How to Learn Any Language 50
How to Learn Any Language 50
Japanese
Like Chinese, Japanese conversation is fairly easy, but the written language is complicated. In wartime, America turned out interpreters in Japanese and Chinese at a satisfactory rate by going straight for the spoken language and ignoring the written language completely. You may be tempted to do the same.
Certainly you can prioritise the ability to speak and understand over the ability to read and write, but I urge you to undertake serious study of the written language and continue steadily. If speech is to be your “hare,” let writing at least be your “tortoise.”
Written Japanese is not as difficult as you might fear. Japanese uses several thousand characters borrowed from the Chinese, but it uses them in a different and more limited way that makes them easy to learn. The characters are used along with two syllabaries, sets of simple written symbols, each of which represents not one single letter but a complete syllable.
Japanese has no tones to worry about, and Japanese grammar involves the learning of certain speech patterns more than changes in verbs, nouns, and adjectives.
Japanese has a clarity missing from Chinese. Learn a Japanese word from your book or cassette and your Japanese friend will understand it at your first attempt to use it.
The commercial advantages of learning Japanese are obvious and on the rise. But even if your Japanese never reaches a level of proficiency enabling you to do business in Japanese, your Japanese host and associates will appreciate your efforts. They, after all, had to learn English. You did not have to learn Japanese. Yet.
Arabic
Arabic is elusive, guttural, and rewarding. Arabic script, written from right to left, writes each letter differently depending upon whether it occurs at the beginning, the middle, or the end of a word. Learn it, however, and you’ll be welcome from the North Atlantic coast of Africa clear through the Middle East to the borders of Iran and Pakistan. Arabic is also the religious language studied by millions of Muslims around the world whose native languages are not Arabic. The Arab population of the United States is growing rapidly. You can hear Arabic on the streets and deal in Arabic in the shops of places like Dearborn, Michigan, where there is a substantial Arab population.
Your investment in Arabic is likely to gain in value when Israel and the Arab states achieve a settlement allowing for commerce and development to replace a half century of open warfare.
Hebrew
Hebrew is one of the more difficult languages, and the numerical incentives for tackling it are not great because Hebrew is spoken only in Israel and in small communities of Israelis in America and other Western countries. Until recently the teaching of Hebrew was illegal in the Soviet Union, but classrooms are overflowing now across the country as Jews prepare to emigrate to Israel or assert their Jewishness inside the Soviet Union. Hebrew is spoken wherever Jews worship around the world, and there is a surge of interest in learning Hebrew among young Americans who were born Jewish even though they may not have had a strong Jewish upbringing.
If you’re not Jewish and choose to learn Hebrew anyhow, you will set loose waves of appreciation among Jews grateful to outsiders willing to go to that much trouble.
Once you learn the Hebrew alphabet, you’ll be in command of virtually the same alphabet used by Yiddish, a language based on fifteenth century low German that was spoken by millions of East European Jews before Hitler’s extermination and is still understood in a surprising number of places. It’s also the alphabet used by Ladino, the “Spanish of Cervantes” that became the “Yiddish” of the Jews of Spanish origin who scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean after the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition. There are few language thrills that can match that of an American who learned the Hebrew alphabet in Hebrew school looking at a printed page in a language he didn’t know existed (many Jews themselves are totally unaware of the existence of Ladino) and discovering he can read it and understand it with his high school Spanish!
Greek
Modern Greek has a grammar slightly less glorious than that of its ancient civilisation. In difficulty, Greek falls somewhere between French and Russian. Each verb has two forms and verbs change according to person, number, and tense. The future tense is almost as easy as it is in English – the word tha serving the role of our will. Adjectives agree with their nouns according to gender (three of them) and number.
Greek enjoys a leftover prestige, not only from ancient times but from the not long vanished tradition of the scholar who prided himself on being at home in Latin and Ancient Greek. Every five minutes during your study of Greek you’ll be reminded of our debt to the Greek language. Zestos means “hot” (“zesty”), chronos means “time” or “year,” “number” is arithmo, when you want your cheque in a restaurant you ask for the logariazmo (as in “logarithm”), the Greek word for “clear” describing weather is katharos (as in “catharsis”), “season” is epohi (“epoch”), and so on.
Greek may be the language of one small European country only, but there are thriving Greek communities throughout the Middle East, Egypt, and other parts of Africa, and the United States. Enterprising Greeks have carried the language around the world.