Horse-riding and Speaking a Foreign Language

Horse-riding has helped me see the difference between learning and acquiring. Throughout my life, whenever I’m confronted with something new, I go out and buy a book. Laugh all you like, but when I found out I was pregnant for the first time, my first stop was a bookstore. But when you’re sitting on a horse, it doesn’t matter what you’ve memorized and how many chapters you can recite. I have two shelves of books about horse-riding and some of them I’ve read three or four times. Some of it is very valuable information and has helped me to improve, but acquisition is what you do when a barking dog bursts out of the bushes and believe me, you don’t have time to look it up. Horse-riding is about developing automatic reflexes, and that is what fluency requires too. I may have seemed gifted in languages, but I am very much ungifted in riding, and it has opened my eyes to how difficult it is to acquire something to the point where you can do it without thinking about it. I’ve also come to realize that the hardest part in riding and in speaking a foreign language is unlearning bad habits that have been acquired and shouldn’t have been.