What are your language objectives? This is not merely one of those abstract questions universities and fitness centres like to annoy you with before they accept your application. Are you planning to marry a German and live in Germany? Then the language you want to learn in German. You should stick to German and learn it well. Do you own a hardware store in a neighbourhood of a growing American city where your customers represent eighteen different language groups, including Tagalog and Punjabi? Then you want to learn greetings, key business expressions like “invoice” and “charge account,” and the names of as many items in your inventory as you can in eighteen different languages, including Tagalog and Punjabi. The way you’re going to spend your language learning hours depends on your objectives. We’re going to presume here that whatever language you choose to learn, you want to learn well. If you merely want to learn a smattering of greetings and phrases in a lot of languages, great. You’re in for a lot of fun, particularly when you see, if you haven’t already, how far even a few words can carry you. In that case, the departure from the method outlined here is obvious. You don’t need mastery of the grammar. Most big bookstores offer racks of phrase books for travellers in up to twenty-five different languages. Buy all you want and study your favourite ten or fifteen of the first hundred phrases in each. Don’t feel frivolous if you feel you want to learn a language but don’t know which one. You’re part of a movement to correct a weakness that has bedevilled America since the founding of our nation. Do you like opera? Try Italian. Diamonds? Try Dutch. Commercial advantage? German or Japanese. Cutting edge positioning for the world down the road? Chinese or Arabic. East-West barrier breaking and door opening? Russian. French is second only to English as an international language, spoken far beyond the borders of France itself. Spanish enables Americans to become more complete citizens of the Western Hemisphere, while a resurgent Spain itself becomes an increasingly important part of Europe. If willingness of subject peoples to learn the language of the conqueror is any indication of the conqueror’s popularity, then the winning conqueror is England and the loser is Russia. Those forced into Moscow’s postwar empire had an aversion to learning Russian, but in spite of Communism’s failure, the Russian language remains the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. It can be your key to the dozen or so related languages (Polish, Czech, etc.). Maybe you want to learn a difficult language, like Finnish; an easy language, like Indonesian; a useful language, like French; or an obscure language, like Albanian. My motives for learning various languages have ranged from chance and youthful energy (Norwegian) to wanting a vital tool for my work (Spanish) to processing refugees (Hungarian) to getting dates with women whose looks I liked (Swedish) to proving I wasn’t an idiot for almost flunking Latin (Chinese). Nobody who sells language learning books and devices will ever frown in disappointment at your choice of a language. Don’t feel you have to apologise or explain that you want to learn Czech – or Catalan or Yoruba or Urdu or Kurdish – for no other reason than you’re tired of walking around a world as exciting as this one speaking only one language!
Now let the adult mind enter and make peace. Obviously, no language tries to be hard just to keep you out. Whatever rules you find perplexing in your target language, that language came by them naturally and organically. Grammar does change, but so slowly you’ll never have to worry about it. Approach the grammar with a smile and your hand extended. That which you understand, take and keep. That which is confusing, return to again and again. That which seems impossible, return to again and again and again, until it becomes merely confusing. It will ultimately become clear. Meanwhile, however, you will be speeding ahead in your command of the language as you keep returning to those stubborn fortresses of grammatical resistance. I can honestly say I came to like the study of grammar. Once you finally approach grammar with the right attitude, it becomes both a map that shows you the pathways through a language and a rocket that takes you there faster. A paleontologist can find lifetime fascination with a fossil a child might ignore, kick, or toss into the lake just to hear the splash. Likewise, the grammar of various languages throws off some laughs and insights nonlinguists never get a chance to marvel at. In German, for example, a woman doesn’t achieve feminine gender until she gets married. The word for “girl” (M?dchen) and “miss” (Fr?ulein) are both neuter gender. In Russian, the past tense of verbs acts like an adjective; it doesn’t shift forms according to person and number as verbs normally do, but shift according to gender and number as adjectives do. In Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish the definite article (“the”) follows the noun and is attached to it. Therefore, “a field” in Norwegian is en mark. “The field,”, however, is marken. Romanian and Albanian, completely unrelated to the Scandinavian languages, do the same thing. In Finnish, the word for “not” is a verb. (At least it behaves like a verb.) Finnish, alone in all the world, has an inflecting negative. In every other language in which verbs conjugate, the form of the verb changes according to person and number, whether the verb is positive or negative. Thus, in Spanish the verb meaning “to want” goes yo quiero, tu quieres, el quiere. If you wish to say “I don’t want”, you keep the verb forms the same and throw the word for “not”, no, in front of it (yo no quiero, tu no quieres, el no quiere). In Finnish, and this is pure believe-it-or-not to anyone who’s looked at a lot of different languages, it’s the word for not that does the changing! Thus, “I want,” “you want,” “he wants” in Finnish goes, (min?) haluan, (sin?) haluat, (h?n) halua. In the negative, however, the verb for “want” becomes halua in all persons and the word for “not” changes from person to person. Thus, “I don’t want,” “you don’t want,” “he doesn’t want” becomes (min?) en halua, (sin?) et halua, (h?n) ei halua. I think my most impossible to top discovery is the fact that in Hindi and Urdu “tomorrow” and “yesterday” are translated by the same word. Once, a Pakistani cab driver actually seemed irked that I found that to be at all strange. “We have verb tenses to tell us which is which” was his testy explanation. American feminists have mounted crusades to convert sexist terms that have over the years insinuated themselves deep into the language. We’ve all abandoned chairman, for example, for the cumbersome but less provocative chairperson, manhole for maintenance hole, and so on. It’s strange that the most blazing example of language sexism has gone unreformed, even though it occurs in some countries with active and successful feminist movements. Maybe it’s because, unlike manhole, this sexism is more than just a word or a term. It’s gone through the bone into the marrow, through the words of the language into the grammar. You may remember it from Spanish 1. You may have gotten it right on the tests and not thought of it since. I refer to the Romance language “gender surrender” from feminine to masculine. Let’s say two women are having lunch. If you want to refer to them in Spanish, the word is ellas, the feminine “they” or “them.” If they should be joined by a man, however, the ellas becomes ellos, masculine for “they” or “them.” And no matter how many more women show up and crowd around the table, the Spanish language can never put that humpty dumpty ellas back into play – unless the lone man leaves! Theoretically, a million women can be rallying in the main square of the capital. The newspapers will report that ellas rallied, made demands, did thus and so. If, however, one man wanders into the square to join in, the proper pronoun is ellos! And that same rule goes for French, Italian, Portugese, Romanian, and a few other languages. You may never come to love grammar, but work with it. Although sometimes annoying and thick in disguise, it’s your friend.
