Will: Do you play the piano?
Skylar: A bit.
Will: Okay, when you look at a piano you see Mozart, right?
Skylar: I see „Chopsticks.“
Will: Beethoven, okay. He looked at a piano, and it just made sense to him. He could just play.
Skylar: So what are you saying? You play the piano?
Will: No, not a lick. I mean, I look at a piano, I see a bunch of keys, three pedals, and a box of wood. But Beethoven, Mozart, they saw it, they could just play. I couldn’t paint you a picture, I probably can’t hit the ball out of Fenway, and I can’t play the piano.
Skylar: But you can do my o-chem paper in under an hour.
Will: Right. Well, I mean when it came to stuff like that… I could always just play.
– From the film Good Will Hunting (1997)
By Way of Introduction
I have often been asked how exactly I go about learning a language by people curious about how I could have gained proficiency in such a wide variety of languages. In the following notes, I hope to provide the most detailed answer possible, using examples of languages I am currently studying.
What follows are notes on the methods by which I am learning Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Hindi, Greek, and any number of other current projects that seem worth mentioning in order to illustrate a particular technique or thought process. To be clear, this is not a manual on how others can or should go about learning a language. Although I will try to describe my own methods in enough detail that they could be reproduced by language teachers and/or learners, I haven’t the faintest idea how useful any of the techniques I describe will be to others.
Learning a language, like learning anything else, is a highly individualised process, and the most effective for any person will ultimately depend on how that person’s mind works. No two minds are exactly alike. Some people have an intuitive understanding of structure, for example, and can work out how to form a sentence in a new language with the minimal information gleaned by looking at example sentences. Others need the principles of sentence structure spelt out in great detail in order to be able to make sense of them. The idea that there is a one-size-fits-all approach to learning language – flogged by the likes of Berlitz – is truly the bane of language learners and teachers everywhere, as it inevitably will lead to frustration.
As such, the best advice I can offer language learners and teachers is:
Play to your/your students‘ strengths. Try to gain an intimate understanding of how you/your student learns things. If something isn’t working, don’t treat it as a failure, but as an opportunity to investigate what it is that isn’t working. If you can understand what about a given approach isn’t working for you or your student, you are at least one step closer to knowing what will work. When, on the other hand, something does work, ask why, so that you can try to do more of it. Every attempt to learn/teach something, whether successful or not, whether language or something else entirely, is an encounter with intellectual diversity, either your own and/or your student’s. Taking the time to truly make sense of these moments of success or frustration will give you a richer understanding of how different people’s minds work, and you will be a better teacher and learner for it.
Of course, most institutional language-learning settings do not offer the time or flexibility to take this intellectual diversity into account, and the teaching methods imposed on courses in school or university often ignore this aspect completely; this, I reckon, is why it is not only possible, but common, to successfully complete four or more years of Spanish courses and still not be able to carry on even a basic conversation in the language. Indeed, if my own language learning had occurred solely or primarily within these structures/strictures, I would likely have little more to show for the experience than most others who learn language in these settings.
So, no, I’m not offering The Guaranteed Language-Learning Method for Everyone Everywhere, and you can quite safely assume that anyone who claims to do so (I’m looking at you, Berlitz) is completely and utterly full of shit. The Method doesn’t exist. Your method does.
What I am offering, instead, is an „in-process“ description of how I, with my own strengths and weaknesses, and my own knowledge base, go about learning the languages I am currently studying. Think of it as an account of intellectual diversity based on one example: me. If you see something of your own learning style, perhaps something you hadn’t been fully conscious of before, I will feel I have done something right. If one of the methods I describe works in your own teaching/learning, or if I shed some light on a source of frustration, I will be happy. If you find a useful way to modify one of the techniques I describe, I would love to hear about it. If you are a linguist of one sort or another, and these notes help broaden your understanding of human language acquisition, I will count that, too, as a success. And if you just find these notes interesting or entertaining, regardless of any interest on your part in actually learning a language, that works just fine for me. Particularly for those in the latter group, I’ll try to keep it lively; language certainly can be a very dry subject, but I see no reason it must be. Surely, something that forms the basis of most humour can be talked about in an amusing way, and a big part of how I learn languages is specifically by amusing myself with them.
