Language Learning: Tower of Babel Revisited!

We have asked for prayer as we seek to master Spanish--before it murders us! Well, in an effort to help you grasp what is involved in acquiring a new language to the point of being reasonably fluent in it, let me explain some of the daily issues we wrestle with.

A Peruvian friend who is fluent in both English and Spanish gave me this illustration. Imagine you are a recovering stroke victim. You know how to walk and move your arms, but you cannot quite get that foot to obey what you think in your head. You struggle to raise your arm or flex your hand. You know HOW to do all these activities, but your brain does not respond at the rate it used to do. You must retrain your brain. THAT is what we are doing with our minds in the process of language learning.

Pam and I know what we want to express, but we cannot get the words we know in Spanish to come out at the rate we desire. Or, we do not even know the vocabulary we need to express some concept. So our brain does a fast "search" of "currently available vocabulary" for words that maybe will approximate what we want to say. Yes, the Spanish language can express everything we can utter in English--and, I am learning, sometimes Spanish is even richer with amazingly more flexibility and variety than in English! But OUR BRAINS just do not seem to want to cooperate with OUR DESIRES to express our thoughts. We have so much vocabulary to gain, and it seems so little time to acquire it.

To further illustrate the vocabulary challenge: I am teaching a Master's level class, The Use of the Old Testament in the New. All students have a B.A. or better who are in my class. So here I sit, reading student papers--but with my Spanish-English Dictionary in hand! I have been a college or seminary professor for more than 25 years. I occasionally have had to look up a word I might read in a student paper written in English. But in this class taught only in Spanish, I regularly look up words the students use. They are functioning with a college-level or better writing vocabulary. I maybe have an eighth-grade reading vocabulary. You get the picture. Once the translation has been made, I understand all that they say, but there are a couple of additional steps in there in the process of understanding that I have not had to do in a class taught in English. Not only does this take more time to grade papers, but it is mentally draining as well.

Basically, we are re-mapping the mind! Now I hope you can pray more specifically for us concerning "language learning."