Americans have grown up believing learning languages is hard. It is not hard! It merely seems hard because language instruction in American schools and colleges has until lately been so exasperatingly dull and unrewarding. Grammar, I again protest, is usually presented in American classrooms as a kind of obstacle course designed to leave you gasping face down on the Astroturf somewhere between the pluperfect and the subjunctive. Grammar can do that to you if you insist on attacking it the old way: frontally, rule by rule, exception by exception, with no fun en route and never feeling the joy of progress. You’re going to learn grammar, all right, but the conquest will never give you pain. You will waft through the thickest walls of grammar like a cartoon ghost and continue your journey onward through the language. Every time you look backward that wall will be lower, thinner, full of increasingly wider openings, and eventually it will disappear entirely. Contrary to centuries of American superstition, you don’t have to conquer the grammar to possess the language. Conquer the language and you’ll possess the grammar! I’ve long entertained the fantasy of putting the old orthodox grammarians on trial for war crimes, the specific charge being assassination of the fun that flows from gaining command of another language. Their defense will predictably be “Bah, humbug. You can’t immerse, converse, rehearse, or even play around with a foreign language without a good foundation in the grammar!” They’re right in insisting on the importance of grammar, but who says you’ve got to have it first, as some kind of brutal initiation? Where is it written that you must wrap cold, wet blankets of grammar around your eagerness to learn another language until it disappears? (Your eagerness, that is. The grammar never does.) A six year old in America doesn’t know what the word grammar means, but he knows to say “he does” and not “he do.” How does he know? “He do” just doesn’t sound right. That’s all! And that’s enough! Years later he will be taught that the English verb in the third person singular of the present tense adds an s or es to the infinitive form, which serves uninflected for all other persons singular and plural. You don’t have to know grammar to obey grammar. If you obey grammar from the outset, when you turn around later and learn why you should say things the way you’re already saying them, each grammatical rule will then become not an instrument of abstract torture disconnected from anything you’ve experienced but rather an old friend who now wants you to have his home address and private phone number. When the grammatical rule come first, followed by its pitiful two or three examples in the textbook, it seems to the student like an artificially confected bit of perversity rolled down upon his head like a boulder. When the grammatical rule comes after you’ve got some of the language in you, it becomes a gift flashlight that makes you smile and say, “Now I understand why they say it that way!” So, you are right now and forevermore warned not to bridle or to question, “Why is the word for ‘go’ in this French sentence vais and in the very next sentence aller?” Simply embrace the faith that both sentences are correct and learn them like Catholic children in strict parochial schools learn the Baltimore Catechism. The more shaken you become by grammatical storms, the more tightly you must hug the faith. I vow it will all become clear. And in this world. You won’t have to wait for any other. It’s easy to reason, “Who am I trying to kid? They’ll always know I’m a foreigner. They’ll excuse my mistakes. So forget about all those rules. I just want to get by. Gimme some words and phrases and get out of my way. As long as they understand!” That’s an attitude to be resisted. When you learn another language, you will be accepted as an honoured volunteer into the culture of another people. Do you want to be accorded a low rank or a high rank? Learn the language properly, which means (eventual) conquest of the grammar. Don’t be a buck private when, for a few minutes of extra concentration, you can be a general. Look at it this way. Grammar is not a marathon run in which, if you tire, falter, or fall, you fail. Grammar is an edifice you must build on your property. But it doesn’t have to be done all at once. At the appointed moment in your studies, I will advise you to master the first five lessons in your grammar book. (Some call it a textbook or a workbook – it’s the book they’ll give you at the bookstore if you ask, “Have you got anything that teaches you French?”) After that, you will advance through reading, conversation, comprehension, and real world contact with the languages in addition to the grammar. As I grappled with the complexities of grammar in Russian, Finnish, Hungarian, and, to a lesser extent, German, I had visions of those people way back when they were wandering tribes. I imagined the tribal elders squatting around campfires consulting with soothsayers who warned them, “In the mid twentieth century a child will be born to the Farber family in a place they’ll call America. He will try to learn our language. At present it’s too simple. Get back to work and come up with some more grammar. Let our noun endings mire him up to his hips. Let the felsh of his face feel the thorns of our verbs. Flay his back with exceptions to our rules and let his hair get caught in our inflecting negatives and perfective aspects. “Hurry!” the soothsayer concludes. “We haven’t got a century to waste. Get in there right now and mess our language up so that poor guy will never get it!
A wise man once said, “I wish I had all the time I’ve ever wasted, so I could waste it all over again.” Others may look at me and see someone who can, indeed, carry on a creditable conversation in about eighteen languages. I’m the only one who knows how much of my language learning time has been wasted, how little I’ve got to show for all those years of study, considering the huge hunks of time I’ve put into it. In fact, I feel like one of those hardened convicts who’s occasionally let out of jail under armed guard to lecture the sophomore class on the importance of going straight. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it at all the way I did then. I’d do it the way I’m doing it now, the way I will detail in this book. It’s the way I’ve finally grown into and the way I hope you will proceed in order to get the absolute most out of your language learning dollar and your language learning minute. Here are some of the myths I held dear in the years when I thought I knew how to study languages, myths I now want to trample before you get the slightest bit seduced by them. I’ll put on my language cassettes while I work around the house and learn the language as easily as I learn the lyrics to popular songs. Great image. It just doesn’t work. You can’t just push a button and let the language you want to learn roll over you. Expecting to learn a language by laid back listening is like expecting to build a magnificent body by going to the gym, sitting in the steam room, chugging a glass of carrot juice, and then bragging about your “workout!” You’re going to have to study the material on that cassette, capture every word, learn it, review it, master it, and then check challenge yourself after every piece of English. (We’ll consider a “piece” to be whatever the speaker on the cassette says in English before you hear the target language. It may be a word, a phrase, a whole sentence.) Abandon all images of language learning that resemble lying on a tropical beach and letting the warm surf splash over you. Pretend, instead, as you listen to your cassette, that you’re a contestant on a TV game show. After each piece of English, ask yourself, “For one thousand dollars now, quick, how do I say that in the language I’m trying to learn?” Since I’m not in school anymore, time isn’t important. I’ll take my time, skip a day, skip two days; the language will still be there when I get back to it. Spoken like a true linguaphony. A language has a lot in common with a military foe. Don’t let it rest. Don’t let it regroup and devise fresh ways to foil your attack. Keep up the rhythm of your offensive. Keep your momentum going. (This is only an illustration of tactics, of course; no language is an enemy.) A programme that features disciplined effort will convince you that you’re serious and generate fresh inspiration and energy. The chapter I’m studying now is hard and probably not too important. I’ll skip it and get back to it later on. That’s a giant killer. The declension of the numbers in Russian. The subjunctive in the Romance languages. The double infinitive in German. The enclitics in Serbo-Croatian. The noun cases in Finnish. Almost every language has formidable mountains to climb. Don’t walk around them. Climb them! Take one step at a time. Just be careful never to surrender to the temptation to beg off the hard stuff and learn only those parts of the language you find congenial. It will seem masochistic, but I want you to learn the names of the letters of the alphabet in your target language and the grammatical terms too, so that when you ask a native how a certain word is spelled, you can bandy the letters back and forth in the language. When you ask a native for the past tense of this verb or the negative plural of that noun, do your asking in the target language. I’m never going to pose as a native speaker of their language, and I’d never be able to pull it off even if I tried, so why bother to develop the right accent? Nobody is arrested for indecent exposure just because he dresses poorly. On the other hand, a person unconcerned about dress will never impress us with his appearance. It’s the same with the proper accent. As long as you’re going to go to the trouble of learning a language, why not try – at very little extra cost – to mimic the genuine accent. A poor accent will still get you what you want. A good accent will get you much more. If you can put on a foreign accent to tell ethnic jokes, you can put one on when you speak another language. If you think you can’t, try! A lot of Americans believe they’re unable to capture a foreign accent when subconsciously they’re merely reluctant to try. We’re all taught that it’s rude to make fun of foreigners. That childhood etiquette is hereby countermanded. “Make fun” of the foreigner’s accent as effectively as you can as you learn his language. Your “infancy” in a foreign language is spent learning to grope with incomplete phrases made up of incorrect words to mash your meaning across. “Babyhood” comes when some of the phrases are complete and more of the words are correct. “Childhood” arrives when you can deal rather fluently with concepts involving bread, bed, buttons, and buses, even though you can’t yet discuss glassblowing in Renaissance Estonia. “Adulthood” is being able to discuss absolutely anything, but with a pronounced American accent. With “maturity” you acquire a creditable accent in the language. You’ll know you’ve achieved maturity when you become annoyed at other Americans you hear plodding through the language with no effort to “foreignise” their accent to approximate the correct one. Be content with partial victories. I rejoiced the moment I learned I could speak Swedish well enough to convince a Norwegian I was a Finn. I celebrated when I realised I could speak Serbo-Croatian well enough to convince an Italian I was a Czech! There will come a moment when I will cross a border and earn the right to say, “Yes, I speak your language”! There’s no such border. Learning a language is a process of encroachment into the unknown. When can you say you “speak a language”? The famous ophthalmologist Dr. Peter Halberg of New York refuses to consider that he speaks a language unless and until he can conduct a medical lecture in the language and then take hostile questioning from his peers. By his standards, he only speaks five languages! My standards are less exacting. I’ll confess to “speaking a language” if, after engaging in deep conversation with a charming woman from a country whose language I’m studying, I have difficulty the next morning recalling which language it was we were speaking. The Language Club, about which I will say more later, has a valuable guideline. When anybody asks a Language Clubber, “How many languages do you speak?” he gives the only safe answer, “One. I speak my native language.” He lets a breath go by to let that “one” sink in, after which he may then add, “However, I am a student of…” and mentions as many languages as he likes. To the question, “Do you speak such and such a language?” the all class response is a James Bond smile and three words: “Yes, a little.” It’s much better to let people gradually realise that your “little” is really quite a bit than to have them realise that your “Yes, I speak such and such” is a fraud. Say you’ve been studying Indonesian, far from a commonplace language, and to your amazement (and delight) one of the other guests for dinner is from Indonesia. Repress the instinct to yelp at your good fortune. Act at first as though you know nothing of Indonesian. Don’t even say “Pleased to meet you” in Indonesian. There will be time. At the right point, much later in the proceedings, you’ll have the opening to remark, “That’s what the merchants of Djakarta would call…” and then let go your best burst of wit – in Indonesian. For you to actually speak Indonesian and allow so much time to elapse before claiming your applause is downright noble. Beware flying socks when you lean over to your new Indonesian friend and, lowering your voice so as not to appear to be calling attention to yourself, finally unleash your evening’s first volley of Indonesian.
