How to Learn Any Language QuicklyEasilyInexpensivelyEnjoyably and On Your Own

帅哥

You’ve already learned some of the “middle language” essential to the mastery offficeffice" />

Chinese. Don’t fear that, because there’s a middle language, you’re being called upon to

learn two languages to acquire just one! It’s a shortcut. The middle language is English –

the way a Chinese person would say it if all he could do were to come up with the

English words literally and nothing more. Thus, “Do you have my pencil?” in middle

language is ‘You have I-belong pencil, no have?” “The man who lives in the white

house” becomes “Live in white house-belong man.”

I find it helpful to look for the middle language no matter what language I’m

studying. In Russian, “The vase is on the table” becomes “Vase on table.” “Do you have

a pen?” becomes “Is by you pen?” “I like the cake” in Spanish is “To me is pleasing the

cake.” “Where have you studied German?” in German is “Where have you German

studied?” “Do you want me to help?” in Yiddish is “Do you want I should help?” – a

construction that should come as no surprise to anyone with immigrant Jewish

grandparents.

The middle language helps you get the hang of things. Once you see the structure as

revealed by the middle language, it’s easier for you to climb inside the targt language.

Learning the “interesting ways” through middle language is especially important in

Chinese.

Chinese has no alphabet. Each ideogram or character is complete unto itself and

each must be learned. There are said to be as many as eighty thousand Chinese

characters. Fear not. You can carry on fairly sophisticated conversations with knowledge

of a few hundred characters and you can carry on like a Ming orator once you compile a

couple of thousand. You can read a Chinese newspaper with fewer than six thousand.

Though lacking an alphabet, Chinese nonetheless has 214 radicals, the elements that

make up the building blocks for almost every Chinese character. The fact that there are

clusters of Chinese characters that surrender to you by the family group makes the going

quicker and easier.

One problem: the pronunciation of each Chinese character is always one syllable

and one syllable only. Therefore, the same sound has to represent a lot of different things.

We have a slight touch of that in English – a pier has nothing to do with a peer – but

imagine how much utterance duplication you’d have if each word in the language were

limited to one syllable only. (Beginners who learn that the Chinese word for “chopsticks”

is kwai dze and “bus” is gung gung chee chuh may object. I simply mean that the term for

“chopsticks” is two separate words [characters] in Chinese and the term for “bus” is

four!) A Chinese textbook for Americans that makes no pretense of being complete lists

seventy-five different meanings for the sound shih alone!

Chinese differentiates among the various possibilities of meaning by the use of

tones. Each Chinese word is assigned a specific tone, like a musical note. Mandarin

Chinese has four tones, Cantonese has nine.

The word wu in Mandarin’s first tone means “room,” in tone two it means “vulgar,”

in tone three it means “five,” and in tone four wu means “disobedient.”

Take the sentence “Mother is scolding the horse.” The spoken Chinese transliterates

as ma ma ma ma. If we want to make it a question and ask “Is mother scolding the

horse?” just add a fifth ma. Without the tones a Chinese person would hear an

unintelligible babble. With the correct tones, however, it would be as clear to him as

“Peering at a pair of pairs on the pier” is to us.

Ideally you should know the tone of each word and the circumstances under which

words shifts tones, but until you attain that lofty peak, you’ll be okay if you do your best

to imitate the tonality of the native Chinese speaker on your cassettes.

Much is made of our ability to read the Chinese soul through the Chinese language.

“Tomorrow” in Chinese is ming tien, which literally means “bright day.” The character

for “good’ literally depicts woman with child, suggesting that a mother and child are

emblematic of everything good. The character meaning “peace” depicts a woman under a

roof. The character for “discord,” however, is three women under one roof!

All that is indeed fun but hardly a cryptanalysis of the Chinese soul. After all, how

much can you tell about the English soul by noting that the word breakfast really means

“breaking” the “fast” you’ve engaged in since your last bite the night before?

Japanese

Like Chinese, Japanese conversation is fairly easy, but the written language is

complicated. In wartime, America turned out interpreters in Japanese and Chinese at a

satisfactory rate by going straight for the spoken language and ignoring the written

language completely. You may be tempted to do the same.

Certainly you can prioritise the ability to speak and understand over the ability to

read and write, but I urge you to undertake serious study of the written language and

continue steadily. If speech is to be your “hare,” let writing at least be your “tortoise.”

Written Japanese is not as difficult as you might fear. Japanese uses several

thousand characters borrowed from the Chinese, but it uses them in a different and more

limited way that makes them easy to learn. The characters are used along with two

syllabaries, sets of simple written symbols, each of which represents not one single letter

but a complete syllable.

Japanese has no tones to worry about, and Japanese grammar involves the learning

of certain speech patterns more than changes in verbs, nouns, and adjectives.

