Discoveries in learning a new language (Part One)

Choosing Spanish as a new language to learn has been quite revealing for me. Obviously, it is not my first attempt at learning another language. Starting with my native French — and even the Savoyard dialect spoken by my parents — I have gone on to English, German, Italian, Japanese (an incomplete journey), and now Español. 

Along the way, I have encountered a number of challenges and, perhaps more importantly, learned a few things about how we actually learn languages. At this point, I have come to believe that one of the keys to fluency is learning and mastering short blocks of words — the expressions, turns of phrase and idiomatic constructions that make up the sentences we use every day.

Rather than building every sentence one word at a time, we gradually acquire these little linguistic building blocks like assembled Lego pieces, and learn to retrieve them as a unit. That is where I am putting most of my focus today. My grammar and conjugation skills remain, to put it mildly, abysmal! But I am increasingly convinced that I don't need to master everything at once. 

I can work on the grammar later, while first building a sufficiently large collection of expressions that allow me to communicate, react and keep a conversation moving. There is another remarkable difference this time around: AI. Having an always-available, patient and nonjudgmental conversation partner makes an enormous difference. It removes much of the paralyzing fear of making mistakes in conversing with another human who knows the language inside out. 

With the AI robot, I can experiment, make a fool of myself, ask the same question ten times, and try again without embarrassment. But AI cannot eliminate the hardest part of language learning: patience. It can accelerate exposure, practice and correction, but it cannot magically accelerate the transformation that has to take place inside the brain. 

Words and expressions first have to be recognized, then understood, then remembered, and eventually retrieved quickly enough to become a spontaneous vocal reaction. And perhaps that is the most fascinating part of the journey: moving language from the head to the mouth. There is a huge difference between recognizing an expression when we hear it and having it appear naturally in our own speech at the exact moment it’s needed. 

So perhaps learning a language is less about filling the brain with words than about gradually building a collection of linguistic reflexes — little blocks of language that, with enough exposure and repetition, stop feeling like something we have learned and start becoming something we simply know how to say. At my rather advanced age, I am discovering that this transformation takes patience. But I am also discovering that the brain is still willing to surprise us. And that, in itself, is a rather encouraging lesson. 

Tomorrow, we’ll explore how we can push these elements forward...

The quintessential American pinhead

Well, what exactly is a pinhead? This American expression literally means the flat or rounded head of a common metal or plastic pin. Figuratively however its means a foolish person, an informal, insulting word for someone who is stupid, silly, or lacks common sense. 

This makes me think about my president and one could ask what’s the reason for that? Simply because PIN is also the starting letters for Pinocchio and Pinochet (In fact, it’s more, it’s PINOC). The friendly Italian character is known for his propensity to lie even though he’s unconsciously warning us of his flaw through a nose that grows in length while Trump doesn’t even worry about that sinful and despicable habit. 

As for Augusto Pinochet he was a Chilean army officer and military dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. He came to power by leading a violent, US-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, which overthrew the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende. 

Pinochet established a military junta, officially assuming the presidency in 1974. His 17-year regime was defined by severe human rights abuses alongside sweeping free-market reforms. Probably much smarter than Trump but as cruel, mean spirited and consumed by himself. 

Next time, you’re asked for your PIN, just remember those two characters that embody the virtues of our president.

The forgiveness bonus (Part Two)

What described yesterday is not just “forgiveness” in a moral sense; it’s a psychological unburdening, a deliberate act of self‑liberation. The most striking part of my experience is that I didn’t forgive people because they deserved it, but I forgave them because I felt that I deserved the relief. 

That’s the big difference. I stopped treating resentment as a form of justice and treating it as a form of self‑harm. Once I made that shift, forgiveness became less about the other person and more about reclaiming my own mental space. 

With this in mind, the effects I describe feeling lighter, freer, mentally clearer — are exactly what happens when we stop carrying emotional debts that will never be repaid. With the “adult in the room” comment, I tried to express that resentment keeps us all locked in a childish reciprocity: “You hurt me therefore I hold on to it.” Instead, forgiveness breaks that sick symmetry: “You hurt me therefore I rise above it.” That asymmetry is precisely the bonus.