How I Married Hungarian You don’t launch into the study of a new language casually, but it’s not quite as solemn a decision as an American man proposing to his girlfriend after an evening of wine and light jazz. It is, however, something like an Ottoman sultan deciding to take on another wife. It really is like a marriage. Something in you actually says, “I do!” and you decide to give it time and commitment that would ordinarily be invested elsewhere. My pledge never to try to learn Hungarian was shattered by Hungarian heroism, Soviet tanks, and my agreeing to help Hungarian refugees resettle in Greensboro. I wasn’t the only journalist who stayed on that story long after history moved on. Every journalist I know who got involved in any part of the Hungarian Revolution became attached to it. I started in Munich in the transit refugee camp for those fleeing Hungarians who were destined to go to America. I buzzed from one refugee to another like a bee to blossoms, drawing as many words and phrases as I could from each and writing them down. The U.S. Air Force gave its Luitpol barracks over to the Hungarians, who promptly plastered their own signs right on top of the English signs on all the doors. The door that once said “Doctor” suddenly said “Orvos.” The door that once said “Clothing” suddenly said “Ruha.” And so on. It was easy to tell who among the Americans and Germans at Luitpol were genuine language lovers. They were the ones who were not annoyed. The Hungarian relabelling of everything at Luitpol actually gave me my most explosive language learning thrill. When I went searching for a men’s room, I found myself for the first time in my life not knowing where to go. You don’t need Charles Berlitz to take you by the hand to the right one when the doors read “Mesdames” and “Messieurs,” “Damen” and “Herren,” “Se?oras” and “Se?ores,” or even the rural Norwegain “Kvinnor” and “Menn.” No such luck prevailed at Luitpol. The two doors were labelled “N???”? and“?é¨rfiak”? I looked at those two words, trying not to let my language love’?s enthusiasm distract from the pragmatic need to decipher which one was which relatively soon. My thinking went like this. The k at the end of both words probably just made them plural. That left ???? andéF¨rfia, or possiblyéF¨rfi. Something came to me. I remembered reading that Hungarian was not originally a European language. It had been in Asia. The Chinese word fo“ ?wom”n?“ ?la”y?, or anything female was?n– ¨ not no and not nu, but that precise umlaut sound that two dots over anything foreign almost always represents. (I lose patience with language textbooks that spend a page and a half telling you to purse your lips as though y’u?re going to say oo as i“ ?ru”e? and then tell you instead to say ee as i“ ?tre”.? If you simply say the e sound i“ ?nervo”s? o“ ?Gertrud”,? y’u?ll be close enough. Following that hunch I entered the door marke“ ?F?rfia”.? The joy that came next should arise in tabernacles, not m’n?s rooms. To my satisfaction and relief I walked in and found five or six otheréf¨rfiak inside! Back in America I went looking for some books and records (there were no cassette tapes in those days) to help me in Hungarian. There were none. Communist rule has so completely cut Hungary off from the West that when you went looking for a Hungarian book, the shelves of even the biggest bookstores leapfrogged Hungarian, jumping right from Hebrew to Indonesian. There was one Hungarian-English phrase book published by a New York Hungarian delicatessen and general store named Paprikas Weiss. To accommodate the wave of Hungarian immigrants who had come to America in the 19’0?s, they had published their own little phrase book, which was distinguished by its utter failure to offer a single phrase of any practical use whatsoever to those of us working with the refugees. It was loaded with sentences like Almomban egy b??t???r??vel viaskod”om,? which mea“s, ?In my dream I had a fight with a bur”lar?! Finally, like supplies that lag far behind the need for them in wartime, some decent English-Hungarian/Hungarian-English dictionaries arri–ed ¨ no grammar books yet, just dictionaries. An explorer named Vilhjalmur Stefansson went to Greenland one time and proved you could live for eighteen months on nothing but meat. I proved it was possible, with nothing but that dictionary, to resettle half a dozen Hungarian refugees who spoke no English at all in Greensboro, North Carolina, to care for all their needs, and have a good deal of fun without one single bit of grammar! Hungarian has one of the most complex grammars in the world, but grammar is like classical music and good table manners’ It?s perfectly possible to live without either if’you?re willing to shock strangers, scare children, and be viewed by the world as a rampaging boor. We had no choice. Hungarians had to be talked to about homes, jobs, training, money, dr’ver?s licenses, and the education of their children. ?Tomorro’ we?ll go to the but’he”?s,? for instance, had to do without the thirty-nine grammatical inflections a Hungarian sentence of that length would properly entail. We did it with nothing but the translation of essential wor“s: ?Tomorrow go meat fel”o“.? ?A charitable woman is coming by to help you with your furniture n”eds? bec“me ?Nice lady come soon give tables cha”rs.? I learned Hungarian fluen–ly ¨ and badly. Many years later I decided to return to Hungarian and learn it properly and grammatically’ It?s a little like being back in Latin class, but this time I have a much better attitude. New Friends For the next thirty-five years I stood my ground and resisted taking up any new language. The languag’s I?d studied up to that point included Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portugese, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Chinese (Mandarin dialect), Indonesian, Hungarian, Finnish, Yiddish and Hebrew. I happily applied myself to building competence in those languages and turning a deaf ear to all others. It was tempting to tackle Greek; so many Greeks I could have practiced with were popping up in my daily travels, but I clung to my policy“of ?No more languages, thank ”ou!? That policy was misguided; in fact, swine headed. I was like the waiter standing there with arms folded who gets asked by a diner if he knows what time it is and brusquely repl“es ?Sorry. ’hat?s not my ta”le!? I could have easily and profitably picked up a few words and phrases every time I went to the Greek coffee shop and in the process learned another major language. But I ’idn?t. In the ’980?s immigrants to New York, where I lived, began to pour in from unaccustomed corners of the world, adding languages like Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Farsi, Bengali, Pashtu, Twi, Fanti, Wollof, Albanian, and Dagumbi to our already rich inventory of Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Yiddish, Portugese, Greek, Polish, and Hebrew. I abandoned the policy. Now I want to learn them –ll ¨ not completely, just enough to delight the heart of an Indian or African cab driver who never before in his entire life met an American who tried to learn his language.
