¡No entiendo!

Last year I submitted what I thought was my greatest intellectual achievement, the result of countless nocturnal library visits and excessive amounts of Tesco Finest sugary treats. Begrudgingly, I later realised that my greatest intellectual achievement had in fact come many years before, in a haze of Sesame Street and shoulder pads. Within a matter of months in the late eighties, I effortlessly moulded from a cooing, giggling dependent into a chattering master of the English language.

There remains a fierce debate about how a person acquires their first language, or second, or as many as they are exposed to during early childhood. Academics however remain in general agreement that this ability rapidly deteriorates; if you are monolingual at age 12, sorry, but you will never master a second language as you may have done aged five.

And so here I am, a decade too late surrounded by misleadingly colourful grammar books and Spanish-English dictionaries. I returned to the linguistic drawing board a week ago, to be greeted by an eclectic array of cartoon characters helping me each very-slow step of the way. The necessity of such child-like methods is humbling, more so for a person who has been surrounded by the British arrogance of not needing to learn another language, as English has permeated some of the most rural parts of our globe.

No, linguistic ability is not a necessity for travel; I have booked rooms with Croatians and arranged bus journeys with Cambodians without ever speaking a word of each others’ language. But with six billion people and five to six thousand languages, monolinguals are a lonely minority in the world. With a language comes an insight into society that cannot be gained from a guidebook, and one which is evidently more rewarding than conversing in basic sign language.

With over a hundred hours of lessons left, I expect to spend many of the coming weeks in a perpetual state of linguistic confusion, cautiously stringing sentences together where necessity demands. But I look forward to the coming weeks with impatient enthusiasm, safe in the knowledge that I would rather endure temporary confusion than One Hundred Years of Solitude.