How to Learn Any Language 2
P A R T O N E
My Story
A Life of Language
Learning
A brief “language autobiography” may help readers whose language learning and language loving careers began only a few moments ago with the opening of this book.
My favourite word – in any language – is the English word foreign. I remember how it came to be my favourite word. At the age of four I attended a summer day camp. Royalty develops even among children that young. There were already a camp “king” and a camp “queen”, Arthur and Janet. I was sitting right beside Arthur on the bus one morning, and I remember feeling honoured. Arthur reached into his little bag, pulled out an envelope, and began to show Janet the most fascinating pieces of coloured paper I’d ever seen.
“Look at these stamps, Janet,” he said. “They’re foreign!” That word reverberated through my bone marrow. Foreign, I figured, must mean beautiful, magnetic, impressive – something only the finest people share with only the other finest people. From that moment forward, the mere mention of the word foreign has flooded me with fantasy.
I thought everybody else felt the same, and I had a hard time realising they didn’t. When a schoolmate told me he turned down his parents’ offer of a trip to Europe for a trip out West instead, I thought he was crazy. When another told me he found local politics more interesting than world politics, I thought he was nuts. Most kids are bored with their parents’ friends who come to dinner. I was too, unless that friend happened to have been to a foreign country – any foreign country – in which case I cross examined him ruthlessly on every detail of his foreign visit.
Once a visitor who’d been through my interrogation to the point of brain blur said to my mother upon leaving, “What a kid! He was fascinated by every detail of every hour I ever spent in another country, and the only other place I’ve ever been is Canada!’
How Latin Almost Ruined It
Walking into Miss Leslie’s Latin class on the first day of ninth grade was the culmination of a lifelong dream. I could actually hear Roman background music in my mind. I didn’tunderstand how the other students could be anything less than enthusiastic about the prospect of beginning Latin. Electricity coursed through me as I opened the Latin book Miss Leslie gave us. I was finally studying a foreign language!
The first day all we did was learn vocabulary. Miss Leslie wrote some Latin words on the blackboard, and we wrote them down in our notebooks. I showed early promise as the class whiz. I quickly mastered those new words, each then as precious as Arthur’s foreign stamps had been eleven years earlier. When Miss Leslie had us close our books and then asked “Who remembers how to say ‘farmer’ in Latin,” I was the first to split the air with the cry of “Agricola!” I soaked up those foreign words like the Arabian desert soaks up spiled lemonade.
What happened thereupon for a short time crippled, but then enriched, my life beyond measure.
I was absent from school on day four. When I returned on day five, there were no more Latin words on the blackboard. In their place were words like nominative, genitive, dative, accusative. I didn’t know what those words meant and I didn’t like them. That “nominative-genitive” whatever-it-was was keeping me from my feast, and I resented it like I resent the clergyman at the banquet whose invocation lasts too long.
The more Miss Leslie talked about these grammatical terms, the more bored I got. Honeymooners would have more patience with a life insurance salesman who knocked on their motel door at midnight than I had with Latin grammar. I clearly remember believing languages were nothing but words. We have words. They have words. And all you have to do is learn their words for our words and you’ve got it made. Therefore all that “ablative absolute” stuff Miss Leslie was getting increasingly excited about was unneeded and, to me, unwanted.
Miss Leslie, noting that I, her highly motivated superstar, was floundering with elementary Latin grammar, kindly offered to assign another student to tutor me on what I’d missed the day before, or even to sit down with me herself. I remember declining the offer. I remember deciding, with the logic of a frustrated fifteen year old, that grammar was just another of those barriers designed by grownups to keep kids from having too much fun. I decided to wait it out.
I shut off my brain as the cascade of changing noun endings and mutating verb forms muscled out the joy of my beloved vocabulary words. I longed for the good old days of being the first in the class to know agricola. More and more that Miss Leslie said made less and less sense. I was trapped in a Bermuda Triangle. My aura of classroom celebrity disappeared, along with my self esteem, my motivation, and almost my affection for things foreign.
I limped along, barely making passing grades; I only managed to pass thanks to the vocabulary section on every test. My knowledge of vocabulary plus some good grammatical guesswork and a little luck got me through Miss Leslie’s class with a low D.
Some of the other students seemed to be enjoying my lameness in Latin, after my being the overpraised and preening star of the class for the first three days. To assuage the hurt, I got hold of a self study book in Chinese. By the last few weeks of school, it was apparent that there was no way I could make better than a weak D in Latin, but that was enough to pass. I hid my humiliation behind that outrageously foreign looking book with thick, black Chinese characters all over the cover. I buried all thoughts of Latin in sour grapes and sat there and studied Chinese instead!
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