How to Learn Any Language QuicklyEasilyInexpensivelyEnjoyably and On Your Own

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By Wednesday I was attending sessions of a spirited Tito propaganda fiesta calledfficeffice" />

the Zagreb Peace Conference and enjoying my first immersion in a language the mere

mention of which impresses people even more than Chinese: Serbo-Croatian!

To my delight, I understood entire phrases from it from my university Russian. I

became aware of “families” of foreign languages, something that doesn’t occur

automatically to Americans because English doesn’t resemble its cousins very closely.

It’s something of a black sheep in the Germanic language family. They say the closest

language to English is Dutch. Dutch is about as close to English as Betelgeuse is to

Baltimore!

I’d noticed the summer before that Norwegian is usefully close to Swedish and

Danish. Serbo-Croatian sounded to me like a jazzier, more “fun” kind of Russian. They

use the Roman alphabet in western Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Slovenia, and in Serbia to

the east they use the Cyrillic alphabet, with even more interesting letters in it than

Russian uses.

Some of the mystique I’d always imputed to multilingual people began to fade. If

you meet somebody who speaks, say, ten languages, your instinct is to be impressed to

the tune of ten languages worth. If, however, you later learn that six of those languages

are Russian, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Polish and Ukrianian – I’m not suggesting

that you dismiss him as illiterate, but you ought to be aware that he got six of those

languages for the price of about two and three fourths! They’re all members of the Slavic

family.

The Yugoslav university students, my hosts, sent me back home aboard a Yugoslav

ship, leaving me sixteen days with nothing to do but practice Serbo-Croatian with the

other passengers. When I got back to school after a solid eight weeks’ absence, I wasn’t

even behind in my German. German is widely spoken in central Europe and I’d spoken it

widely enough during the adventure to float almost even with the class.

Exotics – Hard and Easy

Expertise is a narcotic. As knowledge grows, it throws off pleasure to its possessor, much

like an interest bearing account throws off money. A pathologist who can instantly spot

the difference between normal and abnormal X-rays grows incapable of believing that

there are those of us who can’t. I find it hard to believe there are Americans who can’t

even tell the difference between printed pages of Spanish and French or of Polish,

Danish, or anything else written in the Roman alphabet. Too bad. If you can’t distinguish

the easier languages from the harder ones, you miss the higher joys of confronting your

first samples of written Finnish.

Finland has been called the only beautiful country in the world where the language

is the major tourist attraction. It’s utterly unfamiliar to you no matter where you come

from, unless you happen to come from Estonia, in which case Finnish is only half

unfamiliar to you. There’s always a general knowledge heavyweight around who says,

“Wait a minute. Finnish is related to Hungarian too!”

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Oh, yeah! True, Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are indeed all members of thefficeffice" />

Finno-Ugric language family, but try to find more than six words even remotely similar

in each. As you learn more and more about foreign languages, you’re able to laugh at

more and more jokes about languages. No Las Vegas comic will even knock socks off, or

even loosen them, by standing up and saying, “You know, Finnish and Hungarian are

cousin languages, but Finnish took all the vowels!” Look at the two languages side by

side, however, and you’ll grudgingly accord at least minor wit status to whoever thought

that one up.

You may have experienced the difficulties of tackling Latin and Russian with their

half dozen or so noun cases. Finnish has fifteen noun cases in the singular and sixteen in

the plural! Every word in the entire language is accented on the first syllable, which gives

Finnish something of the sounds of a pneumatic jackhammer breaking up a sidewalk.

I covered the Olympic Games in Helsinki but wisely decided not to try to learn

Finnish. It was the wisdom of the young boxer who’s eager to get in there with the champ

and trade punches, but who nonetheless summons up the cool to decline and wait until

he’s more prepared. I found a much softer opponent on the ship back to the United States.

