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.”
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