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Hey Bob, Gareth Popkins once lectured in Russian history. In Welsh. He grew up in York with English and nothing else. No bilingual parents, no languages spoken at home, and by his own account not much success with them at school either. I spoke to him this week for the podcast, because I wanted to know how somebody gets from there to here. The obvious answer is that he studied harder than the rest of us. He doesn't think so. Nearly all the heavy lifting happened in one stretch in his twenties. He had tonnes of time, no responsibilities, and the freedom to become slightly obsessed. He describes it as a rocket launch. Huge energy at the start to clear the atmosphere, then you drift forward with boosters at will. That launch works when you're 24 when nobody much needs anything from you. But decades later, with a job and a family and a house that keeps demanding things, you never get the energy together, and the rocket sits on the pad. So I asked what he does now. This is the part I had wrong. He hasn't found more hours in the day. He's never had more hours. What he's done, again and again, is arrange the big decisions so the language was already sitting inside them. He chose a doctoral topic that gave him a reason to live in Russia. Years later he joined a law firm partly because it had a Moscow office. None of that is extra study time. It's a different kind of decision, and you can make one at any age. He walks through how it works here: Chat soon, Olly |