Free Language Lessons

That's a good idea.

That happens to me too. My brain seems to have an "English" area and an "everything else" area where all the foreign languages live. If I'm speaking Spanish and don't know a word, but I know it in some other language, it will pop up in every other language except English, before it gets to the English version. When I switched from Spanish to Russian, I'd drop Spanish bits into the Russian sentences occasionally. Then when I took Japanese, it was Russian that carried over the most. But there's affinity tracking too -- in an invented language, I'm more likely to think of a word from some other conlang; while if I'm working Lakota, I'll get carryover from Cherokee.

I think the temporal division may apply to me. The intuition one doesn't. Whatever language I learn, I build it from the bottom up, including a persona to be a native speaker. My vocabulary and grammar may be a narrower subset, but they run deep -- once I've learned a rule, I don't make mistakes with it any more often than I would in English. I can laugh at jokes that are funny in the original language but not in English, or that are funny in English only if you know the culture.

Stuff I don't use regularly can fade somewhat, but if I practice later I can get it back. And I've noticed a weird tendency at least with Spanish; it seems to be growing the back of my head without further study, because sometimes I understand stuff that I didn't study. Go figure.

I can also use my linguistic intuition to figure out solutions in a foreign language. Back in high school, there was an extra credit question to define "slonopatat." Well, "slon" is elephant and the teacher had mentioned that "Winnie the Pooh" had been translated into Russian, so the answer had to be heffalump. I was the only student who got it right -- and that was at Uni High, which is all gifted kids. I was stunned. And then it turned out that some of the kids had never even read Pooh. (What a bunch of cultural illiterates.) The answer just appeared in my head, poof, a flash of intuition like I get in English.

However it is that I learn languages, apparently most people do it differently and get different results.

I was often frustrated by the limitations of most language classes. I wanted either full immersion (which I only got on brief trips to Mexico and Russia) or full disclosure down to the linguistic infrastructure and etymology, which most teachers didn't know. So I did my best to winkle out the rest of the details myself, and to find examples of the languages that I could listen to or read. Gratually I realized that most people don't do it that way, they do what the teachers were trying to present in class out of the book -- a fairly simple introduction to grammar and vocabulary, without the full complexity of whole living language and its roots. I've since discovered that there are other models of language learning, which would be fun to explore someday.

My knowledge of Latin and Greek I picked up from books about dinosaurs, other animals, and plants -- mine often had translations. ("Dinosaur comes from 'dinos' for terrible and 'sauros' for lizard...") I've been playing around lately with inventing scientific names for plants in the Botannia series of poems, which is a lot of fun. I need a better guide to assembling them properly, though; I've found tidbits, but what I want is a complete grammatical guide to that.