We can elevate ourselves by refusing to stay trapped in the emotional basement where the original injury happened. We step out of the cycle, and in doing so, we gain moral altitude. It’s not superiority in the ego sense — it’s superiority in the developmental sense. We’ve moved to a higher level. I also made an important distinction in not forgiving crimes, atrocities, or moral catastrophes, but in simply forgiving ordinary human failings. 

That’s not inconsistency but a form of discernment. Forgiveness is a personal tool, not a political absolution. We’re using it where it’s meaningful and refusing it where it would be morally incoherent. That’s exactly how mature forgiveness works: Resentment is like a tax, a constant, low‑grade drain on attention, mood, and identity. Forgiveness is a tax cut! 

By forgiving we can remove dozens of tiny emotional charges that were quietly running in the background. The cumulative effect feels like a cleansing because it is one. We can clear psychic clutter that had been accumulating for decades. Most people never do this. They die with their resentments intact, still carrying the weight of injuries that happened 40 years earlier. 

All of this is why we should not allow it.

The forgiveness bonus (Part One)

A few months ago, I took a radical step in deciding, once and for all, to forgive all the folks that I felt had wronged me, over my entire life and for all kinds of reasons like humiliation, treason, bullying or stealing from me. 

In my mind, that forgiveness applied to these bad or unpleasant acts that I thought were perpetrated against me as long as they were not criminal in nature and didn’t involve acts that are judged repulsive in our western society.

For instance, I couldn’t forgive Biden and Trump for letting Netanyahu massacre so many people, destroy Gaza and allow terrorist colonists to terrorize Palestinians living in the West Bank, but I can forgive a boss, a co-worker or a neighbor for being a jerk. 

Still just like a soiled piece of linen where some stains are more stubborn than others and take longer to eliminate, absolving takes more or less time depending on the impact we had allowed it to make on us, and – for me at least – it’s still work in progress. 

As of today, I’m feeling extremely good about my decision, but more importantly as time as now accrued, it’s as if I experienced being a new man, have the sensation of being better all over myself and in particular feeling much relieved, mentally much lighter, energetic and literally freer from what in fact was a constant burden I carried along. 

Truthfully, I can’t really believe that getting rid of resentment, bitterness and hostility could represent such a great cleansing and liberating job for me. From there, I realized that there was a justification in stopping this invading resentment through the act of forgiving and establishing ourselves as the “adult in the room” and as a result soaring well above the individual or the experience we absolved. 

Herein is the bonus that we are guaranteed to receive out of the act of forgiving. This simple but difficult act seriously lightens our load and self-elevates ourselves. Pretty impressive and another excellent reason to put an end to the endless cycle of recriminations. 

Tomorrow, we’ll dig deeper into the subject and explore how this process works in practice...

Foreign languages, my ticket to life!

If I had to guess, I think that the seeds of my attraction to America and its English language were planted the day I ran into a magazine called “Europe- Amérique in the 1950s that I read as soon as I could. It was published by the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) — the US agency running the Marshall Plan. 

Following this, I won a contest at school that took me to Paris, Brussels, Stuttgart, Munich, Innsbruck, the Passo Stelvio, Como Lake and all the way to the UN in Geneva. It made my head dizzy with a taste for internationalism and a bottomless appetite for discovery.

The following fall, as I was entering middle school, I started to learn English and while my dedication to learning that language was lackluster it would suddenly coalesce and explode during my compulsory 16-month military service, where I got myself a “Méthode Assimil” the French gold key to language learning. And I learned English, starting with “My tailor is rich…” 

So much so that upon my discharge I clinched an aircraft mechanic job with TWA in Geneva where I was paired up with a crew of German speaking Swiss guys with whom I had to interact daily in English. A decent mastery of conversational English got me without official certification into the Avoriaz ski school and helped me secure lessons with students that could only communicate in Shakespeare’s language. 

I had found my niche and as I got certified and became a better ski instructor in both French and English, I took a stab at German and got myself a second Assimil method, still without the accompanying audio since I had no cassette player at the time. In between, I taught skiing in Australia for two seasons during their down-under winters that were followed with two stays in Germany where I enrolled at the Sprachinstitut in Tübingen for 6 week each time. 

