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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.

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