Challenge: Something New

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: something new you learned last year

I was about to say that I didn't really feel like I'd learned much of anything last year, at least not anything that I'd care to share with my children as part of our accumulated wisdom, but...

There are other kinds of learning, y'know? And I'm making a concentrated effort to get myself back together, and part of that includes trying not to be cranky about everything that happens, let alone the general state of things. And another part of that includes building out my skills a little bit (in my copious spare time, admittedly). 

So what was something new that I learned last year? 

German. 

A little bit of it, at least. 

I was actually looking at language pay for my job, but it turns out they won't pay you extra for knowing just any old language; the list of what languages they will pay for is actually pretty short. Fortunately, that list includes Spanish, and I used to be... conversational, though not really fluent... in Spanish. (I actually majored in Spanish for a year, before I switched over to an English/Anthropology combo and graduated with that.) Admitted, I'm a couple of decades worth of rusty with the language, and what I learned was academic, Castilian Spanish (which is... not what folks speak here in Texas) but still: Spanish!

And now German. Where does German come in? Well, there was a point where Beautiful Wife and I were considering retiring to German someday. Speaking the language seemed like a good idea for that. Plus, learning a new language is supposed to help keep the brain flexible, especially in one's later years, and I am not young. (Hardly elderly, mind you, but not young.) Also,  German is... sort of the other half of the two main language patterns that got trapped together in a horrifying teleporter accident and emerged as the acid-spitting hybrid mutant language that we call English. So it's interesting from that perspective as well.

So when I signed up for Duolingo, I started in on both: Spanish, to dust off those neural pathways, and German, to make some new one. I do one session of each most evenings, and as a result... 

Well, I mean, I still sound like an idiot in German. Like, my grammar and vocabulary are Freshman-year, "Ich liebe bier" stuff that any German preschooler would recognize as clumsy. But it's more German than I knew in 2020, and that's still something.