Portugesefficeffice" />
Don’t dismiss Portugese as some kind of slurring, overnasalised cousin of Spanish.
The lightning population growth of Portugese speaking Brazil alone makes
Portugese a major world language. Ancient Portugese navigators carried the language to
the mid-Atlantic, the African countries of Angola and Mozambique, the enclave of Goa
in India, and even the Indonesian island of Timor.
Portugese is the ninth most widely spoken language in the world, after Chinese,
English, Hindi-Urdu, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, and Indonesian. Thus,
Portugese is an intelligent choice for the language “shopper” who wants to be different
without abandoning the mainstream.
Portugese nasal sounds are easier than the French and the grammar is only slightly
more difficult than Spanish. Because I learned Spanish first, Portugese will always sound
to me like Spanish that’s been damaged on delivery. (That’s just a smile, not an insult.
Dutch sounds the same way to anyone who’s first studied German, Danish sounds that
way to anyone who’s first studied Norwegian, and Serbo-Croatian definitely fits the
description to anyone who’s first studied Russian.)
German
Germany didn’t leave us a world of colonies where people still speak German, but they
may as well have. In addition to being the principal language of Germany, Austria, and
one of the three main languages of Switzerland, German is, surprisingly, the language
most natives will try first on foreigners when they come visiting in Hungary, Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia – in fact all the way from Germany’s
eastern border with Poland as far east as Moscow and from the Baltic Sea in the north
clear down to the Mediterranean. English may edge German out by the time of the next
scientific poll in Eastern Europe, but that leaves a tremendous number of German
speakers across Europe and elsewhere. Germany’s reunification, reestablishing Germany
as the central European power, can only intensify the German language’s importance.
German grammar is far from the most difficult, though you’ll be hard to convince
when you find yourself trapped in one of German’s unending dependent clauses. You can
wait through lunch for the German noun after a loop-the-loop adjectival clause that might
translate literally as “the never- having- definitively- researched- the- mating- habits- of-
the- Asian- armadillo- Dr. Schultz,” and you can wait even longer for the German verb.
It’s something you get the hang of, though, and remember, German is family. Its kinship
with English will be a boon throughout.
There are three genders in German and officially four noun cases, but they’re easy.
In only one case does the noun itself change endings, the rest being taken care of by the
preceding article, adjective, or other modifier.
German offers dividends to those interested in science, philosophy, opera, and
getting a good job in international commerce.
Italian
Everybody who’s ever wrestled with Latin deserves to pick up an Italian grammar book
just to relax. Italian is easy Latin, a delight to plunge into. There are three different types
of verbs, but noun cases have been eliminated. Unlike French, Italian pronunciation is
church bell clear, and you can read Italian off the page and be understood after mastering
the regular rules governing the sounds of letters. There are no orthographical booby traps
such as the English tough, weigh, night, though, and the dozens of other deceptive
spellings we Americans can be grateful we never had to learn as foreigners.
Opera, art, wine, cuisine, history, and archaeology are some of the motivators for
learning Italian. Italians are nicer to foreigners trying to learn their language than any
other people whose language is a major one. A passable attempt to speak French in
France is likely to bring little but grudging comprehension from the French. A passable
attempt to speak Italian in Italy will likely lead to an explosive exclamation, “Ahh, you
speak our language!” followed by an offer of a free espresso.
Dutch
It’s easy to dismiss Dutch as a slim shadow of its big language neighbour, German, and
of possible interest only to those Americans eager to ingratiate themselves with an aging
aunt in Amsterdam with a valuable art collection. Not so fast. In addition to the Dutch
spoken in Holland, there are millions of Belgians whose language may be officially
called Flemish but is actually nothing but Dutch going under an assumed name. You’ve
also got millions of educated Indonesians who speak Dutch as a historical echo from the
four hundred years of Dutch colonial rule. Moreover, Dutch is the mother tongue of
Afrikaans, the language of those white South Africans whose ancestors were the Boers
(boer is the Dutch word for “farmer”). Afrikaaners not only understand Dutch but look
up to Dutch much as an Alabaman looks up to someone who speaks British English.
Dutch is much simpler for Americans to learn than German. There are only two
genders (oddly enough, not mascuine and feminine, but common and neuter). Verb
endings don’t change as much in Dutch as in German, and its word order is more like
English than German’s is.
