I overcame the stumbling blocks of shyness and laziness and, well after my sixtieth birthday, enrolled in a class at a respected language school to study a foreign language I know poorly. I wanted to learn that language better, purely out of intellectual curiosity: I had learned the basics by ear, under poor conditions, and later I’d used it for many years for professional reasons, focusing on the practical aspects, that is, understanding and making myself understood, but neglecting the specifics of the language, its grammar, and its syntax.
My entrance into the classroom for the first lesson was traumatic: I was an outsider, an alien; I didn’t belong here. There were twenty or so students, only three of us males; two young women appeared to be in their thirties, all the others—female and male—were in their twenties. The teacher, who was also young, was educated, likable, intelligent, and very good at overcoming the inhibitions and shyness of the students, clearly experienced at his job, and familiar with the obstacles that interfere with the flow of learning.
He began the class with a frank and open discussion. There are many different reasons for studying a foreign language, and so there are many different methods of teaching it; strictly speaking, the teaching ought to be tailored to the aims, abilities, and previous knowledge of each individual pupil, but, since that wasn’t possible, a number of compromises would be necessary. There are those who want (or need) to learn a language only so that they can read it, or in order to study the literature, or to speak it as a tourist, or to do business in it, or to write business letters, or to hold a technical conversation in it with a colleague who is also a technician; but within this multitude of purposes it is possible to draw a boundary line between the passive command of a language (understanding without speaking) and active command (understanding and speaking). Well, have no illusions: the most talented among you may succeed in attaining an almost complete passive understanding of the spoken or written language; only a genius, at your age (and he was clearly referring to the age of most of the students), could succeed in speaking or writing the language without making mistakes, unless he or she could live abroad for at least six months in “total immersion,” that is, without hearing or speaking a word of Italian.
From the first few classes I realized how cruelly different it is to learn at age twenty, age forty, and age sixty. I believed my hearing was normal: it is, but only for Italian. It’s one thing to listen to someone talking in your own language, where, even if you miss a syllable or a word here or there, you have no difficulty filling in the blank subconsciously, or guessing at it through a quick mental process of exclusion. But if the language in question is a foreign one, then missing a syllable means missing the bus: the person goes on talking while you scramble to reconstruct the missing link. Your understanding can be thwarted by something as minor as the echo of voices off the walls, or a trolley going by in the street outside, but your young classmates don’t seem to be having any difficulties. Other challenges arise from your vision. I would be unfair if I complained about mine; in daily life it gives me problems only perhaps in museums, where you are continually required to adjust your focus to see something from up close and then from far away. The same thing happens at school; agility in adjusting your focus is necessary at all times, your eyes must leap countless times from your notebook to the blackboard and to the teacher’s face. If you have bifocals, things go reasonably well; but if you don’t, your left hand is engaged in an exhausting workout of “on-and-off-and-on-again.”
There are challenges that are more daunting because they run deeper. It is well-known that the process of learning can be broken down into three phases: impressing something in your memory, preserving it, and retrieving it when needed. The last two hold up fairly well: once a concept is impressed, it stays there indefinitely; retrieving it isn’t hard, and, in fact, with the passing years you learn certain stratagems to ensure that the phenomenon of having a word or a concept “on the tip of your tongue” occurs less frequently. But it is etching it into the memory that becomes harder and harder. You have to “learn how to learn”: it’s no longer enough to let the concept find its own way to the warehouse and deposit itself there. It won’t stay there, or not for long: it enters but almost immediately departs, vanishing into thin air, and leaving behind nothing more than an irritating and indistinct trace. You have to learn to intervene with brute force, to hammer it into its notch; it can be done, but it requires time and effort. You have to take methodical notes, and to reread them as many times as needed, weeks and even months afterward. There’s more: you realize that, perversely, it is just as difficult to erase, that is, unlearn mistaken concepts. It’s all as if a hypothetical wax had hardened: harder to make an impression, harder to erase one. Those mistakes in vocabulary or grammar that are so easy to pick up when studying amateurishly later demand method, patience, and a great deal of energy to chisel away.
On the other hand, age does not entail only disadvantages. You’ve managed to pick up a trick or two along the way; it’s easier to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, that is, which concepts should be accepted and recorded with care, and which can be glanced over and discarded. You have more time, greater calm, fewer distractions; you possess (possibly without being aware of it) a coherent body of knowledge into which new knowledge fits like a key in a keyhole. You have old curiosities that have been waiting ten or twenty years to be satisfied, and concepts that have been waited for and desired are remembered better.
Most of all, our objectives are different. Even in the best cases, a student, even after he’s finished with his mandatory education (where motivation is usually minimal), has no more than an indirect motivation. He studies not to learn but, rather, to obtain a certificate or degree that will allow him to continue his studies, or to earn a living; it is rare that he becomes fully aware of the correlation that links learning to professional competence, in part because, unfortunately, it is often the case that no such correlation exists. But even when he is reasonably convinced of the long-term utility of his studies, any actual interest may be weak. In contrast, an old man who chooses on his own to undertake a course of study, without restrictions in terms of schedule, without required attendance, without fear of testing, grading, or even a negative evaluation, experiences a sensation of lightness, of free will, which the handicaps described above and the hard seats do nothing to poison.
It is study, it is self-improvement and growth, but it is also play, theater, and luxury. Play—that is to say, exercise for its own sake, but orderly and governed by rules—is typical of children; but when you play at going back to school, you rediscover a taste of childhood, delicate and forgotten. The competition with your classmates, whether victorious or not, is a form of contact with young people on an equal standing, a fair and open race that would be impossible to undertake elsewhere. The fences separating the generations come down; one is forced to set aside the dull authority of an elder, and is led to pay homage to the superior mental resources of the young, who sit beside you without derision, commiseration, or scorn, and make friends with you. Moreover, giving oneself the gift of an enjoyable endeavor that has no immediate short-term objective is a luxury that costs little and pays rich dividends: it’s as if you had been given, free of charge or almost, a rare and beautiful object.