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.
Why these two, first
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.
3 lessons ready — Hello, Russia, Meet and Greet, Let's Go
Start lesson 1Music
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 actually learned. It taught me what a plateau feels like, how much of the work is listening rather than studying, and why persistence beats intensity over a long enough run. Russian is that same method applied to a much harder problem.
Where this goes
Over time this site is organised around three kinds of language: expression, vitality, and connection. Right now only two projects are real and documented — Russian and piano — so those are the only two on the site. Mandarin and Portuguese are on the list, not on the menu.