How to Learn Any Language 52
How to Learn Any Language 52
Indonesian
Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Consisting of hundreds of islands spread out over a South Pacific area the size of the United States, Indonesia is easily the largest country in the world about which the most other people in the world know the least. With enough mineral wealth in the ground to make it an economic superpower, Indonesia is still frequently confused with India or Polynesia.
Indonesian is the easiest major language in the world for a foreigner to learn. It was called Pasar Malay (“Bazaar Malay”) by the colonial Dutch who looked upon the Indonesian language as a kind of baby talk for servants and merchants. When Indonesia won independence in 1948, the ruler, Sukarno, did his best to take that unstructured language and graft some sophisticated grammar onto it to make it more regimented and thus difficult. He failed.
Indonesian still has nothing that will be regarded as grammar by anybody who’s done battle with Latin or Russian. There are suffixes and prefixes aplenty, neat and regular, that convert verbs into nouns and give verbs additional meanings and the like, but no inflections according to person, number, tense, aspect, or anything else.
Indonesian uses the Roman alphabet and is delightfully easy to pronounce. If you’ve ever studied any other language, you’ll marvel at how quickly and clearly you’ll understand and be understood.
Indonesian is closely related to Malayan, the language of Malaysia and Singapore, and gives you a head start in Tagalog, the major language of the Philippines.
Hindi and Urdu
The spoken languages of India and Pakistan, Hindi and Urdu, are so close that the true language lover is tempted to take the plunge even though both languages use different and, to us, unfamiliar scripts (Devanagari, and a mixture of Persian and Arabic). Though other languages abound on the Indian subcontinent, Hindi-Urdu united their respective
nations and whoever jumps in (despite the current lack of good learning materials) will be able to communicate with a population second only to that of China.
Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian
Despite the grammatical complexity and the relatively small pool of native speakers, an occasional adventurer is drawn almost masochistically to the three Finno-Ugric languages. If you were the hated kid in ninth grade who stayed after algebra class to beg the teacher to introduce you to calculus, they might want to try one of these.
Every word in all three languages is accented on the first syllable – every single word, names and all, giving those languages the sound of a pneumatic jackhammer breaking up a sidewalk. There are, in Finnish, fifteen noun cases in the singular and sixteen in the plural. Hungarian and Estonian aren’t far behind. And that’s the easy part!
People whose language you choose to learn often ask polite questions about why you wanted to learn their language. Let on to a Finn, a Hungarian, or an Estonian that you know a little bit of their language and you will not merely be questioned. You’ll be cross examined!
Swahili
Swahili enjoyed a surge of support beginning in the late 1960’s among young American blacks who wanted to reconnect to their African roots. Anyone who pressed on and mastered Swahili would today speak a language spoken by fifty million people living in central and eastern Africa, including the nations of Kenya and Tanzania in which Swahili is the national language. Swahili is a Bantu language, and once you learn it you can expect easy going when you decide to learn Kiganda, Kikamba, Kikuyu, Kinyanja, Kichaga, Kiluba, Kishona, Kizulu, Kikongo, and Kiduala, all of which are spoken over smaller areas in Africa south of the Sahara.
Swahili uses the Roman alphabet. The Say It In Swahili phrase book advises us not to be discouraged by words like kitakachonisahilishia, because Swahili grammar is mercifully regular and logical!