Language autobiography

The motivations that drive me to learn languages seem to be different from those of the other language nerds on “How to Learn Any Language” website .

I’m much more motivated by the culture (literature, history, traditions) than by the language itself … though I’ve come to enjoy that too.

I was exposed to French in fifth grade (age 10). In eighth grade (age 13), I took a great class in Basic Principles of Language, which intrigued me with its portrayal of patterns among languages. However I hated the Spanish class I took that year, because the Audio Lingual Method (ALM) was so frustrating to me. Next year I switched to German which was taught in the good old fashioned way, drawing heavily on grammar. I loved the vigor of the German language, and the grammar approach made a lot more sense to me. I continued with German for three and a half years, got good grades, but never reached the point where reading was easy for me.

The early exposure to French and Spanish opened me up to the pleasures of foreign language, but it was the methodical approach to German that gave me the concepts that made it possible to learn languages later on.

During college, I was too busy hitch-hiking, getting married and having adventures to study languages.

At age 24, I felt alienated from American culture, and decided that I wanted to immerse myself in Italian, and maybe move there. I read dual-language poetry books, took adult classes, worked through grammar workbooks, and used cheap records (Convers-a-Phone). I got to a basic reading knowledge.

Then I decided to study Spanish and French, since they were so close to Italian — three for the price of one. Soon I became entranced with those cultures too. I was supporting myself by working as a janitor in a winery. When I could, I would sneak into the janitor’s closets and study.

I was poor, and could not imagine going to Italy, so when someone told me about cheap Spanish immersion classes in Guatemala, I jumped at the chance. I worked through all the Spanish grammar books I could, so that when I got to the class, it was pure pleasure. I didn’t have the trouble with learning the basics that many of the other students had.

A few years later I went to France and Italy to study in inexpensive immersion classes. I loved reading in the literature and talking French or Italian with the people I met. The memories are very personal — being a servant for a 90-year-old French countess, who enjoyed telling me her (monarchist) version of French history. Talking to a fresh Italian teenager, daughter of a factory worker, about her dreams to be an architect. Asking my French aunt what “connerie” meant.

By then, I had the bug, and I bought textbooks and interlinear translations for Latin and Greek.

Before I got too far with them, I fell into a well paying profession — computers. Instead of learning cases and vocabulary, it was software and hardware. Are computer languages foreign languages? I approached them during these years with the same enthusiasm: BASIC, Pascal, C, Unix scripts, etc.

After retiring early, I was wandering around the library looking for something to read. I happened to pick up a book of Maigret stories in French by Simenon. To my surprise, I could read it. That whetted my appetite for more, and I threw myself into dozens of Simenon novels, Dumas’s easy-to-read adventure stories, and any popular novels I could find.

By this time, I had become good at using contextual clues to decipher the meaning of a text. When I reached a certain level in French, I turned to novels in Spanish. I began with old detective stories like Perry Mason that had been translated into Spanish. The turning point was when I read the Harry Potter series in Spanish.

At this point, I had worked out the method for achieving reading fluency. I went back to German and gave that a try. That was much harder than French, Spanish and Italian. But the contextual method still works. For example, I read the Wallender series by Henning Mankell translated in German — just the right level for me.

I flirted with Chinese and Hebrew, but soon set those aside for languages that had a quicker payoff. I’ve done several months of Latin and recently started on the Scandinavian languages and Portuguese.

I don’t have any trouble switching from reading one language to another. It would be a different story, of course, if I were trying to speak or write in the language. But for right now, reading is my goal and it gives me a great deal of satisfaction to have piles of cardboard boxes full of books in foreign languages, waiting to be read.

I have an irrational fear that all the languages will begin to clog up my brain, but just the reverse seems to happen. The languages seem to get easier. I’m able to see more connections (e.g., French-English cognates, German vocabulary in the Scandinavian languages).

The book Polyglot (PDF) by the late Hungarian translator Kató Lomb has been an inspiration to me, with her verve and enthusiasm for learning languages. I especially liked her method of reading detective stories to improve reading proficiency.

UPDATE (March 2013)

In early 2013  I threw myself into the Esperanto language. It’s much easier than other languages and has a fascinating history. Some other writers have discovered Esperanto and have been writing articles for the mainstream media, such as Arika Okrent on “How the U.S. made war with the language of peace.”

UDPATE (April 2013)

Just back from an Esperanto conference in Sacramento. Paula was surprised how fluently people spoke – “It was like being in a foreign country.” We talked with people from Senegal, Argentina, Russia, Cuba and Peru. This documentary (excerpt) catches the quirky and appealing ambience of Esperanto-land: