TRAVEL SERIES
Language Learning Goes Hand in Hand with Travel
…and I love both!
Sharing Randomly shared an article about languages — one of my passions. If you haven’t gathered from my writing, travel is my other.
Schoolgirl French
When I was at school, I had a choice of French or German. I chose French because I thought it sounded sexier than German. The fact that my name is French may have had something to do with it – I can’t remember. I still think French sounds sexier than German. To me, a German speaker sounds angry! I still can’t speak German although I look like I should. Travelling in Germany, I’m often mistaken for a local.
Add Japanese
I loved learning French. I topped the class and didn’t have to study hard. At University, I continued with my French studies and took on Japanese as well. There wasn’t a lot of language choices way back then.
I noticed when I watched world movies that by the end of the movie I could understand the dialogue without reading the subtitles. It wasn’t until later in life I realised maybe I should have put this talent to some use. As a teenager, I dreamed of becoming a diplomatic interpreter and travelling the world. Dreams, ah!
Learning Italian
The diplomatic interpreter never eventuated but six kids later, I do travel the world. When I visited Italy, I thought it was the most beautiful language and instead of signing up for classes, hooked up with an Italian man. Sicilian, actually.
Learning Spanish
Then in 2019, I spent a month in Spain, came home and signed up for Spanish classes. I’m still learning Spanish. It’s a comparatively easy language to learn — because it’s Latin-based it makes perfect sense to me. My problem is I’m losing my short term memory so have to study very hard to retain vocabulary. I need to be immersed in it!
Learning Portuguese
To challenge myself even further, I signed up for Portuguese classes too. I love Portugal — not so much the Portuguese language — but I thought with Spanish and Portuguese under my belt, I could confidently travel South America.
Not learning Russian
On my last trip to Europe, I ventured to Russia. I’ve always loved reading Russian novels – in English. I landed in St Petersburg with no Russian phrases at my fingertips.
Calling an Uber was an unmitigated disaster and I had to resort to taking a taxi which cost me dearly. AU$138 — to be exact. He quoted me around $50 which I reluctantly accepted. I had no idea of the conversion rate. In my defence, I was in an extreme amount of pain from the damage I had done to my leg the previous day in climbing to the very top of the tower in Tallinn.
I digress. Not only did I know no spoken words apart from nyet, I couldn’t read any of the signs. They were all written in the Cyrillic alphabet which takes a bit of getting used to. Of necessity, I figured out Cyrillic for restaurant, supermarket and pharmacy. I don’t recommend visiting Russia without a few fundamentals of the language. You may survive in St Petersburg — I did — but don’t think they’ll speak English for you anywhere else, including Moscow.
Travel plans
Unbelievably, I’m planning my next trip to the Balkans — Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria — my son lives in Belgrade. And none of the languages I’m studying will be of much help to me there, but I’ve heard that learning another language — any language — keeps the brain functioning at an optimum level as new pathways have to be created.
So, I’m having fun learning languages and keeping my brain fit and active! It’s a win-win!
