How I Learn Languages – Chapter 1: The Taiyaku Method

One of the methods I have come to rely on quite heavily in language learning is the use of translated editions: Basically, I look for a translation of a book I know well (John Grisham’s The Firm and The Shining and Misery by Stephen King are old standbys) in the language I am trying to learn. The underlying idea is that, since I already know what is happening in the story (and sometimes have much of the dialogue memorised), I already know what the book says, and can direct my attention to how – with what words, arranged in what way – it is being said.

My first conscious use of this technique dates back, as it happens, to the first time I took an interest in learning Hungarian.

In the mid-1990s, I was in an international summer enrichment programme. One afternoon, I heard some of my fellow participants speaking a language that I couldn’t for the life of me recognise. It had the ö and ü sounds of German, but definitely couldn’t have been German, since I couldn’t understand a word of it. Something about the even tone in which they spoke suggested a Slavic language, but I would have recognised at least a few words of a Slavic language, and, besides, I couldn’t think of a single Slavic language with ö or ü in it (as it turns out, this is because none exists).

Finally, since I could find nothing that would even allow me to make an educated guess at what they were speaking, I decided to ask. They told me it was Hungarian.

Despite not knowing a word of Hungarian (with the exceptions of magyar and paprika, meaning ‚Hungarian“ and ‚paprika‘, respectively), I did know a few things about Hungarian thanks to an excellent Routledge paperback I’d bought earlier that year called The Languages of the World. Although it doesn’t cover every language in the world (Ubykh and Mapudungun, for example, are not included in the edition I have), it certainly includes quite a lot of them. The Languages of the World provides a sample text in each language (with English translation), and a brief description of some of the key features of the language in question. From this book, I knew that Hungarian is not related to any other European language, save for a quite distant relationship with Finnish and Estonian via the Finno-Ugric family. I knew that Hungarian is characterised by impressively long words (szövegszerkesztő, for example, for ‚word processor‘) and generally stresses the first syllable.

My interest was piqued.

I asked them if they might help me learn Hungarian, which they quite enthusiastically agreed to do. I imagine that not many people express an interest in learning the language, since the conventional wisdom in Slavic-speaking Eastern and Central Europe is that Hungarian is The Hardest Language in the History of Ever. I can’t quite agree with this assessment; to me, Zulu and Xhosa, with their click sounds and highly complex sequences of prefixes and suffixes, Japanese, with its Chinese characters and complicated sentence structure and verbs, or even the nearby language of Georgian, with its epic consonant clusters (e.g., მწვრტნელი, mts’vrtneli, meaning ‚trainer‘) and highly complex verbs, present much greater challenges. On the other hand, I can certainly understand the sentiment. The linguistic diversity of Eastern Europe is roughly equivalent to that of Spain. Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and the other Slavic languages are closely enough related that a speaker of one wouldn’t have too terribly hard a time understanding the others at least a bit, much as speakers of Spanish will not find Asturian, Galician, or Catalan all that unfamiliar. In Spain, the exception is Basque, a language isolate believed by some to be the last of the languages spoken in Europe before the Indo-Europeans popped by and took over. In Eastern Europe, the big exception is Hungarian (to which one might also add Hungarian’s distant cousin Estonian, the two archaic Indo-European languages Latvian and Lithuanian, and Albanian, which is most closely related to Greek, but not so much that you’d notice).

From my new friends, I learned some basic Hungarian expressions such as greetings, counting to ten, and the like. One of them also happened to have a book of quotations in Hungarian and English called Állítsatok meg a világot! Ki akarok szállni/Stop the World! I Want to Get Off! This book contained an extensive collection of amusingly cynical quotations (Ambrose Bierce had quite a few entries) in both Hungarian and English. Each English quote was immediately followed by a Hungarian translation. This, along with the Hippocrene phrasebook/dictionary I picked up at a nearby bookshop, became my most important source in gaining a sense of how the Hungarian language worked.

As an aside, I would like to note that the mention of Hippocrene is hardly an endorsement. It was the only thing available. I generally do not recommend Hippocrene language books. In their favour, it should be said that they are generally reliable in terms of accuracy. However, this is cancelled out by the fact that their treatment of the languages in question tends to be quite superficial, and the books are printed in fonts so ugly that they give me a splitting headache. If there’s nothing else, Hippocrene will do, but the Teach Yourself and Colloquial series are much better for language learning, and the Oxford paperback dictionaries are infinitely superior in terms of comprehensiveness, detail, and font.

In any case, this book of bilingual quotations proved at least as useful as a source of information on the Hungarian language as the book I had bought that was specifically intended to teach it. One example that I somehow remember after all this time will help illustrate the method I began to develop:

Eng.: The brain: the organ with which we think that we think.

Hun.: Az agy: az a szerv, amivel azt gondoljuk, hogy gondolkodunk.

