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How to Learn Any Language 1
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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? P A R T O N E My Story A Life of Language Learning 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! Chinese Sailors Don’t Speak Latin 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. How to Learn Any Language 5 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!” How to Learn Any Language 6 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,” “Señoras” and “Señores,” or even the rural Norwegain “Kvinnor” and “Menn.” No such luck prevailed at Luitpol. The two doors were labelled “Nk” and “Férfiak.” I looked at those two words, trying not to let my language lover’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 N and Férfia, or possibly Férfi. Something came to me. I remembered reading that Hungarian was not originally a European language. It had been in Asia. The Chinese word for “woman”, “lady”, or anything female was nö – 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 you’re going to say oo as in “rude” and then tell you instead to say ee as in “tree.” If you simply say the e sound in “nervous” or “Gertrude,” you’ll be close enough. Following that hunch I entered the door marked “Fërfiak.” The joy that came next should arise in tabernacles, not men’s rooms. To my satisfaction and relief I walked in and found five or six other férfiak 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 1930’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 betrvel viaskodtom,” which means, “In my dream I had a fight with a burglar”! Finally, like supplies that lag far behind the need for them in wartime, some decent English-Hungarian/Hungarian-English dictionaries arrived – 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, driver’s licenses, and the education of their children. “Tomorrow we’ll go to the butcher’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 words: “Tomorrow go meat fellow.” “A charitable woman is coming by to help you with your furniture needs” became “Nice lady come soon give tables chairs.” I learned Hungarian fluently – 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 languages 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 you!” 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 replies “Sorry. That’s not my table!” 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 didn’t. In the 1980’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 all – 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. How to Learn Any Language 10 French or Tagalog: Choosing a Language 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! How to Learn Any Language 11 Gathering Your Tools You’ve decided which language you’re going to learn, and you’ve made a deal with the grammar of that language: you agree to learn it, and in return it agrees not to rush you, bore you, discourage you, or hurt you. Now it’s time to go shopping. Find a bookstore that offers a broad selection of language learning materials. Don’t settle for one where the clerk is not sure but says, “We might have something in French and Spanish over in ‘Language.’” BASIC TEXTBOOK Find a basic book (textbook, workbook) that gives you a good grounding in the grammar of the language. Never mind if it seems to give you grammar and little else. Never mind if it reminds you of the books that depressed you back in high school and college. We’ll find all the excitement – reading and conversation – elsewhere. Grammar is all you need from this one. DICTIONARY Most language dictionaries are two way: English-French (or whatever) and French-English. Make sure the dictionary you buy at least lives up to that. (I have walked out of bookstores with dictionaries I assumed were two way that turned out to be only one way, and the way I wasn’t looking for!) A lot of dictionaries are infuriatingly inadequate. They don’t even have words like negotiate and proprietor. Spend a little time making sure you’re getting something substantial. It’s a good idea to look through a newspaper and make a list of some of the more complicated words in the news columns. Those are the words you’ll soon be looking up. Does that dictionary have them? Price, colour, and the neatness with which the dictionary fits into your pocket, brief case, or handbag are a lot less important than finding a dictionary that can deliver. PHRASE BOOK Buy a phrase book for travellers. Berlitz publishes a series in eighteen languages, and others keep popping up in bookstores and the racks of airport newsstands. They’re inexpensive and easy to use. These books, smaller than a piece of toast, offer little or no grammar, but they bristle with practical words and phrases, listing the English followed by the foreign language and then a transliteration that guides the rankest beginner to an understandable, usually a creditable, pronunciation. Don’t be put off by the naïveté, inexpensiveness, superficiality, and comparative weightlessness of these travellers’ phrase books when laid alongside your impressive dictionary and your complex grammar book. Good zoos need hummingbirds as well as elephants. NEWSPAPER OR MAGAZINE Find a newspaper or magazine in your target language. Most big cities have newsstands where you can buy publications in a dazzling variety of different languages. Otherwise, call the nearest consulate or embassy of the country whose language you’re out to learn. Usually they’re proud and pleased to help you. If you have a choice, go for a publication from that country itself, rather than one published by immigrants from that country in America. Certainly no foreign language publication printed in America is likely to contain language more authentic than publications printed in the home country, and it may very well be less authentic. A friend of mine who set out to learn French immediately bought a subscription to Le Monde, a popular Paris daily. That’s overkill. If he were to learn every word in any one issue of Le Monde, it would be “mission accomplished.” One issue of one publication in your target language at this point is all you need. STUDENT READER It may be difficult, but if possible see if you can locate a schoolbook or some reading material from the country at about a sixth grade level. Such books are obviously excellent bridges from the rudiments to the real world. If you can’t find one, never mind. Your newspaper or magazine will seem elementary to you soon enough. PORTABLE TAPE PLAYER The invention of the handy portable cassette tape player catapults language learners from the ox cart to the supersonic jet. You can now inhale a foreign language through your ears. “You can’t expect me to do two things at once!” is a bygone complaint. Listening to foreign language cassettes as you go about your daily deeds is a high form of doing two things at once. The Walkman (or any such tape player) is an electronic can opener for whatever language you’re learning. Formerly we had to chew through the tin. How to Learn Any Language 12 CASSETTE COURSES There are many cassette courses in many foreign languages. They range from “travel” cassettes, really simple tourist phrase books set to sound and costing between ten and twenty dollars, clear up to multicassette study courses that carry the student into advanced levels and cost between one and two hundred dollars, or more. Don’t dismiss the least expensive ones as “superficial little travel cassettes.” If you master every word, every phrase, every pronunciation, and every grammatical point contained in even the simplest of those cassettes, you can consider yourself advanced. There are basically four kinds of cassettes for the study of foreign languages. We’ll call them flat single rep, flat double rep, formatted, and cultural. The flat single rep cassettes, usually the least expensive, give you the English word or phrase followed by the foreign equivalent uttered only one time. The flat double rep cassettes are the same, except the foreign phrase is repeated twice. (When you begin making your own study cassettes, you’ll repeat the foreign piece three times.) The formatted cassette puts theories of instruction into practice and follows systems that some highly successful language teachers have found effective. For example the Pimsleur method, named after the late Dr. Paul Pimsleur, takes the student by the ear and guides him through the language as though it were a Disneyland exhibit. Unfortunately Dr. Pimsleur died before he could personally develop courses in a large variety of languages to advanced levels. His techniques, however, are being applied to more courses in more languages by Dr. Charles A. S. Heinle of the Cassette Learning Centre in Concord, Massachusetts. The Pimsleur method provides the best minute by minute “learning through listening,” thanks to several strokes of Dr. Pimsleur’s innovative genius. First of all, you become a participant. Pimsleur doesn’t let you merely listen in hopes your lazy mind will help itself