How to Learn Any Language 31

How to Learn Any Language 31

Motivations

The ads for self study language courses stress the business, travel, cultural, and literary advantages of acquiring another language. But what about meeting girls? Or women? Or boys? Or men? Why let an old fashioned propriety quash that thoroughly proper, in fact praiseworthy, reason to learn another language, namely to enlarge your range of social opportunities, to meet people?
Learning another language to enlarge your opportunity for making new connections is fun and rewarding. Financial and professional success have helped people live their dreams. So has learning another language!
There are blonde languages, by the way, and brunette languages. Why be bashful? Those partial to blondes are advised to learn Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, German, Dutch, and Hungarian. A good brunette list would include Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, and Arabic.
This advice is not offered flippantly. I find the social motive to learn other languages as valid as the commercial, the cultural, or any other. If your motives for learning another language are social, I would steer you to the language of a people you find maximally attractive with every bit as straight a face as I’d advise those interested in importing from Asia to learn Japanese and opera lovers to learn Italian. I would steer you to the language of a people you find maximally attractive with every bit as straight a face as I’d advise those interested in importing from Asia to learn Japanese and opera lovers to learn Italian.
You are not guaranteed love forevermore, but you are guaranteed novelty status. You’ll attract attention in your target community as “the one who went to the trouble of learning our language.” You’ll be invited, introduced around, and questioned thoroughly as to your reasons for studying their particular language. The less popular the language, the greater a celebrity you’ll be among its speakers. French is very popular, so you won’t have Paris at your feet, we’ve already agreed, even after your best rendered “Comment allez-vous?”, but Norwegians will want to burn arctic moss at your altar when after a meal you say “Takk for maten.” That means “Thanks for the food,” which non-Norwegians not only generally don’t know how to say, but also don’t realise it’s traditionally said as you leave the table of your host in Norway.
Native English speakers have more to gain from studying other languages than anybody else. Honour, love, cooperation, respect, advantage – they all shower down upon people in inverse proportion to their need to learn a language.
English is the most prominent language in the world. The Dutch, as one example, all seem to know four or five languages well upon graduation from high school, but (I am not trying to diminish their achievement) they have to learn other languages, beginning with English, to make their way in the commercial world. You can’t play that game with Dutch alone. Languages find their fair rate of exchange as currencies do. We who speak English get a lot more credit from the Dutch if we learn Dutch than they get from us just because they learned English. And so on around the world.
Learn that other language now, while there’s still time to enjoy the honours due those who don’t have to learn the other guy’s language but choose to do so anyhow. That time is rapidly running out. For the very first time in our history Americans are learning other languages not out of courtesy but out of necessity. That fact of life is so new that it’s not yet apparent to America or the world, so we still have a little more time to bask in the admiration of those who had to learn our language and who still believe we simply chose to learn theirs.
Something ennobling happens when you learn to communicate in more than one language. And it’s fun to watch the magic flash as you touch your word wand to the ears of those who’d never suspect you speak their language. It’s one more way of making friends. In big cities you’ll have many chances to find people who speak foreign languages.
But you can’t sally in and ambush strangers in their language even if their accent and appearance make it a sure bet. They’re probably proud of their accent free (or nearly accent free) English. The best way to avoid insulting them – so they can concentrate on loving you when you speak their language – is to say, before you venture one word of their language, “Your accent is beautiful. Are you from England?”
They will then proudly say, “No, I’m from Poland” (or wherever), and they will thereupon welcome your overtures.

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