It has been several months since I started learning Spanish in an online language school. It continues to be an interesting endeavor – sometimes elating and sometimes frustrating, the latter one especially when I cannot remember the vocabulary we learned and used in reading and talking exercises prior. The exciting part is that the process of learning a new language opened new ways of remembering other languages I learned in the past – often in conjunction with comparisons – as to grammar in general and specifically as to word order and the proper tense of verbs depending on what I am trying to say or write. Sometimes, when I am looking for a word, it sure pops up in my head in one of the other languages. On occasion it ends there and google will have to come to the rescue yet sometimes it becomes a stepwise process, where one discovery leads to another and finally, I can remember the word I am looking for. This morning while driving and conducting some sentence forming exercises in my head, it occurred to me that this time around with my Spanish course, I am actually using English as the baseline for my learning. In the past – here think back to the gymnasium and college times – I learned the new language from a baseline of my native language – German. I am not sure if one or the other would lead to faster or better results. Curious now I did a quick search if there were recommendations out there as to how to choose – the only one I found after a rather short search is, that one should use the one with the best proficiency level. I would have to acknowledge that currently the depth and breath of my conversations in German is probably less than in English. While at it I found other interesting tidbits. One article talked about language control mechanisms in a multilingual person’s brain and how there is indeed evidence that switching languages in a variety of use scenarios has certain thresholds if not to say difficulties associated with it. That is apparently measured by response time and accuracy to recognition tasks of visual cues. I am not sure I will be able to observe that for different pairs of languages for example Spanish/German vs. Spanish/English – the most common language in international tourism is English so on trips to Spain or Latin America I expect to fall back to English if necessary. At least I will attempt to complement with English, if I was to get stuck. I will probably watch myself as we toggle between English and German in our daily family affairs. Enough to say that the topic made me more curious and I ordered a book that discusses the brain mechanisms and psychology of processing languages – so more to come.