A summer tradition that vanished after the ffice:smarttags" />1950’s with far too little poetic

lamentation was the “student ship to Europe.” They were almost always Dutch ships

offering unbelievably low fares, hearty food, cramped but clean accommodations, cheap

beer, and always a bearded guitar player who drew the crowd back to the ship’s fantail

after dinner and led the kids of ten or twelve nations in throaty renditions of “I’ve Been

Working on the Railroad.” The singing, the flirting, the joy of heading over or heading

home, and especially the learning of all the other countries’ “Railroads” in all the other

languages made the summer student ship a delight unimaginable to today’s jet lagged

young Dutch airmen about my age. They were all headed for the United States to take

their jet fighter training at various American air bases, and we became old friends at

once. There seemed to be dozens (I later realised hundreds) of Indonesian servants on

board. After four hundred years of Dutch rule, Indonesia had won its independence from

Holland only four years earlier. The thousands of Indonesians who chose to remain loyal

to Holland had to go to Holland, and that meant that virtually the entire Dutch service

class was Indonesian.

I was sitting on the deck talking to one of the Dutch pilots, Hans van Haastert. He

called one of the Indonesians over and said something to him in fluent Indonesian. My

romance with Dutch would begin (in a very unusual way) a few years later, but my

romance with Indonesian was born in the lightning and thunder of Hans ordering a beer

from that deck chair.

If I had never been drawn to foreign languages earlier, that moment alone would

have done it. To me at that time, it was the white suited bwana speaking something pure

“jungle” to one of his water carriers in any one of a hundred and eighteen safari movies

I’d seen. It was Humphrey Bogart melting a glamourous woman’s kneecaps with a burst

of bush talk she had no idea he even knew.

“Where did you learn that?” I asked. It turned out that Hans, like many of his

Dutch confreres, had been born in Java of mixed parents. His Indonesian was just as good

as his Dutch. “Will you teach me some?” I asked.

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For the next eight days, until we were interrupted by the New York City skyline,fficeffice" />

Hans patiently taught me the Indonesian language. When we parted, I was able to

converse with the Indonesian crewmen, just as Hans had that first day on deck. Lest this

come across as a boast, let me hasten to point out that Indonesian is the easiest language

in the world – no hedging, no “almost”, no “among the easiest”. In my experience,

Indonesian is the easiest. The grammar is minimal, regular, and simple. Once I began to

learn it, Indonesian didn’t seem “jungle” anymore. The Indonesians obligingly use the

Roman alphabet, and they get along with fewer letters of it than we do. And their tongue

has an instant charm. The Indonesian word for “sun”, mata hari (the famous female spy

was known as the “sun” of Asia) literally means “eye of the day”. When they make a

singular noun plural in Indonesia, they merely say it twice. “Man,” for example, is orang.

“Men” is orang orang. And when they write it, they just write one orang and put a 2 after

it, like an exponent in algebra (Orang 2). Orang hutan, the ape name pronounced by

many Americans as if it were “orang-u-tang,” is an Indonesian term meaning “man of the

forest.”

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.

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No Iron Curtains for Languagefficeffice" />

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.

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As he railed on, I noticed a Norwegian flag tacked to the wall behind him. “Snakkerfficeffice" />

De norsk?” I asked (“Do you speak Norwegian?”).

He stopped, said nothing for a few seconds. Then, like a Hollywood comic of the

ffice:smarttags" />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!”

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How I Married Hungarianfficeffice" />

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 “N􀃜k” 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.

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Following that hunch I entered the door marked “Fërfiak.” The joy that came nextfficeffice" />

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

ffice:smarttags" />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 bet􀃜r􀃜vel

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 thirtynine 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.

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It was tempting to tackle Greek; so many Greeks I could have practiced with werefficeffice" />

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 ffice:smarttags" />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.

P A R T T W O

The System

Do as I Now Say,

Not as I Then Did

A wise man once said, “I wish I had all the time I’ve ever wasted, so I could waste it all

over again.” Others may look at me and see someone who can, indeed, carry on a

creditable conversation in about eighteen languages. I’m the only one who knows how

much of my language learning time has been wasted, how little I’ve got to show for all

those years of study, considering the huge hunks of time I’ve put into it. In fact, I feel

like one of those hardened convicts who’s occasionally let out of jail under armed guard

to lecture the sophomore class on the importance of going straight.

If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it at all the way I did then. I’d do it the

way I’m doing it now, the way I will detail in this book. It’s the way I’ve finally grown

into and the way I hope you will proceed in order to get the absolute most out of your

language learning dollar and your language learning minute.

