Language learning was never the main focus in my life, except out of necessity, during a time in our lives when, due to my husband's job, we had to travel from South America to South Afrika on a two year business trip. A trip that, three years later led us to settle in Australia permanently. English then became our first acquired language and today (about 40 years later) is still the main spoken language in our household.

But now that we have reached the end of our working life, necessity is once more, rocking our lives. How? Let me explain.

After retirement, especially when coming out from a very busy, high paced, very stressful Information Technology environment, to live in a peaceful farm with lots of greenery and in-tuned with nature, brain fogginess started to develop. Something like my brain going into "vacation mode" ...

So, for the last couple of years, I have been searching for ways to keep my brain active, focussed and alert, all of this without the stressful components of my previous working lifestyle.

And that is how I started learning Turkish: out of the necessity of keeping a healthy, focussed and alert state of mind.

For english speaking people Turkish is a very difficult language (which in itself is an excellent challenge to stimulate the ageing brain and get it out of "vacation " mode). This degree of difficulty is not because of the Turkish alphabet, which is very similar to ours, but for its grammar, particularly the sentence structure, which is back to front to English. Despite its high degree of difficulty, learning Turkish is a lot of fun because there is an endless supply of beautiful Turkish movies and TV series, and singers galore to immerse myself into.

After self teaching Turkish for about a year and reaching an intermediate level of understanding, something extrange has been happening to me: I think that I caught the Polyglot bug. I first became suspicious about this, when in early December, a member of the family arrived from Paris to live here for a few months and I decided to start learning French. This did not seem strange at the time, since French is in the group of easy languages for English speaking people to learn (and I previously did 4 years French in my teenage years).

BUT, further evidence about this Polyglot bug biting me came this weekend, when my son came to visit us with one of his friends, on their way North for a road-trip. His friend happened to be a Polish girl, living in Australia for a few years now. Nothing unusual here, except that after meeting this Polish girl, I decided to give Polish a try and I started learning it straight away. Although Polish is in the same group as Turkish, as the second most difficult language for us to learn, at least for me, having its sentences structured in the same or similar way as English, makes it a bit easier to learn, than Turkish. (Yes, I mentioned that before, sentence structure is the main challenge for me in any language).

Well, there you are. With the Polyglot bug" well diagnosed as having bitten me, I hope I do not get that many more foreign language visitors for a while, at least until I get French, Polish and Turkish to a more advanced level of understanding and fluency.

Oh well ... I am not complaining ... at least I have the time and willingness to do it ... I have the language apps setup. Now, it is just a matter of searching for nice movies, TV series and singers in all these languages and letting this Polyglot bug freely spread.

Crissy

Polyglot Bug

Bak Bana