to some of the new words being offered on the smorgasbord. After five minutes with any Pimsleur course you will always harbour a certain disdain for all cassette courses that merely give you a voice saying something in English followed by the equivalent in the target language. Pimsleur pricks your wandering mind to attention by asking, for example, “Do you remember the Greek word for ‘wine’?” Theoretically, that little trick shouldn’t make a spectacular difference. After all, you bought the course. You want to learn the language. Why should the teacher on cassette have to find ways to constantly recover your attention? The unfortunate truth is that the average mind plays hooky whenever possible. The difference between Pimsleur asking, “Do you remember the Greek word for ‘wine’?” and a voice simply saying “wine” is, as Mark Twain once put it, “the difference between lightning and the lightning bug!” Nor does Pimsleur always settle for the simple verbal prompt. A typical Pimsleur tactic is to demand, “You accidentally bump into a man getting on the bus. What do you say?” That ingrains the foreign phrases for “excuse me” far more than a rote recitation of the words themselves. Pimsleur’s “graduated interval recall” achieves what I call the “pinball effect.” When the steel ball in the pinball machine nears the bottom, you can manipulate the flippers to catch the ball and send it all the way back to the top again. Likewise, at the very instant when your mind is about to let a new word or phrase “fall to the bottom”, Pimsleur zings it in again, sending it back to the top of your awareness. This time it doesn’t sink so fast. When it does, Pimsleur hits it again. Pimsleur gives you a pause on the cassette after each question he asks you. In the early going there’s a temptation to stop the machine while you flounder for the answer. Don’t! Learn to try to come up with the answer during the pause provided. That will more than teach you the word. It will train you to have that word ready for action at all times. It’s marvellous to feel your growth as you relisten to your Pimsleur lessons, succeeding more and more each time at delivering the required word before the teacher’s voice rolls over you with the next question. Berlitz is the most famous name in language instruction, and except for the Berlitz Travel Cassettes, which are flat single rep, all their cassette courses are formatted. The Berlitz Basic Courses, available in French, Spanish, German, and Italian, feature ingenious conversations between teacher and students, and their top of the line Berlitz Comprehensive Courses are really dazzling soap opera-like sagas filled with romance, treachery, suspense, and drama. Both the basic and the comprehensive courses sneak massive payloads of grammar and vocabulary into the student’s repertoire. Cultural cassettes aren’t really language learning cassettes at all, but many people suppose they are and buy and sell them as such. Songs, plays, readings, stories, and poems in foreign languages are indeed helpful, but shouldn’t be mistaken for the “high protein” intake needed to build command of a foreign language. They’re great relaxers, tests of how far you’ve come, adjunctive exercises, and ways of letting the foreigner know that you view his language as more than just a briar patch of irregular verbs. The cultural cassettes are the condiments. The others are the entrées. How to Learn Any Language 13 BLANK CASSETTES We have do it yourself gasoline pumps. We do not have do it yourself eye surgery. It may seem strange to some (and wildly objectionable to others) to recommend do it yourself language cassettes starring you in the language you are trying to learn. Orthodox language teachers are likely to consider that something akin to doing your own eye surgery. I’ve found it extremely helpful. At some point you will have gotten the hang of pronunciation sufficiently to push the record button of your cassette player and recite your own words and phrases onto a blank cassette. Your pronunciation will not be good. It may be bad. But the value of being able to listen to a cassette with the words you need and want at the moment – rather than a cassette prepared by somebody with no knowledge of you, your desires, or your needs – much more than outweighs the disadvantage of your imperfections. So, get blank cassettes – the shortest possible – so you can start building a cassette library of the words and phrases you want to know to supplement those the educators who produced all the standard cassettes decided to teach you first. It’s better to know the word – its meaning, its spelling, its use in sentences – even if you have to listen to it in your unskilled accent, than not to know the word at all. FLASH CARDS Printed flash cards are available in the major languages. They’re about the size of business cards and usually provide a vocabulary of a thousand words. Flash cards are the most underrated language learning tool of all. They’ve been around for decades and go widely unused, even by those who own them. Flash cards commonly list the English word (plus related words) on one side of the card and their foreign equivalents on the other. Some sets of flash cards give you a little grammar at no extra cost, adding to the word itself the forms of that word a student of the language should know. The language student should reach for a fresh stack of flash cards before he leaves home in the morning as instinctively as a policeman reaches for his badge. The flash cards, more than any other tool, can help the student take advantage of the day’s “hidden moments,” the secret weapon upon which the promise and the premise of this method is based. Learn how to keep your flash cards handy. Whip them out and flash test yourself the instant you find yourself with the time. (The person you’re walking with stops to look at a shop window. You’ve read the menu, finished the newspaper, and the waiter hasn’t come yet. The clerk has to validate your credit card. There’s a line at the bank or at the ticket counter. The elevator seems to be stopping at all floors.) Learn how to draw those cards out and start flashing even if all you’ll have is five seconds. If the person you’re telephoning doesn’t answer until the fifth ring, he’s given you time to go through two or three entries. Learn to be quick. I’ve learned how to master a whole new Chinese character between the time I dial the last digit and the time my party says hello. BLANK FLASH CARDS Whether you can locate prepared flash cards in your target language or not, go to your nearest stationery store and get a hefty supply of blanks. As you travel through the language you’ll constantly come across new words, modern slang, special phrases you’d like to know, cute sayings a native speaker teaches you at a party, and the like. Capture them immediately on your blank flash cards and carry a stack with you at all times. In later chapters when we learn how all these tools interrelate, you’ll realise the importance of your own homemade flash cards. Purists may quarrel about recording your own foreign language vocabulary building cassettes. Nobody can quarrel with you preparing your own flash cards. STURDIKLEERS Sturdikleers are the handy celluloid or plastic packets that protect passports, driver’s licenses, etc. Find the size that best accommodates a stack of flash cards and pick up as many as you need, or more. FELT HIGHLIGHTER PEN You’ll need a felt pen to mark all the words in your newspaper or magazine that you don’t know. Choose a colour that highlights but doesn’t obscure the word when you mark it. Those are the tools. Now let’s go do the job! How to Learn Any Language 14 The Multiple Track Attack So is there really a magic way to make learning a foreign language painless? Yes and no. We have some magic, all right, tricks and tactics that literally shovel the language into your head, as opposed to your high school Spanish class that teaspooned it in or didn’t bother getting it in at all. The system, however, won’t work unless you do. There’s going to be pain, but you will have something – plenty – to show for it. The promise here is not gain without pain. It’s the most gain for the least pain. If you suddenly decide to get physically fit (just as you’ve decided to learn another language) you wouldn’t sit around and wonder, “Let’s see. We’ve got aerobic exercises, free weights, stretching, high tech gym machines, jogging, swimming, vitamins, and sensible nutrition. Which one shall I use?” Obviously, you’re going to use a mix of some or all of the above. And that’s the way to approach learning another language. The multiple track attack simply parts from the absurd notion that you should choose a grammar book or a cassette course or a reader or a phrase book; instead, it sets you up with all of the above – and more – simultaneously. You will fail or you will succeed. If you fail, your books, cassettes, dictionaries, and scattered flash cards will litter your drawers and closets like so many unlifted barbells, unswallowed