I have long regretted not growing up in a culture where people routinely learn multiple languages in the course of everyday life. Growing up, I had a friend whose family spoke 4 languages at home. At the dinner table, the family spoke an amalgam language, seamlessly switching between languages to use the most accurate word for what they wanted to say. But just speaking multiple languages would not have been enough for me. My desire is to be able to read literature in the original language. The good news for me is that I find learning to read is easier for me than learning to speak a language. The bad news is that easier is a relative term. I am just not gifted in language acquisition.
If I ever met a genie who offered me 3 wishes, one of them would be for the ability to read and comprehend languages with ease. I would then sit myself down with Dostoevsky, Sholom Aleichem and Isabelle Allende for a reading orgy. Or, I could bypass the genie and just work on my existing Spanish & Yiddish. That wouldn’t help with Dostoevsky though. I tried taking Russian in college, but learning a third alphabet was more than my poor, taxed brain could handle. I suspect if I put all of my crafting energy into beefing up my existing languages or learning Russian, I could do it. But, I guess I don’t want it that badly. Thus my desire to take the easy way out and just let the genie work his/her magic on me.
Hopefully, my genie would include programming languages in his/her gift to me. For the past several years, I have wanted to learn the programming language Ruby. It is a clean and elegant language, which makes it that much more appealing to me. I have books, online resources and offers to teach me Ruby. But, I am lacking the fundamental motivation of a timely need. I can be very self-motivating, but I need an impetus to get me started. For example, I enjoy both walking and riding my bike, but find it incredibly difficult to just go for a walk or a bike ride without a destination in mind. However, if I have errands to run, I don’t hesitate to walk or ride several miles.
The same is true for learning Ruby (or any other language). My desire is there, but the desire alone is not enough to get me started. I need a timely project with a deadline to get me to start tapping into the resources I already have at my fingertips. I have tried creating a project with an arbitrary deadline, but I wasn’t able to fool myself. Instead, I allowed myself to get distracted by other projects with real deadlines.
I should just own that I am not one of those people who can learn something just for the sake of learning. I wish I were, but I am not. Instead, I will just continue to frustrate myself with unfulfilled desires. Unless that genie appears. So, if you happen to run into an oil lamp in need of shining, or a stoppered bottle, let me know. The genie I have been dreaming of might just be inside.