In these notes, I will do my very best to avoid jargon, in hopes of making them accessible to as many people as possible, no matter what their educational background. If I must use a technical term, I will explain it, as I will, of course, also do for those terms I have coined myself as a way of describing aspects of how I go about learning a language.
Before going into the specifics of how I am currently learning Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Greek, Hindi, etc., it will be useful to sketch my jumping-off point. Since, as discussed above, the methods that will work for any one person depend largely on how their minds work, their specific abilities, and the base of knowledge they start out with, it only makes sense to provide some introduction of those things in my own case. If any of it comes off as boasting, this is certainly not my intent. If anything, I am much less likely than others to assume that my breadth of knowledge in the field of languages is down to some innate talent or ‚genius‘ (a term I have always been quite uncomfortable with, because it seems to me that it mostly serves to put my skills on a pedestal, and contributes sweet bugger-all to understanding how I do what I do with language – my goal is to clarify, rather than mystifying); more than anything, I think that my own language skills are primarily the result of mental flexibility due to exposure, from a very young age, to a wide variety of languages, and to an ever-growing conscious understanding of exactly how my mind deals with new languages.
As it currently stands, I am sufficiently fluent to work as a professional translator (which is to say, fluent enough that I can read and understand highly specialised legal, medical, technical, and other specialised documents with minimal difficulty), in Russian, Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Portuguese, English, Swedish, Danish, Catalan, Flemish, Afrikaans, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Moldovan, Romanian, Korean, and Yiddish.
Of these, my native languages, to which my mind defaults due to length and intimacy of acquaintance, are English, Spanish, and German. I think, feel, write, and converse in all of these with equal ease and proficiency, though one may come slightly more naturally to me than either of the others at a given time, based generally on which of them I am primarily using in everyday interactions. If I spend an extended period of time speaking only Spanish or German (because I happen to be in an environment where those are the main languages in use), it generally requires a bit of time to adapt to speaking English primarily again and vice versa. How much reorientation time is necessary in any given case varies based on how long and/or exclusively I have been speaking the respective language.
Of the other languages, those familiar with the various families and groups languages fall into will have noticed that nearly all of the languages I have listed belong to the Indo-European family, an extremely broad group of related languages that include such diverse specimens as English, Italian, Greek, Persian/Farsi, Hindi, Russian, Lithuanian, Albanian, and Sanskrit.
More specifically, seven (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan, Moldovan, Romanian) are Romance languages derived from Latin, with Spanish and Portuguese being extremely closely related to each other, French and Italian being more similar to each other, and Catalan acting as something of a bridge between those two groups. Moldovan and Romanian (which are nearly identical, especially since the Latin alphabet has returned to general use for writing Moldovan), on the other hand, are somewhat more distant cousins; these two languages are often considered to be the most archaic major Romance languages, and preserve features from Latin (such as noun declensions) that have long since disappeared from the others. They are also distinguished by the wide variety of words they have borrowed from Bulgarian and Turkish, and the structural similarities they share only with Greek and the Balkan languages (Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian).
Most of the rest are Germanic languages, including (naturally) German and English, the Scandinavian languages Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish (which, apart from some differences in phonetics and spelling, are virtually identical), Dutch and Flemish (also close enough to be mutually intelligible), and Afrikaans (which is derived from Dutch, but differs principally in terms of spellings, verb forms [Afrikaans has much simpler verbs than Dutch or Flemish], and some differences in vocabulary). Yiddish, too, falls within this group, and is (apart from being written with a modified Hebrew alphabet) extremely similar to German.
