It hits us without warning and really quite out of the blue… our heart races at the thought of it, our pupils dilate, our thoughts obsess with desire. We imagine whole worlds opening up before us, yielding access to exotic people and adventure.
We attend our first date, I mean class, and we are not disappointed; rather hopeful, excited even as we picture ourselves tucked away at some great café in a little seaside pueblo, eating ethnic delicacies while discussing art and philosophy with really interesting people. Our fantasy continues for about 6 or 8 more classes but then our romantic illusions begin to be fade … the reality of the long hard road we must take to reach that pueblo and café and new found friends tempts us to believe we´ve fallen victim to silly romantic folly and nothing more. That there is just no way before middle age or retirement or before we die, we´re going to be able to gain the skills necessary to comfortably and independently make our way in this new language.
BUT – just like we have to care for and nuture our relationship with our new love if we want it to go anywhere, we must care for and nurture our dream to speak another language if we really want to make a life with it. All work and no play - not fun, nor productive. Textbooks have their place, and so does bringing home the bacon, but textbooks and bacon alone do not garantee a happy-ever-after ending. We need to find ways to feed that original passion to keep it alive if we are to live our adventure to it’s fullest potential.
For me this meant searching the Internet for stuff to read that interested me. Armed with my dictionary, it would take me literally hours to get through an article. But I stuck with it cause I wanted the information. In order to understand the information, I had to be able to understand what I was reading …. so the carrot to learn? …. interesting information.
So do what it takes….travel, read, listen to music, but keep that dream alive. What is it they say? ‘No one looked back on their life and wish they had worked more!’ If we only worked as hard on keeping the romance alive as we did on our verb tenses. Joan, Editor in Chief, La Casa Rojas
