{"id":1306,"date":"2013-08-14T08:09:10","date_gmt":"2013-08-14T12:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/?p=1306"},"modified":"2020-10-02T13:43:48","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T17:43:48","slug":"my-late-life-language-learning-part-2-it-all-began-because-i-started-losing-at-gin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/2013\/08\/14\/my-late-life-language-learning-part-2-it-all-began-because-i-started-losing-at-gin\/","title":{"rendered":"My Late-Life Language Learning Part 2: It All Began Because I Started Losing at Gin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Self-proclaimed “old, retired guy” Dick Mills is sharing his adventures learning French in this series titled “My Late-Life Language Learning”. In case you missed it, here is Part One<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Passport1\"<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

What does it take to motivate someone to take on the challenge of learning a new language?\u00a0 There must be as many answers as there are new learners out there.\u00a0 Remember, now, that we are talking about old folks \u2013 people who are presumably past the (now pass\u00e9<\/i>) traditional age-65 retirement milepost.\u00a0 That leaves out the need to satisfy a job requirement as a main motivator, because I, and the other folks I\u2019m talking about, don\u2019t have those kinds of jobs!\u00a0 So what did it for me?<\/p>\n

For me, getting into learning French happened \u2013 I suspect, typically \u2013 because of a mix of things.<\/b><\/p>\n

Thing One:<\/b>\u00a0 I have a daughter whom I watched as she slowly evolved from a snuggly armful into the usual incomprehensible teen; then \u2013 amazingly \u2013 became a serious college student.\u00a0 And after that she kept going, onward and upward.\u00a0 It gradually became clear to me that she was probably headed higher on the success ladder than I had managed to climb during my working-for-others years.<\/p>\n

And besides that, she started beating me at Gin.<\/i><\/p>\n

French was one of her college majors, and a lot of what she was doing was in France, and in French.\u00a0 Just one example:\u00a0 she somehow bludgeoned her way past the roadblocks and became the only woman \u2013 and, horror of horrors, an American woman! \u2013 in an economics class at the elite Science Po<\/i>, a really big-deal school, to which wannabe French prime ministers and such struggle to be admitted.<\/p>\n

Well, harrumph!\u00a0 So, OK, she can do that, in a foreign language, and in a foreign country.\u00a0 Well, maybe I\u2019ll show folks (folks like daughters) that I can still do a few things, too.\u00a0 And so I signed up for the beginning-French course at the Harvard Extension School.<\/p>\n

So Thing One for me was nothing more than that old competitive instinct<\/i> \u2013 the urge not to be one-upped, and especially not by a little twerp whom I used to beat at Gin!<\/p>\n

The urge to win \u2013 it\u2019s a powerful motivator.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t the only thing that helped to get me hooked on French.<\/p>\n

Thing Two:<\/b>\u00a0 Demaris, my wife, was working on a degree, also at the Extension school, and she needed two years of a language.\u00a0 So, why should she not choose French, and we would do it together?\u00a0 And that\u2019s what we did, teaming in all the classes, and drilling each other on the \u201ccrunchy\u201d stuff, like verb conjugations and noun genders.\u00a0 It gave the two of us \u2013 married for a gazillion years \u2013 a chance to work together, in an entirely new way, toward a common goal.<\/p>\n

Thing Two, then, was this opportunity to team with my best buddy (and wife).\u00a0 This almost, but not quite, made drilling on those conjugations and those genders and those spellings (with <\/span>accents!) seem like fun.\u00a0 But the \u201cfun\u201d wasn\u2019t the main boost from my Thing Two.\u00a0 The real kicker was the different modes of learning that become available when two people do it together<\/i> \u2013 maybe not for everyone, but for me it made a huge difference.<\/p>\n

So we had some fun, and we did some hard work, and \u2013 I won\u2019t kid you \u2013 it was not a small challenge for an old guy who had spent a lot of time in his past life learning . . . but not recently!<\/p>\n

And I still wouldn\u2019t have done it if it hadn\u2019t been for one more thing.<\/p>\n

Thing Three:\u00a0 <\/b>I fell in love with Paris!\u00a0 I discovered for the first time that I like everything French \u2013 France, the French people, their culture, their history, their literature . . . but most of all I love enjoying, basking in, everything about Paris in French<\/span>!<\/p>\n

Years ago I used to travel there for work.\u00a0 I had a job for a dozen years that took me to Paris (and a bunch of other far-away places) about four times a year, and in Paris I would see the Paris airport, and Paris hotel rooms, and Paris offices and conference rooms, and Paris taxis.\u00a0 But I only spoke English, and I never really<\/span> saw anything<\/span>.\u00a0 Even earlier, as a tourist I had done the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre \u2013 in English, of course \u2013 and I didn\u2019t see anything then, either.<\/p>\n

And then I did; I began to see everything!<\/i>\u00a0 And mostly because of that daughter I told you about.\u00a0 She lived in Paris for a year, and Demaris and I spent a couple of (small) chunks of that year tagging along behind her, beginning to use our, at the time still minimal, new capability in the language.<\/p>\n

\"dm_paris\"<\/a>And that made all the difference.\u00a0 A new world began to open to us; we could actually become, haltingly at first, resident parts of the local scene.\u00a0 We staked our claim on \u201cour\u201d table at the corner caf\u00e9 for our coffee-and-croissant \u201cpetit d\u00e9jeuner<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0 After a few days we didn\u2019t have to order our breakfast; it just showed up when we sat down!\u00a0 We began to greet the regulars taking their coffee at le<\/i> zinc<\/i> (the counter, where it\u2019s cheaper); we would take our turn reading one of the communal journals<\/i> (newspapers) from the common pile.\u00a0 And most Parisian of all, we would sometimes sit for hours, watching the energetic life of the city begin on the street outside.<\/p>\n

It was really Thing Three that did it for me.\u00a0 I had pried open \u2013 by just a crack \u2013 the door to another cultu\"My<\/a>re, another world, another way of living and of looking at life.\u00a0 And it was ownership of my modest capability in the language that helped me to realize what would be available to me if I were really<\/span> to commit to learning French!<\/p>\n

It was sitting over my morning coffee-and-croissant breakfast when I really committed.\u00a0 I decided that I would accept the challenge of moving out of the \u201cbeginning\u201d level and calling myself an \u201cintermediate\u201d French learner.\u00a0 But that\u2019s a story that will have to wait \u2018til next time.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Continue the journey in Part 3<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

Self-proclaimed “old, retired guy” Dick Mills is sharing his adventures learning French in this series titled “My Late-Life Language Learning”. In case you missed it, here is Part One. What does it take to motivate someone to take on the challenge of learning a new language?\u00a0 There must be as many answers as there are…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[542801],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1306","post","type-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archived-posts"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1306"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1315,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions\/1315"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}