vitamins, unsoiled workout suits, and unused jogging shoes. They will mock you every time your embarrassed eye falls upon them. Succeed, and you’ll be the proud owner of another language. Charles Berlitz says that saying a word or phrase aloud ten to twenty times is more effective a learning technique than merely reading the same item fifty to one hundred times. Likewise, seeing a word or phrase in your grammar book fifty times does not secure it in your memory as effectively as seeing it two or three times and them coming across that same word or phrase by surprise in a newspaper or magazine or hearing it on a cassette or in a radio broadcast or a movie or in conversation with a native speaker. It may be hard to explain why the multiple track attack works, but it’s easy to prove that it does. It’s somehow related to the excitement of running into someone from your hometown on the other side of the world. You might have ignored him back home or dismissed him with a “howdy,” but you’ll be flung into each other’s arms by the power of meeting unexpectedly far from home. The rub off effect kicks in nicely almost from the beginning of your effort as words you learned from a flash card or cassette pop up in your workbook or newspaper. Sure, you will eventually conquer the word even if it occurs only in your grammar book or your phrase book or on your cassette, but that learning involves repeated frontal assault on a highly resistant unknown. Let that same word come at you, however, in a real life newspaper article and your mind embraces it as an old friend. Attempting to master a language with a grammar book alone is too boring; with phrase books alone, too superficial; with cassettes alone, too fruitless (except with Pimsleur!); and with dictionary and newspaper alone, impossible. The multiple track attack makes your work pay off.Getting Started Open your grammar to the first lesson. Do you understand the first paragraph? If so, proceed to paragraph two. If not, reread paragraph one. Can you determine precisely what it is that’s blocking you from comprehension? If so, take a pencil (not pen) and underline the word or words that are tripping you up. Run a wavy pencil line down the left hand margin of whatever confuses you. That paragraph will never change. The grammatical point that the confusing paragraph seeks to make will remain as immutable as Gibraltar until your mind decides to open up to it. Comprehension frequently clicks on like a light switch. No rush. Try to summarise what you don’t understand. Pretend you’re writing a letter to your aunt complaining about this ridiculous new language you’re trying to learn and, using as few words as possible, encapsulate your confusion in writing. Take that note and put it in a Sturdikleer holder and carry it with you in your pocket or bag. Get into the habit of writing down everything that confuses with you and carrying it with you. You will try to find informants or mentors – either native speakers or others who’ve learned your target language well enough to answer your questions. Befriend the Korean grocer, the Italian waiter, the Albanian at the pizzaria, your dentist’s Romanian secretary. You don’t need such people, but they’re extremely helpful and easier to locate than you might think, and getting easier all the time as America becomes an international mixture of peoples. Your informants will usually love being asked to help you learn their language. Let’s suppose you’ve stubbed your venturesome toe on paragraph one or two or three or whichever, and no comprehension clicks on. At this point you must consciously overturn the rules of misdirected American language teaching and do something radical. You must wave goodbye to your unsolved puzzle and keep moving ahead. If you don’t understand it, skip it for the time being. Chances are excellent your confusion will clear itself up as you progress through more and more concepts that you do understand. You will have the pleasure of looking back on earlier lesssons in the grammar, seeing your wavy pencil lines beside a now clear paragraph, and saying to yourself, “How could I have ever been derailed by this?” It’s fun erasing those wavy lines! Continue through five lessons of the grammar before you so much as glance at any of your other tools. Leave the cassettes wrapped in their packaging. Don’t be tempted to look at the newspaper or magazine in your target language. The more of a language lover you are, the tougher it will be. Plodding through grammar while friendly cassettes and real life newspapers await will make you feel like a child who has to finish his homework before he runs out and plays baseball. And that’s exactly the point. You are a child in that new language, and like all children, you have to learn to put first things first. Grammar comes first. Build a little character by slogging through five chapters of it. You will build up a head of steam that will send you charging headlong into more pleasant terrain. Cassettes, newspapers, flash cards, and phrase books will cut the boredom out of waiting for buses and replace it with growth in another language; these will be your reward after you make an honest beginning in the grammar. Sustain your spirit during the grammar study by reminding yourself how soon you’re going to be allowed to go out and “play.” How to Learn Any Language 15 Into the Real World When you’ve served out your sentence of five lessons of grammar, spread out all your other tools (you should regard them as “toys”) and prepare to use them all simultaneously. Take the newspaper or magazine. Go to the upper left hand corner of page one. (In languages like Arabic and Hebrew, that will be the upper right hand corner of the “back” page, which is their front.) That article is your assignment. It will easily be the toughest newspaper article you’ve ever read. And it will just as certainly do you more good than any other. Take your highlighter and highlight all the words you don’t know in the first paragraph. You may very well end up with a coloured line through every single word in that paragraph. After all, this is no schoolhouse text that dips to your beginner’s level. This is as real life and real world as an exercise can get. And all you’ve had so far is five lessons of elementary grammar. Never mind. Play the game and dutifully mark through every word you don’t know, even if it be every last word in that first paragraph! Then reach for your dictionary and your blank flash cards. Go to the first word and look it up. One of four things will happen: (1) You’ll find the word exactly as it appears in the newspaper. (2) You’ll find a word that starts out the same but seems to go haywire halfway through or at the end. (3) The word will not be in your dictionary (even though you gave that dictionary a “sophistication” test before you bought it.) (4) You will think that word is not in the dictionary because the word has done crazy things with itself. It’s altogether possible, owing to rules of that language you haven’t learned yet, that the role of the word as it appears in the newspaper demands it be written differently from the base form, which is the one listed in the dictionary. (The word vaya in Spanish, for example, won’t be in the dictionary. It’s the singular imperative form of the verb ir meaning “to go.”) In case 1, the word is in the dictionary spelled exactly the way it is in your newspaper (from now on we’ll say “text” – it could be a magazine or even a book). Take a blank flash card and write the English on one side; then flip it over and write the foreign word on the other. Write in block letters so your flash cards will always be easy to read. I hesitate to labour the procedure for making your own flash cards. There is a preferred procedure, however, and I herewith present it in case you don’t already know it. Single words and entire phrases are best handled differently. When you write individual words on your flash card, you only need a “short runway,” so treat the card in its “tall” (vertical) form rather than its “fat” (horizontal) form and enter your words one under the other down the length of the card. Write the English word across the “forehead” of the card, then flip it, not sideways, but head over heels, and write the foreign word across the opposite forehead. Then turn the card back over to the English side and write your next word directly underneath, turn it over and write in the foreign word, and keep repeating until the card is filled. That head over heels lengthwise flip makes the card easier to manipulate in a crowded bus or elevator and less likely to fall out of your hand. When you graduate to writing entire phrases on your blank flash cards, it’s obviously better to treat the card in its fat form. Continue to flip head over heels. Now, case 2: You find a word in the dictionary that seems as though it’s trying to be the word in your text but it falls off track: the ending changes spelling. You’ve probably found your base word, all right, but the word in the text, for reasons you