They say that as you get older, learning languages is great exercise for your neural connections. That sounds optimistic — until you actually try to use those same fading threads to pull together the slippery English gerund or the entire system of tenses.
My relationship with languages has always followed some strange, almost quantum graph. Take Belarusian, for example. I never studied it in school — we lived in a different country back then. But I had a natural cheat code: my grandmother‘s village.
My mother used to tell me that as soon as they shipped me off there for three summer months — a two‑year‑old little lump — I would completely assimilate. I’d come back home a fully formed agrarian philosopher. In the evening, when my mother came home tired from work, I would walk up to her, heave a deep and meaningful sigh, and announce:
“Mama, kab ty vedala, yak tsyazhka khlib zarablats.”
(Mom, if you only knew how hard bread is earned.)
Or, seeing her knitting or mending socks, I would ask sternly:
“Ty sho robish, lapish?”
(What are you doing, patching things up?)
I knew no rules, no alphabet — but the language had burned itself into my BIOS, lodged deep in the subcortex. Back then I had no idea that this childish word *lapish* — “you put on patches” — would become the central symbol of my linguistic life.
---
Years later came Italian. I was around forty, working with Italians. I decided to get serious: I signed up for a language course. Piano, piano — step by step — and after a few months I could communicate well enough to talk business.
But here’s the strange part. A couple of years later, I had a huge falling out with those very same Italians. And the language simply… self‑destructed. One fine day I realized I understood absolutely nothing in Italian. The files had been deleted along with the contacts. My brains just froze, and Italian turned into a bodiless ghost, wandering the back alleys of memory.
---
And now? Now two thirds of a century are behind me. It turns out that forty was just a light frost. At sixty‑six, the temperature of learning new information is heading confidently not just toward absolute zero — but somewhere even deeper. Atoms stop moving. English articles hover in weightlessness. Words bounce off my brain like peas off a concrete wall.
So my current attempt to learn English and, at the same time, revive that deep‑rooted Belarusian — it’s pure Manilovism, of course. That crystal bridge over the pond, where merchants sit around drinking tea and discussing prospects.
---
But if you look closer, something strange is happening at that pond.
Out of the murky, icy water, my own linguistic ghost slowly climbs out. It shivers in the wind of absolute zero. From somewhere it pulls out a ball of bright red thread and begins stubbornly darning — lapits — the gaping holes in its ghostly robe.
A hole where the English perfect tense used to be.
A tear where forgotten Belarusian words have vanished.
A bright red thread roughly and crookedly pulls the edges of the void together, trying to stitch the unstitchable.
Hopeless? Absolutely. The ghost will never gain flesh, no matter how hard it tries.
Will I stop trying?
Not a chance.
---
Because with age, the paradigm shifted without my noticing. Before, I learned a language to know. Now I do it simply to learn. In my personal Tao, the goal is not the point — the Way is the point. Even if that Way sometimes looks like digging “from fence to lunch” or darning a ghost‘s hoodie with red thread — it’s still mine, and it keeps me from freezing solid.
And who knows? Maybe one day I really will build that imaginary crystal bridge. I’ll pull that stubborn ghost with its needle out of the water, iron its robe carefully with a warm iron. And then I’ll look at a passing photon and say, with impeccable pronunciation:
“Kab ty vedaŭ, yaki heta tsyazhki khlieb — anhielski vuchyts!”
(If only you knew how hard this bread is — learning English!)