What's on your mind?

[Kain Nobel]

Languages are strange and fascinating.

'I'll never pretend to be an expert in anything but English, but I did study Spanish for two years. It never really stuck, and now I live around no Spanish speakers so it's pointless for me to even bother. Well, if I ever had to translate a bunch of things in Spanish, I'm sure that knowledge would help, but I doubt I'd be able to determine if it was any better than something tech itself can do on it's own. I'm sure if I travelled, it would come in handy, but I have no plan to ever visit a Spanish speaking country. Certainly, I'd probably like to, but you have to be rich to be travelling and vacationing these days.

One day I was watching Italy news, for no real reason whatsoever, but the topic was Iran's nuclear program and middle eastern geopolitics. Maybe it popped up on my feed or something. Whatever the case, I was shocked how well I could understand every word spoken, clear as English, like I had grew up speaking Italian my whole life. I've never studied one single iota of Italian, and I swear I don't know anything, but it was clearer than Spanish which is what I've studied. I've had similar situations with Pashto too, which was exciting, but... does it even have anything similar to Spanish, Latin or any of the other Romance languages? Possibly, but I just don't know. The Pashto experience was not as clear as Italian was, there was some radio static, but it was still pretty good - I'm confident I could understand about 70% of the Pashto news report, whereas Italian was 100%.

Both were clearer than Spanish is to me, which really puzzles, fascinates and bothers me at the same time.

Maybe visual context of both situations helped. Or knowledge on the subject matter. I'm not a linguist, but I think I could learn multiple languages if I had both the opportunity and need.

Listening to Spanish, I get bits and pieces but everybody talks too fast for me to really catch it, so I consider half of it gibberish. Sometimes I catch enough context to understand what's being said, but most times I really don't, unfortunately. Natural speakers sound like Speedy Gonzales to me and it bothers me that I cannot process it fast enough to understand it fully. To this day, I feel I could have a full conversation in Spanish, but I hesitate to even bother because it just makes the speed of doing business so much slower and more difficult. Nah, I don't like to gum up the gears or mishear/misspeak things, so google translate it is.

I hate to give up on it so easily, but I feel it doesn't have enough utility in my personal life to be worth the hassle, nor does it really serve a professional purpose. In the context of business, I don't want to have to guess and solve mysteries, I just want to be able to do the job right. No misunderstandings. Still fun though. I'll probably still study it throughout my life, casually and occasionally, because it's still a neat language and the one foreign language I'm most likely to encounter in the wild.