Study of polyglots offers insight on brain's language processing

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2. I'm addicted to language learning

I grew up near the Texas Gulf Coast between Houston and Corpus Christi, so I’ve grown up around Spanish and knew a little. But I wanted to be a doctor and my mom said I should take Latin but changed my mind about being a doctor. So I took 2 years of high school Latin. In college I took 2 years of Russian just to be different. And I took a semester of French but I didn’t like it.

Then I graduated from college with a degree in Mathematics and didn’t think too much about language learning. When I was about 45, I thought to myself that I didn’t have enough saved for retirement. So I looked up moving to a country that was cheap enough to live well on Social Security and started learning Spanish. I studied with a group at a restaurant with a book. Then one of the group came back from Guatemala. He had gone to Spanish language school in Guatemala. In 2008 I went to Guatemala for 2 weeks. The same year at home in Houston , I fell in love with my neighbor from Honduras.

In March of 2013, I found out about Duolingo. I started with Spanish and then studied Portuguese, Italian and French. I would say the only one I speak pretty well besides English is Spanish but I’ve spoken to Brazilians and they were surprised I could speak any Portuguese at all. I finished the Portuguese course but they keep adding to the Spanish course. I finished it once and then I blew my streak and when I came back they had added a bunch.