How to Learn Any Language 40
FORMS OF ADDRESS
English is deceptively easy in forms of address. Everybody in second person singular and plural is you. Your spouse is you. Your four year old child is you. Your interior decorator is you. The President of the United States is you. Your cocker spaniel is you. In almost every other language, speakers differentiate, sometimes sharply, between the FAMILIAR form of address (French tu, German du) and the FORMAL form (French vous, German Sie). The usual rule is that you use the familiar form of address only when addressing (talking to) intimates, children, and animals. All others take the formal form.
There comes a moment in the affairs of humans when someone who started out formally as a stranger or casual acquaintance becomes, with time and congeniality, so familiar that the formal form of address seems almost stilted and even offish or insulting. In some countries – Norway, for instance – the tension is broken by the suggestion Skal vi drikke dus? (“Shall we drink to a new era in our friendship?” one in which we’ll address each other as the familiar du rather than the formal De?) That’s a speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace moment in the relationship. If there’s no objection, the two friends take a glass and toast their graduation from formal to familiar with their drinking arms intertwined!
DIMINUTIVES
A charming trick almost every language has is this “shrinking” of someone or something you like by the use of diminutives. The diminutive of Charles is Charlie. The diminutive of William is Billy. The diminutive of star is starlet. The diminutive of pig is piglet or piggy. The Olympics of diminutives is won hands down by the Italians, who have literally dozens of different forms of the diminutive, each conveying its own special nuance of feeling for the noun undergoing the shrinking.
IDIOMS
Idioms are expressions that may not make sense but have clear and specific meanings anyhow because the speakers of the language have “agreed” that, rules notwithstanding, those particular words shall have a particular meaning. An idiom has a meaning that cannot be derived from the conjoined meaning of its elements.
In English, we say “Let’s take a walk!” What are you taking? In Spanish, that becomes “Damos un paseo,” which literally means “Let’s give a walk!” What are you giving? Neither makes much sense but both are correct. Both are idioms.
Some English idioms, at random, are: at first blush, at one’s wits end, axe to grind, beat around the bush, break the ice, chip off the old block, crack a joke, fit as a fiddle, forty winks, get in one’s hair, give a piece of one’s mind, keep the wolf from the door, red tape, and with flying colours.
All languages have idioms. They’re fun and enriching and they illustrate differences and similarities among cultures. How philosophically distant is the Norwegian who says about a dim witted person, “Han er darlig utstyrt i oeverst etasje” (“He’s poorly equipped on the top floor”), from the American Southerner who says, “He’s three pickles shy of a barrel”?
Learn to diagnose idioms in English and make sure you never try to translate them literally into any other language. If you try to tell a Spanish friend, “I’m on a roll,” do not say “Estoy en un panecillo.” He will look under your feet for signs of crumbs without any comprehension that what you really meant to express is that things are going extremely well for you at the moment.
Likewise, be attentive to idioms as they come at you in other languages. The German who tells you to “break your neck and your leg” is really wishing you luck. So is the Italian who seems to be sending you “into the mouth of the wolf”!
The foregoing is by no means the whole of the mechanical vocabulary you’ll need to conquer every other language on earth. You’ve got some dandies waiting for you inside whatever language you choose to tackle. In French and other languages you’ll meet the double negative. In Finnish, it’s worse: you’ll meet the inflecting negative! German will be watching to see if you can handle its double infinitive. Russian can’t wait to hit you with its perfective and imperfective verb aspects. Gender in Hebrew is so complex you have to know the sex of a dog before you can command it to quit biting you.
These are not monsters in the woods. The lovely people who speak all those languages descend from people who found every single one of those Bermuda Triangles of grammar utterly logical and useful, and they’ve never felt the need to change.
The old school grammarians, the ones who assassinated the desire of young Americans to learn foreign languages, were right in their insistence that knowledge of grammar is vital.
They were wrong, however, to insist that all grammar must be learned here and now before we take our first step into conversation and the fun of learning another language.
Again, grammar is best attacked from the rear. When you read the rule in your grammar book you may say to yourself, “Oh, so that’s the reason I’ve been saying it that way all along, the way I learned from my phrase book, my cassettes, my newspaper, and my Italian friend at the pizzaria!”
When you come upon an explanation of a grammatical wrinkle and you don’t understand all the terms in English, pick up a dictionary (not a language dictionary, but an English only dictionary). You’ve got to know something of your own language before you can efficiently learn another.