From the years 1997 to 2006, I studied roughly 4 times as much Italian as I did A Greek. Admittedly, it is very difficult to calculate, but if I’m wrong for those quantities it’s not by much. 18 years later, I can speak Italian fluently, if not better than I did in 2006 and yet before I restarted my Greek studies a month ago, not more than 50 words of A Greek remained with me. Almost all of it was gone. Why did so much of my Italian remain but so little of my A Greek was lost? Although μυριαδες in the spoken Latin community have already discovered the rather obvious fact that speech is the way to retain a target language, this still leaves the larger problem unsolved as what to do during the long periods between interacting with a Greek-speaking partner.
Yes, of course, we need to speak Greek as much as possible, but all too often it is difficult to muster more than an hour or two per week, especially when you’re just starting out and haven’t yet found partners willing to waste time on you. I’ve tried talking to myself and it does help but I still think there is a more effective way.
So I’m going to try to following experiment. I’ve decided that speaking words in which real emotion is involved or when you have to literally use the target language to actually save your life that that is a far more effective reinforcer than merely uttering words of little consequence (pretty bad English sentence but you get the idea). For example, when I was Italy, I did not jump through all the bureaucratic hurdles properly in terms of getting my visa renewed. So I had to go down to the questura and try to pull some strings in the hopes that they might bend the rules for me. Miraculously, I got lucky and this actually worked. I think that process of using Italian so as to avoid the enormous inconvenience of having to go to Switzerland and then reenter the country did loads more for my Italian than 5 hours of reading a novel.
So here is my plan. I’m actually rather impressed with ChatGpt’s ability to translate Greek. Even if it’s wrong, it can serve as a training wheel until I find something better. Several of the things I speak throughout the day, particularly those with real emotion involved, I’m going to translate them into Greek, then repeat them as if I actually said them in real life. In that way, I might be able to bind some emotion to some of the words I speak in Greek and hopefully they will stick better.
Ok, so here are some of the first words I’m going to practice speaking. I recently suffered an extremely disappointing rejection. This woman was perfect, spoke 6 languages, very easy to get along with, we had two dates but then she sent me this killer text message:
Back from my road trip. Okay, so I need to tell you that I am not interested in dating. I like you as a person, but not in that way. And I may go dancing tomorrow, hopefully we can remain on good terms.
There are a few colloquial expressions which are hard for a computer to understand, so to make it more explicit we’ll go with:
I’ve returned from my journey. So I need to tell you that I am not interested in being in love with you. I like you as a friend, but not erotically. And I may go dancing tomorrow, hopefully we can remain friends.
Now, again, the above English is quite cringeworthy, but we’re not worried about it. So ChatGpt renders this as:
Ἐπέστρεψα ἐκ τῆς ὁδοιπορίας μου. Χρὴ οὖν λέγειν σοι ὅτι οὐκ ἐθέλω ἐρᾶν σοῦ. Φίλος μέν εἰμι σοῦ, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἐρωτικῶς. Καὶ ἴσως χορεύσω αὔριον, ἐλπίζω φίλοι μεῖναι.
Undoubtedly, the Ancients would not have said this but it doesn’t matter, we’re just trying to get our bearings with the language. After we read more, we’ll find better way of expressing similar sentiments.
The next step is to speak those words out-loud, record them, then listen to them several times and let those wounds sink in and gradually have them become ingrained in your memory.
In this way, it might be possible to use the powers of emotion to learn language more effectively.
