This Bloody Language

I am terribly sortry for the long delays, and especially for this being nothing more than a sign saying hang in there. I am once again on a french keyboard, ands I really cant write on this thing; so until I can find a better keyboard, not to mention a less virus riddled computer, I will leave you all with a short blurb about this bloody language.

Learning a new language is hard. No, really. I am fairly certain most if not all of you reading this have tried to learn another language at some point in your dissolute pasts, and some of you even suceeded. Good for you. Have a beer.

It might even have been easy for some of you. I will admit, I used to think nothing of my rudimentary knowledge of french, having had it ever since my time in Switzerland as a 5 year old. Now that I have had more time to meditate on it, though, I am beginning to appreciate those 6 months more and more, primarily for their timing. For those of you who dont know, the first 6 years or so of your life are a critical phase for the growth of many things, like bones and lungs muscles and varied internal organs. For the lucky few, those 6 months are also the time when your brain starts to grow. More important than this, though, is that, like a plant that gets turned sideways and grows with a 90 degree turn in it, if you are exposed to stuff during those 6 months, it permanently changes the physical makeup of your brain. Or something like that, most of this is coming from half-remembered conversations with my mother. 

The point being, if you learned a language then, its almost too easy to speak it. Like Ryan and Adam, my new friends the yemeni brothers, who are fluently quadra-lingual (Arabic, castilian, spanish, and english). How cool, right? Must have taken them a lot of time to learn that, right? Yea, they did study some since then, but most of it is literally natural for them. 

The other half of this post is really short, because I am 5 sentences away from snapping this keyboard in half. Most of you are native english speakers. Lets say that your brains are computers that are operating on OS 10.7, a macintosh operating system, because I am a hipster. 

Now imagine a friend took your computer, wiped it, and put Windows on it. When you first boot that bad boy up, and instead of that friendly munched-on apple, you see whatever absurd re-imaging of the flag they are using now...

Bricks would be shat.

Its not a perfect analogy, I know, but the point is similar. You would still have your computer, with its old strength, and the same programs, mostly, but nothing feels right, everything is just weird and you dont know how things work.

Like trying to write on a bloody french language keyboard.