Since starting my new job two weeks ago, I've gotten back in the habit of getting up very early in the morning, usually between three and four in the morning. I go out to the porch in the dark and appreciate the quiet and slowness while the world is still asleep. Being up so early, I can start my morning prayers by bringing up the livestream of the Fatima shrine in Portugal, where they have recitation of the rosary every day at noon their time, which is 4 am Pacific.
Last year I decided I wanted to be able to recite the rosary in as many languages as possible, and I had learned it in five languages, first in Latin and English, and then in French, Greek and German. Definitely Greek was the hardest to learn to pronounce the syllables, even though I'd studied Greek in the past. Actually I should be honest and say that I learned the Lord's Prayer, the Ave Maria, and the Glory Be in all those languages.
This summer I decided I wanted to expand it out, and made a point of learning a few other languages. It is easy to practice a few of them using the livestream from Lourdes in France, where they have English, French, Spanish and Italian daily, and Polish on Saturdays. Polish was fun to learn. Now using the Fatima stream I can add Portuguese. That takes me up to nine.
One of the best things about this is that it gives me a chance to practice all these languages every day. I can at least recite the Lord's Prayer in every language in which I know it.
It's funny how the different languages give your mouth a work out in a different way. Each language has its own way in which you use the muscles of your mouth and and lips, and when you start speaking in a language, you work out those muscles in particular, and sometimes you can the effort. Even in French, which I've been speaking for almost forty years now, I can feel my lips getting fatigued from the particular way one makes French vowels. There is a French way of holding your mouth and lips in a resting position, and likewise in the other languages too. Polish makes you stretch your lower lip wide to make the syllables, in words like grzesznymi, which means "sinners", as in "pray for us sinners."
I've learned the wisdom of making my own prayer book that is effectively my phrasebook for all these prayers. I print out the prayers in the same format and put them in plastic sheet covers (my old habit from graduate school in Austin) and keep them in a binder, so I can flip from one to another. It's important to let your eye learn to read the words as you recite them, and at other times just to let your mouth make the syllables without seeing them written. It works out all the parts of your brain and memory to do it that way.
Another aspect of language learning that this method bring out is lateral jumping from one language to another. This can be harder than it seems. When reciting the Latin prayers, they come out of my mouth fluidly, reflexively, without having to think about them. But if I recite in Italian or Spanish, and then try to jump to Latin, at first it all came out like a train wreck, and I couldn't even remember some most basic words. "Ave Maria...then...uh....". The Latin words are often in reverse order. I discovered that one must make a specific mental route between one language and another. Thus I learn to jump not only from English into Latin but specifically from Italian or French into Latin. Different neural paths get activated.
One trouble I still have is that sometimes when reciting in Italian or Spanish, I will spontaneously jump from one to other, from one line to the next and not even notice. I will start the Ave Maria in Italian and end in Spanish, or vice versa. This is getting less frequent because of my method as I described in the previous paragraph, but it still happens in places where I don't have the words down exactly.
The ultimate trick is writing things down. Writing is the key to learning to speak a language (as opposed to understanding it while someone is speaking it). Writing supercharges language learning. I have my white board on a drafting table next to me, and I force myself to write down an entire prayer from memory. This was quite a challenge while learning the Polish prayers because of all the accents on letters that are not in English. Even making one mistake, I would force myself to write it from the beginning until I got it perfect. It's amazing what progress you can make if you force yourself to pay attention to the little things.
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