Can you give me a potted history of your language journey?
I’d learned French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit by the end of college. In graduate school, I added medieval literary languages such as Old Norse, Old French and Middle High German. Then, living in Berlin, I added more medieval Germanic dialects, Dutch and a bit of Frisian, Swedish and other Scandinavian languages, as well as Italian, Portuguese, Occitan and Catalan. After that, during an intensive 10-year “monastic” period in Korea, I learned Korean, Japanese, Mandarin and Classical Chinese, but also Russian, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Turkish, Swahili, Irish Gaelic, Modern Greek and most of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages.
I know you don’t like being asked how many languages you speak, but I’m afraid I have to…
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I don’t count; it’s very hard to say. Some languages are so close to each other it feels like cheating to count them separately. And what about my dead languages? Altogether I’ve studied maybe 60 or 70.
Where did your love of languages come from?
I was raised a monoglot but and I travelled around a lot as a child. Then there was my maternal grandmother. She was a German immigrant’s daughter in the Midwestern US, so she grew up bilingual in English and German, and somehow she fell in love with Spanish. So she taught herself Spanish as a young girl, then Portuguese. She became a professional translator and interpreter of four languages. I always knew I was destined to be a polyglot.
How do you motivate yourself to keep learning?
I approach polyglottery as a sport, as athleticism, mental exercise. Playing games is fun, right? There are many things out there that can make you happy but, take it from me, the most fun thing in the world is autodidactic learning.
Do you find at all that languages interfere with one another when you are learning them?
Absolutely not. When I am speaking one of my weaker languages, a stronger relative may sometimes jump in with vocabulary or structure, but that is more assistance than interference. However, when I was in my intensive learning phase and studying dozens of languages simultaneously, they never interfered with each other.
So your brain doesn’t feel full?
I don’t think the human brain can get full like we’d say “this box is full”. The problem is there are only so many hours in a day. Give me total freedom of time like I had during my intensive learning years, and I could conceivably do 100 languages. But these days that wouldn’t fulfil me as much as getting to read the literature of these many cultures. I want to take languages that have richer cultural literatures and really develop my knowledge of those. The brain is not full but the clock is full.
What drives you to learn new languages?
I think when most people hear an unknown language, their reaction is “oh, it’s foreign, I don’t understand it”, and then they shut it off. It becomes background noise. I hear it and think – what’s that, I want to identify it at least. It’s irritating to me if I can’t figure out what language the sound – or shape if you’re talking about script – belongs to. It’s basic curiosity.
Tell me about your key technique for learning a new language, and how it works
I call it shadowing. I shadow the audio of the target language by listening to it through earphones and speaking along with it as simultaneously as I possibly can. I’ve found the best way to do this is while walking outdoors as swiftly as possible, maintaining a perfectly upright posture and speaking loudly. My students find it a challenging form to learn, but I have found it to be very effective. It helps me to internalise, and in the end memorise, a representative chunk of the language. That’s a firm start. Of course, much study follows.
It’s said that people adopt cultural stereotypes when speaking a foreign language. Do you feel more romantic when speaking Portuguese?
No, I don’t.
But do thought patterns change with language?
While I don’t agree that you have a different personality when using different languages, it’s true that the structure of your thought sometimes has to be different. Because in Korean, for example, you don’t conjugate verbs according to person at all, but rather according to a wide variety of different “respect” levels that have to do with age, the nature of your relationship to the person you’re speaking with, and so on. Behind it all is a Confucian concept that if someone is six months older or younger than you, they have to be addressed differently than if they are the same age as you.
Do you cherry-pick favourite expressions?
Not consciously. Maybe it’s because I spent last summer in St Petersburg, Russia, but these days, if I like something, I say “eto khorosho” – that’s good, that’s nice. When I lived in Germany I made a conscious effort to block English, to switch my whole mental operating system over to German. After that, in Korea, I still automatically thought in German and I still often do. I curse in German. Scheisse.
People say German language structure is more precise. Does that make you less likely to blather on, like we do in English?
You can blather on in German! Your brain just functions in a different fashion: the verb’s going to come at the end and that’s that.
Has being a hyperpolyglot given you any insight into there being an overarching language of thought, a mentalese?
I do believe there is a mentalese. Sometimes I prohibit my mind from accessing other languages, to force it to stay in one, and under those circumstances my thought process will not stop when I don’t know a word, the way it would if I were conversing, but rather will only pause and then register the concept namelessly in mentalese before moving on.
“I don’t think the human brain can get full like we’d say ‘this box is full’”
Do you have any language ambitions left?
I’ve put a moratorium on new languages, because I’ve studied too many to take them all to a high level. So at this stage I’m trying to get to a higher level with Arabic and Russian, and in my reading of a few others. I consciously aborted Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and Swahili, all of which I studied to a very high degree. I have a peek every now and then to make sure there’s something still there, and there always is. Then there’s another set of languages that I didn’t consciously abort, but which I’m not getting to spend any time with. So if I had an ambition it’s not to learn Tibetan or Quechua, but to get my Persian or Hindi back.
Are there subsets of polyglots who want to become obscurists?
Yes. As the polyglot community grows, people want to stand out, so they take on novel challenges. The ultimate would be to learn a non-scripted language that no anthropologist has studied. On one hand, you would have no grammar, but on the other hand if you have a knack for it, if the native speakers accept you, you could go and live with them and it would be sink or swim.
Are your kids following in your footsteps?
Yes, they’re having a different experience to me. I speak French all the time with my sons, and I’m teaching them Latin, German, Spanish and Russian. I love my father very much, and he never encouraged me nor forced me to learn languages. I’m not that kind of father.
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Alexander Arguelles , in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. His research focus is on foreign language study skills
This article appeared in print under the headline “You had me at hallå”
