Language lover Patricia reveals the surprising reason she joined the uTalk Challenge
Patricia’s one of the 12 uTalk Challengers to make it all the way to December – and she’s already completed language number 12 (Amharic). Some of the other languages she’s learnt since January include Basque, Czech, Farsi, and Kazakh (not to mention Icelandic, Latvian and Esperanto last year). Here’s her story…
You know by now if you’ve been following my adventures that one reason I took the uTalk Challenge in 2016 was that I wanted to travel. Well, at least in my head. I think it’s impossible to learn a new language without somehow learning about the culture behind the language, because the culture is part of the language. But you already knew that about me. So today I’d like to share with you the more obscure reason I took up the uTalk Challenge this year: I wanted to test the limits of my brain.
I was genuinely curious to find out if there was a limit to the number of languages my brain could take in. Is it possible that at a certain point, my brain would say “please stop, no más, I can’t take it any more”? Essentially, would my brain get tired, confused, or just plain irritated with the number of languages I challenged it with? Surprisingly, no. Actually, I noticed quite the opposite: my brain got better and better at learning! I was stunned when I completed the Essentials of my last two languages, Hungarian and Amharic (definitely not easy ones!), in ten days.
I also felt like learning new languages somehow “consolidated” the languages I already knew. Is it because my brain was constantly comparing and contrasting in the background? Hungarian, although remotely related to Finnish, sounds nothing like it, but my brain did register that the Hungarian “vaj” sounded a lot like the Finnish “voi” (butter). The same occurred with Lithuanian and Polish, or with Greenlandic and Danish. Parallels were also drawn in sentence structure or use of certain words. It even made me think about how I use languages I know. Learning new languages was a great exercise for my brain in all this comparing and contrasting, which served me to consolidate a lot more the languages I already knew. It did the opposite of “confusing” me.
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I also noticed that when I revisited the languages I had learned a few months prior, they were somehow more intuitive, as if my brain had not only memorized some words and sentences, but had actually absorbed them, analyzed them, and deciphered the patterns in them to make future use and learning easier. Perhaps this is what goes on in children’s heads when they’re learning their first language? I came to the realization that oftentimes, we get too caught up in trying to understand grammar and syntax and all of that too quickly when we should be letting our brain naturally figure out what we’re learning. I now have no doubt that it’s something the brain is naturally programmed to do and that we shouldn’t underestimate its capacities.
So whatever reason you have to not learn a language, I say set it aside and give your mind a chance to learn. I guarantee you’ll be surprised by the results and you may make a few new discoveries in the process 😉
The uTalk Challenge 2017 is now open! Find out more and sign up at utalk.com/challenge. Good luck!
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