My French is nowhere near what it used to be, I’ve just discovered. Once, years ago, I could comfortably read Spanish and French at the newspaper/ novel level and was working hard to add German to my language list. No more, alas. I was stunned and dismayed to discover how much I’ve simply lost. I can still manage some Spanish, both conversationally and in reading, but German has become an indecipherable sea, and while my French grammar remains, the vocabulary has all but disappeared.
However, I still read well enough that I got the general gist of a fascinating review of Create A Language Clinic (and fell back on free translation to fill in what I missed).
Reading the review, I discovered that the reader had worked through the book the same way I worked through the post; using a translation service. That’s a hard, hard way to learn to build a language—weirdly recursive, in that you’re working from a language you don’t know though a translator that translates like a multilingual drunkard with comprehension issues to convert into your language the method for creating other languages. I lift my glass to the diligent Leppiya, who definitely did the course the hard way. And apparently still got the humor. I’m glad that came through.
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