Everyone has plans for retirement, and a key goal for me was refreshing some of the foreign languages I’d studied.
I’ve dabbled in lots of languages, including exotics like Albanian and Hungarian, but wanted to be reasonable and focus on restoring ability in the languages I knew the best: French, Romanian, and Bulgarian.
I lived in France for a year and at one point spoke it quite well. Ditto for Romanian some ten years later. And the year in Romania actually reinforced the French, since much of the reading I did for my dissertation was in that language.
I had only studied Bulgarian for a summer, but really liked it a lot and had also thought the country fascinating when I visited while living in Romania. Several years of effort in a language of the same family, Russian, assisted me with Bulgarian, though only to a point. In fact, the two languages have substantial structural differences as well as the expected variations in vocabulary.
Unlike the pre-Internet days, it’s now easy to get access to real, current texts in foreign languages. No more wondering where your aunt’s pen has gone to.
I quickly discovered that my Romanian was still quite good. I could read newspaper stories with only rare excursions to the dictionary. I do have to look up acronyms, of course, but that works out well because I can go to the Romanian version of Wikipedia. So looking something up actually helps reinforce my skills.
French was very disappointing. No problem with the grammar (there isn’t much, really) but I’d forgotten a lot of common words. I quickly discovered Google Translate and quickly learned that it’s most inadequate, not infrequently giving hilariously inaccurate renderings of colloquial phrases. Instead, I mostly use Reverso which works very well.
Bulgarian was about what I expected. I remembered most of the grammar (much more complicated than even Romanian). I recall grammar passively, though; trying to write or speak would be impossible at the moment. And I had to look up lots and lots of words. Interestingly, Google Translate works well for this. I think it must be because Bulgarian journalists avoid the fairly casual language that’s much used in French publications (in Romanian as well). As with French, though, I wouldn’t trust GT for anything serious; sometimes, as I’ve confirmed with my trusty old dictionary, it wanders far off the mark.
Another tool that’s quite useful is Google’s Language Immersion. It’s an add-on (Extension) to the Chrome browser. You simply choose your language and level and it translates a web page in very close to real time. So, at the moment, I have it set to show Bulgarian at about 40% of full translation. What I get are English language web pages where about 40% of the words show up in Bulgarian (including the Cyrillic alphabet). The words are distributed in a logical fashion and often help me understand how to translate common English phrases.
I don’t use Language Immersion at 100%, though. When LI tries to convert the whole thing it makes the kind of silly errors you see in Google Translate.
Sometimes, I use a program called Quizlet. This is free software that provides the computer equivalent of the 3x5 flash cards I use for French and Bulgarian. The program works well, but I prefer the ability to quickly sort cards the way I do with the physical versions. One advantage of Quizlet is that, for more common languages, it will pronounce the foreign word for you. That doesn’t help me with French, but it would be great if available for Bulgarian where the word stress can take unexpected positions (GT doesn’t show stress). Unfortunately, Quizlet doesn’t speak Bulgarian.
Languages are fun and the web helps make them accessible. Next, I’m going to try podcasts. They should help with comprehension. As for actually speaking, that remains to be seen. This particular brain may be too old for that much rewiring.
