How to Learn Any Language 1 How to Learn Any Language 1 Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and On Your Own by Barry Farber Founder of the Language Club/Nationally Syndicated Talk Show Host To Bibi and Celia, for the pleasure of helping teach them their first language, followed by the pleasure of having them then teach me their second! Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: My Story A Life of Language Learning Part II: The System Do As I Now Say, Not As I Then Did Psych Up French or Tagalog: Choosing a Language Gathering Your Tools The Multiple Track Attack Hidden Moments Harry Lorayne’s Magic Memory Aid The Plunge Motivations Language Power to the People Back to Basics Last Words Before the Wedding Part III: Appendices The Language Club The Principal Languages of the World Farber’s Language Reviews Acknowledgements I want to thank my editor, Bruce Shostak, without whose skill and patience much of this book would have been intelligible only to others who’ve had a blinding passion for foreign languages since 1944. I further thank my publisher, Steven Schragis, for venturing into publishing territory heretofore officially listed as “uninteresting”. Dr. Henry Urbanski, Founder and Head of the New Paltz Language Immersion Institute, was good enough to review key portions of the manuscript and offer toweringly helpful amendments. Dr. Urbanski’s associate, Dr. Hans Weber, was supremely helpful in safeguarding against error. I further wish to thank all my fellow language lovers from around the world who interrupted their conversations at practice parties of the Language Club to serve as willing guinea pigs for my questions and experimentations in their native languages. How to Learn Any Language Introduction This may be the most frequently told joke in the world – it’s repeated every day in almost every language: “What do you call a person who speaks two languages?” “Bilingual.” “What do you call a person who speaks three languages?” “Trilingual.” “What do you call a person who speaks four languages?” “Quadrilingual.” “What do you call a person who speaks only one language?” “An American!” With your help this book can wipe that smile off the world’s face. The reason Americans have been such notoriously poor language learners up to now is twofold: 1. We’ve never really had to learn other peoples’ languages before, and 2. Almost all foreign language instruction available to the average American has been until now (one hates to be cruel) worthless. “I took two years of high school French and four more years in college and I couldn’t even order orange juice in Marseilles” is more than a self effacing exaggeration. It’s a fact, a shameful, culturally impoverishing, economically dangerous, self defeating fact! Modern commerce and communications have erased reason 1. You and the method laid out in this book, working together, will erase reason 2. It started for me when I learned that the Norwegian word for “squirrel” was acorn. It may have been spelled ekorn, but it was pronounced acorn. Then I learned that “Mickey Mouse” in Swedish is Mussie Pig. Again, the Swedish spelling varied, but sowhat? As delights like those continued to come my way, I realised I was being locked tighter and tighter into the happy pursuit of language love and language learning. My favourite music is the babble of strange tongues in the marketplace. No painting, no art, no photograph in the world can excite me as much as a printed page of text in a foreign language I can’t read – yet! I embraced foreign language study as a hobby as a teenager in 1944. When I was inducted into the army in 1952, I was tested and qualified for work in fourteen different languages. Since then I’ve expanded my knowledge of those languages and taken up others. Whether fluently or fragmentally, I can now express myself in twenty-five languages. That may sound like a boast, but it’s really a confession. Having spent so many years with no other hobby, I should today be speaking every one of those languages much better than I do. If you’re a beginner, you may be impressed to hear me order a meal in Chinese or discuss the Tito-Stalin split in Serbo-Croatian, but only I know how much time and effort I wasted over those years thinking I was doing the right thing to increase my command of those and other languages. This book, then, does not represent the tried and true formula I’ve been using since 1944. It presents the tried and true formula I’d use if I could go back to 1944 and start all over again! Common sense tells us we can’t have dessert before we finish the meal; we can’t have a slim figure until we diet; we can’t have strong muscles until we exercise; we won’t have a fortune until we make it. So far common sense is right. Common sense also tells us, however, that we can’t enjoy communicating in a foreign language until we learn it. This means years of brain benumbing conjugations, declensions, idioms, exceptions, subjunctives, and irregular verbs. And here common sense is wrong, completely wrong. When it comes to learning foreign languages, we