“Describe your last attempt to learn something that did not come easily to you.”
Humorously the best option I have to answer this would be learning the Abacus. When I was a kid I learned it but then forgot it as anyone does when you don’t apply what you’ve learned to your regular life. As an adult I got curious and picked up an app and tried to play around with one seeing if I could re-learn it. I struggled a little bit until I realized that I was using it in the wrong direction. I was trying to apply the operators in right-to-left when I should have been doing it left-to-right. It wasn’t difficult, but once I figured it out it clicked and parts of my memory long ago came back along with the rediscovered skill.
The other thing, which I have training software for is to reacquire French as a fluent foreign language. Two years ago Scott gave me an entire Rosetta Stone course in French. I’ve been plugging away at it off and on and I need to put aside some time, make the time, and dive in. That should be a mixed bag as I have a primary majority of english, some german, and a lot of french bouncing around in my head already, so at some point what I can’t remember the Rosetta Stone system will re-teach me, and then the rest will come flooding back on its own.
About the languages, something that I’ve always thought but have no proof one way or the other about is the question of whether or not people think differently when they use different languages. That thinking one way in English is not exactly the same as when you think about something in French, for example. I don’t mean to say that any language is less than any other, English proves that is not correct – when English lacks a way to convey something English speakers just start accumulating new ways to do it. They harvest words from other languages, coin new words, even create new grammars just to get over the hump and explain something in English. But I do think there are subtle differences in between languages that might lend some credence that the way one person thinks in French isn’t the exact same as when that person thinks in English. The best way to answer this curiosity of mine is to finish the Rosetta Stone course and become operationally fluent in French. I look forward to it a lot.