My Toughest Opponent For the next four years I avoided taking up any new languages. I had nothing against any of them (except one). It was just that there were too many gaps in the tongues I’d already entertained and I wanted to plug them up. The language I had something against was Hungarian. Before a summer weekend with army buddies in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I went to the post library and checked out an army phrase book in Hungarian to look at over the weekend. The introduction bluntly warned, “Hungarian is perhaps the hardest language in the world, and it is spoken by only about ten million people.” I resolved I’d never get any closer to it. Hungarian was the next language I studied. When Hungary rebelled against Soviet oppression in 1956, I was invited by the U.S. Air Force to join a team of reporters covering Operation Safe Haven, the airlift of all Hungarian refugees who were to receive asylum in the United States. That was far from enough to make me want to study Hungarian – yet. Every child is treated to fantasies like Buck Rogers and his invincible ray gun, Superman, Batman, or, in my case, Jack Armstrong and his “mystery eye”, a power imparted to him by a friendly Hindu who, merely by concentrating and holding his palms straight out, could stop every oncoming object from a fist to a bullet to a bull to an express train. By this time I began to note that similar powers – offensive and defensive – could unexpectedly and delightfully accompany the mastery of languages. No Iron Curtains for Language Many reporters got to the Hungarian border with Austria during the outpouring of refugees that followed the Soviet oppression of the Hungarian freedom fighters. They went to the Red Cross shelters on the Austrian side, interviewed some refugees and relief workers, and went home. I was invited to join a secret team of volunteer international “commandos” who actually slipped into Hungary by night to ferry refugees across the border canal on a rubber raft. The centre of the refugee operation was the Austrian border village of Andau. I asked a local policeman in German where the refugee headquarters was. It was Christmas night. It was dark. It was cold. There were no tour bus operators on the streets hawking tickets to the Hungarian border. He told me to go to Pieck’s Inn. At Pieck’s Inn the bartender said, “Room nineteen.” The fact that I was getting all this in German without looking around for somebody who spoke English was a convenience, but that’s not what I mean by the power of another language. That came next. I went upstairs to room nineteen and knocked on the door. “Who’s there?” shouted a voice in interestingly accented English. “I’m an American newspaper reporter,” I yelled back. “I understand you might help me get to the Hungarian border.” He opened the door cussing. “I’ll never take another American to the border with us again,” he said before the door even opened. “No more Americans! One of you bastards damned near got us all captured night before last.” He turned out to be a pleasant looking young man with blonde hair. When I knocked, he was busy adjusting heavy duty combat boots. He continued his tirade as we faced each other. “That American knew damned good and well that flashlights, flashbulbs, even matches were forbidden.” He went on in rougher language than I’ll here repeat to tell how an American with a camera broke his promise and popped off a flashbulb while a raft load of refugees was in the middle of the canal, causing the refugees and the rescuers on both sides of the canal to scatter. That burst of light, of course, let the Communists know exactly where the escape operation was taking place. He described in valiant but not native English exactly how much ice would have to form around the shell of hell before any other American reporter or any reporter of any kind would ever be invited to join the operation again. As he railed on, I noticed a Norwegian flag tacked to the wall behind him. “Snakker De norsk?” I asked (“Do you speak Norwegian?”). He stopped, said nothing for a few seconds. Then, like a Hollywood comic of the 1940’s pulling an absurd reversal, he said, “You’ve got big feet, but there’s a pair of boots on the other side of the bed that might fit you. Try ‘em on!” All night long we stood there waiting for the shadows to tell us that another group of refugees had arrived on the far bank of the canal. Then we’d push the raft into the water and play out the rope as our two boatmen paddled across. One would get out and help four or five Hungarians into the raft. When the raft was loaded, the boatman still in the raft would tug on the rope and we’d pull it back over. Then the lone boatman would paddle over again and repeat the process until all the refugees were on the Austrian side. The second boatman came back with the last load. We had to wait at least an hour to an hour and a half between refugee clusters. I was the coldest I’d ever been in my life, and there was no place to huddle behind or curl up inside. All we could do was stand there and wait. Light wasn’t the only thing prohibited. So was talk. Normal speech travels surprisingly far over frozen flatland, and it was important not to betray our position to the Communist patrols. We were only allowed to whisper softly to the person immediately ahead of us on the rope and the person immediately behind. I tried to remember what day it was. It was Thursday. It had only been the previous Saturday night when I’d taken a Norwegian girl, Meta Heiberg, from Woman’s College to the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we saw newsreels of almost the very spot where I was now standing. When the screen showed Hungarian refugees pouring into Austria, Meta had said, “My sister Karen’s over there somewhere helping those people.” That was all. The next day I got the call inviting me to fly over with the air force. On Monday I flew. And here I was, freezing and waiting and marvelling at the courage of the boatmen who voluntarily put themselves into jeopardy every time they crossed to the other side of the canal. Eventually I decided to avail myself of whispering rights. The figure in front of me was so roundly bundled against the cold I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. I leaned forward and said, “My name is Barry Farber and I’m from America.” A woman’s voice replied, “My name is Karen Heiberg and I’m from Norway.” The cold, the power of the coincidence, and the tension of the border all combined to keep me from maximising that opportunity. All I managed to do was flatfootedly utter the obvious: “I took your sister Meta to the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina, five nights ago.” The effect on Karen was powerful. I can’t complain, but I wish I’d been quick enough to add, “She sent me over here to find out why you never write Uncle Olaf!”
