A while back I was working my shift at a university library reference desk and pondering the nature of human learning. I considered how a person my age has forgotten what it was like to be learning something new and hard, e.g. higher math or fluid mechanics or philosophy or basketball rules...
I decided to relive that feeling, thinking it might make me a better teacher and, as a bonus, keep my ageing brain agile and fit. What better way to test my learning abilities than by trying unfamiliar languages? I was already using the Duolingo app to practice my rusty German skills (reading knowledge of German, with 4 semesters of college German including Scientific German.) To feel like a real beginner, I browsed the available languages and found--Klingon! Boy is this a test. Not merely a foreign language, but an invented language for an alien race. The grammar, word order, spelling, etc. are different from the Germanic languages, so my brain was starting almost from scratch. The app does use the Latin alphabet rather than Klingon script, so I was not totally lost. But close.
One of the most immediate challenges was just training my brain to recognize the unfamiliar sounds. As infants we hear the language spoken by our own family and our ears become accustomed to distinguishing those sounds. Soon infants begin to babble and the babblings contain those sounds. Infants in Japan make different sounds than infants in Canada or Kenya or Spain. By adulthood, we may have a hard time making sounds from other languages that are not contained in our own.
Learning Klingon has made me experience what my own students must have felt when I first drew an integral sign on the blackboard, or a geometry proof, or a list of literary terms or science vocabulary. I did find that my engineer brain was able to pick up certain patterns in the new language, such as figuring out that the word order was object-verb-subject.
After a few weeks of doing German and Klingon on the app, I decided to add another language. Why? I was curious whether my brain could keep several languages straight while I was learning them. An experiment to see how far I can push my brain before it overloads. Yes, I am such a geek that I experiment on my own brain. And now I am blogging about it. Stay tuned for more on my weird personal experiment.