don’t yet comprehend, has taken another form. Is it a verb? Then the dictionary will give you the infinitive form (to be, to do, etc.), whereas the form in your text could be one of many variations, depending on person, number, tense, or, in some languages, aspect. If that riff of grammatical terms makes you feel like I felt on my fifth day of Latin class, fear not. Language teachers would prefer to assume that such grammatical jargon is familiar to every graduate of an American high school English class. Alas, that assumption is grossly misguided. But help is here. The “Back to Basics” chapter later in this book will explain all necessary grammatical terms in friendly, nonthreatening language that requires no prior understanding of grammar. Write the base form – the dictionary form, that is – on your flash card and try to decipher the meaning of the text with that base form as a clue. If the meaning is clear, don’t worry yet about why the word in the text differs from the base form. Part of the fun of this process is having that knowledge surrender itself to you as you proceed through your grammar book. If the meaning is not clear, make a “question card,” spelling the confusing word the way it appears in the text. Keep your Sturdikleer with question cards with you at all times. When you meet your informant, or anybody who can explain your confusion away, pull out the question card and your miasma of confusion will become windshield wiper clear. List no more than six unknown words per flash card. Don’t clutter the card. It’s a good idea to draw a line under both the English and the foreign word, giving each entry its own “cubicle” on the card. Also, check carefully to make sure you don’t omit either the English or the foreign word, giving you a situation in which English word number three on the card fails to correspond to foreign word number three. (I once went around for almost a year thinking the Russian word for “prince” meant “raspberry jam”!) How to Learn Any Language 16 In cases 3 and 4, either the word’s not in the dictionary or it’s not there in any form recognisable to you. Enter the word on a question card. You may have four or five complete cards, eighteen or twenty words defined and ready to be learned, from the first paragraph in your text alone. Put those cards in clear plastic and carry them with you at all times. Don’t mix them up with the question cards. Keep them separate. The cards with the dictionary forms of the foreign words from the text you didn’t know, with their English equivalents on the reverse side, are the beginning of your collection of linguistic growth protein. Advance! Now you’re ready for paragraph two. Between paragraphs one and two, you’ve been glancing at those flash cards during your hidden moments – waiting in line, on elevators, etc. With highlighter poised like a sword, you now sally forth into the second paragraph. The going will probably be noticeably easier, because paragraph two will likely be dealing with much the same subject matter as paragraph one and many of the words will be repeats. Step back and note how many fewer coloured lines marking unknown words there are in paragraph two. Never mind that those are repeat words. If you knew them from flashing your cards in the interval between tackling paragraph one and tackling paragraph two, then it’s clean conquest. Bask in it, and move on to paragraph three. No cheating! Don’t let your possible lack of interest in the subject matter of the text tempt you into junking it and jumping across the page to another article that looks like it’s about something that interests you more. No soldier fighting in the arctic would dare ask his commanding officer if he might be excused to go fight in the tropics. Advance! Charge! Slog through it one step – one word – at a time. By the time you reach the end of page one, if it’s a newspaper, you will note with glee that the coloured markings indicating words you didn’t know, almost solid in the early paragraphs, will have diminished precipitously by the end of the page. That page is a progress chart. And you’ll have what seems like a ton of flash cards loaded with words in varying degrees of surrender to you. Carry as many flash cards with you as possible, and rotate them regularly so your attention is evenly parcelled out among them. Tradition bound teachers would have problems with that kind of “ice plunge,” a naked leap into a foreign language newspaper after only five lessons of grammar with nothing for help but a dictionary, which in many cases can’t help because you won’t know the various disguises (changing forms) of many of the words. What’s the point? There are several. America is a nation of people who make straight A’s in intermediate French and then get to Paris and realise they don’t speak intermediate French! The knowledge that the text – newspaper, book, magazine, whatever – is a real world document that does not condescend to a student’s level is a tremendous confidence builder and energiser for your assault upon your target language. The awareness that you’re making progress, albeit slowly, through typical text, genuine text, the kind the natives buy off their newsstands and read in their coffee shops, gives even the rank beginner something of the pride of a battle toughened marine. Memorise Your Part You are now, let’s say, beginning chapter six of your grammar book and fighting your way valiantly down the first column of your text. Keep going on both these fronts, and pick up another tool. Open your phrase book and read the introduction carefully, paying particularly close attention to the rules of transliteration. All such books will have three columns: the English word or phrase, the foreign language translation, and then the transliteration, which is your guide to proper pronunciation using the English alphabet. When you get the hang of the language, you won’t need the transliteration crutch. Until you do, you need it totally. But note that there is no recognised standard system of transliteration. The International Phonetic Alphabet is supposed to be, but nobody uses it because learning it is almost as hard as learning another language itself. There are at least half a dozen ways to transliterate the capital of China. The Chinese communists prefer Beijing. The Chinese nationalists prefer Peking. If that were the only word you wanted to learn and there were no need for you to learn transliteration systems, we could write it Bay-jing, adding that the Bay is pronounced like the English word for the body of water and the jing like the first syllable of “jingle.” Your phrase book will take mercifully little space to tell you how to pronounce the words according to their chosen system of transliteration. Usually in less than a page you’ll be told to pronounce ai like the y in “sky”; ei like the eigh in “weigh” and so on through all the needed sounds. Some phrase books indicate which syllable gets the stress by placing an accent mark on top of it, others by capitalising every letter in the syllable. Don’t be impatient because you suddenly feel you’re called upon to learn another written language which is neither English nor the language you’re trying to learn. Look upon the transliteration guide as your opportunity to learn the combination to a safe that will let you help yourself to the correct pronunciation of every word in that book! Advance now to the first page of phrases in the phrase book. Your newspaper didn’t teach you how to say “How are you?” and it’s a good bet the first five lessons of your grammar didn’t either. Here it comes! This is your first chance to learn how to actually say things. “Yes.” “No.” “Please.” “Thank you.” “You’re welcome.” “Good morning.” “Good afternoon.” “Good evening.” ”I’m very pleased to meet you.” “How are you?” “Very well, thanks; and you?” “Fine.” You’ll master these precious nuggets of real life communication quickly. But don’t stop with merely mastering them. Use that phrase book and plot a conversational pattern, a routine you go into when you meet someone who speaks your target language. Treat it as though you’re memorising your part in a play. ”How do you do?” “My name is _______.” “What’s your name?” “Where are you from?” “How long have you been here?” “I don’t speak your language well.” “How do you say that in your language?” “May I get you something to drink?” “I don’t understand.” “Would you please repeat?” Here again, traditionalists would frown. “That’s not learning a language,” they’d protest. “That’s just learning how to parrot a few phrases!” How to Learn Any Language 17 And right they’d be, if that were all you were doing. But you are now accumulating flash cards with vocabulary and moving through lesson seven or eight of the grammar, so don’t feel you have to apologise for learning how to parrot a few handy phrases. Your ability to bandy some useful phrases is a motivator. There you are, speaking the language! Isn’t that what you started all this for? Admittedly you’re not debating the economic consequences of his