I've learned 20 languages: what keeps me going?

Language acquisition, as opposed to the deliberate learning of languages,

language acquisition is a natural process.

And we learn through input from language content that.

We are able to absorb in some way.

That's how we transfer a language, which we don't have inside us.

We bring it into us.

But in order for that to work, there have to be some linkages, some connections.

And today I want to talk about some of those connections and talk a bit

about how I learned languages and what were the key connections, dare

I say links, that brought me to the different languages that I have learned

to different levels throughout my life.

The first language that I deliberately sought to acquire

was French, which I had at school.

And so I had a lot of exposure and I, we did grammar exercises and drills, but I

couldn't speak until I had a professor.

And I've told this story before at McGill university, professor Rabotin.

Who made French civilization interesting to me.

There was a link there.

There was a connection.

As a result, I ended up going to France.

I studied there for three years.

I hitchhiked around France.

So there was a connection.

Now it's easy to then connect from French to a neighboring language,

neighboring in the sense of.

Vocabulary and structure, which of course was Spanish.

So with my French knowledge, I went to Spain, hitchhiked around in Spain.

I would be sitting in a car with a driver or sitting in a truck with a truck driver.

And I would have to speak the whole time.

So the language was coming at me all the time.

And even if I didn't quite understand what they were saying, I would say

something to keep the conversation going and I would acquire the language.

So that connection there was from.

French to Spanish and my hitchhiking took me to Italy and I tried out my

Spanish and I've got Italian back.

And through that connection, I built up a bit of a sense of Italian.

Ultimately though, and I think this is an important point.

We don't just fall into languages.

A lot of effort is needed to learn languages, even related or neighboring

languages, so I can remember buying a Linguaphone series, or maybe I got

a second hand for Italian and listen to it over and over and over again,

because I couldn't treat Italian as just some kind of form of Spanish.

It's a different language and it has a lot of idiosyncrasies of its own.

Later on, I was to learn Portuguese to a certain level and Romanian.

I'll explain how I got there.

But the thing about the Portuguese, which is so close to Spanish in vocabulary, in

fact, for the longest time, I couldn't.

I couldn't even identify it as Portuguese before I started studying it.

It sounded to me more like Russian because the Portuguese, they kind of

chew their vowels like the Russians do.

So it's not obvious that connection is there.

It can be a source of attraction, but it doesn't mean you can just expect

to learn the related language easily.

So the next group of languages that I went to was Asian languages.

Now by Asian languages, I'm referring to Chinese, therefore Mandarin and

Cantonese, and Japanese and Korean.

Now I learned Mandarin.

I had a lot of trouble with Cantonese.

I had to devote myself to learning Cantonese, even though the vocabulary

is extremely similar, but the pronunciation is quite different.

The writing system is the same.

Essentially Mandarin speakers tend to use simplified more, Cantonese

speakers tend to use simplified.

Traditional more, but the difference between the two is not very great, but

then it ended up that I moved to Japan.

But here again, related languages only in the sense that they're

part of the same culture, broadly speaking, and Japanese uses Chinese

characters, but the underlying language of course is quite different.

However, the attraction for me to learn Japanese is that.

Is that I was living there.

The attraction to learn Mandarin was that I was sent there to learn Chinese

by my employer, the Canadian government.

But while living in Japan, I said, you know, Korea isn't far away.

Uh, it also uses Chinese characters.

It should be easy for me.

So that was again, the connection to Korean.

I have never managed to do as well in Korean as I had hoped.

Again, confirming the fact that even though there are similarities

and there's a lot of shared vocabulary, it's still difficult.

Different language.

And it takes a lot of effort, a lot of listening, a lot of reading, and

eventually a lot of speaking in order to become proficient in that language.

Similarly, you know, Vietnamese, I visited Vietnam with my wife and some friends,

and it also has, I gather a lot of Chinese words in their language, but I got

nowhere, I grabbed a phrase book before going and I wasn't able to say anything.

So related languages can be a source of attraction.

It doesn't mean it's a slam dunk.

To learn those languages.

So after the Asian languages, which are grouped as Asian because they're,

they share vocabulary, they're geographically close to each other.

But they are part of different language systems.

Then I went to the Slavic system and my link or the connection there was

that as a teenager, I had read The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, Anna Karenina.

It seems so exotic, you know, so I said, geez, I should learn that language.

Plus I want to do it without this tremendous focus on grammar that seems

to be the style in teaching Russian.

And so I learned Russian through a lot of input, again, connections, for example,

even, you know, movies, videos that I couldn't really understand that well.

It increased that connection, that emotional tie.

I still remember Justoki Romance, which was one of the first, uh, Russian

movies that I saw, and it was, you know, the vogue, uh, 19th century.

It was so romantic and exotic.

And that was that connection again, that pulled me towards the language.

