. . . on speaking in tongues
I’VE KIND OF got a mini girl crush on Dora The Explorer at the moment. I mean Peppa has a lot going for her, but the fact remains that she is a pig. Dora is an actual non-anthropomorphic girl. Okay, a cartoon girl. Not an animal or a princess or a wardrobe-obsessed pouty doll. As such, she is one of the lamentably few female role models for children, and is less concerned with her wardrobe than her ability to traverse challenging landscapes so that she can find the best blueberries.
Dora is adept at map reading and her active lifestyle means she mostly wears practical shorts. Her priorities in life are adventure, puzzle solving, friends and family. She has an eclectic array of friends and is admirably graceful in her approach to her frenemies, particularly one named Swiper, that sneaky fox who steals her stuff just because he can.
Most of all I love Dora because she is Latina and has that bilingual thing going on. More than 10 years after she was created, she teaches Spanish to children in 100 countries across the world. Hola! Vamonos! Los recursos Humanos!
Dora doesn't actually say los recursos humanos, that's just me showing off because all of a sudden I know a lot of Spanish words. What happened was that thanks to Dora, my toddlers suddenly knew more Spanish than I did and this inspired me to learn a bit myself.
Los recursos humanos, I am proud to be able to tell you completely off the top of my head, without the aid of any books, is the Spanish for human resources. It is one of 144 random words of Spanish I can now spell and pronounce since discovering the website memrise.com. By the time you read this I probably know more than 200 because it turns out that for the first time in my life, I am a swot. After the first couple of short visits to this addictive language vocabulary site, I felt like some kind of genius.
Cat? El gato. Business? El negocio. To retire? That's easy, it's jubilarse, which has quickly and for obvious reasons become my very favourite Spanish word.
I'd like to tell you that I am learning Spanish so that on my next holiday I will be able to do more than order doughnuts on the beach, but for fiscal reasons we won't be going out foreign any time soon. So I suppose I am learning Spanish words because it's good for my brain and better than watching rubbish on the telly. La faldais skirt, la resacais hangover. I could go on. And on and on.
The incredible thing is that using the memrise method, your vocabulary expands without even trying. You learn in that magical way where things stick in your head despite yourself. I say magical because every time I go back to the site I am convinced that I will no longer know any of the words, when what actually happens is that I know every single one. It’s like language voodoo. And suddenly anything seems possible with the right tuition. Maybe I could have learned long division properly if only I was taught in a different way, one that didn’t make my head melt.
Switching to French for a couple of sessions, I learn more in that language than I did in six years at secondary school. Evangelical now, I make my sceptical mother go on it. She immediately feels 20 per cent smarter and says it beats Sudoku for keeping the mind active.
I don’t know when I will next get to Spain, or France for that matter. But when I read that less than six per cent of the world’s population speaks English as their main language, I realise being at least mildly conversant in other languages is just, on a humanitarian level, polite.
Now that I’m trilingual I want to keep on trying. After a few weeks I press a button on the site which helps me start learning the most widely spoken language in the world. Nobody is more surprised than me that I now know some Mandarin. I can recognise the characters for random things such as pork and old person and man and meat and ladle and fabric. In fairness it hasn’t proved as easy as Spanish and French; the brain gets even more of a workout, but it’s doable.
So now I “speak” four languages. I can’t string the words together, admittedly, but I could pass myself in Spain and France and possibly China should I ever need to. Which for some reason is all deeply comforting and smug-making. Adios amigos.
In other news . . .
If you are feeling under the weather on Monday, you are not alone, according to some dubious science. The third Monday in January has been dubbed Blue Monday, aka the saddest of the year, taking into account the weather, the post-Christmas credit-card debt and the fact that all your resolutions have already gone to pot. Fear not, bluemonday.org has some uplifting suggestions for coping with the day instead of hiding under the duvet