Un Bon Mot – Language Learning is Hard…

No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.

– Tolkien, English and Welsh

 I’m thinking this is true, as my Spanish and Portuguese “fluency” languishes… It’s tough to learn languages, and I like doing it. It must be harder if you hate it and only do it because someone tells you it will be useful (as thousands of Canadian schoolchildren are told each year as an explanation for why they are learning French). Knowing languages is probably a useful skill for writers too, so that the foreign phrases they insert are grammatically correct – as well as teaching us what un bon mot means. But if you don’t enjoy it, you might not get far.

 Anyway, I’ve probably just hit the bottom for this semester, and that may be a reason for my lack of progress language-wise. It’s sad – I start each school year fresh off vacation and full of confidence, which always evaporates by November. But I always do survive. 🙂