Here are some of the myths I held dear in the years when I thought I knew how to

study languages, myths I now want to trample before you get the slightest bit seduced by

them.

I’ll put on my language cassettes while I work around the house and learn the

language as easily as I learn the lyrics to popular songs.

Great image. It just doesn’t work. You can’t just push a button and let the language

you want to learn roll over you. Expecting to learn a language by laid back listening is

like expecting to build a magnificent body by going to the gym, sitting in the steam room,

chugging a glass of carrot juice, and then bragging about your “workout!”

You’re going to have to study the material on that cassette, capture every word,

learn it, review it, master it, and then check challenge yourself after every piece of

English. (We’ll consider a “piece” to be whatever the speaker on the cassette says in

English before you hear the target language. It may be a word, a phrase, a whole

sentence.)

Abandon all images of language learning that resemble lying on a tropical beach

and letting the warm surf splash over you. Pretend, instead, as you listen to your cassette,

that you’re a contestant on a TV game show. After each piece of English, ask yourself,

“For one thousand dollars now, quick, how do I say that in the language I’m trying to

learn?”

Since I’m not in school anymore, time isn’t important. I’ll take my time, skip a day,

skip two days; the language will still be there when I get back to it.

Spoken like a true linguaphony. A language has a lot in common with a military

foe. Don’t let it rest. Don’t let it regroup and devise fresh ways to foil your attack. Keep

up the rhythm of your offensive. Keep your momentum going. (This is only an

illustration of tactics, of course; no language is an enemy.) A programme that features

disciplined effort will convince you that you’re serious and generate fresh inspiration and

energy.

The chapter I’m studying now is hard and probably not too important. I’ll skip it

and get back to it later on.

That’s a giant killer. The declension of the numbers in Russian. The subjunctive in

the Romance languages. The double infinitive in German. The enclitics in Serbo-

Croatian. The noun cases in Finnish. Almost every language has formidable mountains to

climb. Don’t walk around them. Climb them! Take one step at a time. Just be careful

never to surrender to the temptation to beg off the hard stuff and learn only those parts of

the language you find congenial.

帅哥

It will seem masochistic, but I want you to learn the names of the letters of thefficeffice" />

alphabet in your target language and the grammatical terms too, so that when you ask a

native how a certain word is spelled, you can bandy the letters back and forth in the

language. When you ask a native for the past tense of this verb or the negative plural of

that noun, do your asking in the target language.

I’m never going to pose as a native speaker of their language, and I’d never be able

to pull it off even if I tried, so why bother to develop the right accent?

Nobody is arrested for indecent exposure just because he dresses poorly. On the

other hand, a person unconcerned about dress will never impress us with his appearance.

It’s the same with the proper accent. As long as you’re going to go to the trouble of

learning a language, why not try – at very little extra cost – to mimic the genuine accent.

A poor accent will still get you what you want. A good accent will get you much

more.

If you can put on a foreign accent to tell ethnic jokes, you can put one on when you

speak another language. If you think you can’t, try! A lot of Americans believe they’re

unable to capture a foreign accent when subconsciously they’re merely reluctant to try.

We’re all taught that it’s rude to make fun of foreigners. That childhood etiquette is

hereby countermanded. “Make fun” of the foreigner’s accent as effectively as you can as

you learn his language.

Your “infancy” in a foreign language is spent learning to grope with incomplete

phrases made up of incorrect words to mash your meaning across. “Babyhood” comes

when some of the phrases are complete and more of the words are correct.

“Childhood” arrives when you can deal rather fluently with concepts involving

bread, bed, buttons, and buses, even though you can’t yet discuss glassblowing in

Renaissance Estonia.

“Adulthood” is being able to discuss absolutely anything, but with a pronounced

American accent. With “maturity” you acquire a creditable accent in the language. You’ll

know you’ve achieved maturity when you become annoyed at other Americans you hear

plodding through the language with no effort to “foreignise” their accent to approximate

the correct one.

Be content with partial victories. I rejoiced the moment I learned I could speak

Swedish well enough to convince a Norwegian I was a Finn. I celebrated when I realised

I could speak Serbo-Croatian well enough to convince an Italian I was a Czech!