Rumours of Russian When I arrived at the University of North Carolina, I got my first real opportunity to speak the European languages I was learning with native speakers. Students at the university came from many different countries. The Cosmopolitan Club, a group of foreign students and Americans who wanted to meet one another, gathered every Sunday afternoon in the activities building. I felt like a bee flitting from blossom to blossom until it is too heavy with pollen to fly or even buzz. A rumour rippled across the campus in my senior year that seemed too good to be true. The university, it was whispered, was planning to start a class in Russian. Sure enough, the rumour was soon confirmed. It was a historic event. Not only was the course the first in Russian ever offered by the University of North Carolina (or possibly by any university in the South), it also represented the first time the university had offered what one student called a “funny looking” language of any kind (he meant languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet)! The enrollment requirements were stiff. First you had to have completed at least two years in a “normal” language (Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese) with good grades. I qualified and was accepted. For me the first day of Russian was a lot like the first day of school. I’d toyed with one funny looking language already (Chinese), but I knew Russian was a different kind of funny looking. Would I conquer it, as I had Spanish and Norwegian, or would Russian swallow me whole, as Latin had? There were forty-five of us in that Russian class thinking varying versions of the same thing when the teacher, a rangy Alabaman named “Tiger” Titus, entered the room. After a formal “Good morning” he went straight to the front of the room and wrote the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet on the blackboard. You could feel the group’s spirit sink notch by notch as each of Russian’s “funny looking” letters appeared. Students were allowed under university rules to abandon a course and get themselves into another as long as they did it within three days after the beginning of the term. We had defections from Russian class in mid-alphabet. By the time Tiger Titus turned around to face us, he had fewer students than had entered the room. “My soul!” exclaimed one of the deserters when I caught up with him at the cafeteria later that day. “I’ve never seen anything like that Russian alphabet before in my life. Why, they’ve got v’s that look like b’s, n’s that look like h’s, u’s that look like y’s, r’s that look like p’s, and p’s that look like sawed off goal posts. They got a backwards n that’s really an e and an x that sounds like you’re gagging on a bone. They got a vowel that looks like the number sixty-one, a consonant that looks like a butterfly with its wings all the way out, and damned if they don’t even have a B-flat!” The next day there were no longer forty-five members of the university’s first Russian class. There were five. I was one of the intrepid who hung in. A Lucky Bounce to the Balkans Writer/columnist Robert Ruark, a talented North Carolinian and drinking buddy of Ava Gardner, once wrote boastfully about a college weekend that began someplace like Philadelphia and got out of hand and wound up in Montreal. I topped him. I went to a college football game right outside Washington, D.C., one weekend and wound up in Yugoslavia for six weeks! The previous summer I’d been named a delegate from the university to the national convention of the National Student Association. I came back as chairman for the Virginia-Carolinas region of NSA. In October I was in College Park, Maryland, for the Carolina-Maryland game. At half time, at the hot dog stand, who should be reaching for the same mustard squirter as I but National NSA president, Bill Dentzer. “Who can believe this?” he said. “We’ve been looking for you for three days!” I explained it was our big senior out of town football weekend and College Park, Maryland was a long way from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and there was a lot going on and I was sorry he couldn’t reach me. “Why were you looking for me?” I asked. “We wanted you to go represent us in Yugoslavia,” he said. I told him I’d love to. “It’s too late now,” he said. “The plane leaves Monday from New York, and it’s already Saturday afternoon and the State Department’s closed, so there’s no way to get you a passport…” “Bill,” I interrupted, “I have a passport. I can easily get back to Chapel Hill and pick it up in time to fly from New York on Monday.” By Wednesday I was attending sessions of a spirited Tito propaganda fiesta called the Zagreb Peace Conference and enjoying my first immersion in a language the mere mention of which impresses people even more than Chinese: Serbo-Croatian! To my delight, I understood entire phrases from it from my university Russian. I became aware of “families” of foreign languages, something that doesn’t occur automatically to Americans because English doesn’t resemble its cousins very closely. It’s something of a black sheep in the Germanic language family. They say the closest language to English is Dutch. Dutch is about as close to English as Betelgeuse is to Baltimore! I’d noticed the summer before that Norwegian is usefully close to Swedish and Danish. Serbo-Croatian sounded to me like a jazzier, more “fun” kind of Russian. They use the Roman alphabet in western Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Slovenia, and in Serbia to the east they use the Cyrillic alphabet, with even more interesting letters in it than Russian uses. Some of the mystique I’d always imputed to multilingual people began to fade. If you meet somebody who speaks, say, ten languages, your instinct is to be impressed to the tune of ten languages worth. If, however, you later learn that six of those languages are Russian, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Polish and Ukrianian – I’m not suggesting that you dismiss him as illiterate, but you ought to be aware that he got six of those languages for the price of about two and three fourths! They’re all members of the Slavic family. The Yugoslav university students, my hosts, sent me back home aboard a Yugoslav ship, leaving me sixteen days with nothing to do but practice Serbo-Croatian with the other passengers. When I got back to school after a solid eight weeks’ absence, I wasn’t even behind in my German. German is widely spoken in central Europe and I’d spoken it widely enough during the adventure to float almost even with the class. Exotics – Hard and Easy Expertise is a narcotic. As knowledge grows, it throws off pleasure to its possessor, much like an interest bearing account throws off money. A pathologist who can instantly spot the difference between normal and abnormal X-rays grows incapable of believing that there are those of us who can’t. I find it hard to believe there are Americans who can’t even tell the difference between printed pages of Spanish and French or of Polish, Danish, or anything else written in the Roman alphabet. Too bad. If you can’t distinguish the easier languages from the harder ones, you miss the higher joys of confronting your first samples of written Finnish. Finland has been called the only beautiful country in the world where the language is the major tourist attraction. It’s utterly unfamiliar to you no matter where you come from, unless you happen to come from Estonia, in which case Finnish is only half unfamiliar to you. There’s always a general knowledge heavyweight around who says, “Wait a minute. Finnish is related to Hungarian too!” Oh, yeah! True, Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are indeed all members of the Finno-Ugric language family, but try to find more than six words even remotely similar in each. As you learn more and more about foreign languages, you’re able to laugh at more and more jokes about languages. No Las Vegas comic will even knock socks off, or even loosen them, by standing up and saying, “You know, Finnish and Hungarian are cousin languages, but Finnish took all the vowels!” Look at the two languages side by side, however, and you’ll grudgingly accord at least minor wit status to whoever thought that one up. You may have experienced the difficulties of tackling Latin and Russian with their half dozen or so noun cases. Finnish has fifteen noun cases in the singular and sixteen in the plural! Every word in the entire language is accented on the first syllable, which gives Finnish something of the sounds of a pneumatic jackhammer breaking up a sidewalk. I covered the Olympic Games in Helsinki but wisely decided not to try to learn Finnish. It was the wisdom of the young boxer who’s eager to get in there with the champ and trade punches, but who nonetheless summons up the cool to decline and wait until he’s more prepared. I found a much softer opponent on the ship back to the United States. A summer tradition that vanished after the 1950’s with far too little poetic lamentation was the “student ship to Europe.” They were almost always Dutch ships offering unbelievably low fares, hearty food, cramped but clean accommodations, cheap beer, and always a bearded guitar player who drew the crowd back to the ship’s fantail after dinner and led the kids of ten or twelve nations in throaty renditions of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” The singing, the flirting, the joy of heading over or heading home, and especially the learning of all the other countries’ “Railroads” in all the other languages made the summer student ship a delight unimaginable to today’s jet lagged young Dutch airmen about my age. They were all headed for the United States to take their jet fighter training at various American air bases, and we became old friends at once. There seemed to be dozens (I later realised hundreds) of Indonesian servants on board. After four hundred years of Dutch rule, Indonesia had won its independence from Holland only four years earlier. The thousands of Indonesians who chose to remain loyal to Holland had to go to Holland, and that meant that virtually the entire Dutch service class was Indonesian. I was sitting on the deck talking to one of the Dutch pilots, Hans van Haastert. He called one of the Indonesians over and said something to him in fluent Indonesian. My romance with Dutch would begin (in a very unusual way) a few years later, but my romance with Indonesian was born in the lightning and thunder of Hans ordering a beer from that deck chair. If I had never been drawn to foreign languages earlier, that moment alone would have done it. To me at that time, it was the white suited bwana speaking something pure “jungle” to one of his water carriers in any one of a hundred and eighteen safari movies I’d seen. It was Humphrey Bogart melting a glamourous woman’s kneecaps with a burst of bush talk she had no idea he even knew. “Where did you learn that?” I asked. It turned out that Hans, like many of his Dutch confreres, had been born in Java of mixed parents. His Indonesian was just as good as his Dutch. “Will you teach me some?” I asked. For the next eight days, until we were interrupted by the New York City skyline, Hans patiently taught me the Indonesian language. When we parted, I was able to converse with the Indonesian crewmen, just as Hans had that first day on deck. Lest this come across as a boast, let me hasten to point out that Indonesian is the easiest language in the world – no hedging, no “almost”, no “among the easiest”. In my experience, Indonesian is the easiest. The grammar is minimal, regular, and simple. Once I began to learn it, Indonesian didn’t seem “jungle” anymore. The Indonesians obligingly use the Roman alphabet, and they get along with fewer letters of it than we do. And their tongue has an instant charm. The Indonesian word for “sun”, mata hari (the famous female spy was known as the “sun” of Asia) literally means “eye of the day”. When they make a singular noun plural in Indonesia, they merely say it twice. “Man,” for example, is orang. “Men” is orang orang. And when they write it, they just write one orang and put a 2 after it, like an exponent in algebra (Orang 2). Orang hutan, the ape name pronounced by many Americans as if it were “orang-u-tang,” is an Indonesian term meaning “man of the forest.”