Japanese has a clarity missing from Chinese. Learn a Japanese word from your

book or cassette and your Japanese friend will understand it at your first attempt to use it.

The commercial advantages of learning Japanese are obvious and on the rise. But

even if your Japanese never reaches a level of proficiency enabling you to do business in

Japanese, your Japanese host and associates will appreciate your efforts. They, after all,

had to learn English. You did not have to learn Japanese. Yet.

Arabic

Arabic is elusive, guttural, and rewarding. Arabic script, written from right to left, writes

each letter differently depending upon whether it occurs at the beginning, the middle, or

the end of a word. Learn it, however, and you’ll be welcome from the North Atlantic

coast of Africa clear through the Middle East to the borders of Iran and Pakistan. Arabic

is also the religious language studied by millions of Muslims around the world whose

native languages are not Arabic. The Arab population of the United States is growing

rapidly. You can hear Arabic on the streets and deal in Arabic in the shops of places like

Dearborn, Michigan, where there is a substantial Arab population.

Your investment in Arabic is likely to gain in value when Israel and the Arab states

achieve a settlement allowing for commerce and development to replace a half century of

open warfare.

帅哥

Hebrewfficeffice" />

Hebrew is one of the more difficult languages, and the numerical incentives for tackling

it are not great because Hebrew is spoken only in Israel and in small communities of

Israelis in America and other Western countries. Until recently the teaching of Hebrew

was illegal in the Soviet Union, but classrooms are overflowing now across the country

as Jews prepare to emigrate to Israel or assert their Jewishness inside the Soviet Union.

Hebrew is spoken wherever Jews worship around the world, and there is a surge of

interest in learning Hebrew among young Americans who were born Jewish even though

they may not have had a strong Jewish upbringing.

If you’re not Jewish and choose to learn Hebrew anyhow, you will set loose waves

of appreciation among Jews grateful to outsiders willing to go to that much trouble.

Once you learn the Hebrew alphabet, you’ll be in command of virtually the same

alphabet used by Yiddish, a language based on fifteenth century low German that was

spoken by millions of East European Jews before Hitler’s extermination and is still

understood in a surprising number of places. It’s also the alphabet used by Ladino, the

“Spanish of Cervantes” that became the “Yiddish” of the Jews of Spanish origin who

scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean after the beginning of the Spanish

Inquisition. There are few language thrills that can match that of an American who

learned the Hebrew alphabet in Hebrew school looking at a printed page in a language he

didn’t know existed (many Jews themselves are totally unaware of the existence of

Ladino) and discovering he can read it and understand it with his high school Spanish!

Greek

Modern Greek has a grammar slightly less glorious than that of its ancient civilisation. In

difficulty, Greek falls somewhere between French and Russian. Each verb has two forms

and verbs change according to person, number, and tense. The future tense is almost as

easy as it is in English – the word tha serving the role of our will. Adjectives agree with

their nouns according to gender (three of them) and number.

Greek enjoys a leftover prestige, not only from ancient times but from the not long

vanished tradition of the scholar who prided himself on being at home in Latin and

Ancient Greek. Every five minutes during your study of Greek you’ll be reminded of our

debt to the Greek language. Zestos means “hot” (“zesty”), chronos means “time” or

“year,” “number” is arithmo, when you want your cheque in a restaurant you ask for the

logariazmo (as in “logarithm”), the Greek word for “clear” describing weather is

katharos (as in “catharsis”), “season” is epohi (“epoch”), and so on.

Greek may be the language of one small European country only, but there are

thriving Greek communities throughout the Middle East, Egypt, and other parts of Africa,

and the United States. Enterprising Greeks have carried the language around the world.

Swedish, Danish, Norwegian

The Scandinavian languages are lumped together because of their similarity and the

reliability with which natives of one Scandinavian country can deal with the languages of

the others. That similarity is something for you to know and enjoy, not something for you

to mention to the Scandinavians themselves. They’re horrified when outsiders say, “Gee,

Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are all alike!” They prefer to dwell upon the

differences. There was a popular movement in Norwegian early in the twentieth century

to change the language for no apparent reason other than to make it less like Danish.

If your aim is to communicate in all three countries, learn Norwegian first. It’s the

linguistic centre of Scandinavia. A Dane can deal comfortably with Norwegian, but much

less so with Swedish. A Swede can deal comfortably with Norwegian, but much less so

with Danish. A Norwegian can deal comfortably with both Swedish and Danish.

The Scandinavian languages are relatively easy for Americans to learn. They’re

Germanic languages, related to English, but vastly easier to learn than German. The verbs

don’t change for person and number, and only slightly for tense. The word order follows

English obligingly most of the way. Like Dutch, the Scandinavian languages have two

genders – common and neuter – and the definite article follows the noun and becomes

one word. (For example, “a pen” in Norwegian is en penn, “the pen” is pennen.)