can start with the dessert and then use its sweetness to inspire us to back up and devour the main course. What six year old child ever heard of a conjugation? Wouldn’t you love to be able to converse in a foreign language as well as all the children of that tongue who’ve not yet heard of grammar? No, we’re not going to rise up as one throaty revolutionary mob, depose grammar, drag it out of the palace by the heels, and burn it in the main square. We’re just going to put grammar in its place. Up to now, grammar has been used by our language educators to anesthetise us against progress. If it’s grammar versus fun, we’re going to minimise grammar and maximise fun. We’re going to find more pleasant ways to absorb grammar. Unfortunately, there are a lot more “self improvement” books than there is self improvement. Too many books whose titles are heavy with promise turn out to be all hat and no cattle – not enough take home after you deduct the generalities and exhortations to “focus” and “visualise” your goals. Extracting usable advice from high promising books can be like trying to nail custard pies to the side of a barn. Mindful of that danger, I will not leave you with nothing but a pep talk. Follow the steps herein, and you will learn the language of your choice quickly, easily, inexpensively, enjoyably and on your own. And you’ll have fun en route, though not nearly as much fun as you’ll have once you get that language in working order and take it out to the firing range of the real world! The System The language learning system detailed in this book is the result of my own continuous, laborious trial and error beginning in 1944. That which worked was kept, that which failed was dropped, that which was kept was improved. Technology undreamed of when I started studying languages, such as the audiocasette and the tape player small enough to carry while walking or jogging, was instantly and eagerly incorporated. The system combines: •THE MULTIPLE TRACK ATTACK: Go to the language department of any bookstore and you’ll see language books, grammars, hardcover and paperback workbooks, readers, dictionaries, flash cards, and handsomely bound courses on cassette. Each one of those products sits there on the shelf and says, “Hey, Bud. You want to learn this language? Here I am. Buy me!” I say, buy them all, or at least one of each! You may feel like you’re taking four or five different courses in the same language simultaneously. That’s good. A marvellous synergistic energy sets you soaring when all those tools are set together in symphony. •HIDDEN MOMENTS: Dean Martin once chided a chorus girl, who was apathetically sipping her cocktail, by saying, “I spill more than you drink!” All of us “spill” enough minutes every day to learn a whole new language a year! Just as the Dutch steal land from the sea, you will learn to steal language learning time, even from a life that seems completely filled or overflowing. What do you do, for example, while you’re waiting for an elevator, standing in line at the bank, waiting for the person you’re calling to answer the phone, holding the line, getting gas, waiting to be ushered from the waiting room into somebody’s office, waiting for your date to arrive, waiting for anything at any time? You will learn to mobilise these precious scraps of time you’ve never even been aware you’ve been wasting. Some of your most valuable study time will come in mini lessons of fifteen, ten, and even five seconds throughout your normal (though now usually fruitful) day. •HARRY LORAYNE’S MAGIC MEMORY AID: An ingenious memory system developed by memory master Harry Lorayne will help you glue a word to your recollection the instant you encounter it. What would you do right now if I gave you a hundred English words along with their foreign equivalents and told you to learn them? Chances are you would look at the first English word, then look at the foreign word, repeat it several times, then close your eyes and keep on repeating it, then cover up the foreign word, look only at the English and see if you could remember how to say it in the language you’re learning, then go on to the next word, then the next, and the next, and then go back to the first to see if you remembered it, and so on through the list. Harry Lorayne’s simple memory trick based on sound and association will make that rote attempt laughable. The words will take their place in your memory likeornaments securely hung on a Christmas tree, one right after the other all the way up to many times those hundred words. •THE PLUNGE: You will escape the textbook incubator early and leap straightaway, with almost no knowledge of the language, into that language’s “real world”. A textbook in your target language, no matter how advanced, is not the real world. On the other hand, an advertisement in a foreign language magazine, no matter how elementary and easy to read, is the real world. Everything about you, conscious and subconscious, prefers real world to student world contact with the language. An actor knows the difference between rehearsal and