Pattern Slurping

One of my favorite aspects of learning languages is learning their history. I'm a history and anthropology nerd, I was a couple classes away from my anthro minor in college and if the history department had had anyone focusing on areas that I was actually interested in I would have easily attempted a double-major. (This would have gotten tricky. English and history both qualify under the 'humanities' section at my alma mater, and we were sledgehammered into taking a wide breadth of social sciences and hard sciences by the credit requirements. But I would have done it, dammit.) So it was an absolute revelation in my ability to learn new languages when one of my English profs told me about the Great Vowel Shift. The wiki article on it's not bad, though frankly the academic debates of it don't much matter for the purposes of this post.

What does matter is that I learned consciously in my early 20s something that I'd known subconsciously, through years of French as well as training as a singer. English had a vowel shift over the course of some several centuries, and that vowel shift only got more pronounced (pun semi-intended) as American English and British English drifted apart. By contrast, the Romance languages retained quite a lot of the a = ah, e = ay, i = ee, o = oh, and u = oo sounds. Not always with perfect consistency, but it gave me a hell of a template to map new Romance languages onto. I like templates, so long as I know they're only templates!

...this plus learning French first is, however, probably why my Spanish sounds Italian-accented. Oops. At least my consonants are, through deliberate practice, not European. Latin American Spanish is far, far more useful, practical, and frankly? A lot easier than the nuances of Iberian Spanish. Just like whenever I get around to Portuguese I plan to learn Brazilian as opposed to Continental.

On the downside, this means I had to toss out the template when I got around to German, and I have no template whatsoever when it comes to non-Indo-European languages. These languages, I have to form my own templates as I go. And I suppose I should explain; I don't mean a literal template either on my hard drive or in my gdocs or anything else, I mean the mental mapping I do in order to organize my brain. I tend to think in metaphor a lot, and it shows in the language choices I make as well as the ways in which I process learning new skills.

(We don't talk about the metaphorical workshop wherein I store my musical knowledge. That way lies madness, or at best confusion.)

Humans are a pattern-seeking species as a whole, so it's not surprising that this lives at the top of my toolkit. If you speak multiple languages, what patterns and templates do you use to keep your communication skills fresh?