Craig Dodge Taiwan

Who hasn't heard the axiom "Use it or lose it"? It's so common because it's so true! It also applies to a wide variety of situations. Let me tell you a little story about why I chose the phrase for the tag line of my web site and blog.

One of my personal hobbies and part-time professions is fitness training. I have been working-out on and off for maybe 20+ years, but became more focused as I faced my mid-life crisis.  Experiencing my own aging and observing that of my parents and grandparents, I was faced with the reality that if we don't use our muscles, we lose them. If we don't exercise as we get older, we lose our strength to the point where simple tasks, like going up stairs or carrying our own groceries,  become increasingly difficult. The good news is that exercise can reverse, or at least slow down the process. By using our muscles, we not only don't lose them, but we can build more! My motto as a fitness trainer, therefore, became "Use it or lose it".  (My other fitness training motto was GOYA: Get Off Your Ass, but that's a different story.)

Another thing I worried about as I started getting older was losing my mind. Like our muscles, though,  by keeping our brains active, we can prevent or at least slow down thinks like Alzheimer's. We can keep our brains active by reading, trying new things, take a new way to work or ....even..... LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE!  (Imagine that.)

Here's where I need to go back in time a little, and then make a confession.

...

My foreign language learning dates back to 1980, when I started college. As part of my university major, International Studies, I studied French for 4 years, including a summer study program in France. Half-way through my degree program, I took a year off to participate in a work-study program in Japan, and continued to study Japanese another year after I got back. After college, I moved to Miami where the primary language is Spanish. Although I didn't study Spanish formally, living in Miami for 10 years helped me to become fairly conversational. I even studied a semester of Portuguese while dating a DJ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. So, I have a fairly long and extensive history of learning languages.

The confession: I didn't follow my own advice. I didn't keep up with the languages, and have therefore forgotten most of what I learned.

What makes it especially regrettable is not only that I've lost contact with most of the interesting people I was able to meet by using those languages, but also the career opportunities I've missed. It was my French that was instrumental in getting me my first position at American Airlines, but after leaving the airport, I seldom used French. I also had very little opportunity to use Japanese while living in Miami. Several of the people with whom I studied in Japan went on to use the language to get some very rewarding jobs. I didn't continue with Portuguese after breaking up with the DJ, which also probably means some missed opportunities as Brazil is a hot emerging market. By not keeping up with Spanish, either, after leaving Miami, I closed the doors to some opportunities there, too. The bottom line is that I didn't keep using the languages, so I've mostly lost them.

No one can ever take away the experiences I had learning the languages and traveling to so many countries, and it opened my mind to so many new ways of thinking, but I've largely lost whatever fluency in those languages  I worked so hard to get. I missed some very good job opportunities and I've lost contact with many dear friends.

So to all my friends learning English, or any other new language, don't make the same mistake that I did. Don't let all your hard work go to waste. It's not that difficult to keep up a language after you've learned it. Just read from time to time, listen to some MP3's or podcasts and chat with me whenever you can. Just don't lose your language abilities.