How to Learn Any Language 43
To Speak or Not to Speak
Be neither too boorish nor too reticent with your new knowledge. Don’t go barrelling in with scant command of a language if doing so causes ungainly delays in a busy restaurant. Neither should you let shyness deny you a good opportunity to send a few volleys of conversation across the net.
Don’t be like the beginner who took his party into a French restaurant in New York and insisted on trying to order for everybody in French. The waiter, himself French, quickly abandoning any hope of understanding the poor wretch, pulled a diplomatic coup worthy of a medal and a kiss on both cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” he said, with an accent French enough to draw the truffles up out of the underbrush of Alsace, “I don’t speak French.”
“You don’t speak French!” thundered the hapless showoff.
“Non, monsieur,” said the waiter.
“Well, then,” said he, “send me somebody who does!”
Speaking of Peace
Does knowledge of other languages lead to peace? One witness says “No. Knowing the other guy’s language merely enables you to get into more arguments of greater depth and intensity.” Another witness says, “Of course, language knowledge breeds peace. How could I pull a trigger and shoot a man when what I really want is a chance to sit down with him and learn his irregular verbs?” Put me solidly in the latter category. It’s impossible to learn a language and not learn a great deal about the country and its people, and usually those who learn about a country and its people develop a certain empathy and advocacy for that nation.
When Serb fights Croat in Yugoslavia, I don’t ignore it. Neither do I choose sides. They were both so helpful to me when I was learning Serbo-Croatian. I want them all to work together and get along.
A little knowledge of a language, then of a people, can convert even a rabid partisan into a one man peace movement!
Keep Learning
Stay with it. Keep pressing ahead with all of the tools in all of the ways suggested, plus whatever other ways you discover en route that seem to work for you. Keep pursuing opportunities to use what you learn, not just in exercises and self simulation, but in genuine, real life conversation, reading, writing and comprehension.
When will you “arrive”? When will you no longer “be studying” but “have learned” the language?
Never! At least, pretend never. Your linguistic infancy will lead to babyhood, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and so on. Your fragments of knowledge will lead to competence. Your competence will lead to fluency. Your fluency will intensify to higher and higher levels of fluency.
The best attitude, however, is that your attempt to master the foreign language should remain perpetually unfinished business.
You’ll succeed if you make sure you never go to bed knowing no more of your target language that you did when you woke up!
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