Forsaking Latin for Chinese was my own form of juvenile defiance. However, I have since used Chinese in some way almost every day. I confess to occasional curiosity as to what all those A students from Miss Leslie’s Latin class are doing these days with their Latin. During summer vacation we went to Miami Beach to visit my grandparents. On one trip, as Uncle Bill drove us from the train station in Miami to Miami Beach, we passed a large group of marching sailors. As we drew abreast of the last row I noticed that the sailor on the end was Chinese. Then I noticed that the sailor beside him was also Chinese. I blinked. The whole last row was Chinese. And the next whole row was Chinese too. The entire contingent of marching sailors was Chinese! I felt like a multimillion dollar lottery winner slowly realising he’d gotten all the right numbers. I had no idea there were Chinese sailors in Miami, but why not? It was during World War II, China was our ally, and Miami was a port. There they were, hundreds of native speakers of the language I was trying to learn. I couldn’t wait to fling myself into their midst sputtering my few phrases of Chinese at machine gun velocity. I didn’t know what adventures were awaiting my Latin classmates that summer, but I was confident none of them were about to approach an entire contingent of sailors who spoke Latin! When we got to my grandparents’ hotel, I gave them the quickest possible hug and kiss, ran out, took the jitney back over the causeway to Miami, and started asking strangers if they knew where the Chinese sailors were. Everybody knew the Chinese sailors were billeted in the old Hotel Alcazar on Biscayne Boulevard. After their training, I was told, they gathered in groups and strolled around Bayfront Park. I waited. Sure enough, in late afternoon the park filled with Chinese sailors. I picked a clump of them at random and waded on in, greeting them in phrases I’d been able to learn from the book my parents had bought me. I’d never heard Chinese spoken before. No records, tapes, or cassettes. I could hit them only with the Chinese a D student in Latin could assemble from an elementary self study book in Chinese conversation in Greensboro, North Carolina. It sounded extraplanetary to the Chinese sailors, but at least they understood enough to get the point that here was no Chinese American, here was no child of missionary parents who’d served in China. Here was essentially an American urchin hellbent on learning Chinese without any help. They decided to provide the help. You don’t have to win a war to get a hero’s welcome. The Chinese naval units stationed in Miami seemed suddenly to have two missions – to defeat the Japanese and to help me learn Chinese! A great side benefit to learning foreign languages is the love and respect you get from the native speakers when you set out to learn their language. You’re far from an annoying foreigner to them. They spring to you with joy and gratitude. The sailors adopted me as their mascot. We met every afternoon in Bayfront Park for my daily immersion in conversational Chinese. A young teenager surrounded by native speakers and eager to avenge a knockout by a language like Latin learns quickly. There was something eerie about my rapid progress. I couldn’t believe I was actually speaking Chinese with our military allies in the shadow of the American built destroyers on which they would return to fight in the Far East. If only Miss Leslie could see me now! Naturally my grandparents were disappointed that I didn’t spend much time with them, but their bitterness was more than assuaged when I bought gangs of my Chinese sailor friends over to Miami Beach and introduced them to my family. My grandparents had the pleasure of introducing me to their friends as “my grandson, the interpreter for the Chinese navy.” I exchanged addresses and correspondence with my main Chinese mentor, Fan Tung-shi, for the next five years. Sadly, his letters stopped coming when the Chinese Communists completed their conquest of the Mainland. (He and I were joyously reunited exactly forty years later when a Taiwan newspaper interviewed me and asked me how I learned Chinese. One of Fan’s friends saw his name in the article.) That summer, in Will’s Bookstore on South Green Street back in Greensboro, I walked past the foreign language section and spotted a book entitled Hugo’s Italian Simplified. I opened it, and within ten or fifteen seconds the “background music” started again. Arrividerci, Latin Italian, I discovered, was Latin with all the difficulty removed. Much as a skilled chef fillets the whole skeleton out of a fish, some friendly folks somewhere had lifted all that grammar (at least, most of it) out of Latin and called the remainder Italian! There was no nominative-genitive-dative-accusative in Italian. Not a trace, except in a few pronouns which I knew I could easily take prisoner because we had the same thing in English (me is the accusative of I). Italian verbs did misbehave a little, but not to the psychedelic extent of Latin verbs. And Italian verbs were a lot easier to look at. I bought Hugo’s book and went through it like a hot knife through butter. I could have conversed in Italian within a month if there’d been anybody around who could have understood – a learning aid which the Greensboro of that day, alas, could not provide. I was clearly a beaten boxer on the comeback trail. Why was I all of a sudden doing so well in Italian after having done so poorly in Latin? Was it my almost abnormal motivation? No. I’d had that in Latin, too. Was it that Italian was a living language you could go someplace some day and actually speak, whereas Latin was something you could only hope to go on studying? That’s a little closer to the mark, but far from the real answer. My blitz through Italian, after my unsuccessful siege of Latin, owed much to the fact that in Italian I didn’t miss day four! I’m convinced that it was day four in ninth grade Latin that did me in. No other day’s absence would have derailed me. When I left on day three we were bathing in a warm sea of pleasant words. If only I’d been there on day four when Miss Leslie explained the importance of grammar, I might have felt a bit dampened, but I’d have put my head into the book, clapped my hands over my ears, and mastered it. After Italian I surged simultaneously into Spanish and French with self study books. Though by no means fluent in either Spanish or French by summer’s end, I had amassed an impressive payload of each. I was ready to stage my come from behind coup. Regulations in my high school demanded that a student complete two years of Latin with good grades before continuing with another language. After that, one could choose Spanish or French. I had completed only one year of Latin with poor grades, and I wanted to take both Spanish and French! I had not yet learned the apt Spanish proverb that tells us “regulations are for your enemies.” I learned the concept, however, by living it. Miss Mitchell was the sole foreign language authority of the high school. She taught Spanish and French. She was considered unbendable – in fact, unapproachable – in matters of regulation fudging. I didn’t know that on the first day as classes were forming. I’m glad I didn’t. I went to her classroom and asked if I might talk something over with her. I told her I was particularly interested in foreign languages, and even though I’d only had one year of Latin and didn’t do well in it at all, I’d really like to move into Spanish and French. If she could only see her way clear to let me, I’d appreciate it forever and try awfully hard. She asked if I had a transcript of my grades from Miss Leslie’s Latin class. No, I didn’t, I explained, but I had something more to the point. I’d bought books in Spanish and French over the summer and gotten a good head start. I hoped a demonstration of my zeal would win her favour. Like a tough agent softening sufficiently to let a persistent unknown comic do part of his routine, Miss Mitchell invited me to do my stuff. I conversed, I read, I wrote, I recited, I conjugated, I even sang – first in Spanish, then in French. Miss Mitchell gave no outward sign of emotion, but I knew the magic had worked. “I’ll have to talk it over with the principal,” she said, “but I don’t think there will be a problem. We’ve never had a case anything like this before. If I can get approval, which language, Spanish or French, would you like to take?” In a fit of negotiatory skill I wish would visit me more often, I said, “Please, Miss Mitchell, let me take both!” She frowned, but then relented. I got to take both. From the ambitious boxer floored early in round one by Latin grammar, I was all of a sudden the heavyweight language champ of the whole high school! Ingrid Bergman Made Me Learn Norwegian I did well in high school Spanish and French. When you’ve pumped heavy iron, lifting a salad fork seems easy. When you’re thrown into a grammar as complex as Latin’s at the age of fourteen, just about any other language seems easy. I never quit thanking Spanish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Romanian and Yiddish just for not being Latin. I’ve always been particularly grateful to Chinese and Indonesian for having nothing in their entire languages a Latin student would recognise as grammar. It was so enjoyable building my knowledge of Spanish, French, Italian and Chinese, I never thought of taking on any other languages. Then I saw an Ingrid Bergman movie and came out in a daze. I’d never imagined a woman could be that attractive. I went directly to the adjoining bookstore and told the clerk, “I want a book in whatever language it is she speaks.” Miss Bergman’s native tongue, the clerk told me, was Swedish, and he bought fortha copy of Hugo’s Swedish Simplified. It cost two dollars and fifty cents. I only had two dollars with me. “Do you have anything similar – cheaper?” I asked. He did indeed. He produced a volume entitled Hugo’s Norwegian Simplified for only one dollar and fifty cents. “Will she understand if I speak to her in this?” I asked, pointing to the less expensive Norwegian text. The clerk assured me that yes, any American speaking Norwegian would be understood by any native Swede. He was right. A lifetime later, at age thirty, I wheedled an exclusive radio interview with Ingrid Bergman on the strength of my ability in her language. She was delighted when I told her the story. Or at least she was a nice enough person and a good enough actress to pretend.
