Learning languages as a Sisyphean endeavour

On picking difficult hobbies

It’s been a nice chilled start to the year here at Stiff Upper Quip, after a lovely festive period with family and friends. I’ll be back on the newsletters Thursday.

In the meantime, here’s a little amuse-bouche from my friend Leo Gibbons about the challenges of learning languages with dyslexia, and why it’s well worth doing anyway.

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Photo, Los Muertas Crew, ‘A Juggler in a Black Shirt Balancing a Juggling Club on his Forehead’ via Pexels.com

Every day, I listen to a short audio recording of conversational French or Finnish on my Speakly language learning app. I read the text for ages, with the translation underneath. Occasionally, I hear a voice in my head go ‘Use the force Luke, let go.’ I turn off the text and translations. I close my eyes and listen intently… and can barely follow a word. I wonder ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’ Sisyphus pushed a boulder up a hill, all day, every day, for all eternity.

For my part, I push that boulder for an hour a week, at London’s Finnish Institute, but the outcome feels likely to be similar, tho perhaps with less glory involved than was the case for Sisyphus.

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When he was a teenager, my older brother’s best mate would knock on our front door each morning to collect him, and they’d walk to school together. My brother was always running late. As such nearly every morning, Daniel would say ‘Hello’ and patiently wait around at the bottom of our stairs. One morning, Daniel stopped me and, his face bearing a huge grin said, ‘Check this.’ He then took our four juggling balls and began to smoothly juggle them round and round, face contorted with a mix of intense concentration and wonder.

Eleven-year-old me yawned and shrugged. To my surprise, Daniel exploded. Jabbing at me, he explained that he had dyspraxia, which meant that his being able to juggle was remarkable. Juggling for someone like him was near impossible, but through grit and perseverance, he’d learnt to do something he was told he’d never be able to. And I had just shrugged it off, mildly annoyed that he’d momentarily delayed me on my way to grab some Cinnamon Grahams.

After university, I went and studied for an NCTJ Diploma in Newspaper Journalism. During my course, I completed placements at a couple of local newspapers, only to witness an industry dying before my eyes. After that taste of clickbait, decay, and terrible wages, I chose not to go into journalism. Nevertheless, I breezed through most of my diploma, getting a First in all my assignments. Apart from finding Adobe InDesign an absolute headache, I don’t remember stressing about a single bit of coursework.

However, I didn’t get a distinction.IIn fact I nearly didn’t pass my diploma at all. You see, it was 2014, and the NCTJ Diploma was old school, and to pass it, you needed to learn shorthand to a speed of at least 60 words-per-minute, this being about half our average speaking speed. You needed to clear 80 words-per-minute to get the highest degree.

We were given three attempts to pass the 60wpm exams. To do so, you needed to transcribe a speech with fewer than five errors, no matter how minimal they were. I was in the final exam with a handful of other stragglers. Deep down, I think I got more than five errors in my final exam, but it was marked internally, and I believe my instructor took pity on me.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t practiced. I sat at my parents’ table for hours and hours working on my shorthand — often listening to a tape out loud, which must’ve been maddening for them. One evening, my brother came over and asked what I was up to. He commented that learning shorthand was pointless (correct), and anyway, my tape was so slow, couldn’t I just copy it out longhand? I scoffed. There is no way anyone could keep up with this tape and log it down verbatim, writing longhand. My brother bet me that he could. I smugly sat back in my chair and handed him my pen, ‘Go on, then.’

And he did it. Well, nearly, he missed a sentence or so, which would have pushed him over the five errors, but still! I was absolutely gobsmacked. I asked him how he did it, and he explained that once he fell behind the tape, he could process what was being said and just catch up. It meant that once the tape finished, he was still writing, but he still completed the transcript. He had remembered what had been, was writing out what had been said, all the while listening to what was currently being said, all at the same time. Black magic.

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As a child, my brother would infuriate teachers. He would be chatting to his friends or staring out the window, and the teacher would snap at him and in that classic teacher way, ask him, in front of everyone, ‘Aaron, what have I just been saying?’

My brother would then repeat, word-for-word, what the teacher had just said moments earlier. Teachers found this both highly obnoxious and tricky to respond to. On the other hand, I infuriated teachers because, even when I was trying to listen to them, the sound went into one ear and out the other. I was diagnosed with dyslexia two years ago, and it means incidents like this have started to make sense.

During the pandemic, I also started learning languages in my spare time. I began learning Finnish, because I have some familial roots there, I am a Finnophile, and because I wanted to test myself. 

I also began learning French, because I remained burned and disappointed by the fact that I was not good enough to take it as a subject at A Level — and because I felt I needed to learn a  worthwhile language, alongside an essentially pointless one.

For French, I have dipped in and out of, doing weekly private tutoring, alongside the odd beginner term at the Institut Français or Alliance Française. I took two years away from learning it while I undertook my MA. Finnish I have plugged away at throughout — doing an hour a week of study, for several years now. I am probably at an A2 level in both languages. In French, I know more vocabulary, but I might be marginally better at sticking Finnish together to form coherent sentences. French function words still kill me.

Throughout all my classes, I have consistently had the worst listening skills of all the students in every group. Very simple sentences can fry my brain, and after I get lost on one sound or word, everything after it falls away. Often, when my teacher is speaking, it just sounds like noise. A jumbled-up series of sounds. Even tho she is uttering vocabulary that I already know.

My parents tell me that they were frequently called into my nursery due to my bad behaviour. When the teacher would tell me to stop, I just stared blankly at them and kept doing what I was doing. I probably just couldn’t understand them. I would sometimes try to explain why I was throwing sand out of the pit and it would just come out as noises and grunts. Learning languages has helped me understand why my speech was delayed as a child and why I struggled in my early years at school.

My childhood speech impediment lingers in my frequent tendency to get tongue-tied, and I think my dyslexia is the cause of the distinctive cadence of my speaking voice. However, I’ve mastered English pretty well now.

Yet perhaps I still felt I had something to prove. Like Daniel, I picked up a hobby that is uniquely challenging to me. Learning to juggle, like learning Finnish, is challenging and pointless, unless you’re in Finland, which I am currently not. But for Daniel, it was a sign that he could overcome the hand that he was dealt, through grit and perseverance. By learning foreign languages, I hope to do the same.

According to the US State Department, it takes an English speaker an average of 1012 class hours to learn Finnish to a professional standard. Studying it for one hour a week would mean it would take me about 20 years to reach a strong B2 level. I’d never get to the Finnish. Realistically, you’re never going to reach such a high level of conversational fluency without immersion, without constant practice in speaking and listening. As such, I know my language learning, in which I’m investing so much time, is a folly.

To an outsider, my learning decisions might just look like an eccentric quirk. Yet the next time you wonder why someone might be learning to juggle, or indeed picking up any other challenging hobby, consider the fact that what they are learning might have a significance for them that might not immediately be apparent.

Check out Layo’s Substack below.