Spring Mountain Spring Moon
Apparently the dropout rate for language instruction is incredibly high. I believe it. There were several drop out points along the way in my Latin learning, moments when the thickness of my resistance seemed impenetrable.
Read the other day that it takes 600 hours of practice to become fluent in a foreign language. The same article said that learning a language was just hard, not impossible. Now it’s beginning to appear that this article had it right.
Thing is, it seems like I have way over 600 hours of practice translating. Now this article referred to learning, say, French, and admitted that other languages like Mandarin could take much longer. Maybe fluency and accuracy in translation are different, I don’t know, but it’s taken me a long time to get where I am and that’s still far from 100%.
Like most pilgrims, the journey was key to the adventure, but the destination has proved worthy of the path. Rationales for learning Latin developed over time. One was the third phase desire to keep the brain active, creating new neural pathways. The second, or was it the original one, involved making the stories of the Metamorphoses a deep and accessible resource for writing. The third was to challenge my self-perception as one who could not learn a language.
The first I don’t know how to measure. The second has been happening all along the way and, happily, the third was a successful challenge. Challenging self-perceived limitations is an important facet of life at any age, perhaps more so as we move well into our third phase.