Holland is said to be the non-English speaking country with the highest percentage

of people fluent in English. The three Scandinavian countries are close behind. You may

never need their language no matter where you go or who you deal with in Scandinavia,

but Scandinavians are among the most appreciative people on earth if you know their

language anyhow.

Polish, Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian

These western Slavic languages use the Roman alphabet. The eastern Slavic languages

use the Cyrillic (sometimes mistakenly called the Russian) alphabet. Don’t suggest it

after a few drinks in Warsaw, but Polish might be better off using the Cyrillic alphabet. A

Polish sound resembling the sh combined with the following ch in push charlie is spelled

szcz in Polish. That sound, which requires four letters in the Roman alphabet, needs only

one in the Cyrillic! Romanising Slavic languages leads to orthographical madness. A

newspaper reporter in a small Southern town went into his editor’s office and said,

“There’s been an earthquake in the Polish city of Pszczyna.” He showed the editor the

story off the wire. After a momentary frown the editor looked up and said, “Find out

what the name of the place was before the earthquake!”

Except for Polish, none of these languages has much bounce beyond its borders, but

if your reason for wanting to learn them involves family, love, or business, that won’t

matter. All Slavic languages are grammatically complex. Verbs change for reasons that

leave even those who speak Romance languages weeping over their wine and wondering

why. There are at least six noun cases in every Slavic language, sometimes seven.

The big payoff in learning any of these Slavic languages is the automatic down

payment you’re making on Russian itself. Russian will be a breeze if you already know

another Slavic language, and conversely, the other Slavic languages will come more

easily if you already know Russian.

Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Ukranian,

Byelorussian

Everything stated above about the western Slavic languages applies to these eastern

Slavic languages with one exception – they use the Cyrillic alphabet, with slight

variations from language to language.

The similarities between Serbian and Croatian, the main languages of Yugoslavia,

are so striking the languages are usually lumped together as Serbo-Croatian.

If you know any two Slavic languages, you can make yourself understood in any of

the other Slavic languages. That may be challenged by Slavic scholars, but it works well

in real life between the western border of Poland and the Ural Mountains and from the

arctic tip of Russia to the Black Sea beaches of Bulgaria.

Indonesian

Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Consisting of hundreds of islands

spread out over a South Pacific area the size of the United States, Indonesia is easily the

largest country in the world about which the most other people in the world know the

least. With enough mineral wealth in the ground to make it an economic superpower,

Indonesia is still frequently confused with India or Polynesia.

Indonesian is the easiest major language in the world for a foreigner to learn. It was

called Pasar Malay (“Bazaar Malay”) by the colonial Dutch who looked upon the

Indonesian language as a kind of baby talk for servants and merchants. When Indonesia

won independence in 1948, the ruler, Sukarno, did his best to take that unstructured

language and graft some sophisticated grammar onto it to make it more regimented and

thus difficult. He failed.

帅哥

Indonesian still has nothing that will be regarded as grammar by anybody who’sfficeffice" />

done battle with Latin or Russian. There are suffixes and prefixes aplenty, neat and

regular, that convert verbs into nouns and give verbs additional meanings and the like,

but no inflections according to person, number, tense, aspect, or anything else.

Indonesian uses the Roman alphabet and is delightfully easy to pronounce. If

you’ve ever studied any other language, you’ll marvel at how quickly and clearly you’ll

understand and be understood.

Indonesian is closely related to Malayan, the language of Malaysia and Singapore,

and gives you a head start in Tagalog, the major language of the Philippines.

Hindi and Urdu

The spoken languages of India and Pakistan, Hindi and Urdu, are so close that the true

language lover is tempted to take the plunge even though both languages use different

and, to us, unfamiliar scripts (Devanagari, and a mixture of Persian and Arabic). Though

other languages abound on the Indian subcontinent, Hindi-Urdu united their respective

nations and whoever jumps in (despite the current lack of good learning materials) will

be able to communicate with a population second only to that of China.

Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian

Despite the grammatical complexity and the relatively small pool of native speakers, an

occasional adventurer is drawn almost masochistically to the three Finno-Ugric

languages. If you were the hated kid in ninth grade who stayed after algebra class to beg

the teacher to introduce you to calculus, they might want to try one of these.

Every word in all three languages is accented on the first syllable – every single

word, names and all, giving those languages the sound of a pneumatic jackhammer

breaking up a sidewalk. There are, in Finnish, fifteen noun cases in the singular and

sixteen in the plural. Hungarian and Estonian aren’t far behind. And that’s the easy part!

People whose language you choose to learn often ask polite questions about why

you wanted to learn their language. Let on to a Finn, a Hungarian, or an Estonian that you

know a little bit of their language and you will not merely be questioned. You’ll be cross

examined!