opening night; the football player, between practice scrimmages and the kickoff in a crowded stadium. And you will know the difference between your lessons in the target language and the real world newspapers, magazines, novels, movies, radio, TV, and anything else you can find to throw yourself into at a stage your high school French teacher would have considered horrifyingly early! There you have it: The Multiple Track Attack, Hidden Moments, Harry Lorayne’s Magic Memory Aid, The Plunge. Visualise the target language as a huge piece of thin, dry paper. This system will strike a match underneath the middle of that paper, and your knowledge, like the flame, will eat its way unevenly but unerringly outward to the very ends. Just as food manufacturers like to label their products “natural and organic” whenever they can get away with it, many language courses like to promise that you will learn “the way a child learns.” Why bother? Why should you learn another language the way a child learned his first one? Why not learn as what you are – an adult with at least one language in hand, eager to use that advantage to learn the next language in less time than it took to learn the first? 英语 北京英语 北京英语培训 北京英语培训学校 北京英语培训机构 北京英语培训中心
How to Learn Any Language 2 How to Learn Any Language 2 P A R T O N E My Story A Life of Language Learning A brief “language autobiography” may help readers whose language learning and language loving careers began only a few moments ago with the opening of this book. My favourite word – in any language – is the English word foreign. I remember how it came to be my favourite word. At the age of four I attended a summer day camp. Royalty develops even among children that young. There were already a camp “king” and a camp “queen”, Arthur and Janet. I was sitting right beside Arthur on the bus one morning, and I remember feeling honoured. Arthur reached into his little bag, pulled out an envelope, and began to show Janet the most fascinating pieces of coloured paper I’d ever seen. “Look at these stamps, Janet,” he said. “They’re foreign!” That word reverberated through my bone marrow. Foreign, I figured, must mean beautiful, magnetic, impressive – something only the finest people share with only the other finest people. From that moment forward, the mere mention of the word foreign has flooded me with fantasy. I thought everybody else felt the same, and I had a hard time realising they didn’t. When a schoolmate told me he turned down his parents’ offer of a trip to Europe for a trip out West instead, I thought he was crazy. When another told me he found local politics more interesting than world politics, I thought he was nuts. Most kids are bored with their parents’ friends who come to dinner. I was too, unless that friend happened to have been to a foreign country – any foreign country – in which case I cross examined him ruthlessly on every detail of his foreign visit. Once a visitor who’d been through my interrogation to the point of brain blur said to my mother upon leaving, “What a kid! He was fascinated by every detail of every hour I ever spent in another country, and the only other place I’ve ever been is Canada!’ How Latin Almost Ruined It Walking into Miss Leslie’s Latin class on the first day of ninth grade was the culmination of a lifelong dream. I could actually hear Roman background music in my mind. I didn’tunderstand how the other students could be anything less than enthusiastic about the prospect of beginning Latin. Electricity coursed through me as I opened the Latin book Miss Leslie gave us. I was finally studying a foreign language! The first day all we did was learn vocabulary. Miss Leslie wrote some Latin words on the blackboard, and we wrote them down in our notebooks. I showed early promise as the class whiz. I quickly mastered those new words, each then as precious as Arthur’s foreign stamps had been eleven years earlier. When Miss Leslie had us close our books and then asked “Who remembers how to say ‘farmer’ in Latin,” I was the first to split the air with the cry of “Agricola!” I soaked up those foreign words like the Arabian desert soaks up spiled lemonade. What happened thereupon for a short time crippled, but then enriched, my life beyond measure. I was absent from school on day four. When I returned on day five, there were no more Latin words on the blackboard. In their place were words like nominative, genitive, dative, accusative. I didn’t know what those words meant and I didn’t like them. That “nominative-genitive” whatever-it-was was keeping me from my feast, and I resented it like I resent the clergyman at the banquet whose invocation lasts too long. The more Miss Leslie talked about these grammatical terms, the more bored I got. Honeymooners would have more patience with a life insurance salesman who knocked on their motel door at midnight than I had with Latin grammar. I clearly remember believing languages were nothing but words. We have words. They have words. And all you have to do is learn their words for our words and you’ve got it made. Therefore all that “ablative absolute” stuff Miss Leslie was getting increasingly excited about was unneeded and, to me, unwanted. Miss Leslie, noting that I, her highly motivated superstar, was floundering with elementary Latin grammar, kindly offered to assign another student to tutor me on what I’d missed the day before, or even to sit down with me herself. I remember declining the offer. I remember deciding, with the logic of a frustrated fifteen year old, that grammar was just another of those barriers designed by grownups to keep kids from having too much fun. I decided to wait it out. I shut off my brain as the cascade of changing noun endings and mutating verb forms muscled out the joy of my beloved vocabulary words. I longed for the good old days of being the first in the class to know agricola. More and more that Miss Leslie said made less and less sense. I was trapped in a Bermuda Triangle. My aura of classroom celebrity disappeared, along with my self esteem, my motivation, and almost my affection for things foreign. I limped along, barely making passing grades; I only managed to pass thanks to the vocabulary section on every test. My knowledge of vocabulary plus some good grammatical guesswork and a little luck got me through Miss Leslie’s class with a low D. Some of the other students seemed to be enjoying my lameness in Latin, after my being the overpraised and preening star of the class for the first three days. To assuage the hurt, I got hold of a self study book in Chinese. By the last few weeks of school, it was apparent that there was no way I could make better than a weak D in Latin, but that was enough to pass. I hid my humiliation behind that outrageously foreign looking book with thick, black Chinese characters all over the cover. I buried all thoughts of Latin in sour grapes and sat there and studied Chinese instead! 英语学习 北京英语学习 北京学习英语 北京英语听力 北京英语在线学习 北京英语学习方法 北京英语学习网 北京在线英语 北京英语网
How to Learn Any Language 3 How to Learn Any Language 3 Chinese Sailors Don’t Speak Latin Forsaking Latin for Chinese was my own form of juvenile defiance. However, I have since used Chinese in some way almost every day. I confess to occasional curiosity as to what all those A students from Miss Leslie’s Latin class are doing these days with their Latin. During summer vacation we went to Miami Beach to visit my grandparents. On one trip, as Uncle Bill drove us from the train station in Miami to Miami Beach, we passed a large group of marching sailors. As we drew abreast of the last row I noticed that the sailor on the end was Chinese. Then I noticed that the sailor beside him was also Chinese. I blinked. The whole last row was Chinese. And the next whole row was Chinese too. The entire contingent of marching sailors was Chinese! I felt like a multimillion dollar lottery winner slowly realising he’d gotten all the right numbers. I had no idea there were Chinese sailors in Miami, but why not? It was during World War II, China was our ally, and Miami was a port. There they were, hundreds of native speakers of the language I was trying to learn. I couldn’t wait to fling myself into their midst sputtering my few phrases of Chinese at machine gun velocity. I didn’t know what adventures were awaiting my Latin classmates that summer, but I was confident none of them were about to approach an entire contingent of sailors who spoke Latin! When we got to my grandparents’ hotel, I gave them the quickest possible hug and kiss, ran out, took the jitney back over the causeway to Miami, and started asking strangers if they knew where the Chinese sailors were. Everybody knew the Chinese sailors were billeted in the old Hotel Alcazar on Biscayne Boulevard. After their training, I was told, they gathered in groups and strolled around Bayfront Park. I waited. Sure enough, in late afternoon the park filled with Chinese sailors. I picked a clump of them at random and waded on in, greeting them in phrases I’d been able to learn from the book my parents had bought me. I’d never heard Chinese spoken before. No records, tapes, or cassettes. I could hit them only with the Chinese a D student in Latin could assemble from an elementary self study book in Chinese conversation in Greensboro, North Carolina. It sounded extraplanetary to the Chinese sailors, but at least they understood enough to get the point that here was no Chinese American, here was no child of missionary parents who’d served in China. Here was essentially an American urchin hellbent on learning Chinese without any help. They decided to provide the help. You don’t have to win a war to get a hero’s welcome. The Chinese naval units stationed in Miami seemed suddenly to have two missions – to defeat the Japanese and to help me learn Chinese! A great side benefit to learning foreign languages is the love and respect you get from the native speakers when you set out to learn their language. You’re far from an annoying foreigner to them. They spring to you with joy and gratitude. The sailors adopted me as their mascot. We met every afternoon in Bayfront Park for my daily immersion in conversational