A brief “language autobiography” may help readers whose language learning and language loving careers began only a few moments ago with the opening of this book. My favourite word – in any language – is the English word foreign. I remember how it came to be my favourite word. At the age of four I attended a summer day camp. Royalty develops even among children that young. There were already a camp “king” and a camp “queen”, Arthur and Janet. I was sitting right beside Arthur on the bus one morning, and I remember feeling honoured. Arthur reached into his little bag, pulled out an envelope, and began to show Janet the most fascinating pieces of coloured paper I’d ever seen. “Look at these stamps, Janet,” he said. “They’re foreign!” That word reverberated through my bone marrow. Foreign, I figured, must mean beautiful, magnetic, impressive – something only the finest people share with only the other finest people. From that moment forward, the mere mention of the word foreign has flooded me with fantasy. I thought everybody else felt the same, and I had a hard time realising they didn’t. When a schoolmate told me he turned down his parents’ offer of a trip to Europe for a trip out West instead, I thought he was crazy. When another told me he found local politics more interesting than world politics, I thought he was nuts. Most kids are bored with their parents’ friends who come to dinner. I was too, unless that friend happened to have been to a foreign country – any foreign country – in which case I cross examined him ruthlessly on every detail of his foreign visit. Once a visitor who’d been through my interrogation to the point of brain blur said to my mother upon leaving, “What a kid! He was fascinated by every detail of every hour I ever spent in another country, and the only other place I’ve ever been is Canada!’ How Latin Almost Ruined It Walking into Miss Leslie’s Latin class on the first day of ninth grade was the culmination of a lifelong dream. I could actually hear Roman background music in my mind. I didn’tunderstand how the other students could be anything less than enthusiastic about the prospect of beginning Latin. Electricity coursed through me as I opened the Latin book Miss Leslie gave us. I was finally studying a foreign language! The first day all we did was learn vocabulary. Miss Leslie wrote some Latin words on the blackboard, and we wrote them down in our notebooks. I showed early promise as the class whiz. I quickly mastered those new words, each then as precious as Arthur’s foreign stamps had been eleven years earlier. When Miss Leslie had us close our books and then asked “Who remembers how to say ‘farmer’ in Latin,” I was the first to split the air with the cry of “Agricola!” I soaked up those foreign words like the Arabian desert soaks up spiled lemonade. What happened thereupon for a short time crippled, but then enriched, my life beyond measure. I was absent from school on day four. When I returned on day five, there were no more Latin words on the blackboard. In their place were words like nominative, genitive, dative, accusative. I didn’t know what those words meant and I didn’t like them. That “nominative-genitive” whatever-it-was was keeping me from my feast, and I resented it like I resent the clergyman at the banquet whose invocation lasts too long. The more Miss Leslie talked about these grammatical terms, the more bored I got. Honeymooners would have more patience with a life insurance salesman who knocked on their motel door at midnight than I had with Latin grammar. I clearly remember believing languages were nothing but words. We have words. They have words. And all you have to do is learn their words for our words and you’ve got it made. Therefore all that “ablative absolute” stuff Miss Leslie was getting increasingly excited about was unneeded and, to me, unwanted. Miss Leslie, noting that I, her highly motivated superstar, was floundering with elementary Latin grammar, kindly offered to assign another student to tutor me on what I’d missed the day before, or even to sit down with me herself. I remember declining the offer. I remember deciding, with the logic of a frustrated fifteen year old, that grammar was just another of those barriers designed by grownups to keep kids from having too much fun. I decided to wait it out. I shut off my brain as the cascade of changing noun endings and mutating verb forms muscled out the joy of my beloved vocabulary words. I longed for the good old days of being the first in the class to know agricola. More and more that Miss Leslie said made less and less sense. I was trapped in a Bermuda Triangle. My aura of classroom celebrity disappeared, along with my self esteem, my motivation, and almost my affection for things foreign. I limped along, barely making passing grades; I only managed to pass thanks to the vocabulary section on every test. My knowledge of vocabulary plus some good grammatical guesswork and a little luck got me through Miss Leslie’s class with a low D. Some of the other students seemed to be enjoying my lameness in Latin, after my being the overpraised and preening star of the class for the first three days. To assuage the hurt, I got hold of a self study book in Chinese. By the last few weeks of school, it was apparent that there was no way I could make better than a weak D in Latin, but that was enough to pass. I hid my humiliation behind that outrageously foreign looking book with thick, black Chinese characters all over the cover. I buried all thoughts of Latin in sour grapes and sat there and studied Chinese instead
How to Learn Any Language 1 Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and On Your Own
by Barry Farber Founder of the Language Club/Nationally Syndicated Talk Show Host
To Bibi and Celia, for the pleasure of helping teach them their first language, followed by the pleasure of having them then teach me their second!
Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: My Story A Life of Language Learning Part II: The System Do As I Now Say, Not As I Then Did Psych Up French or Tagalog: Choosing a Language Gathering Your Tools The Multiple Track Attack Hidden Moments Harry Lorayne’s Magic Memory Aid The Plunge Motivations Language Power to the People Back to Basics Last Words Before the Wedding Part III: Appendices The Language Club The Principal Languages of the World Farber’s Language Reviews
Acknowledgements
I want to thank my editor, Bruce Shostak, without whose skill and patience much of this book would have been intelligible only to others who’ve had a blinding passion for foreign languages since 1944. I further thank my publisher, Steven Schragis, for venturing into publishing territory heretofore officially listed as “uninteresting”. Dr. Henry Urbanski, Founder and Head of the New Paltz Language Immersion Institute, was good enough to review key portions of the manuscript and offer toweringly helpful amendments. Dr. Urbanski’s associate, Dr. Hans Weber, was supremely helpful in safeguarding against error. I further wish to thank all my fellow language lovers from around the world who interrupted their conversations at practice parties of the Language Club to serve as willing guinea pigs for my questions and experimentations in their native languages.
