INTERESTING TIMES

In second grade I had French classes, so I learned a smattering of French then, but never continued it.

In high school I was asked to choose a language to study (the options being French, German, and Spanish); I decided rationally that Spanish was spoken by the largest number of people in the world, so I went that way, taking two years of Spanish in high school and a third year at the local community college (I really didn't like my second-year Spanish teacher, so when I walked into third-year and saw her there, I dropped the class).

In college I was advised that I should have some reading knowledge of German if I wanted to go to grad school in mathematics, so I took a year's worth of German classes. I forget whether that was before or after I went to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria briefly as a tourist.

In grad school I was (as predicted) required to pass reading-comprehension exams in two of French, German, and Russian, on grounds that mathematics research papers have traditionally been written in those languages. I picked French and German because they use familiar alphabets, have lots of cognates, and I'd already studied both of them a little. The reading-comprehension exams amounted to "here's a chapter of an undergraduate math textbook in Language X; come back with an English translation of it in a few weeks," and I passed both of them.

Later in grad school my advisor got funding for me to attend a month-long workshop with him in Prague. The University didn't offer classes in Czech, but there were self-study materials at the library, so I spent a few months before the Prague trip studying Czech, and impressed my advisor on our first day there by walking into a convenience store and saying "Dvacet listeky, prosim" ["twenty mass-transit tickets, please"]. (One ticket cost 4 kroner, or about fifty cents, and would get you on the street-car; two would get you on the faster subway that only served a few places in the city.)

Around 2020 shalmestere installed DuoLingo on her phone and tried to learn some Irish, in honor of her Irish ancestry, but "it made her brain hurt"; she switched to Welsh (where she also has ancestry) and had a better time.

In summer 2022 we visited Wales, so a few months earlier I installed DuoLingo on my phone and we both tried to learn Welsh (not that one needs to speak Welsh to be a tourist there, but it's always cool to learn another language). I can still say things like "Ydy Bailey eisiau mynd am dro?" ["does Bailey want to go for a walk?"]

In Spring 2024 we visited Spain, so a few months earlier we both switched to studying Spanish in DuoLingo. My high school Spanish came back pretty well, and things mostly made sense to me. There are words that according to all the rules should be masculine but are actually feminine, or vice versa, but those are rare.

In Fall 2025 we visited France and Belgium, so a few months earlier we both switched to studying French in DuoLingo, and are still working on that. My grade-school French did not come back so well, though there are lots of helpful cognates, and I stumble over my tongue whenever there's a pronunciation exercise. And I'm reaching the conclusion that I Do Not Like French; it's almost as irrational and unpredictable as English. I'm still having trouble remembering which nouns are which gender (not an issue in English), and which adjectives go before the noun and which after it (not an issue in English, although we have weird rules about in what order to put multiple adjectives), but the real bugbear is pronunciation.

The words "souvent" and "savent" are spelled similarly, but one is pronounced as two syllables and the other as one. Can you guess which is which? Apparently the "ent" ending is silent in verbs, but not in prepositions, or something like that.

The words "aller", "allez", "allé", "allés", "allée", and "allées" are all forms of the verb "to be", which is somewhat irregular in most languages (including French and English), but irregularity isn't the problem here. All six of these words are spelled differently, any one would be grammatically incorrect if substituted for any of the others, and all six are pronounced identically. The phrases "Il court" and "Ils courent" ["he runs" and "they run"] are pronounced identically, as are the feminine equivalents "Elle court" and "Elles courent" (I got a listening exercise wrong in DuoLingo by guessing the wrong one).