Five-minute free writes, Day 30 - "Memory"

In the lifelong learning program that I love, I have tried at least three times to participate in language classes - once in traveler's French, once in traveler's Italian, and once in beginning Spanish.  Since I had both French and Italian in college, and I had spent some time in Italy long, long ago , I found that the rules of pronunciation came back to me pretty quickly, and so did some of the vocabulary.

But the Spanish - oh, no.  I could not remember a vocabulary word from the beginning of the class until the end. Granted, the class lasted two hours, with a tiny bit of socializing right in the middle over the break - but still. Not one bit of memory was available.

I thought this was odd until I researched this phenomenon a bit and discovered that, sure enough, learning a new language at an old age is pretty tough. Seems as though some of those imprinting mechanisms just aren't working much any longer.

Even more fascinating was the interference that my youthful French and Italian ran all through the Spanish class.  Those tongue muscles just did not want to unlearn what they had been taught.  Thank goodness that "si" is the same in at least two of those languages!

And of course there are other opportunities to mourn the deterioration of memory.  Trying to remember how to play the piano ....