government’s latest reversal on tariff agreements, but you are asking someone if he’s too cold and telling him you hope to meet him again. More magic happens when you’re at that peak motivation. You find yourself acquiring more material, more conversational gems gleaned from his end of the conversation. Remember, you’re a confessed beginner. When you don’t understand something, you’re excused for asking him to repeat it, spell it, write it down on one of your blank flash cards. (Always carry some.) It’s gratifying, in fact, enthralling, to enter your next conversation with your powers to converse enhanced by the previous encounter. A note of caution, however. Eventually you may find yourself about to small talk so fluently you’ll mistake that ability for having arrived. Back to the newspaper and the grammar with you before such thoughts corrupt! Add Cassettes For most of the history of the world, there was no way the self taught language student could hear the language spoken. He had to rely on printed rules, grossly inadequate, to guide him in pronunciation of his target language. Then came the phonograph record, which seemed like ideal deliverance from darkness, until the tape recorder came along, followed quickly by the portable cassette tape recorder, which allowed language learners to pick up ear phones and listen to a wide variety of foreign language fare as they jogged, shopped, ran errands, or walked to work. As is the case with many technological breakthroughs, disappointment followed. The closets of many fine, otherwise strong willed people are littered with the wreckage of once beautifully packaged foreign language cassette courses. They thought technology had replaced study. They thought all you had to do was pop a cassette into the machine, press a button, and take in the language like a car takes in gasoline. Remove that inflated expectation, resolve to do your part, and the invention of the portable cassette tape player will indeed fulfill its promise to the language lover endeavouring to become a language learner. Are you presently armed with the right cassette course? Unless your cassette was mislabelled and carries lessons in a language other than the one you’d like to learn, it’s a good learning aid. It may not be the best. It may be far behind the best, but so what? It will offer you words and phrases in your target language with native accuracy in pronunciation. You no more want to limit your hearing of the language to one cassette course than you’d want to confine your tennis playing to one partner. The ideal cassette library is one in which the student can pull down a cassette for review in rotation and not quite remember how the dialogue goes or what’s coming next. A little mystery, rather than rote familiarity, aids the student ear in its difficult mission of paying attention. Within certain obvious limits, you can buy literally every course in your target language that’s commercially available and still describe your adventure with the language as “inexpensive.” In your beginning stages you should insist on cassettes that come with a written transcript of everything recorded. (The Pimsleur courses are an exception. Their integration of written word exercises and their back and forth interaction between teacher and student more than excuse the absence of word for word transcription.) It’s a good idea to follow the text visually as you listen to the cassette the first few times. As you get a little bit familiar with the target material, divorce the two. Take the cassette and the tape player with you. Listen even when you can’t follow the written text. Read the text even when you can’t listen. You’ll find the two excellent reinforcers for each other. If your cassette course is flat single rep or flat double rep, keep listening over and over and try to capture as many words and phrases as you can. When you’re ready – actually, long before you’re ready – challenge the cassette to a duel. Start at the beginning and see how many words and phrases you know. After the English, stop the cassette recorder with the pause button and ask yourself, “Do I know it in the target language? Do I almost know it? Do I know any part of it – how the word or phrase begins, how it ends, what major sound characterises it? Do I know enough to give myself credit for at least partial conquest?” Don’t be in a rush to release the pause button and see how well you did. Make a teasing game of it. Make yourself wait for the fulfillment of hearing the term in the target language. That will make a stronger hit into your memory. Drop a weighty object from a higher tower than previously and it will sink deeper into the mud. Then move on to the next term. It’s a little like playing solitaire; no matter how you write your own rules, it still retains the arresting power of a game. Maybe you’ll ask yourself if you can score one out of five correct; later, one out of four. It’s hard to imagine it in the early going, but you will eventually play the game by seeing if you can get every term on the cassette correct from beginning to end. But that’s not quite total victory. Total victory is seeing if you can do it without stopping to think. And then, if your machine has the mechanism, try it at accelerated speed! How to Learn Any Language 18 Hidden Moments They taught us in the fable of the tortoise and the hare so early, most of us dismissed it as a children’s tale and ignored the powerful lesson it contains: Others may be brighter. Others may learn quicker and retain more. Yet whosoever keeps on plodding relentlessly toward the goal of mastering another language, though his gifts be dim, stands a better chance than the unmotivated genius whose dazzle ignited so much envy in high school Spanish class. Harnessing your hidden moments, those otherwise meaningless scraps of time you’d normally never think of putting to any practical use, and using them for language study – even if it’s no more than fifteen, ten, or five seconds at a time – can turn you into a triumphant tortoise. By now you’re slogging your way through the grammar and enjoying it more (or suffering it less) than you did in college because you no longer feel obliged to dwell upon a knotty point until you understand it before moving forward. You will not fail a test or risk a bad grade if you abandon some grammatical black hole that tries to swallow you, and move on ahead. You’re battling your way through the foreign language newspaper, your slow progress mitigated by the awareness that this is the real world and the daily language won’t get any tougher than that text. You’re cherry picking through your phrase book, learning how to say practical things in your target language and rehearsing all those precious phrases as though they were your part in a play. Your cassettes are beginning to bore you without teaching you a great deal (yet). You’re amassing a flash card collection. By now you’ve probably met someone from the country whose language you’re learning and, like a rookie cop about to make his first collar, you risked your ego by attempting a greeting. He laughed appreciatively – and answered you in English. Hidden moments will heal your deficiencies soon enough, but first let’s talk about the unhidden moments, the study time you’ve arranged to commit to your endeavour. This book is written for those who can’t or don’t want to expend the time or money required to attend formal classes. Successful self teaching is our objective. If you can take a whole hour every day and devote it to your studies, you’re in excellent position to make satisfying, even dramatic, progress. If you can devote a half hour a day, you’re still poised for success. If you can’t commit a regular block of time, if the best you can do is an hour here, a half hour there, and maybe a three hour block of time over the weekend, that’s satisfactory, provided you keep it up and maintain momentum. Gardens unattained go to weed. Apples bitten into and abandoned turn brown. Likewise, your collection of language data – words, phrases, rules, and idioms – will dissolve into a useless mass if not kept up. Apportion as much time as you reasonably can and as regularly as you can, and then enjoy the magic as the hidden moments kick in. A professional financial advisor on radio once urged people to take careful inventory of their financial assets, promising that overlooked and forgotten riches were to be revealed at every hand. Her credibility disappeared for me at that moment. I honestly think I’ve never been at a point in my economic life where I was likely to underestimate my holdings by as much as seventy-five cents! When it comes to time, however, that’s a much more lucrative matter! You can learn a language in twelve months using only those moments you didn’t realise you had. We’ve already mentioned a few corners in which hidden moments lurk awaiting liberation. Let’s review them and add some more. Moments we instinctively bid goodbyes to include those spent waiting for and riding in elevators, waiting for the person