How to Learn Any Language Introduction This may be the most frequently told joke in the world – it’s repeated every day in almost every language: “What do you call a person who speaks two languages?” “Bilingual.” “What do you call a person who speaks three languages?” “Trilingual.” “What do you call a person who speaks four languages?” “Quadrilingual.” “What do you call a person who speaks only one language?” “An American!” With your help this book can wipe that smile off the world’s face. The reason Americans have been such notoriously poor language learners up to now is twofold: 1. We’ve never really had to learn other peoples’ languages before, and 2. Almost all foreign language instruction available to the average American has been until now (one hates to be cruel) worthless. “I took two years of high school French and four more years in college and I couldn’t even order orange juice in Marseilles” is more than a self effacing exaggeration. It’s a fact, a shameful, culturally impoverishing, economically dangerous, self defeating fact! Modern commerce and communications have erased reason 1. You and the method laid out in this book, working together, will erase reason 2. It started for me when I learned that the Norwegian word for “squirrel” was acorn. It may have been spelled ekorn, but it was pronounced acorn. Then I learned that “Mickey Mouse” in Swedish is Mussie Pig. Again, the Swedish spelling varied, but sowhat? As delights like those continued to come my way, I realised I was being locked tighter and tighter into the happy pursuit of language love and language learning. My favourite music is the babble of strange tongues in the marketplace. No painting, no art, no photograph in the world can excite me as much as a printed page of text in a foreign language I can’t read – yet! I embraced foreign language study as a hobby as a teenager in 1944. When I was inducted into the army in 1952, I was tested and qualified for work in fourteen different languages. Since then I’ve expanded my knowledge of those languages and taken up others. Whether fluently or fragmentally, I can now express myself in twenty-five languages. That may sound like a boast, but it’s really a confession. Having spent so many years with no other hobby, I should today be speaking every one of those languages much better than I do. If you’re a beginner, you may be impressed to hear me order a meal in Chinese or discuss the Tito-Stalin split in Serbo-Croatian, but only I know how much time and effort I wasted over those years thinking I was doing the right thing to increase my command of those and other languages. This book, then, does not represent the tried and true formula I’ve been using since 1944. It presents the tried and true formula I’d use if I could go back to 1944 and start all over again! Common sense tells us we can’t have dessert before we finish the meal; we can’t have a slim figure until we diet; we can’t have strong muscles until we exercise; we won’t have a fortune until we make it. So far common sense is right. Common sense also tells us, however, that we can’t enjoy communicating in a foreign language until we learn it. This means years of brain benumbing conjugations, declensions, idioms, exceptions, subjunctives, and irregular verbs. And here common sense is wrong, completely wrong. When it comes to learning foreign languages, we can start with the dessert and then use its sweetness to inspire us to back up and devour the main course. What six year old child ever heard of a conjugation? Wouldn’t you love to be able to converse in a foreign language as well as all the children of that tongue who’ve not yet heard of grammar? No, we’re not going to rise up as one throaty revolutionary mob, depose grammar, drag it out of the palace by the heels, and burn it in the main square. We’re just going to put grammar in its place. Up to now, grammar has been used by our language educators to anesthetise us against progress. If it’s grammar versus fun, we’re going to minimise grammar and maximise fun. We’re going to find more pleasant ways to absorb grammar. Unfortunately, there are a lot more “self improvement” books than there is self improvement. Too many books whose titles are heavy with promise turn out to be all hat and no cattle – not enough take home after you deduct the generalities and exhortations to “focus” and “visualise” your goals. Extracting usable advice from high promising books can be like trying to nail custard pies to the side of a barn. Mindful of that danger, I will not leave you with nothing but a pep talk. Follow the steps herein, and you will learn the language of your choice quickly, easily, inexpensively, enjoyably and on your own. And you’ll have fun en route, though not nearly as much fun as you’ll have once you get that language in working order and take it out to the firing range of the real world! The System The language learning system detailed in this book is the result of my own continuous, laborious trial and error beginning in 1944. That which worked was kept, that which failed was dropped, that which was kept was improved. Technology undreamed of when I started studying languages, such as the audiocasette and the tape player small enough to carry while walking or jogging, was instantly and eagerly incorporated. The system combines: ?THE MULTIPLE TRACK ATTACK: Go to the language department of any bookstore and you’ll see language books, grammars, hardcover and paperback workbooks, readers, dictionaries, flash cards, and handsomely bound courses on cassette. Each one of those products sits there on the shelf and says, “Hey, Bud. You want to learn this language? Here I am. Buy me!” I say, buy them all, or at least one of each! You may feel like you’re taking four or five different courses in the same language simultaneously. That’s good. A marvellous synergistic energy sets you soaring when all those tools are set together in symphony. ?HIDDEN MOMENTS: Dean Martin once chided a chorus girl, who was apathetically sipping her cocktail, by saying, “I spill more than you drink!” All of us “spill” enough minutes every day to learn a whole new language a year! Just as the Dutch steal land from the sea, you will learn to steal language learning time, even from a life that seems completely filled or overflowing. What do you do, for example, while you’re waiting for an elevator, standing in line at the bank, waiting for the person you’re calling to answer the phone, holding the line, getting gas, waiting to be ushered from the waiting room into somebody’s office, waiting for your date to arrive, waiting for anything at any time? You will learn to mobilise these precious scraps of time you’ve never even been aware you’ve been wasting. Some of your most valuable study time will come in mini lessons of fifteen, ten, and even five seconds throughout your normal (though now usually fruitful) day. ?HARRY LORAYNE’S MAGIC MEMORY AID: An ingenious memory system developed by memory master Harry Lorayne will help you glue a word to your recollection the instant you encounter it. What would you do right now if I gave you a hundred English words along with their foreign equivalents and told you to learn them? Chances are you would look at the first English word, then look at the foreign word, repeat it several times, then close your eyes and keep on repeating it, then cover up the foreign word, look only at the English and see if you could remember how to say it in the language you’re learning, then go on to the next word, then the next, and the next, and then go back to the first to see if you remembered it, and so on through the list. Harry Lorayne’s simple memory trick based on sound and association will make that rote attempt laughable. The words will take their place in your memory likeornaments securely hung on a Christmas tree, one right after the other all the way up to many times those hundred words. ?THE PLUNGE: You will escape the textbook incubator early and leap straightaway, with almost no knowledge of the language, into that language’s “real world”. A textbook in your target language, no matter how advanced, is not the real world. On the other hand, an advertisement in a foreign language magazine, no matter how elementary and easy to read, is the real world. Everything about you, conscious and subconscious, prefers real world to student world contact with the language. An actor knows the difference between rehearsal and opening night; the football player, between practice scrimmages and the kickoff in a crowded stadium. And you will know the difference between your lessons in the target language and the real world newspapers, magazines, novels, movies, radio, TV, and anything else you can find to throw yourself into at a stage your high school French teacher would have considered horrifyingly early! There you have it: The Multiple Track Attack, Hidden Moments, Harry Lorayne’s Magic Memory Aid, The Plunge. Visualise the target language as a huge piece of thin, dry paper. This system will strike a match underneath the middle of that paper, and your knowledge, like the flame, will eat its way unevenly but unerringly outward to the very ends. Just as food manufacturers like to label their products “natural and organic” whenever they can get away with it, many language courses like to promise that you will learn “the way a child learns.” Why bother? Why should you learn another language the way a child learned his first one? Why not learn as what you are – an adult with at least one language in hand, eager to use that advantage to learn the next language in less time than it took to learn the first