Chinese. A young teenager surrounded by native speakers and eager to avenge a knockout by a language like Latin learns quickly. There was something eerie about my rapid progress. I couldn’t believe I was actually speaking Chinese with our military allies in the shadow of the American built destroyers on which they would return to fight in the Far East. If only Miss Leslie could see me now! Naturally my grandparents were disappointed that I didn’t spend much time with them, but their bitterness was more than assuaged when I bought gangs of my Chinese sailor friends over to Miami Beach and introduced them to my family. My grandparents had the pleasure of introducing me to their friends as “my grandson, the interpreter for the Chinese navy.” I exchanged addresses and correspondence with my main Chinese mentor, Fan Tung-shi, for the next five years. Sadly, his letters stopped coming when the Chinese Communists completed their conquest of the Mainland. (He and I were joyously reunited exactly forty years later when a Taiwan newspaper interviewed me and asked me how I learned Chinese. One of Fan’s friends saw his name in the article.) That summer, in Will’s Bookstore on South Green Street back in Greensboro, I walked past the foreign language section and spotted a book entitled Hugo’s Italian Simplified. I opened it, and within ten or fifteen seconds the “background music” started again. Arrividerci, Latin Italian, I discovered, was Latin with all the difficulty removed. Much as a skilled chef fillets the whole skeleton out of a fish, some friendly folks somewhere had lifted all that grammar (at least, most of it) out of Latin and called the remainder Italian! There was no nominative-genitive-dative-accusative in Italian. Not a trace, except in a few pronouns which I knew I could easily take prisoner because we had the same thing in English (me is the accusative of I). Italian verbs did misbehave a little, but not to the psychedelic extent of Latin verbs. And Italian verbs were a lot easier to look at. I bought Hugo’s book and went through it like a hot knife through butter. I could have conversed in Italian within a month if there’d been anybody around who could have understood – a learning aid which the Greensboro of that day, alas, could not provide. I was clearly a beaten boxer on the comeback trail. Why was I all of a sudden doing so well in Italian after having done so poorly in Latin? Was it my almost abnormal motivation? No. I’d had that in Latin, too. Was it that Italian was a living language you could go someplace some day and actually speak, whereas Latin was something you could only hope to go on studying? That’s a little closer to the mark, but far from the real answer. My blitz through Italian, after my unsuccessful siege of Latin, owed much to the fact that in Italian I didn’t miss day four! I’m convinced that it was day four in ninth grade Latin that did me in. No other day’s absence would have derailed me. When I left on day three we were bathing in a warm sea of pleasant words. If only I’d been there on day four when Miss Leslie explained the importance of grammar, I might have felt a bit dampened, but I’d have put my head into the book, clapped my hands over my ears, and mastered it. After Italian I surged simultaneously into Spanish and French with self study books. Though by no means fluent in either Spanish or French by summer’s end, I had amassed an impressive payload of each. I was ready to stage my come from behind coup. Regulations in my high school demanded that a student complete two years of Latin with good grades before continuing with another language. After that, one could choose Spanish or French. I had completed only one year of Latin with poor grades, and I wanted to take both Spanish and French! I had not yet learned the apt Spanish proverb that tells us “regulations are for your enemies.” I learned the concept, however, by living it. Miss Mitchell was the sole foreign language authority of the high school. She taught Spanish and French. She was considered unbendable – in fact, unapproachable – in matters of regulation fudging. I didn’t know that on the first day as classes were forming. I’m glad I didn’t. I went to her classroom and asked if I might talk something over with her. I told her I was particularly interested in foreign languages, and even though I’d only had one year of Latin and didn’t do well in it at all, I’d really like to move into Spanish and French. If she could only see her way clear to let me, I’d appreciate it forever and try awfully hard. She asked if I had a transcript of my grades from Miss Leslie’s Latin class. No, I didn’t, I explained, but I had something more to the point. I’d bought books in Spanish and French over the summer and gotten a good head start. I hoped a demonstration of my zeal would win her favour. Like a tough agent softening sufficiently to let a persistent unknown comic do part of his routine, Miss Mitchell invited me to do my stuff. I conversed, I read, I wrote, I recited, I conjugated, I even sang – first in Spanish, then in French. Miss