you’re dialing to answer, waiting while he puts you on hold, waiting for a long outgoing message from someone’s answering machine to reach its conclusion. There are those moments when you’re helplessly trapped – when someone who’s too good a friend to hang up on delivers an unending narrative requiring no verbal participation on your part beyond an occasional grunt, groan, “dear me,” “gee whiz,” or other appropriate interjection to let him know you’re still there. It’s usually safe to divert some of your attention from your friend to your flash cards. There’s a major payload of hidden moments right there, and we haven’t even gone beyond the elevator and the telephone! We can take time back from our days just like the Dutch took land back from the sea and put it to work. What do you normally do when you’re waiting in line at the bank, the post office, the airline counter, the bus or train station, or the supermarket checkout counter? What do you do while you brush your teeth? You could be listening to a language cassette. What plans have you made for the time you’re going to spend waiting behind your steering wheel at the gas pump? Or waiting for the rinse cycle? Waiting for the school bus? You get the point. An honest, thorough scrutiny of your normal week will yield dozens, even hundreds, of minutes that can be put to work learning your target language. And don’t forget, a scrap of time need be no longer than five seconds to advance you closer to your goal. Arrange your life so you will never be caught without something to study in your target language. If you carry a briefcase or a pocketbook, your grammar book or newspaper, even your dictionary, can be your companion. Phrase books are usually so thin they easily fit into a coat pocket. There’s nothing holy about your foreign language newspaper. Cut off a page and fold it up and carry it with you, along with your highlighter. Certainly we can all agree there’s no excuse ever to get caught without flash cards. The instant you get stymied – in line at the cash machine, waiting for a store clerk, etc. – pull out your deck of flash cards and get to work. If your hidden moment only lasts five seconds, giving you time for only one flash card, give that flash card five seconds of the right kind of effort. Look at the English. Suppose it says “shoe.” Say to yourself something like, “What a great moment in my life. I presently do not know the word for ‘shoe’ in my target language. Within seconds that infirmity will be erased! I will get a look at the word and, though it may not lodge in my memory after one single flash, that word will eventually be mine.” Make a big deal out of it. Indeed, it is a big deal when you expand your vocabulary. Now flip the card. If your target language is Spanish, the other side of the card will reveal the word for shoe as zapato. Once we hand you the ultimate vocabulary memory weapon, the one developed by Harry Lorayne, you will put that word through a mental process that will make it easier to retrieve. Right now, just try to remember it any way you can, even by rote. Proceed to the next card, or the next word on that card. You should have enough cards with you so the same word doesn’t pop up so quickly that you haven’t really tested your retention, but not so many cards that you don’t meet the same word for another two or three days. The fun comes when you meet the word again. Imagine the word is your opponent in a duel. Is it going to be you or he? Look only at the English. Try to remember. Don’t flip the card until you’re certain you’re defeated and cannot possibly come up with the word. Even grizzled multilingual veterans who’ve used this system successfully will find themselves letting their guard down and moving from the English word on the flash card to the foreign word too quickly. No challenge, no effort, no gain. There’s no memory glue better than standing there, in the line at a bank or wherever, looking at the English side of a flash card, not knowing the word immediately, trying hard to bring it back, fearing you can’t, and refusing to give up. Suddenly you think you have it. You flip the card over and see that you were, indeed, correct! That word has no more chance of escaping you than your middle name. How to Learn Any Language 22 The Almosters The skeptic has one shot left before he’s wiped out by the power of the method. He can, at this point, say, “Hold it! Every word you’ve used to demonstrate the system so far falls much too neatly into our lap – liar, mole-yay. It’s a setup. It’s not real. Very few words will cooperate with the system once you tackle the real world!” And he’s right! The words we’ve been subjecting to the memory system so far are automatics. They fall right into your lap with self suggesting images. Only a small percentage of words will fall into the system as facilely as the automatics. More, many more than you imagine, will fit automatically into the system, but far from enough to conquer another language. Never mind! Behind the words that fit neatly into the system are many times that number of words that, while fitting nowhere nearly as neatly, can nonetheless take you so close to the target word that true memory can easily complete the job. We call those words almosters. Of our four groups – automatics, almosters, toughies, and impossibles – the almosters make up by far the single biggest category. Let’s demonstrate. The Chinese word for “lobster” is transliterated as low-shah, pronounced very much like LOAN-shark. If you imagine that lobster is so expensive you need a loan shark to negotiate a lobster lunch, true memory will easily putt you from loan-shark to low-shah. Shrimp in Indonesian is gambiri, pronounced gam to rhyme with “Tom” followed by “beery” (gam-BI-ri). You complain to your waiter in Indonesia that the chewing gum he served you tastes awfully beery. He advises you it’s not chewing gum, it’s shrimp. Your putt will take you from GUM-beery to GAM-beery. The Serbo-Croatian word for “spoon” is kasika, pronounced KASH (to rhyme with “gosh”)-ee-kah. You want to get a spoon in Belgrade. They send you outside the hotel to a cash-and-carry to get a spoon if you want one. Or if you’re familiar with the Eastern grain called kasha (buckwheat groats), you can imagine dipping you spoon into a bowl of kasha in the back seat of your car. True memory will carry you from kasha-car to KASH-ee-ka. “Spoon,” then, equals KASH-ee-ka. The Italian word for “day” is giorno, pronounced JUR (as in “jury”)-no. You’re eagerly awaiting the outcome of a legal action, but the jury has been tied up all day with no verdict. Even stronger would be the notion of eagerly awaiting the outcome of the trial and learning that the whole day went by without the jury even showing up! All day and jury no. “Day” equals JUR-no. “Humid” in Farsi is martoob, pronounced mar (as in “marshal”)-TOOB (as in “tube”). It’s so dry in Central Iran that in order to provide comfortable humidity in your room, the maritime authorities arranged to bring water in through a tube. True memory will easily let you lop off all but the first syllable of “maritime” and change the vowel from the a as in “maritime” to a as in “marshal” so that humidity equals mar-TOOB. “Banana” in Indonesian is pisang, pronounced PEA-song, the second syllable rhyming with the cong in “conga”. You’d long heard of jungle magic in the outer islands of Indonesia, but you never really believed it until you went to the local grocer looking for bananas. You don’t see bananas anywhere. You ask if he has any bananas. Sure, he says, plenty. “Excuse me,” you say, “I don’t see any.” Be patient, he begs you, until he finishes with a customer. When it’s your turn he asks you how many bananas you want. You reply, half a dozen. He then takes six peas and sings them a mysterious little song. Before your bewildered eyes, they turn into bananas! The peas that were sung to became bananas. Your only putt is to make the final vowel sound like the o in “conga.” So “banana” equals PEA-song. The Spanish word for “to iron” is planchar, pronounced plan (to rhyme with “Don”)-CHAR (as in “charcoal”). The hotel in Madrid has an excellent reputation, with only a single and rather bizarre lapse. Apparently a maid with too much seniority to be fired has a habit of leaving the iron on the backside of the trousers so long it leaves burn marks the size of the iron itself smack across both buttocks. You have no choice. Your pants need ironing and you’ve got to take your chances. To improve your odds you gingerly approach the concierge and say, “ Excuse me, sir. Could you please find out if the maid plans to iron these pants correctly or if she plans to char them?” Your putt is to carry the plan sound from one rhyming with “tan” over to one rhyming with “Don.” “To iron” equals plan-CHAR. The Indonesian word for “donkey” is keledai, pronounced almost exactly like “call it a day” without the it. That’s what donkeys in hot climates are reputed to want to do after carrying their loads, and that’s what we’ll do now with