermione's Time-Turner). So I took three years of French, plus four extra years of Spanish, and got to a reasonable level of fluency in both, though I wish I'd carried on with French instead of the useless art and drama classes I ended up taking. I also wish I'd tackled German instead of lazily choosing a language I already spoke - though I had a German boyfriend all through high school, it is one language that I've never learned and always wanted to. Though I did pick up ancient Nordic runes from my German boyfriend - not a language per se, but I've always liked symbols and codes.

I picked up basic Greek in my last two years of high school, purely for fun. I needed to know the alphabet anyway, for math and physics (and occasionally biology) so it didn't seem like a hardship to learn a bit more. It was handy when we went on holiday to Corfu for two weeks at the end of Year 10, too - all the road signs were in Greek, so I ended up the designated navigator every day.

After school, I fell into Italian, sort of against my will. I briefly dated a guy in Spain (when I moved back there in my teens) who was from Naples. He spoke no English; I spoke no Italian at the time. I figured we could meet in the middle and speak Spanish - we were in Spain, after all - but no. He couldn't handle Spanish. So I learned basic Italian. Though the relationship was brief, I used the Italian again when we had an Italian lodger who avoided house rules by refusing to learn English (I can say "please flush the toilet" with the best of them!) and a third time when my doctor ordered me to take up opera to help improve my lungs after repeated bouts of pneumonia. Now I'm supposed to be learning properly, in preparation to live in Milan, but my plans keep falling by the wayside - once again there are not enough hours in the day to do all that needs doing. The handy thing about being brought up speaking Spanish is that Catalan, Italian and Portuguese (which I don't speak, but can sometimes translate) - and even French at times - come much more easily, as the Romance languages have similar structures.

When I got the head injury in 2005 and lost my memory, I lost many of my language skills. D'oh. I can still read and translate - poorly - in Spanish and Catalan and sometimes Italian and French, but can't have a conversation. I can read the Greek letters but have no idea what any of the words mean. The funny thing about my memory since the brain damage is that I still have some of the information in my brain, but it's no longer organised the way it used to be and I often don't know that I have information about a subject until I need to access it. Even nine years later, it's common for a subject to come up (language or anything else), upon which I find I have a wealth of knowledge to impart. Afterwards friends will look at me like, "I didn't know you knew anything about..." (Australian snakes / the Dogon people of Mali / how to build ships / cross-pollination of pepper plants / 18th century French court clothing / etc ad infinitum...) Yeah, I didn't know I knew anything either, till I needed it. Due to this oddity, I hold on to the possibility that my language skills will make a miraculous return if I ever find myself in the middle of a bunch of Greeks / Italians / Menorquí people.

After the brain damage and the resulting fallout, I needed a change, so one day, out of the blue, I bought myself a DS game called My Japanese Coach. I was hooked from the first lesson. That autumn I booked myself on a part-time Japanese course at our local uni, and here I am four years later. Everyone thought I was crazy and tried to discourage me. "Why do you want to learn Japanese? You've never learned anything like it before. You can't use it in a career..." Both reasons were exactly why I wanted to learn it. Japanese was the first thing I'd ever done, in my entire life, that was mine. It wasn't for school, it wasn't future career planning, it wasn't because it would help me do my job better or because I was dating a guy who spoke it or because I intended to take a vacation there. It was for no reason other than it was fun and I wanted to. While I'd always enjoyed learning other languages - and everything else I learned - I'd never done anything in my life purely because I wanted to. Every choice I'd ever made, everything I'd learned, every book I'd read and CD I'd listened to, every hobby I'd done, had been about either pleasing my parents, taking recommendations from friends and boyfriends, or acquiring skills that might help me somewhere down the line. Japanese wasn't any of those things. I didn't think I'd ever use it. Japanese was mine.

I'm off school this semester, due to lack of money and the pressures of moving house, but in the autumn I plan to go back to Japanese and pick up Mandarin, if I'm near a school that teaches it. (My current university does, but I don't know where I'll be living come autumn.) I'd also like to start Cantonese, but I haven't found a part-time course yet. Those two are half-fun and half-future planning. With China being the economic power it is these days, it seems smart to speak the languages, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't enthralled by the challenge. It's been a while since I took up something right from scratch, with no prior knowledge - I think Japanese was the last thing, back in 2009. I always like to have something to get my teeth into.

Not all languages come well to me. I seem to have a mental block against Russian and Hebrew - I've tried to learn them several times, and it's never gone well. It's not the writing systems either - in addition to the western alphabet I read Greek upper and lowercase, Nordic runes, hiragana, katakana and some kanji; there's no logical reason why I shouldn't be able to learn Russian and Hebrew. It's just a mental thing. I've never tried Arabic, and that is one that I really should have learned a long while ago, given my job. There are a dozen languages that would help me in my job as a social worker in South and East London - Yoruba, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi are at the top of the list. And I want to learn Vietnamese and Korean some day, just because they're beautiful.

If I lived another hundred years I would only make a dent in all the things I want to learn.

I can never decide whether that fact makes me sad or happy.