Learning curves

JON: As you may recall, we moved to Denmark with the theory that I was still capable of learning a new language at my advanced age. At first I went go to a government-funded language school, a fine institution with what claims to be an efficient method for teaching the young and able-minded amongst us. However, it is perhaps not quite such a good method for the somewhat more elderly, and definitely not a lot of use for anyone with a degenerative brain disorder which is slowly turning his grey matter to custard. I have often said that if at first you don’t succeed – just give up. I took my own sage advice and gradually dropped out of language school.

But although my “just say no” approach to failure works OK in general, I admit that it’s also nice to succeed once in a while. An aside: who is most likely to succeed? A toothless budgerigar (succeed/suck seed). It’s a dentist joke – my–o-my but we had fun whilst chiseling wisdom teeth out of jaws.

Anyway. Then we had a brain wave (well, when I say “we”, I mainly mean my thinking-brain dog, a glossy-haired bitch called Marie). What I needed was a group of people who would talk to me in Danish v-e-r-y - s-l-o-w-l-y and preferably also have a limited vocabulary. Who answers to that description? Old folks, that’s who. So I started going to the Oak House day centre for the slightly demented twice a week.

At first this was perhaps a less than perfect solution. Of the other eight or ten old guys and gals there, only two spoke a form of English, but not as she is spoke in Blighty - more pidgin, or perhaps swan. However, their English was vastly superior to my Danish, so it would be churlish to complain.

However, I recently changed the days I go there from Mondays and Fridays to Tuesdays and Thursdays. And with that change came a whole different bunch of people, so things started to perk up rather pleasantly. Here was fresh meat, or at least several new blokes, to practice my Danish on. One guy in particular speaks near-perfect English. On our first meeting, he told fascinating tales of international derring-do and seemed to be an all-round good guy, so much so that on my first day I had to wonder why he was an ‘inmate’ of the day centre. It didn’t take long to work out what the problem was, though: he has the memory capacity a concussed bee or, for the more technical of my readers, a Sinclair ZX80. So although his stories are interesting, they have a tendency to repeat on you over and over again. Fortunately, my memory is not that great either these days, so I don’t mind the repetition too much.

Now, if I could only get them to serve proper food at lunch instead of all this foreign muck…