I may not be a whiz at langauges after all

As I keep winding up in bed or on the floor for my back, I'm starting to move to the "long haul view" of my sequestration, and have started working on my German again. Given that I just used a possibly made-up English word in that last sentence, perhaps I should also start working on my English.

I've taken some German language classes while we've lived here, some 8 weeks worth before A was born, and then another class last fall. I learned a lot in each, although I don't think I got very far either time. At least, not in that undergraduate-language-immersion sort of way. But at the same time, I know how little benefit I'd get from another group class right now if I only could spend a few hours a week studying German. My brain is mushy, whether from age or motherhood, and things just don't sink in like they used to, leaving no foundation for new information to take hold. I consistently perform spectacularly poorly on the little flash cards quiz feature on my dictionary app. "Oh sure", you comfort me, "but those are random words that you may never have seen before."

"Oh no", I hand you back your comfort, newly washed, with a homemade thank you note, "those are the words I have been studying, marking in the app, and just failed to identify last time I took the quiz. An hour ago."

In search of a high value, decent return on my time investment, given the little time I have, I have decided to take the quiz every day (I add words to it as I look them up for the first time), and to watch at least an hour of German-language TV. The conditions on this are: (1) it must have subtitles because I am not yet good enough with verbal German and there are some 5 dialects, at least, flying around our cable channels, and (2) it must be entertaining (movies or soaps or cop shows) and (3) it must be simple enough language that I have a chance of following partially by context (soap operas and American romantic comedies dubbed in German perform very well in this condition). I get about 20% of what is being said (written on the screen), I hear German, I fill in context enough to keep watching even though I am missing 80% of the words. I do okay so far. I hope that, at the very least, I am reinforcing German grammatical structure in my brain even if I keep forgetting vocabulary words.

When my grandfather moved to Brasil from Lithuania, he learned something like 10 new Portuguese words a day. I've never been able to get even close with German. Actually, even one word a day is kind of easily beating me. Then again, my grandfather wasn't at home all day, raising the many daughters he had. He was working, and speaking to people, and you can bet than few people in his workday were speaking much Lithuanian to him. (Not as few as one might guess, given that he was living in a Lithuanian immigrant neighborhood, but still....).

Yesterday while I flipped channels in search of subtitles, I found a Brazilian athlete being interviewed, with German subtitles. And at this moment I started to doubt how skilled I actually am at learning new languages. I grew up hearing Portuguese when my mom and her sisters talked on the phone. Later, in highschool, I took to Spanish pretty quickly and have since thought myself quite adept at language acquisition. Watching this soccer player talk about his life and family, I was instantly comforted by the Portuguese I heard, and using that to practice my German. And then a bit disappointed to realize that my skill for Spanish may just have been early exposure to Portuguese.

In which case, as regards German, I'm pretty screwed.