Prolific

Subject: Prolific

Prolific. The word was position perfect it related to a conversation I was having with a Moldovan friend about my latest blog. He said that he hadn't read all of them but had read only some because of time constraints and because I was so prolific in churning them out. "Where did you learn that word" I said ? "From the shrimps" he answered.
Our vocabulary, built up over time is dependent on what we do and who we talk to. It's dependent on what we read and the programs we watch on the TV. It's dependent on our hobbies and interests.
So shrimps (his hobby and business) breed prolifically and the word found its use in describing the manufacture of my blogs.
I am always amazed how some people find learning a language much easier then others.
The guys who work with me are from Russia, Lithuania, and Moldova. They all speak English really well and when, amongst themselves they will revert to some lingua  franca of there own they seamlessly step into English whilst I am there. 
Learning another language was a talent I never had. I lived in South Africa for years but never learned Afrikaans. It was all around me but I would wait until English was used and never bothered that I missed out on what was said if spoken in Afrikaans. 
Laziness yes. Mentally deaf to other languages because English is spoken across the world,yes. Part of the colonial superiority which resides in most Brits, yes.
Andrews girlfriend is learning Tibetan. To my ear it's an amazing mixture of linguistic contradictions a really difficult language that has no connection to the Latin based language we speak. How she retains and makes connections out of her lessons I have no idea but some people are gifted with the patience to unravel the syntax.
When starting out in 1961 on the trip that took me all around the world I lived in Amsterdam for a few months. The chap who would accompany me as far as Cape Town, John Thornhill soon learnt to speak Dutch. He was proficient by the time we left and it stood him in good stead when we arrived in SA to merge what he had learnt into understanding Afrikaans. I was oblivious to Dutch as I was to Afrikaans, it was a dead zone to me and whilst intellectually I longed to speak  the language I was, as a Teflon pot is to food, nothing stuck.
The inroads into comprehension, the strides you make in affirming your collaboration with someone if you speak the same language in a foreign country, the less foreign you become with benefits all round. But no, whilst I could see the case I was not prepared to put in the hard miles and I wonder if it was not a case of my being insular, lost in my own world, satisfied in the discussions which were whirling and continue to whirl in my own head.
Perhaps the blog is a manifestation of this "one sidedness", this singular conversation where thoughts can be expressed without fear or favour, without a contradiction to destroy their pristine imagery.