This is the first language log post since the end of January, eight whole months ago...

And it's pretty much a confession of total failure... I look back on all the bright ideas and good intentions I set down in that previous post, and feel as though I'm reading about a different person. Because hardly any of that has happened... And there's not a lot to be expected from the last quarter of the year because we're going to be travelling.

This is the problem, you see. Life is like a hollow and open-ended tube. Because I live where I do, I think of it as a bamboo tube, the kind you would normally fill with sticky rice. But imagine you're filling it with pingpong balls.

I'm lucky in that I have many balls at my disposal, but the fact remains that the tube will only ever hold a certain number...

So this year, I've shoved into the tube a fair amount of travel, and quite a bit of intensive Kuching-ing (socializing, enjoying the culture, doing medical stuff, going to events, reading history...). Plus -- just recently -- I've added a ball labelled writing.

None of these things would I choose not to do. But inevitably, a few balls have also slidden out of the other end. Watching movies is one. We've done hardly any of that since we got back.

And language-learning, unfortunately, is another.

Now, it's not that the last eight months have been monolingual. I fit in a few minutes of Duolingo every day, for example, in various language-pairings:



Our multilingual environment is still a stimulant:



And I have read quite a few books in French, German, and Spanish this year. (I've also just started something in Italian. After the horrendously difficult Shanghai, it took me a while to get my toe back in the acqua.)

If you add newsletters into the mix, then, aside from those four languages, I'm also regularly encountering Portuguese (there's now a Brazilian version of The Conversation) and Indonesian.

But I can record no progress -- no progress whatsoever -- on three languages that I'd really like to take further: Turkish, Russian, and Chinese.



And I realize that I miss the learning feeling that Andrew Methven writes about here. Back in February 2021, he set himself the goal of reading one long-form Chinese news article every day. Having stuck to that goal, he now benefits from masses of cultural knowledge, all the communicational confidence that comes with that, and a massive sense of achievement: "This is the compounding effect of reading Chinese language news every day. Your knowledge and understanding of what is happening in China become so much deeper in a way that you wouldn’t be able to achieve just relying on English language news."

Now, I'll almost certainly never get to the stage where I can read Chinese news articles. But his point -- adjusted for ability and circumstances -- is still valid. Regularly investing time brings rich returns, both practical and emotional.



In 11 days' time, we'll be travelling again. No complaints about that. Whatsoever. I'm looking forward to it. But it does mean a few more pingpong balls are going to be rammed into the tube, and so, inevitably, a few will also drop out.

And we'll mostly be in countries whose languages I don't speak (our travelling and my language-learning really never seem to align...)

Still, a bit more Italian and a bit more Turkish (for the beginning and the end) would definitely come in handy. No commitments, though, because commitments seem to be pointless. We'll see...