How to Learn Any Language 6
How I Married Hungarian
You don’t launch into the study of a new language casually, but it’s not quite as solemn a decision as an American man proposing to his girlfriend after an evening of wine and light jazz. It is, however, something like an Ottoman sultan deciding to take on another wife. It really is like a marriage. Something in you actually says, “I do!” and you decide to give it time and commitment that would ordinarily be invested elsewhere.
My pledge never to try to learn Hungarian was shattered by Hungarian heroism, Soviet tanks, and my agreeing to help Hungarian refugees resettle in Greensboro. I wasn’t the only journalist who stayed on that story long after history moved on. Every journalist I know who got involved in any part of the Hungarian Revolution became attached to it.
I started in Munich in the transit refugee camp for those fleeing Hungarians who were destined to go to America. I buzzed from one refugee to another like a bee to blossoms, drawing as many words and phrases as I could from each and writing them down.
The U.S. Air Force gave its Luitpol barracks over to the Hungarians, who promptly plastered their own signs right on top of the English signs on all the doors. The door that once said “Doctor” suddenly said “Orvos.” The door that once said “Clothing” suddenly said “Ruha.” And so on. It was easy to tell who among the Americans and Germans at Luitpol were genuine language lovers. They were the ones who were not annoyed.
The Hungarian relabelling of everything at Luitpol actually gave me my most explosive language learning thrill. When I went searching for a men’s room, I found myself for the first time in my life not knowing where to go. You don’t need Charles Berlitz to take you by the hand to the right one when the doors read “Mesdames” and “Messieurs,” “Damen” and “Herren,” “Señoras” and “Señores,” or even the rural Norwegain “Kvinnor” and “Menn.”
No such luck prevailed at Luitpol. The two doors were labelled “Nk” and “Férfiak.” I looked at those two words, trying not to let my language lover’s enthusiasm distract from the pragmatic need to decipher which one was which relatively soon.
My thinking went like this. The k at the end of both words probably just made them plural. That left N and Férfia, or possibly Férfi. Something came to me. I remembered reading that Hungarian was not originally a European language. It had been in Asia. The Chinese word for “woman”, “lady”, or anything female was nö – not no and not nu, but that precise umlaut sound that two dots over anything foreign almost always represents. (I lose patience with language textbooks that spend a page and a half telling you to purse your lips as though you’re going to say oo as in “rude” and then tell you instead to say ee as in “tree.” If you simply say the e sound in “nervous” or “Gertrude,” you’ll be close enough.
Following that hunch I entered the door marked “Fërfiak.” The joy that came next should arise in tabernacles, not men’s rooms. To my satisfaction and relief I walked in and found five or six other férfiak inside!
Back in America I went looking for some books and records (there were no cassette tapes in those days) to help me in Hungarian. There were none. Communist rule has so completely cut Hungary off from the West that when you went looking for a Hungarian book, the shelves of even the biggest bookstores leapfrogged Hungarian, jumping right from Hebrew to Indonesian. There was one Hungarian-English phrase book published by a New York Hungarian delicatessen and general store named Paprikas Weiss. To accommodate the wave of Hungarian immigrants who had come to America in the 1930’s, they had published their own little phrase book, which was distinguished by its utter failure to offer a single phrase of any practical use whatsoever to those of us working with the refugees. It was loaded with sentences like Almomban egy betrvel viaskodtom,” which means, “In my dream I had a fight with a burglar”!
Finally, like supplies that lag far behind the need for them in wartime, some decent English-Hungarian/Hungarian-English dictionaries arrived – no grammar books yet, just dictionaries. An explorer named Vilhjalmur Stefansson went to Greenland one time and proved you could live for eighteen months on nothing but meat. I proved it was possible, with nothing but that dictionary, to resettle half a dozen Hungarian refugees who spoke no English at all in Greensboro, North Carolina, to care for all their needs, and have a good deal of fun without one single bit of grammar!
Hungarian has one of the most complex grammars in the world, but grammar is like classical music and good table manners. It’s perfectly possible to live without either if you’re willing to shock strangers, scare children, and be viewed by the world as a rampaging boor. We had no choice. Hungarians had to be talked to about homes, jobs, training, money, driver’s licenses, and the education of their children.
“Tomorrow we’ll go to the butcher’s,” for instance, had to do without the thirty-nine grammatical inflections a Hungarian sentence of that length would properly entail. We did it with nothing but the translation of essential words: “Tomorrow go meat fellow.” “A charitable woman is coming by to help you with your furniture needs” became “Nice lady come soon give tables chairs.”
I learned Hungarian fluently – and badly. Many years later I decided to return to Hungarian and learn it properly and grammatically. It’s a little like being back in Latin class, but this time I have a much better attitude.
New Friends
For the next thirty-five years I stood my ground and resisted taking up any new language. The languages I’d studied up to that point included Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portugese, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Chinese (Mandarin dialect), Indonesian, Hungarian, Finnish, Yiddish and Hebrew. I happily applied myself to building competence in those languages and turning a deaf ear to all others.
It was tempting to tackle Greek; so many Greeks I could have practiced with were popping up in my daily travels, but I clung to my policy of “No more languages, thank you!” That policy was misguided; in fact, swine headed. I was like the waiter standing there with arms folded who gets asked by a diner if he knows what time it is and brusquely replies “Sorry. That’s not my table!”
I could have easily and profitably picked up a few words and phrases every time I went to the Greek coffee shop and in the process learned another major language. But I didn’t. In the 1980’s immigrants to New York, where I lived, began to pour in from unaccustomed corners of the world, adding languages like Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Farsi, Bengali, Pashtu, Twi, Fanti, Wollof, Albanian, and Dagumbi to our already rich inventory of Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Yiddish, Portugese, Greek, Polish, and Hebrew. I abandoned the policy. Now I want to learn them all – not completely, just enough to delight the heart of an Indian or African cab driver who never before in his entire life met an American who tried to learn his language.
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