November 11, 2014 – Can we learn faster and easier?

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I wish I could go back to my 13 year old self to ask her why she decided, as a high school freshman, to take French.  I don’t remember if it was a lark, or if there was something deeper.  In any case, my teacher, Monsieur Terando sparked in me a love of languages, especially French. I took French all four years and two more in college. By my last year I had dreams in French. (Isn’t that weird how we know that we are dreaming in another language?)  But, I didn’t take it any further because I wasn’t into French literature; I wanted to communicate in French and was not at all literary!

As any of you who’ve read what I write about my paintings know, I still have this thing about France, Paris in particular – where I had a stay in my early 30’s and have visited many times since.  There is a glinty vein of Parisian-French that runs through me.  I also love Italy. There’s something captivating about the energy of Italy, the food, the style, the countryside, the art – it’s an entrancing place.  Since I have a solidly functional command of French, it’s been especially frustrating to me to be unable to communicate like that in Italy. I would love to speak Italian like I do French.  Besides being convenient, I feel different when I speak French. It’s as if that vein takes me over. I’m not just speaking French, my experience of the place is much more intimate and personal – it’s as if I am French.  I’d love to connect in that same way in Italy.

Fast-forward to last week:  I happened upon a neighbor and her new doggy on my morning hike with Bo. She had to turn off her Pimsleur Spanish lesson on her iPhone to talk to me.  This had me come home to look up language learning programs. Our family has been talking about a trip to Italy next year to celebrate our dad’s new knee and Italian has been calling to me.  Which was most effective?  Pimsleur has been around forever, I’d seen ads for Rosetta Stone in the airport… Poking around online, I ended up on a website called Fluent in 3 Months with Benny the Irish Polyglot.  He’s written a book by the same title and has taught himself a bunch of languages really quickly.  I love it!  Something outside the box.  I’m just a few days into his free email series and I am incredibly inspired by his philosophy.

He talks about learning – in his world, languages – in a way that can apply to learning in general. He says you can’t learn to speak a language without speaking! And speaking right from the start, even before you learn how!  We often (and I have so experienced this) are frozen, unable to say anything, for fear of making mistakes.  He suggests you adopt a confidence and just go for it.

The inspiration immediately had me translate his philosophy to what I teach – painting watercolor. Just as you can’t learn to speak a language without speaking, you can’t learn to paint without painting!  There is a proverb I read on Benny’s site that is telling – and hilarious – it goes:  “If skill could be gained by watching, every dog would become a butcher.” We’ve got to get messy!  There have been budding artists in my classes and groups who are quite afraid to paint. I often find myself saying “it’s just a piece of paper, it’s not your worthiness!”   Just last week, I was hearing one painter in the Friday group express disappointment in how a wash looked to her. I suggested she instead say to herself:  “huh?” in sort of a, “isn’t that curious?” tone.

You see, in whatever we do, if we could do better we would.  We could look at missing the mark along the way as simply information, feedback about what that particular way of doing it resulted in.  Huh?  is freedom to swing out and see what happens.  Just like speaking to someone in a language I don’t yet know, even before I can come up with the correct words.  Benny says it speeds up learning languages, what if it also speeds up learning how to work with watercolor?   I’m going to keep following Benny’s pointers to learn Italian (we’ll see about the 3 months), and I’m going to apply this philosophy even more with the artists my groups. I bet that second-guessing ourselves slows us down.  As I read in a recent Seth Godin post “Taking delight in the journey takes confidence. It pushes the envelope of design. And it’s fun.”  So where do we get the confidence if we don’t have it?  We get it from each other, by risking together, it’s way more safe to make mistakes.  I say:  Andiamo!   Let’s have some fun!