A slower learning pace

Over two years ago, I decided to learn Spanish from scratch and thanks to new tools tapping into modern technology, including now AI, I thought it would be a cake-walk compared to the horrible methods I used in the past and during all my youth when I set to learn English, German and Italian. 

Since my return to language learning, I found out the hard way that some “kinks” got in the way of my “gift for learning foreign languages”. 

Now, my progress is more slower and no later than yesterday, I stumbled when I was ask by my AI tutor what flowers were in my garden, I could name two or three species like daisies and columbines, but stumbled lamentably when I was looking for the equivalent names in Spanish for lavender and lupine, but couldn’t even remember them in English or French. 

I thought something might be going wrong with my memory. Sure, there’s a difference between forgetting and having trouble retrieving a word. What reassured me, however, was that this was not really a failure of knowledge. I knew perfectly well what lavender and lupine looked like; what failed me was the retrieval of their names. And that distinction may become increasingly important as we grow older. 

Perhaps learning a language later in life is less about how much we can absorb than about how quickly we can retrieve what we have already learned. The vocabulary may still be there, somewhere in the crowded attic of the brain, but finding just the right box can take a little longer. 

So I should stop blaming my “gift for languages” and start making allowances for the rather more crowded filing cabinet in my head. The good news is that curiosity is still working perfectly well—and as long as that’s the case, I intend to keep opening new drawers, even if I sometimes have to wait a little longer to find what I put in them...