Mitchell gave no outward sign of emotion, but I knew the magic had worked. “I’ll have to talk it over with the principal,” she said, “but I don’t think there will be a problem. We’ve never had a case anything like this before. If I can get approval, which language, Spanish or French, would you like to take?” In a fit of negotiatory skill I wish would visit me more often, I said, “Please, Miss Mitchell, let me take both!” She frowned, but then relented. I got to take both. From the ambitious boxer floored early in round one by Latin grammar, I was all of a sudden the heavyweight language champ of the whole high school! Ingrid Bergman Made Me Learn Norwegian I did well in high school Spanish and French. When you’ve pumped heavy iron, lifting a salad fork seems easy. When you’re thrown into a grammar as complex as Latin’s at the age of fourteen, just about any other language seems easy. I never quit thanking Spanish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Romanian and Yiddish just for not being Latin. I’ve always been particularly grateful to Chinese and Indonesian for having nothing in their entire languages a Latin student would recognise as grammar. It was so enjoyable building my knowledge of Spanish, French, Italian and Chinese, I never thought of taking on any other languages. Then I saw an Ingrid Bergman movie and came out in a daze. I’d never imagined a woman could be that attractive. I went directly to the adjoining bookstore and told the clerk, “I want a book in whatever language it is she speaks.” Miss Bergman’s native tongue, the clerk told me, was Swedish, and he bought fortha copy of Hugo’s Swedish Simplified. It cost two dollars and fifty cents. I only had two dollars with me. “Do you have anything similar – cheaper?” I asked. He did indeed. He produced a volume entitled Hugo’s Norwegian Simplified for only one dollar and fifty cents. “Will she understand if I speak to her in this?” I asked, pointing to the less expensive Norwegian text. The clerk assured me that yes, any American speaking Norwegian would be understood by any native Swede. He was right. A lifetime later, at age thirty, I wheedled an exclusive radio interview with Ingrid Bergman on the strength of my ability in her language. She was delighted when I told her the story. Or at least she was a nice enough person and a good enough actress to pretend. 学英语 北京学英语 北京在线学英语 学习英语 网络学习英语 英语学习网站 英语网站 学习英语网
How to Learn Any Language 4 How to Learn Any Language 4 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)! The enrollment requirements were stiff. First you had to have completed at least 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.” By Wednesday I was attending sessions of a spirited Tito propaganda fiesta called 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!” Oh, yeah! True, Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are indeed all members of the 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 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. For the next eight days, until we were interrupted by the New York City skyline, 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.” 英语口语 北京英语口语 北京英语口语培训 北京英语口语培训学校 北京英语口语培训班
How to Learn Any Language 5 How to Learn Any Language 5 My Toughest Opponent For the next four years I avoided taking up any new languages. I had nothing against any of them (except one). It was just that there were too many gaps in the tongues I’d already entertained and I wanted to plug them up. The language I had something against was Hungarian. Before a summer weekend with army buddies in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I went to the post library and checked out an army phrase book in Hungarian to look at over the weekend. The introduction bluntly warned, “Hungarian is perhaps the hardest language in the world, and it is spoken by only about ten million people.” I resolved I’d never get any closer to it. Hungarian was the next language I studied. When Hungary rebelled against Soviet oppression in 1956, I was invited by the U.S. Air Force to join a team of reporters covering Operation Safe Haven, the airlift of all Hungarian refugees who were to receive asylum in the United States. That was far from enough to make me want to study Hungarian – yet. Every child is treated to fantasies like Buck Rogers and his invincible ray gun, Superman, Batman, or, in my case, Jack Armstrong and his “mystery eye”, a power imparted to him by a friendly Hindu who, merely by concentrating and holding his palms straight out, could stop every oncoming object from a fist to a bullet to a bull to an express train. By this time I began to note that similar powers – offensive and defensive – could unexpectedly and delightfully accompany the mastery of languages. No Iron Curtains for Language Many reporters got to the Hungarian border with Austria during the outpouring of refugees that followed the Soviet oppression of the Hungarian freedom fighters. They went to the Red Cross shelters on the Austrian side, interviewed some refugees and relief workers, and went home. I was