There will come a moment when I will cross a border and earn the right to say,

“Yes, I speak your language”!

There’s no such border. Learning a language is a process of encroachment into the

unknown. When can you say you “speak a language”? The famous ophthalmologist Dr.

Peter Halberg of New York refuses to consider that he speaks a language unless and until

he can conduct a medical lecture in the language and then take hostile questioning from

his peers. By his standards, he only speaks five languages!

My standards are less exacting. I’ll confess to “speaking a language” if, after

engaging in deep conversation with a charming woman from a country whose language

I’m studying, I have difficulty the next morning recalling which language it was we were

speaking.

The Language Club, about which I will say more later, has a valuable guideline.

When anybody asks a Language Clubber, “How many languages do you speak?” he

gives the only safe answer, “One. I speak my native language.” He lets a breath go by to

let that “one” sink in, after which he may then add, “However, I am a student of…” and

mentions as many languages as he likes.

To the question, “Do you speak such and such a language?” the all class response is

a James Bond smile and three words: “Yes, a little.” It’s much better to let people

gradually realise that your “little” is really quite a bit than to have them realise that your

“Yes, I speak such and such” is a fraud.

Say you’ve been studying Indonesian, far from a commonplace language, and to

your amazement (and delight) one of the other guests for dinner is from Indonesia.

Repress the instinct to yelp at your good fortune. Act at first as though you know nothing

of Indonesian. Don’t even say “Pleased to meet you” in Indonesian. There will be time.

At the right point, much later in the proceedings, you’ll have the opening to remark,

“That’s what the merchants of Djakarta would call…” and then let go your best burst of

wit – in Indonesian.

For you to actually speak Indonesian and allow so much time to elapse before

claiming your applause is downright noble. Beware flying socks when you lean over to

your new Indonesian friend and, lowering your voice so as not to appear to be calling

attention to yourself, finally unleash your evening’s first volley of Indonesian.

帅哥

As I grappled with the complexities of grammar in Russian, Finnish, Hungarian,fficeffice" />

and, to a lesser extent, German, I had visions of those people way back when they were

wandering tribes. I imagined the tribal elders squatting around campfires consulting with

soothsayers who warned them, “In the mid twentieth century a child will be born to the

Farber family in a place they’ll call America. He will try to learn our language. At

present it’s too simple. Get back to work and come up with some more grammar. Let our

noun endings mire him up to his hips. Let the felsh of his face feel the thorns of our

verbs. Flay his back with exceptions to our rules and let his hair get caught in our

inflecting negatives and perfective aspects.

“Hurry!” the soothsayer concludes. “We haven’t got a century to waste. Get in there

right now and mess our language up so that poor guy will never get it!”

Now let the adult mind enter and make peace. Obviously, no language tries to be

hard just to keep you out. Whatever rules you find perplexing in your target language,

that language came by them naturally and organically. Grammar does change, but so

slowly you’ll never have to worry about it. Approach the grammar with a smile and your

hand extended. That which you understand, take and keep. That which is confusing,

return to again and again. That which seems impossible, return to again and again and

again, until it becomes merely confusing. It will ultimately become clear. Meanwhile,

however, you will be speeding ahead in your command of the language as you keep

returning to those stubborn fortresses of grammatical resistance.

I can honestly say I came to like the study of grammar. Once you finally approach

grammar with the right attitude, it becomes both a map that shows you the pathways

through a language and a rocket that takes you there faster.

A paleontologist can find lifetime fascination with a fossil a child might ignore,

kick, or toss into the lake just to hear the splash. Likewise, the grammar of various

languages throws off some laughs and insights nonlinguists never get a chance to marvel

at.

In German, for example, a woman doesn’t achieve feminine gender until she gets

married. The word for “girl” (Mädchen) and “miss” (Fräulein) are both neuter gender. In

Russian, the past tense of verbs acts like an adjective; it doesn’t shift forms according to

person and number as verbs normally do, but shift according to gender and number as

adjectives do. In Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish the definite article (“the”) follows the

noun and is attached to it. Therefore, “a field” in Norwegian is en mark. “The field,”,

however, is marken. Romanian and Albanian, completely unrelated to the Scandinavian

languages, do the same thing.