A new perk at my job is the opportunity to study languages using the online software Rosetta Stone. I figured I’d give it a try and signed up for an account. I’m not good with languages (despite a reasonable grasp of American English). I have 3/4 of a year of high school German (we moved before I could finish), two years of high school French, and three semesters of college German (the minimum required to graduate, and I scraped by — the trend was not good, I was on track to earn a “D” if I took another class).

I started with the more familiar German a couple weeks ago. I’ve been acing it (except for the pronunciation — I struggle to get the arrow out of the red zone on the meter). I’m still in Unit One, but I’m zipping along. It’s great for building confidence.

Another language I’ve been curious about is Chinese. Just for grins, I started it tonight at home — I chose an emphasis on reading and writing (alphabet unfamiliar) for this. I’ve been through Unit One, Lesson One twice tonight. The native speaker reads text I can see on the screen aloud, and I’m supposed to pick one of four pictures to match the text. The first time through, I scored a whopping 39% correct and took 7 minutes and 40 seconds to complete the exercise. The second time through, I scored a whopping 59% and took 5 minutes and 49 seconds to complete the exercise. A couple of the words were starting to make sense to me, but I was still mostly lost.

It will take me some time before the German becomes foreign to me, but at least the vocabulary is coming back quickly. I’m fascinated at using the same process for Chinese though, since I have zero vocabulary and experience with the language to build upon. I might play with several languages to see if any single language seems more natural than any other.