this particular series of examples. How to Learn Any Language 23 Un-American Sounds So far we’ve shied away from words containing sounds that don’t exist in English. The real world won’t be so protective. “Un-American” sounds are exaggerated as an obstacle to progress in most languages. I say that not because it’s unimportant to master the sounds correctly, but because most of them will enter your repertoire automatically with practice. The trilled r in Spanish, the French r that sounds as though it issues from inside the pituitary gland, the half-sh half-guttural in German, the double consonant in Finnish, the many umlauted u’s and a’s and o’s in the various European languages will all be explained in your grammars, and better than explained on your cassettes: they’ll be pronounced. Many languages carry so many markings and so many different kinds of markings over and under certain of their letters you may be intimidated. Almost all of them are empty threats; despite their sinister looking foreignness, they don’t convey any sounds we don’t have in English. The two dots over certain a’s in Swedish simply tell you that particular letter is pronounced as the first a in “accurate.” Without the dots, it’s the a in “father.” There’s no need to run from the Norwegian o with a line slicing diagonally down through it: the first e sound in “Gertrude” is close enough. Languages with the double consonant spend far too much time warning us Americans that this is something strange to us. It is not strange. We have double consonants too, maybe not inside the same word, but definitely inside the same phrase. We pronounce the last sound of the first word and the first sound of the last word in “late train.” We don’t say “lay train.” So much for the frightening double consonant. We’ll make no attempt here to teach you the “click” sounds of some of the languages in South Africa or the larynx twisting sounds of the Georgian language spoken in Soviet Georgia that actually sounds like paper ripping inside the speaker’s throat. Those sounds are unrepeatable for most Americans and the languages in which they appear are mercifully obscure. There is really only one sound that doesn’t exist in English that we’re obliged to learn well, and that’s the guttural common in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Dutch, and several other languages. Most textbooks are notoriously weak in conveying that sound. They know they’re committing consumer fraud when, as they frequently do, they merely advise the American student to “approximate the ch sound in the German name ‘Bach’ or the final sound in the Scottish word ‘Loch.’” However, “Bach” is not pronounced bak. “Loch” is not pronounced lock. “Chanukah” is not pronounced Ha-na-ka. The trick is to learn how to make the real sound. The best method, though perhaps inelegant, is to imagine that you’re about to say the plain old h sound, and suddenly you feel a terrible tickle in the middle of your throat. The original h sound then becomes lost in all the other powerful things you now do. Clear your throat violently to eject the irritant causing that tickle. You will then have the “Chanukah” sound, the “Bach” sound, the “Loch” sound, the “chutzpah” sound. That sound has no natural parents in the English language. It’s up for adoption. Stop and think what image comes easily to your mind that can make you hear that sound. Don’t be afraid to exaggerate it. Then tone it down. Dry it out. It will soon be as serviceable and comfortable as the sounds you grew up with. How to Learn Any Language 24 Gender The Harry Lorayne method of remembering the gender of nouns in foreign languages makes you feel downright foolish for not having thought of it yourself! In some languages you have to remember the gender of nouns in order to adjust the articles or the endings of the adjectives that go with them. All the Romance languages – Spanish, French, Italian, Protugese, Romanian, etc. – have masculine and feminine gender. Usually, but far from always, you can figure which is which by the word’s ending: o for masculine, a for feminine. French, however, conceals gender clues with noun endings as unrevealing as battlefield camouflage. German and Russian have masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. The Scandinavian languages call their two noun genders “common” and “neuter,” as does Dutch. Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Hungarian, and Finnish, like English, have no noun genders. How do we remember whether the French noun for “train,” also spelled train, is le train (masculine) or la train (feminine)? It happens to be masculine, le train. Imagine not merely a train that has no women passengers, but a train that doesn’t allow women passengers! The men prefer it that way. In hot weather, when the air conditioning fails, they sit around in their underwear. Feminists are outraged, but the Supreme court keeps postponing the case. Men’s magazines litter the aisles. There are twice as many men’s rooms as necessary because there are no ladies’ rooms. Once the train screeched to a halt between stations and an alarm sounded. It seems a band of militant women tried to board the train and hijack it. They were eventually beaten back, before the men in the club car even had to put their pants back on. Le train; masculine. The French word for “café” is le café; masculine. You could either confect another all male scenario for a café similar to the one you did for the train. Or imagine a masculine name emblazoned over the entrance – something like the Macho Café or the Rambo Café. Le café; masculine. “Hour” in French is l’heure; feminine. Occasionally you get a gift like this one. Heure is pronounced very much like her without the h. L’heure; feminine. “Nose” in French is le nez; masculine. The members of which sex break their noses playing football and hockey, boxing, wrestling, and fighting with wise guys who insult their dates? Le nez; masculine. “Night” in French is la nuit; feminine. Who ever heard of a “man of the night?” La nuit; feminine. “Ticket” in French is le billet; masculine. Always look for opportunities to incorporate a memory hook for the gender as you capture the word itself. Billet is pronounced bee-yay, almost exactly like the letters B.A. as in Bachelor of Arts. If “bachelor” doesn’t have a sufficiently strong male connotation to you, imagine a giant male bumble bee buzzing around. Le billet; masculine. “Train station” in French is la gare; feminine. Shall we imagine women waiting for their homebound commuting husbands at the train station? Not a good idea. You may forget whether the waiting women or the expected husbands are the star of the association. How about hundreds of women waiting for one man, pouncing upon him and fighting over him as he unsuspectingly steps off the train? La gare; feminine. “Church” in French is l’eglise; feminine. Imagine an angry mob of French women storming a church in France, demanding that women be allowed into the Catholic priesthood. L’eglise; feminine. Let this one be a lesson to you. “Mustache” in French is la moustache; feminine! Imagine the circus lady with a mustache, or a new French wine that causes women to grow mustaches, or a little girl asking her mother if she can ever have a mustache. La moustache; feminine. Some languages have neuter gender too. Try to come up with associations that suggest icy impersonality. “House” in German is das Haus; neuter. Imagine a house so cold and unappealing it couldn’t have possibly been graced by man or woman for years. No one lives there or would ever conceivably want to. Das Haus; neuter. “Pen” in Russian is pero, pronounced pee-RAW. What could be more sexless than a pea that’s raw? Pero; neuter. How to Learn Any Language 28 Commit Language Larceny There are interesting lessons coiled up inside ordinary greetings in different languages. The Estonian greeting Kuidas (käsi käib) literally means “How does your hand walk?” An old Chinese greeting is Chr bao le, mei lo? which means, “Have you had food yet?” – no small achievement in the China of some periods. A charming greeting in Yiddish is “Zug mir a shtikel Toireh,” which means “Teach me a piece of Torah,” the Torah being the five books of Moses and the holiest document in the Jewish religion. Language learners can use the spirit of that last one to good advantage. When you encounter a native speaker of your target language, and when you start a conversation in that language, three things are certain. You will be stuck for words you need but don’t know. He will use words you don’t understand. And you will make mistakes. Get into the habit of exploiting those moments to the hilt! When you don’t know a word, ask him for it. When you don’t understand a word he uses, ask him what it means. Ask him to do you the favour of correcting your mistakes. You may not have much luck with that latter request; he may be too polite or too impressed that you’re making an effort in his language to criticise you. If you feel he’s letting your mistakes slide by, pick a