My Language Learning Odyssey
A different language is a different vision of life. – Federico Fellini
Why am I even talking about languages?
Because I’m not only obsessed with the English language, I’m obsessed with them all. And like the characters in Coldharbour, I’ve grown up in a multicultural and multilingual environment, plus the places I’ve been to have informed Coldharbour (and later projects, like Walpurgisnacht). My writing would be very different if I hadn’t grown up in the house I have or had the experiences I’ve had, and since a few people have enquired about my history with languages (especially since I’m in a constant balancing act between studying them and actually writing), here’s a rundown.
For reference, if you’re not a language geek like I am, I’ll refer to the CEFR language levels throughout: A1 (elementary – think basic tourist stuff), A2 (lower intermediate – GCSE for Brits), B1 (intermediate – A-Level, can use a subjunctive), B2 (upper intermediate – conversationally solid, grammatically competent), C1 (fluent in the practical sense – you can probably listen/read material made for natives and hold a wide variety of conversations without difficulty), C2 (boss level).
German – current level: C1, still using (2000ish-present day)
I grew up with a parent whose sentences were a mix of English, German, and Yiddish, due to our Jewish heritage. To be brutally honest, it took me a very long time to realise that the Yiddish was, in fact, Yiddish, and not just a weird, old-fashioned German. As a pre-teen, the majority of my TV was German (to this day, my knowledge of Noughties pop music skews towards the European) and I jumped at the chance to study it at school for five years, in which I went on four trips to the Rhineland.
As a young adult, I continued to visit Germany, this time to Berlin, but I let my German drift away, despite my half-hearted attempts at watching series or using apps that just frustrated me because I already knew that ‘apple’ was ‘der Apfel’ and so on.
And then my father died. And all the German and Yiddish in the house just… evaporated. I couldn’t even bring myself to use the language until five years later, when I discovered Easy German and binge-watched everything they had. Luckily, because I had been around the language so young, my German comprehension was back to a solid B2 level within three or four months. I then bought some solid grammar and vocabulary books (because I was never taught grammar in a systematic way, and German grammar is beyond systematic), and started to have speaking sessions on the platform I also teach on.
And I’m still going – I’m determined to have my German as good or even better as my Italian, so it can take pride of place as my second language again. As for Yiddish, well, I can understand it, but as it’s such an endangered language and there’s no one left in the family that uses it…
Spanish – past level: B1-B2, will resurrect next year (2017-18)
Now, if we ignore three years of secondary school French, Spanish was the second foreign and first Romance language I seriously tried to learn. And it wasn’t for fun, no. I was moving to Mexico to teach English, so the school director advised us all to ‘brush up on Duolingo’. Yes, Duolingo. A combination of that, a weak in-person teacher, and my own hastily-found conversation tutor led to my comprehension being pretty good, but my speaking was poor. It didn’t help that all of our Mexican friends spoke English to a greater or lesser extent, thus proving that just moving to a country doesn’t mean you’re genuinely immersed in its language. I actually studied Spanish more intensely when I returned to the UK, as I was initially planning to find a job in Spain (i.e. much closer to home). However, after a glorious few weeks travelling around the country with my much-improved Spanish, I took a different opportunity based here. Regrets? I have a few. But anyway, while I found getting my head around a Romance language very difficult (again, my experience was with Germanic languages as a child, i.e. the best time to acquire a language without too much of a headache), I knew it was at least possible. Which led me to…
Italian – current level: C1, still using (2019-present day)
I wanted to travel around Italy and it’s one of those countries where knowing the local language helps. It was as simple as that. The grammar and vocabulary is similar enough to Spanish that I at least felt like I wasn’t starting from scratch, but I soon fell head over heels with the language, thanks to my teacher Rossella, with whom I still have lessons seven years on. I now have many Italian students, I’ve been to Naples (there were also plans to go to Rome, but I tested positive for Covid the morning of my flight), and I have very strong feelings about cappuccino timing, the quality of RAI programming, and bureaucracy. Not to mention how Rome in July sounds like Dante’s Inferno.
I initially reached C1 in Italian around 2022 and with some short breaks/hiccups, I’m back at maintaining the language. I really don’t have any goals for C2 in either Italian or German, just because that is so time-intensive and it’s just not necessary for my using the languages in my everyday life, which I already do. Plus, I still have issues with prepositions and I can’t roll my R.
Portuguese – past level: B1, no plans to take it back up (2020-21)
This is a great example of languages being one of my special interests and having too much time during the pandemic. I loved the sound of Brazilian Portuguese and had a really great teacher – plus my reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary started at a very solid level due to the similarities with Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Italian. But I was more focused on Italian, dipped back into both Spanish and German briefly, and a temporary break turned into… well, five years, I guess. It’s a really lovely language, but I don’t have enough of a cultural tie or an urgent need to pick Portuguese back up.
Romanian – my next goal (probably in the 2030s at this rate)
Romanian. Once my German, Italian, and Spanish are all solidly C1, I’ll be coming for you. I grew up intensely fascinated by vampires, my favourite actor is Romanian, one of my favourite poems is Romanian, and I just love the culture and the language itself. It looks bizarre and sounds gorgeous – it’s still a Romance language, but with strong Slavic and even Germanic influences. It’s a notoriously difficult language to learn in terms of European ones, mostly, it seems, because of the dearth of good resources. However, unlike my other languages, my goal with Romanian is more or less comprehension. I can already partially understand the language when I listen to it, but that’s my other languages doing a lot of heavy lifting and filling in the blanks. I just want to be able to know… alright, what Sebastian Stan is saying in Romanian interviews, and read Luceafărul without issue. I’ll also probably take this language at a much more relaxed pace than the others.
My Current Language Routine
Working on languages takes time. All of this ‘fluent in X months’ stuff is genuinely bollocks. At the moment, I’m only balancing German and Italian, which currently looks like a lot of listening to native-level podcasts while studying/revising vocabulary and grammar. I also have regular speaking sessions with my tutors (weekly for German, monthly for Italian), though I know next year I need to make a bit more time for reading and writing.
Depending on what else I have going on in my life, the time I dedicate to my languages varies. For instance, during the summer, I wasn’t intensely writing, so I could spend fifteen hours a week per language, half on proper study, half on listening (while running, cooking, etc.), while at more intense times, this looks more like five to ten hours a week per language and almost only listening.
Either way, I always make sure I make some time in the week for both languages, just like I have to do for running, working out, reading – all of these things need some kind of maintenance or routine. I will also say that I’ve built up this time over years – I didn’t just jump in one day studying Italian for five hours, in the same way I didn’t just wake up one day and run a 5K.
Coldharbour: A Step Behind…
Language is bound tight to heritage in Coldharbour, so here’s Maddie’s perspective on coming to terms with whole worlds she’s not fully part of :
Dad had tried to explain Hanukkah by saying it was basically like doing Friday Night Dinner eight nights in a row, with some extra steps and actually remembering to light the menorah (which had its own fancy name, Hanukiyah) and saying some prayers that made him sound like they were coughing up furballs.
But it was like she was watching a screen go up between them as her dad slipped into a world Maddie didn’t know and couldn’t understand, a whole other language, a whole other way of thinking, and she thought that she might get it now, that look in her mum’s eyes when she’d shown her those family photos and said that the Wildes were Jewish.
Cos that was Maddie now, wasn’t it? A step behind, a second apart.
Coldharbour II: The Dead Land comes out on Halloween. You can pre-order it and read the first in the series, Coldharbour: A Gothic Tale of Love and Death, now.
