Hey, if Irma Rombauer could have “The Joy of Cooking” I can have “The Fun of Learning.” Both use recipes and ingredients put together in a certain order to create something that is delicious and enjoyable.
As part of my work to stretch myself in my learning, I’m trying something “fun” right now: I have a few children’s books in Haitian Creole that I’m translating into English.
It is a good way to get the feel for a language, and a good way to “hear” a language in its more simple form. Children’s books often use simpler tenses and sentence constructions, and reduce the vocabulary so that the young mind is not taxed too much with too many details. Also, at the lowest levels, the books tend to be decorative and colorful, giving the eye much to do to imagine the story without merely using the words.
I’ve taken up a book (MANMAN, MWEN BEZWEN WOU MWEN YO—Mom, I need my wheels) that tells the story of Edi, a young boy who one day finds that his father has removed the training wheels from his bicycle. Edi is distraught because he does not know how to ride a bike all by himself. But with the help and encouragement of his mother and father, Edi learns to ride the bike, learning from his mistakes (he falls down because he wasn’t paying attention) and discovering a new happiness in doing something that gives him freedom and helps him to become included with the kids in his neighborhood.
What’s interesting is that as I have been reading the story and slowly hammering out the English meaning, I had a moment of insight that this story is about more than just learning to ride a bike.
It is also about what I’m doing in learning how to speak a new language.
Like Edi, I started off with the training wheels of Duolingo. A predictable vocabulary. A predictable spelling. A predictable grammar and syntax. But then, as I became more adventurous, the training wheels came off, and I starting learning “solo” — that is, learning by making awful mistakes and having terrible results. (Not like I’ve hurt anyone, but it is painful to make a grammatical mistake and have someone just give you that look that you said something terribly insulting when you simply meant to ask a question.)
The best way to learn is to simply do. I’m trying that. I don’t like that I’m learning so slowly! I want to be fluent and at the level of fluency I have in English (which I have been speaking now for some six decades). But I first must try out the first moments of wobbling on this bicycle, afraid to hit the ground, but determined to go on ahead.