Swahili

Swahili enjoyed a surge of support beginning in the late ffice:smarttags" />1960’s among young American

blacks who wanted to reconnect to their African roots. Anyone who pressed on and

mastered Swahili would today speak a language spoken by fifty million people living in

central and eastern Africa, including the nations of Kenya and Tanzania in which Swahili

is the national language. Swahili is a Bantu language, and once you learn it you can

expect easy going when you decide to learn Kiganda, Kikamba, Kikuyu, Kinyanja,

Kichaga, Kiluba, Kishona, Kizulu, Kikongo, and Kiduala, all of which are spoken over

smaller areas in Africa south of the Sahara.

Swahili uses the Roman alphabet. The Say It In Swahili phrase book advises us not

to be discouraged by words like kitakachonisahilishia, because Swahili grammar is

mercifully regular and logical!

English

The mere fact that you’re reading these words right now calls for self congratulations. It

means you’re fluent in the winner, the international language, the number one language

of all time!

When a Soviet plane approaches the airport in China, the pilot and the control tower

don’t speak Russian to each other. They don’t speak Chinese. They speak English. If an

Italian plane is about to land in another part of Italy, the Italian pilot and the Italian traffic

control person also speak English.

When the Israeli general and the Egyptian general met in Sinai in October 1973 to

talk truce in the Yom Kippur War, they didn’t speak Hebrew. They didn’t speak Arabic.

They spoke English.

When Norwegian whaling ships put into the port of Capetown, South Africa, to hire

Zulu seamen, the interviewing is not done in Norwegian or Zulu. It’s done in English.

The parliaments of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway send delegates to a body called

the Nordic Council. Their official meetings are conducted – at great expense in

interpreters and simultaneous interpretation equipment – in Swedish, Danish and

Norwegian. When the meetings end, however, and the delegates from the three

neighbouring countries adjourn to the bar and the dining room, they all start speaking

English with each other!

Haven’t you noticed something odd about protestors you have seen on TV

demonstrating in Lithuania, Estonia, Korea, Iraq, Mexico, and other countries where

neither the protestors, the ones they’re protesting against, nor the local media speak

native English? In addition to the signs and banners in their own languages, they always

carry signs and banners in English. And for good reason. They want their message to

reverberate around the world.

On a map of Africa, Nigeria seems a tiny patch where the bulge of that gigantic

continent meets the body. Inside that patch, however, live between 100 and 120 million

people speaking 250 different languages, with names like Yoruba, Ibo, Hausa, Nupe, and

Oyo. From their first day of school, the children of Nigeria are taught English. Without

English, not only could Nigeria not talk to the world, Nigerians couldn’t even talk to each

other.

When a Nigerian educator, Aliu Babtunde Fafunwa, proposed in early 1991 that

Nigerian children begin their education in their 250 respective mother tongues, the

government newspaper itself wrote in an editorial, “The least luxury we can afford in the

last decade of the twentieth century is an idealistic experiment in linguistic nationalism

which could cut our children off from the main current of human development.” That’s

hardly a hate filled denunciation of former colonial masters.

Every attempt to launch an artificial international language has so far failed.

Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Kosmos, Monoglottica, Universalsprache, Neo-Latine,

Vertparl, Mundolingue, Dil, Volapuk, even an international language based on the notes

of the musical scale, all started out weak and gradually tapered off. My guess is they

always will. You can no more “vote” a language into being the international language

than you can vote warmth into a blizzard.

Languages attain prominence something the way individuals and countries do,

through all kinds of force, including war. There’s an added element in prominence,

however. Brute force is not enough. The winning language must have a degree of

acceptability to the losers.

Russian emerged from World War II as a mighty language, but it failed to bluster

beyond the bounds of the Communist empire. Russian even failed to inspire people to

learn it inside their empire. Students in Hungary, Romania, and East Germany knew no

more Russian after eight years of schooling than Americans know French after similar

exposure.

English, on the other hand, was welcomed. Africans and Asians may not have

rejoiced at being forcibly incorporated into the British Empire, but they recognised that

the English language, if learned by all, was a unifying tool that enabled different tribes

who lived five miles apart to communicate for the first time, in a language brought down

upon them from thousands of miles away.

A wolf will lift his neck to let a larger wolf know that he accepts the other’s

dominant role as leader. The entire world has lifted its neck to acknowledge English as

the language of choice in the modern world. It wasn’t all military and commercial power,

either. American movies, songs, comic strips, TV series, even T-shirts all helped make

English the international language of the earth by acclaim.

But only the shortsighted will consider the dominance of English reason to return

foreign language materials to the bookstore and forget the whole thing. It’s precisely

because the peoples of the world honour our language that we get so much more

appreciation when we go out of our way to honour theirs.