invited to join a secret team of volunteer international “commandos” who actually slipped into Hungary by night to ferry refugees across the border canal on a rubber raft. The centre of the refugee operation was the Austrian border village of Andau. I asked a local policeman in German where the refugee headquarters was. It was Christmas night. It was dark. It was cold. There were no tour bus operators on the streets hawking tickets to the Hungarian border. He told me to go to Pieck’s Inn. At Pieck’s Inn the bartender said, “Room nineteen.” The fact that I was getting all this in German without looking around for somebody who spoke English was a convenience, but that’s not what I mean by the power of another language. That came next. I went upstairs to room nineteen and knocked on the door. “Who’s there?” shouted a voice in interestingly accented English. “I’m an American newspaper reporter,” I yelled back. “I understand you might help me get to the Hungarian border.” He opened the door cussing. “I’ll never take another American to the border with us again,” he said before the door even opened. “No more Americans! One of you bastards damned near got us all captured night before last.” He turned out to be a pleasant looking young man with blonde hair. When I knocked, he was busy adjusting heavy duty combat boots. He continued his tirade as we faced each other. “That American knew damned good and well that flashlights, flashbulbs, even matches were forbidden.” He went on in rougher language than I’ll here repeat to tell how an American with a camera broke his promise and popped off a flashbulb while a raft load of refugees was in the middle of the canal, causing the refugees and the rescuers on both sides of the canal to scatter. That burst of light, of course, let the Communists know exactly where the escape operation was taking place. He described in valiant but not native English exactly how much ice would have to form around the shell of hell before any other American reporter or any reporter of any kind would ever be invited to join the operation again. As he railed on, I noticed a Norwegian flag tacked to the wall behind him. “Snakker De norsk?” I asked (“Do you speak Norwegian?”). He stopped, said nothing for a few seconds. Then, like a Hollywood comic of the 1940’s pulling an absurd reversal, he said, “You’ve got big feet, but there’s a pair of boots on the other side of the bed that might fit you. Try ‘em on!” All night long we stood there waiting for the shadows to tell us that another group of refugees had arrived on the far bank of the canal. Then we’d push the raft into the water and play out the rope as our two boatmen paddled across. One would get out and help four or five Hungarians into the raft. When the raft was loaded, the boatman still in the raft would tug on the rope and we’d pull it back over. Then the lone boatman would paddle over again and repeat the process until all the refugees were on the Austrian side. The second boatman came back with the last load. We had to wait at least an hour to an hour and a half between refugee clusters. I was the coldest I’d ever been in my life, and there was no place to huddle behind or curl up inside. All we could do was stand there and wait. Light wasn’t the only thing prohibited. So was talk. Normal speech travels surprisingly far over frozen flatland, and it was important not to betray our position to the Communist patrols. We were only allowed to whisper softly to the person immediately ahead of us on the rope and the person immediately behind. I tried to remember what day it was. It was Thursday. It had only been the previous Saturday night when I’d taken a Norwegian girl, Meta Heiberg, from Woman’s College to the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we saw newsreels of almost the very spot where I was now standing. When the screen showed Hungarian refugees pouring into Austria, Meta had said, “My sister Karen’s over there somewhere helping those people.” That was all. The next day I got the call inviting me to fly over with the air force. On Monday I flew. And here I was, freezing and waiting and marvelling at the courage of the boatmen who voluntarily put themselves into jeopardy every time they crossed to the other side of the canal. Eventually I decided to avail myself of whispering rights. The figure in front of me was so roundly bundled against the cold I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. I leaned forward and said, “My name is Barry Farber and I’m from America.” A woman’s voice replied, “My name is Karen Heiberg and I’m from Norway.” The cold, the power of the coincidence, and the tension of the border all combined to keep me from maximising that opportunity. All I managed to do was flatfootedly utter the obvious: “I took your sister Meta to the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina, five nights ago.” The effect on Karen was powerful. I can’t complain, but I wish I’d been quick enough to add, “She sent me over here to find out why you never write Uncle Olaf!” 北京英语口语培训中心 北京英语口语课程 北京英语口语学习 北京英语口语