fairly long sentence and ask him to help you hammer out your mistakes in just that one sentence. Write that sentence down on one of your blank flash cards. Ask him to check it again. Milk the moment. As the Latin goes, Carpe diem! Don’t ever enter into anything as precious as a conversation in your target language with a native speaker and leave knowing no more than when you started. You’ve got a repertoire in that language. He has a larger one. Reach in and help yourself. How to Learn Any Language 29 At No Extra Cost You may think you have a good idea precisely how your life will improve once you’ve mastered your target language. You’re wrong. It will be much better than you think. Unexpected good things happen to you when you learn even a little of the other guy’s language. A chapter detailing some of those things may seem like preaching to the choir, when you consider that anybody likely to be reading this has already decided he wants to learn. So what? Who more than the members of the choir deserve the inspiration? All the case histories that follow were culled and corroborated by members of the Language Club who were asked to be alert to all the nice little extras that come your way when you speak another language. Many of them happened to me personally and continue to happen almost daily. In New York and some other major cities a huge percentage of the cab drivers are from Haiti. Try this, just to get a taste of the power of another language. If your driver is Haitian, lean forward and say (phonetically), “Sa (rhymes with “ma”) pass (“pasta” without the “ta”) SAY (as in the English “say”), pa-PA (“papa,” but accented on the last syllable). Sort those sounds out and try it. “Sa paSAY paPA?” It means something like the French Comment ça va? (“How are you?”), but it’s not French. It’s his native Haitian Creole slang and he may never before have heard that utterance from the lips of a non-Haitian. That one line is guaranteed to get you reactions ranging from a long, slow smile to a cheery “Where did you learn that?” to loud and joyous laughter to the exclamation, “You must know Haiti well!” Don’t get the idea that Haitians are the only ones susceptible to the charm of hearing a few words of their language. They just may be more demonstrative than most in showing it. Romanian cab drivers have turned off the metre and given me a free ride in return for my “Good morning” in Romanian. A Soviet Georgian cab driver refused to take my money and invited me to Sunday dinner at his home, one of the tastiest treats and most interesting evenings I’ve ever enjoyed. An Indonesian cab driver screamed – that’s all, just screamed – upon hearing “Thank you” in his language. I’ve long suspected there’s a memo posted in the kitchen of every Chinese restaurant in America instructing all personnel not to let any American who exhibits any knowledge of Chinese go unrewarded. Try this experience, just to taste the power. The Chinese term for “chopsticks” is kwai dze. The first word is pronounced like the Asian river the American war prisoners built the bridge over. The second word sounds like the ds in “suds.” The next time you’re in a Chinese restaurant, smile at the waiter and say “Kwai dze.” When he brings the chopsticks, smile again and say, “Shieh, shieh” (“Thank you”). Pronounce that as you should “she expects,” making sure you never get as far as the x and accentuating the “she”. The immediate payoffs on this one can range from a free plum brandy cocktail at the end of the meal clear over to a stubborn refusal to let you pay. The more subtle, and satisfying, payoff is that they will assume you know not only the rest of the Chinese language but the Chinese cuisine as well, and they’ll probably give you no less than the absolute finest the house can produce every time they see you come in. Your rewards for knowing even a paltry few words of a language vary in inverse proportion to the likelihood that you’ll know any at all. A German baker isn’t likely to endorse his whole day’s profit on strudel over to your favourite charity merely because you enter his shop with a big “Guten Tag” (“Good day”), but an Albanian baker might if you enter with “Tungjatjeta.” You won’t knock French socks off with a “Comment allez-vous?” (“How are you?”), but you may set winter gloves flying in Helsinki with a correctly pronounced “(Hyvää Päivää” (“Good morning”). Don’t overdo it. I’ve known cab drivers from obscure countries almost drive off the road when they’re surprised with a burst of their native tongue from an American passenger, and once I had a Chinese waitress in a Jewish delicatessen (honest!) get so rattled when I ordered for our party in Chinese that she messed up our order beyond redemption. How to Learn Any Language 30 I have many times ignited what looked like spontaneous street festivals by hailing groups of people on the sidewalk in the language I heard them speaking. They frequently stop, return the greeting, and then start hobnobbing with the people in my group, leading to laughs, the exchange of addresses, dates for later on, and, I suspect, even more! I’ve never understood the joy of bagging a bird or a deer and watching it fall to the ground. My joy is bagging strangers from other countries with the right greeting in the right language and watching them come to a halt and become old friends at once. The material payoffs of learning foreign languages are many and predictable, though perhaps a bit surprising in their scope. In early 1990 a friend told me he was looking to fill a job paying $650,000 a year; qualifications: attorney, knowledge of Russian, and willingness to relocate to Moscow. I prefer the psychological payoffs of studying foreign languages – pleasures so keep you could almost call them spiritual. They joy of a true mathematician escalates as he moves from algebra to trigonometry to calculus. Likewise, the joy of the true language lover escalates as he advances from what I call “Foreign 1” to “Foreign 2.” Foreign 1 is interpreting or translating (interpreters speak, translators write) from your native language to a foreign one. Foreign 2 is doing it from one language that’s foreign to you to another one that’s foreign to you. You are permitted to feel like Superman when you pull off such a feat. You are not permitted to act like Superman, nor are you permitted to let on that you feel like Superman. You mien should approximate that of a bored New York commuter telling a stranger how many stops there are between Grand Central Station and New Rochelle. The best Foreign 2 feeling I ever had was interpreting for Finns trying to communicate with Hungarians. Finnish and Hungarian are widely hailed as the most difficult languages in the world. They’re related to each other, but not in any way that’s helpful or even apparent. There aren’t five words remotely similar in the two languages, and a Hungarian and a Finn can no more understand each other than can a Japanese and a Pole. I long nurtured a dream of house lights coming up in the theatre. The theatre manager comes to centre stage and says, “Is there a Finnish-Hungarian interpreter in the house?” I wait until he repeats his request louder so that everyone in the theatre will get a load of those qualifications. I then, in the fantasy, grudgingly make my presence and, by implication, my suitability for the assignment known. I rise and approach whatever emergency it is that requires my linguistic talents, while those hundreds of theatre goers gasp at their relative inadequacies. Something like that actually did light up my life for an evening and then some. I was invited by a well known woman broadcaster to join another couple who had invited her and a guest to a Madison Square Garden horse show. I’d never dated her before. I felt outclassed in the glamour department, and I was uncomfortable as we four wound our way through that upper crust crowd looking for our places. Suddenly I was spotted by Anna Sosenko, lyricist, writer, theatre producer, and dealer in the memorabilia of show business worldwide and down through the ages. Anna wrote, among other biggies, the song “Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup.” “Hey, Barry,” Anna yelled out over the crowd from about twenty rows away. “Can you come by my studio next week? I need you to translate some Ibsen!” Remember what that sudden spinach infusion did for Popeye’s biceps in the animated cartoons? That’s exactly what happened to my standing in the foursome after Anna’s outcry. My date and her friends turned to me. “Ibsen? You translate Ibsen? Where did you learn to translate Ibsen?” They may very well not have known what language Henrik Ibsen wrote in. Never mind! You don’t have to be absolutely sure which country a prince is a prince of in order to show respect, as long as you’re sure he’s a real prince. Likewise, with Anna Sosenko doing the yelling, everybody was convinced I could bring Ibsen to life in English. [ Last edited by telomerase on 2009-2-20 at 11:43 ] |
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