I think I’ve hit another wall.
The first wall was after the first month or so of learning kreyòl ayisyen (Haitian Creole, or HC) when I realized that Duolingo wasn’t doing enough for me. It was helping, sure! I gained the essentials of vocabulary and grammar, and as I continue to use Duolingo (I’m on Day 214) my vocabulary continues to increase to the point where I now “know” about 700-800 words. (To be fair, many of them are reusable words that have many meanings, so “pa” and “konnen” and “fè” and “mache” are doing a lot of work to hide a lot of what I know. And don’t get me started on “li” or “men” or “san”…)
So I hired a tutor, then gained a second, then acquired a third. Now I have three different tutors who are instructing me using three different methods, and that is helping me a lot to understand accents and regionalisms. Because HC is still a language in process (English is, too, so it’s neither unusual nor exotic) sometimes I really have to know that there are several ways to say something or even spell something, and that is okay! (Nwit, nwi, and nuit are all forms of “night,” for example, and we don’t have time to talk about all the ways to say “grandmother.”)
So four or five times a week I have hour-long conversations with my tutors, and they are typically a set of questions and answers, which is good! That helps me to listen and think in HC.
What I need, though, are conversations that are more than Q&A, and where I am doing as much listening as I am talking. In my current setup, which again I emphasize is not bad, I do a lot of the talking. “What did you eat today? What did you make for dinner? What are you wearing? How is your family doing?” all engender a conversation that is mostly me talking.
Where I’m falling down is listening to longer phrases and paragraphs from people talking to me in HC and me processing the conversation in real time to understand and then responding thoughtfully because I’m paying attention. That’s a real conversation.
And I want to be able to listen to various radio & TV stations and understand, or YouTube channels, or even humor and music, both which are poetry—and poetry is really the hardest part of learning a language.
I’m absolutely not complaining! I’m learning a lot.
What I want, though, is just more. I want to be challenged more and to be forced (perhaps that’s not quite the right word) to listen for understanding.
It’s kinda like this: I think I need to be in an immersive environment where I don’t get to lean upon my English language skills with the hope that my interlocutor will break their commitment to speaking only HC with me & “rescue” me with an English response.
Even now if someone talks clearly I don’t always get it, and it is really frustrating for them to have to say things even more slowly or repeat certain phrases. It’s not really a conversation. It’s yet another lesson, and as much as lessons are valuable—they are not the real, active use of the language for human connection.
Because that’s what I want—that connection.
And that eggshell of “rescue-English” needs to be broken if I am to get to the next level of making omelets.
I wonder if “work from home” can be extended to include a remote location in Jakmèl, Potòprens, or Okap? If not there, maybe just a three-month stint in Mayami . . .