How to Learn Any Language QuicklyEasilyInexpensivelyEnjoyably and On Your Own

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How to Learn Any Languagefficeffice" />

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

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Introductionfficeffice" />

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 so

what? 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 like

ornaments 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.

帅哥

An actor knows the difference between rehearsal and opening night; the footballfficeffice" />

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

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My Storyfficeffice" />

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’t

understand 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.

帅哥

Miss Leslie, noting that I, her highly motivated superstar, was floundering withfficeffice" />

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.

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Everybody knew the Chinese sailors were billeted in the old Hotel Alcazar onfficeffice" />

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.

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Arrividerci, Latinfficeffice" />

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.

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Like a tough agent softening sufficiently to let a persistent unknown comic do partfficeffice" />

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 forth

a 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.

Rumours of Russian

When I arrived at the University of North Carolina, I got my first real opportunity to

speak the European languages I was learning with native speakers. Students at the

university came from many different countries. The Cosmopolitan Club, a group of

foreign students and Americans who wanted to meet one another, gathered every Sunday

afternoon in the activities building. I felt like a bee flitting from blossom to blossom until

it is too heavy with pollen to fly or even buzz.

A rumour rippled across the campus in my senior year that seemed too good to be

true. The university, it was whispered, was planning to start a class in Russian.

Sure enough, the rumour was soon confirmed. It was a historic event. Not only was

the course the first in Russian ever offered by the University of North Carolina (or

possibly by any university in the South), it also represented the first time the university

had offered what one student called a “funny looking” language of any kind (he meant

languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet)!

帅哥

The enrollment requirements were stiff. First you had to have completed at leastfficeffice" />

two years in a “normal” language (Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese) with good grades.

I qualified and was accepted.

For me the first day of Russian was a lot like the first day of school. I’d toyed with

one funny looking language already (Chinese), but I knew Russian was a different kind

of funny looking. Would I conquer it, as I had Spanish and Norwegian, or would Russian

swallow me whole, as Latin had?

There were forty-five of us in that Russian class thinking varying versions of the

same thing when the teacher, a rangy Alabaman named “Tiger” Titus, entered the room.

After a formal “Good morning” he went straight to the front of the room and wrote the

Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet on the blackboard.

You could feel the group’s spirit sink notch by notch as each of Russian’s “funny

looking” letters appeared. Students were allowed under university rules to abandon a

course and get themselves into another as long as they did it within three days after the

beginning of the term. We had defections from Russian class in mid-alphabet. By the

time Tiger Titus turned around to face us, he had fewer students than had entered the

room.

“My soul!” exclaimed one of the deserters when I caught up with him at the

cafeteria later that day. “I’ve never seen anything like that Russian alphabet before in my

life. Why, they’ve got v’s that look like b’s, n’s that look like h’s, u’s that look like y’s,

r’s that look like p’s, and p’s that look like sawed off goal posts. They got a backwards n

that’s really an e and an x that sounds like you’re gagging on a bone. They got a vowel

that looks like the number sixty-one, a consonant that looks like a butterfly with its wings

all the way out, and damned if they don’t even have a B-flat!”

The next day there were no longer forty-five members of the university’s first

Russian class. There were five.

I was one of the intrepid who hung in.

A Lucky Bounce to the Balkans

Writer/columnist Robert Ruark, a talented North Carolinian and drinking buddy of Ava

Gardner, once wrote boastfully about a college weekend that began someplace like

Philadelphia and got out of hand and wound up in Montreal. I topped him. I went to a

college football game right outside Washington, D.C., one weekend and wound up in

Yugoslavia for six weeks!

The previous summer I’d been named a delegate from the university to the national

convention of the National Student Association. I came back as chairman for the

Virginia-Carolinas region of NSA. In October I was in College Park, Maryland, for the

Carolina-Maryland game. At half time, at the hot dog stand, who should be reaching for

the same mustard squirter as I but National NSA president, Bill Dentzer.

“Who can believe this?” he said. “We’ve been looking for you for three days!”

I explained it was our big senior out of town football weekend and College Park,

Maryland was a long way from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and there was a lot going on

and I was sorry he couldn’t reach me. “Why were you looking for me?” I asked.

“We wanted you to go represent us in Yugoslavia,” he said. I told him I’d love to.

“It’s too late now,” he said. “The plane leaves Monday from New York, and it’s

already Saturday afternoon and the State Department’s closed, so there’s no way to get

you a passport…”

“Bill,” I interrupted, “I have a passport. I can easily get back to Chapel Hill and

pick it up in time to fly from New York on Monday.”

帅哥

The enrollment requirements were stiff. First you had to have completed at leastfficeffice" />

two years in a “normal” language (Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese) with good grades.

I qualified and was accepted.

For me the first day of Russian was a lot like the first day of school. I’d toyed with

one funny looking language already (Chinese), but I knew Russian was a different kind

of funny looking. Would I conquer it, as I had Spanish and Norwegian, or would Russian

swallow me whole, as Latin had?

There were forty-five of us in that Russian class thinking varying versions of the

same thing when the teacher, a rangy Alabaman named “Tiger” Titus, entered the room.

After a formal “Good morning” he went straight to the front of the room and wrote the

Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet on the blackboard.

You could feel the group’s spirit sink notch by notch as each of Russian’s “funny

looking” letters appeared. Students were allowed under university rules to abandon a

course and get themselves into another as long as they did it within three days after the

beginning of the term. We had defections from Russian class in mid-alphabet. By the

time Tiger Titus turned around to face us, he had fewer students than had entered the

room.

“My soul!” exclaimed one of the deserters when I caught up with him at the

cafeteria later that day. “I’ve never seen anything like that Russian alphabet before in my

life. Why, they’ve got v’s that look like b’s, n’s that look like h’s, u’s that look like y’s,

r’s that look like p’s, and p’s that look like sawed off goal posts. They got a backwards n

that’s really an e and an x that sounds like you’re gagging on a bone. They got a vowel

that looks like the number sixty-one, a consonant that looks like a butterfly with its wings

all the way out, and damned if they don’t even have a B-flat!”

The next day there were no longer forty-five members of the university’s first

Russian class. There were five.

I was one of the intrepid who hung in.

A Lucky Bounce to the Balkans

Writer/columnist Robert Ruark, a talented North Carolinian and drinking buddy of Ava

Gardner, once wrote boastfully about a college weekend that began someplace like

Philadelphia and got out of hand and wound up in Montreal. I topped him. I went to a

college football game right outside Washington, D.C., one weekend and wound up in

Yugoslavia for six weeks!

The previous summer I’d been named a delegate from the university to the national

convention of the National Student Association. I came back as chairman for the

Virginia-Carolinas region of NSA. In October I was in College Park, Maryland, for the

Carolina-Maryland game. At half time, at the hot dog stand, who should be reaching for

the same mustard squirter as I but National NSA president, Bill Dentzer.

“Who can believe this?” he said. “We’ve been looking for you for three days!”

I explained it was our big senior out of town football weekend and College Park,

Maryland was a long way from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and there was a lot going on

and I was sorry he couldn’t reach me. “Why were you looking for me?” I asked.

“We wanted you to go represent us in Yugoslavia,” he said. I told him I’d love to.

“It’s too late now,” he said. “The plane leaves Monday from New York, and it’s

already Saturday afternoon and the State Department’s closed, so there’s no way to get

you a passport…”

“Bill,” I interrupted, “I have a passport. I can easily get back to Chapel Hill and

pick it up in time to fly from New York on Monday.”