You need not pretend Dutch is a beautiful language. The Dutch themselves joke
about the coarseness of their language. It’s got more of a guttural sound than Arabic,
Hebrew, Russian, and Farsi. If you want a concert in Dutch guttural, ask the next person
who speaks Dutch to say, “Misschien is Uw scheermesje niet scherp genoeg.” It means
“Perhaps your razor blade is not sharp enough,” but that’s irrelevant. That short sentence
explodes with five gutturals that cause the speaker to sound like the exhaust pipe of a
Greyhound bus through a full set of gear changes!
When you learn Dutch, you can cash in on at least forty percent credit when you
decide to take up German.
Russian
Russian is the world’s fourth language in number of speakers after Chinese, English, and
Hindustani. It is extremely difficult to learn to speak Russian correctly, but the Russians
have learned to be patient with foreigners who speak incorrect Russian. Journalists and
others fascinated by discussing recent history with Soviet citizens suddenly free to talk to
foreigners get a lot of joy out of knowing Russian. The much touted commercial
advantages of learning Russian, however, have so far fallen far short of expectation.
The jobs with gargantuan salaries promised to Russian speakers as a fruit of the
resurgence of free enterprise in the Soviet Union are few and shaky as the early
enthusiasm of foreign investors gives way to wait and see attitudes. Long range, Russian
remains a good bet for those willing to learn a language for career advantage. And in the
meantime you can enjoy reading Chekhov and Dostoyevski in the original.
The Russian alphabet may look formidable, but it’s a false alarm. It can be learned
in twenty minutes, but then you’ve got to face the real obstacles, such as three genders;
six noun cases with wave upon wave of noun groups that decline differently; a past tense
that behaves like an adjective; and verbs that have not just person, number, and tense, but
also something called “aspect” – perfective or imperfective.
Knowing Russian yields a lot of satisfaction. You want to pinch yourself as you
find yourself gliding through a printed page of a language you may have grown up
suspecting and fearing. Russian, like German, crackles with good, gutsy sounds that
please you as they leap from your tongue. Russian is a high gratitude language. The new
immigrants from the Soviet Union, though they speak one of the major languages of the
world, don’t expect Americans to know it. They’ll be overjoyed to hear their language
from you.
One advantage of choosing Russian is the head start it offers in almost a dozen
other Slavic languages, should you suddenly want or need one.
Chinese
Chinese is actually more of a life involvement than a language you choose to study.
When you’re in your easy chair studying, Chinese has more power to make you forget
it’s dinner time than any other language. It has more power to draw you out of bed earlier
than necessary to sneak in a few more moments of study. There’s simply more there.
More people speak Chinese than any other language on earth. There’s hardly a
community in the world that doesn’t have someone who speaks Chinese as a native. Even
in the ffice:smarttags" />1940’s, when I first began studying Chinese, there was a Chinese restaurant and a
Chinese laundry even in our small town of Greensboro, North Carolina. You can count
on conversation practice in Chinese from the Chinese laundries of Costa Rica to the
Chinese restaurants of Israel.
The Chinese Communists on the mainland and the Chinese Nationalists in Taiwan
agree that the national language of Chinese is the northern Chinese dialect of Mandarin.
Accept no substitute. Be sure you know what you’re doing if you set out to learn any
Chinese dialect other than Mandarin! It was almost impossible to find a Chinese person
in a Chinese restaurant in America who spoke Mandarin forty years ago. They all spoke a
subdialect of Cantonese, being descendants of the Chinese labourers who came to build
America’s transcontinental railroad in the 1800’s. Today it’s almost impossible to find a
Chinese restaurant in America where the waiters don’t speak Mandarin.
Don’t let yourself be drawn into Cantonese merely because your Chinese friends
happen to be of Cantonese descent or because your new employees are from Cantonese
speaking Hong Kong. Even the Cantonese themselves are now trying to learn Mandarin!
Spoken Chinese is enthrallingly easy. There’s nothing we could call “grammar” in
Chinese. Verbs, nouns, and adjectives never change endings for any reason. I once
caught a showoff student of Chinese trying to intimidate new students by warning them
that Chinese had a different word for “yes” and “no” for each question! That’s largely
true, but not the slightest bit difficult.
The closest thing Chinese has to what we think of as grammar is what we’ll call
“interesting ways.” When you pose a question in Chinese you present both alternatives.
Thus, “Are you going?” becomes “You go not go?” or “Are you going or not?” If you
are going, the word for “yes” to that question is “go.” If you’re not going, you say “Not
go.” Likewise, “Are you going to play?” becomes, literally translated, “You play not
play?” To answer “yes,” you say “Play.” “No” is “Not play.” |