Similarly, I discovered this radio station, Ekho Moskvy, which had

all kinds of audio and text content on it that I could listen to daily

and learn about politics in Russia.

While improving my Russian after that, because of course, Russian is

a Slavic language and my father and my parents were from Czechoslovakia.

I said, you know, I should learn Czech.

And I discovered this wonderful radio program called Tolki Českominulosti,

which talks about the history of the Czech lands, you know, Bohemian Moravia.

And, uh, eventually the Austro Hungarian empire.

And, but even going back to the, uh, Holy Roman empire, which was largely, of

course, different parts of Germany and Austria and, uh, having visited Prague,

of course, it's all meaningful to me.

And so I went from Russian to Czech because there's a

connection there, obviously.

And while I was into my Russian period, then we had the events

in, in Ukraine of 2014 and someone directed me towards Schuster Live,

a TV program, uh, in Ukraine.

At that time, the Ukrainians tended to speak 50 percent of the time in Russian,

50 percent of the time in Ukrainian.

I couldn't understand the Ukrainians.

Uh, of course I have tremendous sympathy for what they are trying to do to achieve

genuine independence for their country.

So then I went and learned Ukrainian.

So that's still staying within that Slavic range, that connection from Russian to

Czech, then to Ukrainian, and then to Polish, because a lot of the vocabulary in

Ukrainian is similar to Polish vocabulary.

And of course, Ukraine was under Poland for a long, long time.

And, uh, culturally they were connected, uh, until.

A range of historical events, uh, changed the course of Ukrainian

history, at least for parts of Ukraine.

But with Ukraine and Poland now, we're in the Austro Hungarian empire again.

So that kind of directs me towards Romanian and, which was part

of the Austro Hungarian empire.

And I was doing business in Romania, so I decided to learn Romanian, but it's of

course connected to the Romance languages.

And it was quite easy to learn for that reason.

Although it has some grammatical structures that are different.

One of the interesting grammatical structures in Romanian is this sort of

double conjugation, in other words, in English, we use the infinitive, I want

to go, in Romanian they say, I want, I go, but they do that as well in Greek.

They do it in apparently in other Balkan languages.

So that's kind of interesting.

So that was a connection, sort of a Balkan connection.

And once we're in the Balkans, then with my wife, we were in Croatia.

We also went to Crete.

And of course, uh, not only was Venice a part of the Austro Hungarian empire,

but of course, the Venetians were very active, uh, in the old Adriatic.

So in Crete, they have these wonderful towns that are Venetian towns, but

they speak Greek and I learned my Greek for the period that we were in Crete.

Now we're getting closer to Turkey because even when we were in Croatia,

we went up to Sarajevo and the Turkish influence there is very evident in

their buildings and the structures.

There was lots of mosques and that kind of thing.

And, uh, there are still, uh, Turkish speakers in, in the Balkans.

So now we move to the other side of the, uh, Hellespont.

Because I visited Jordan, I got interested in Arabic.

And so I'm learning Arabic.

And then I decided to learn Farsi, which it shares the writing system, shares about

15 percent of the vocabulary with Arabic.

But it's a Indo European language.

And of course, once you start studying the history of that region, you

see the extent to which even in the Caliphate, the Umayyad Caliphate,

and more so in the Abbasid Caliphate, the Persian speakers and the Turks

who were more of the soldiers.

We're very influential in those governments.

And eventually they would go off and form other, you know, countries.

And the Turks were very influential in establishing certain, uh,

you know, Iranian dynasties, the Safavid dynasty, for example.

And if we venture further afield into central Asia, we see this

mixing of Farsi and Turkish in Samarkand and Bukhara and so forth.

And if you want to further afield, we'll get to the Uyghurs who at

one point had a powerful state.

And, uh, even in China during the Tang dynasty, Turkish soldiers

and generals and, uh, and Persians were very influential.

And of course, Buddhism came through the Silk Road.

So.

Everything connects, it's connections.

And when we learn the language, we learn new words and we connect them to words

that we already know, which is why I only ever use a bilingual dictionary.

I cannot understand how people can learn a language using a monolingual

dictionary, where they see explanations in the language they're trying to

learn, where they're inevitably going to find many words they don't understand.

Connected to words, you know, Connected to feelings you have connected to memories

you have when you go to speak, you have to connect what you would like to say

your utterance has to connect somehow to words and structures that you have in

memory that you can pull out and start using neurons connect with each other.

So it's all about connections.

And actually, when we.

Created link, the reason we call it link, not link you.

And why we went with that word was that to me, connections,

linkages, they are, that is such a big part of, of language learning.

And so I just was thinking about that, that the other day, and I thought it

would be kind of interesting to take you through a bit of a walk through some of

the languages I have learned, how they connect, why they connect and where it

helped me and where it didn't help me.

So there you have it.

And, uh, I look forward to your comments.

Thank you.

Bye.