Keep your mind active. Find your voice. Learn something new.
Languages After 60 is the working record of what that actually takes — the lessons, the practice plans, the parts that are harder than expected. Not advice from a teacher. Notes from someone doing the work now.
Who is doing this
I play guitar and bass, and I have spent a career in technology. Spanish is my second language — learned as an adult, used in real conversations, and hard-won enough that I know exactly how long the middle of that process takes.
So this is not a beginner writing about beginning. It is somebody who has finished a long learning project once, starting two more, and keeping an honest record of both.
What is running now
Languages
A new alphabet, unfamiliar sounds, and no shared vocabulary to lean on. Russian was chosen precisely because nothing about Spanish makes it easy. It is the honest test of whether the method transfers.
4 lessons ready — Hello, Russia, Meet and Greet, Let's Go, Help Me Understand
Start lesson 1Languages
Newly begun. No conjugations, no genders, no tenses — and almost all of the difficulty moved into the ear, where pitch is part of the word. A different kind of hard from Russian, and an inviting one for a musician.
4 lessons ready — Hello, Meet Someone, Let's Go, Help Me Understand
Begin MandarinMusic
Not learning music from zero — I already read, hear, and play. Piano is the problem of translating what my hands know on a fretboard into an entirely different geometry, with both hands working independently.
A 90-day practice experiment, tracked weekly
Read the planEvidence, not a claim
Spanish is the second language I learned. Early classes and years of hearing it around El Paso may have left me with more than I realized, but Spanish became real when work in Mexico made communication necessary. I’m carrying that experience into Russian and Mandarin: listen, use what you know, make mistakes, and keep going.
Where this goes
Over time this site is organised around three kinds of language: expression, vitality, and connection. Only what is genuinely being worked on appears here — Russian, Mandarin, and piano, with Spanish as the record of what came before. Portuguese is on the list, not on the menu.