At the time, the only baseline knowledge of Hungarian I had to draw on were the extremely basic things I had picked up from my friends and the Hippocrene dictionary/phrasebook. This was limited to words like ember (person), reggel (morning), víz (water), the basic forms of the verb ‚to be‘ (lenni — én vagyok, te vagy, ő van, etc.), basic verb endings in general, the fact that the direct object of a verb takes a t at the end (víz – vízet), the numbers from one to ten, and question words like mi (what), ki (who), mikor (when), hol (where), etc.

From this decidedly minimalist starting point, certain things became immediately apparent in the Hungarian translations of the quotes. One of the most significant discoveries I made was the tendency to put a (the) on the beginning of question words.

Mi, as mentioned above, means ‚what‘. By adding the case suffix -vel to it, we get mivel (with what?), which is similar in structure to the German womit (wo – where, mit – with), which means the same thing.

In the quote, ‚with which we think that we think‘ is rendered as amivel azt gondoljuk, hogy gondolkodunk. Because of their endings, gondoljuk and gondolkodunk were definitely verbs, and the repetition of the root gondol- clearly paralleled the one repeated verb in the English: to think. It seemed pretty safe to assume that both gondoljuk and gondolkodunk meant ‚we think‘. I could only speculate, however, on why exactly two different forms would be used to mean ‚we think‘ in the same sentence like this.

Given that hogy was positioned between the two ‚we thinks‘, it seemed that, in addition to meaning ‚how‘, hogy could also be used to mean ‚that‘ in the sense of:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says that he perjured himself in ‚the least untruthful manner possible‘.

Azt, I knew, meant ‚that‘ in the sense of ‚that bloke‘ (az a fickó, in case anyone is interested), with a t on the end to indicate that it was the object of the verb gondoljuk (we think).

This left one word unaccounted for: amivel. Everything else having been matched to an English equivalent, amivel had to mean ‚with which‘.

What jumped out at me with amivel was that it seemed to be a (the) added to the question word mi (what) with the suffix –vel (with) on the end. I had seen similar examples in the other quotes: a-mi, a-ki, a-mikor, a-hol. The pattern seemed to hold true everywhere I looked for it, leading me to conclude that the way to turn a question word into the corresponding conjunction (e.g., from the ‚who‘ of ‚Who is he?‘ to the ‚who‘ of ‚The guy who proved that Clapper perjured himself‘) was simply to add a to the beginning. I tried it out in communication with friends, and it worked just as I’d thought it would.

In other words, I started out with a Hungarian phrase:

Az agy: az a szerv, amivel azt gondoljuk, hogy gondolkodunk,

consisting of ten words, of which five were new to me. Using this method, I was able to work out (correctly) what every one of the new words meant. I was also able to learn various other things. For example, I learned that to say ‚that organ‘, you can’t just add az (the word for ‚that‘ as in ‚this and that‘) to szerv (organ). Instead, I found, the correct form is az a szerv, literally ‚that the organ‘. I also learned that there were two separate ways of saying ‚we think‘, depending, apparently, on whether we are thinking something in particular (gondoljuk) or are just thinking generally (gondolkodunk). On top of that, the Hungarian sentence showed me that, in Hungarian, you can’t just say ‚we think that‘, as in other languages:

English: We think that X

German: Wir denken, daß X

French: Nous pensons que X

Spanish: Pensamos que X

Russian: Мы думаем, что X (My dumajem, chto X)

but

Hungarian: *Gondoljuk, hogy X[1]

Instead, the X of the second part of the phrase has to have an explicit counterpart in the first: azt gondoljuk, hogy X, with azt being ‚that‘ (az) plus -t to show that it is the object of gondoljuk (we think).

If I was able to get this much useful information out of a single ten-word sentence with a translation but no glossary or grammatical explanations, I’d clearly found a worthwhile approach.

At the time, I was not really aware of exactly how I was doing it. I just saw the words match up one by one, and everything fell into place.

It was only in this past year, when working on my Greek with the Greek version of Stieg Larsson’s Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo[2], or in Greek Το κορίτσι με το τατουάζ [To koritsi me to tatouaz]) that I really began to understand how I was deriving all these things from sentences with this many unknown elements.

Essentially, it boiled down to deductive reasoning. I started out with a few (sometimes a very few) things I knew, and using the relationships between the things I knew to gradually reduce the number of things in the sentence that I didn’t know. In short, I was doing algebra with sentences.

Since this first encounter with the value of translated editions for language learning, I have continued to use it extensively for every language I’ve taken an interest in (at least those for which I could find translated editions). As a result, I now have The Firm in Polish (Firma), Slovak (Firma), Japanese (法律事務所, houritsu-jimusho), Norwegian (Firmaets mann), Hungarian (A cég), and Hebrew (הפירמה – Ha-Firma), Romanian (Firma), and am currently awaiting the Finnish edition (Firma, again), in addition to Misery in Norwegian (Kidnappet), Swedish (Lida), Finnish (Piina), Arabic (بؤس – Bu’s), Japanese (ミザリー, Mizarii), and Polish (Misery), just to name two examples.

This technique, which I’ve come to think of as the taiyaku method (after the Japanese name for books in which a Japanese translation is placed directly opposite the original, 対訳本 [taiyaku-bon]), will figure heavily as these notes progress.