Three others are Slavic languages, including Russian (the first language I began teaching myself, when I found myself, at age five, captivated by the Russian alphabet), Macedonian, and Bulgarian.
Korean and Japanese, on the other hand, are generally considered to be „language isolates“, which is to say that, as far as linguists have been able to determine, they have no known next of kin. However, both languages borrow heavily from Chinese, and, indeed, have borrowed many of the same words from Chinese, such that if one understands the differences in how each language pronounces a particular Chinese loanword, one can easily transfer one’s Japanese vocabulary over to Korean, and vice versa. Similarly, despite being unrelated, the two languages are extremely similar in terms of grammar, so that what one knows about sentence structure in one language is often readily applicable to the other.
In short, whilst the list is quite long in terms of individual languages, the similarities amongst the languages on the list make knowledge of one of them a fairly reliable stepping stone to knowledge of another. I’ve heard it said that knowledge of any language is knowledge of all language, and my own experience certainly bears this out. The more languages I have learnt, the less is truly new to me when I begin learning another.
For example, when I first began studying Korean in earnest several years ago, I was already fluent in Japanese to the point of being assumed to be Japanese by people with whom I communicated by phone or in writing (in person, of course, people are much less likely to make this assumption). As such, all sorts of similarities began jumping out at me almost immediately. The Korean word 관계 (gwangye), for example, sounded strangely similar to the Japanese word 関係 (kankei) (a Chinese borrowing); when I found that gwangye, just like kankei, meant „relationship“, I began to look for other Chinese borrowings that the two languages had in common, and found quite a few. I also began to realise that there was a fairly consistent pattern in the differences in pronunciation of the same Chinese (Sino-) word in Korean versus Japanese, meaning that it was possible to work out the meaning of a newly encountered Sino-Korean word quite reliably just by converting from one pronunciation to the other. This sort of pattern recognition (which also allowed me immediately to identify the French enseigner and the Italian insegnare as variations on the theme of the Spanish enseñar, which, like the others, also means „to teach“) is a major component of how I learn any new language.
Another way that these languages can be categorised for pattern recognition purposes is by structure.
For example, several of these languages put the adjective before the noun:
English: The arrogant dickhead
German: Der arrogante Depp
Russian: Высокомерный мудак (vysokomierniy mudak)
Japanese: 傲慢な間抜け (gouman-na manuke)
Others, on the other hand, generally put the adjective after the noun:
Spanish: El huevón arrogante
Italian: Lo scemo arrogante
Some generally put the verb between the subject and the object:
English: I drink whisky.
German: Ich trinke Whisky.
Norwegian: Jeg drikker whisky.
French: Je bois du whisky.
Others prefer to put the verb at the very end:
Japanese: 俺はウィスキーを飲んでいる (Ore-wa uisukii-wo nondeiru)
Korean: 나는 위스키를 마셔. (Na-neun uiseuki-reul mashyeo).
Some put information about the relationships between nouns before the nouns they refer to:
English: I went to Wolverhampton.
German: Ich bin nach Wolverhampton gefahren.
Spanish: Fui a Wolverhampton.
Serbian: Došao sam u Volverhampton.
Others put it afterwards:
Japanese: ウォルバーハンプトンに行った。(Uorubaahamputon-ni itta)
Korean: 월버햄프턴에 갔어. (Weolbeohaempteon-e gasseo).
I could name any number of other such categories (languages that have masculine, feminine, and/or neuter nouns versus those with no gender at all, languages that leave nouns as-is versus those that change the endings on them for one reason or another, etc., etc., etc.), but the above should be sufficient to illustrate another aspect of what I mean when I refer to „pattern recognition“. The more such patterns I become familiar with – and it is surprising how many languages fall into one or the other of the above patterns – the less likely a new language is to be entirely unfamiliar, no matter how little relation it bears to any language I already know.
All of these general remarks will be fleshed out in much greater detail in the subsequent sections, in which I will begin discussion how I am learning the languages I am learning right now.