There, I polished my conversation skills and was ready to add that skill to my quiver as soon as the winter season began. From there, I thought that adding Italian would be the right thing to do and here I was grabbing a third Assimil volume, this time with cassettes, as I finally had a player by then! Because Italian is so closely related to French and the dialect from Savoie, I didn’t feel the need to go too deep into studying that language, but still claimed it as an extra skill of mine. 

This coincided with my scoring a great job with Look on the account of speaking four languages! I would eventually use my Italian and improve on it a lot when I worked with Lange ski boots and started to spend an insane amount of time at the company’s Italian factory. Further down the line and towards the end of my career, I spent quite a bit of time in Japan which encouraged me to learn some basic Japanese, but I found that exercise intensely difficult. 

Two years ago, to prepare for some vacations in Andalusia, I got involved with Spanish and that effort and the pleasure I get out of learning that new language keeps me motivated to pursue my efforts. As anyone could conclude, my focus on languages wasn’t a waste of time!

A cool epitaph!

Everyday, our walk zigzags for 1,430 feet inside the Park City Cemetery and we enjoy the calm away from the heavy morning traffic. Many times, I’ve thinking about epitaphs and why not, one that could be perfect the day I might need one! 

That’s how I got hooked into a few lines of a French song by Georges Moustaki that goes like this: “Nous avons toute la vie pour nous amuser, nous avons toute la mort pour nous reposer." It roughly translates into “We have a whole lifetime to have fun; we have all of death to rest.” 

I find that it possesses a disarming simplicity. Moustaki knew how to wield: a naked truth, devoid of pathos or grand rhetoric, but offering almost a philosophical smile at the human condition. "We have all of life to have fun, we have all of death to rest." 

As an epitaph, it is remarkably apt. It conveys three essential things: A trust in life: as long as it’s here, one must live it, savor it, and embrace it as a playground for learning and connection. A peaceful acceptance of death: not as a threat, but as a natural, inevitable, and almost gentle rest. 

A philosophy of lightness: no tragedy, no drama, just a way of saying, "I’ve done my part; I’ve lived; now I rest." It is neither bleak nor fatalistic. On the contrary, it is a way of saying that some of us chose to live fully, to enjoy life, learn, and love, and that what follows is merely a return to stillness. 

It seems to be tailored-made for me, who love to reflect deeply on life’s trajectory, on aging well, on continuing to grow, and on turning my remaining years into a crescendo rather than a decline. It makes this sentiment rings true and it says I’ve played the game to the very end! 

Who wants another leak?

Just ten days after my nice new fence around my backyard was completed my next door neighbor to the west sent me a pretty rough text message telling me that my contractor and his crew must have had disrupted his irrigation sprinklers line and the a leak that he directly attributed to their negligence during their work had developed on his property. 

When we met, he sounded clearly convinced that his sprinkler underground line has been disturbed by the post excavation work and I realized that he may be right to be suspicious, but I wasn’t 100% convinced. 

This originated from the fact that even though the area is located on a 5 to 10% slope, it seemed quite odd that the water didn’t go into a sloped (diagonal) trajectory, but for strange reasons that disregarded the basic laws of hydrology and gravity, it would have chosen to flow across the fall line, and when we tested the line, the water was gushing out six feet away west from the post and the presumed breakage area when it should have manifested itself near the fence post. 

As a follow up to our in-person meeting, I offered to dig up around the corner post, near the fence, but level with the observed leak, to examine if, and where, there’s a break or fracture on the PVC pipe causing the leakage and the area was bone-dry. 

Either way, I promised to keep him posted. The next day it took me about one hour and a half to dig a hole that was a couple of square feet in surface and about one and a half foot deep. 

I finally come in contact with the white PVC pipe, except that unlike what my neighbor had told me it wasn’t in a straight line, it branched out on a T connection to the leaking area six feet away and 18" deep, a place where none of the fence workers could have disturbed the line. 

Thanks to my calm, patience and personal handy work, I clearly proved to him that his premature conclusion was dead wrong. Saying that he was embarrassed was an understatement!