“Why should I forget it?” he retorted.
“It’s just a lot of stuff,” I said.
“If you study something deliberately and respectfully, it becomes part of you and it has a relationship to other things, so why should it slip away?” And he’s right—we remember things better when they are tied to other things, especially strong personal emotions, but also to basic drives (like sex). Yet Alexander said he uses no mnemonics to remember words or grammatical patterns except for the etymological connections that he already possesses.
Sitting in his library one afternoon, I saw a poignant exchange between Alexander and his eldest son, who had wandered in to watch us. Alexander had tried to coax him to stay before, sometimes by saying things about languages that struck me as uncomfortably earnest.
Alexander: You’re going to a Spanish school next year.
Son: No, and no, and no!
Alexander: How come you don’t want to speak Spanish?
Son: Because they’re hard . . . it’s hard.
Alexander: What about French and English?
Son: Not . . . as hard as that, but French is a little bit more harder than English.
Alexander: Why?
Son: Because when you’re starting to learn French you make mistakes, but English you don’t, but only a few. But you make a lot with French and other languages.
Alexander: So English is the natural language?
Son: Yeah.
The boy giggled, squirmed away, and ran out of the room; I laughed with his father. But the exchange had a sadness, pointing to a gulf between father and son that seemed destined to widen. Or maybe it was that he was pushing them to become devout followers of his religion when they still too young. We attribute great linguistic abilities to children, but the pursuit of the mystery of languages, like the pursuit of God, is for adults alone.
Alexander doesn’t get strident about it, but he doesn’t want me to talk about the brain, his or anybody else’s. You won’t find any answers there, he says. The few times I posed questions about talent, aptitude, or anything cognitive that he might have been born with, Alexander let me know that he doesn’t possess those things. I get the sense that he wants his discipline, his scholarly mien, and his incisive (if fusty) appreciations—his personality, in other words—to get the credit for his accomplishments. As far as the will to plasticity goes, focus on the will, he was saying, not on the plasticity.
Yet plasticity is what it looks like. Here he was in his early forties, still learning new things. He had adjusted his tasks to stretch his cognitive skills without overtaxing them. By reading and writing and depending on dictionaries when he needs to, he can make his use of languages the easier receptive, not productive, feat. Also, he can worry less about how his knowledge of English will interfere with the word order and other syntactic variations in other languages, because he’s not generating new sentences in real time. His shadowing exercises make him familiar with pronunciations, but they can’t prepare him for the etiquette of a culture. He’s not bothered by this gap in knowledge, though. He can do what’s expected in English, Korean, German, and French. If he spent enough time in a country, he said, he could compile what he knows and talk to people. He also reduces the challenges he faces by not striving for a native accent. Once, he snapped at “a coterie of critics who always surface to harp on the lack of a native accent (as if such a thing were desirable, let alone attainable).”
Alexander’s languages have made him more efficient at learning more languages. It’s commonly accepted that learning a second language within the same family is simpler, and this is true (it saves time with vocabulary, for instance). But Alexander and others with his capacities can take advantage of experience across families. People like him have honed the learning strategies that work for them and use them more often. Presented with a new language, he has an easier time grasping its sounds and its patterns, but he needed five or six languages before his hard work began paying off.
One person I met later claimed to have “cracked the code” of Arabic verbs, which are usually taught in the past tense first, because those are the shortest. Then people learn the present tenses, and with a lot of difficulty learn the exceptions. This person figured out that it’s easier to learn the present tense first, and then to derive the past. “I found very beautiful rules, almost without exceptions,” he exclaimed, “so that means the system had been upside down for centuries!” Another person had a system for learning the tones of Mandarin, Hmong, and Thai that involved practicing all of the possible two-tone combinations. He did this mainly to help in accurately perceiving and producing the tones; along with knowing each tone in isolation, you eventually have to know the transitions to and from every adjacent tone.
Just as they can become peculiarly invested in certain language structures, hyperpolyglots report emotional reactions to languages that drive or repel them. Alexander said he doesn’t like the way Mandarin sounds, so it was easy for him to stop working on it. From a woman who’d majored in four languages in college and went on to serve as a military interpreter in Russian, I heard that she had been unable to learn Arabic during her deployment in Iraq because it was the enemy’s language. A man reported that in middle school he’d chosen German over French, which he perceived as a “sissy” language, a perception that stayed with him for decades.
Neither are all parts of the grammar of a language equally friendly. Christopher, the “polyglot savant,” got stumped as readily as normal speakers by the meaning of a word in a language invented by researchers (the word meant something different depending on where it was placed and whether it was attached to the third word of a sentence or appeared in a sentence’s third clause). The hyperpolyglot who “cracked” Arabic said that Russian verbs had stumped him. As in many languages, these verbs have two forms, one for finished action (the perfective), one for unfinished action (the imperfective). In Russian the rules for perfective and imperfective are complex, with many exceptions. He felt you’d have to be brought up in a Russian family to get the verbs right. The great Mezzofanti himself suffered a nervous breakdown after struggling with Mandarin Chinese in Naples and lost every language he knew except his mother tongue, Bolognese.
Does Alexander have superior analytical abilities? He won’t even speculate. On such questions, he seemed bizarrely preoccupied with what it would tell about language learning more broadly. Once I tried telling him about research on a small group of accomplished adult learners of Dutch and the factors that contributed to their success. At first he listened respectfully, then he stopped me. “It’s just this teeny tiny group of people. How is this going to help the other people who are studying Dutch?” I enumerated some of what exceptional language learning could provide, but he didn’t want to change his mind, for fear he’d have to admit some biological gift not of his making.
I regarded him for a moment, then took up a thought and speared him with it: Speak, brain, I wanted to lean close and whisper, tell me the secret thing that’s in you, tell me what drives you. You’ve traced the human languages, each one a richly layered symphony, to the place where they become the simplest of hummable tunes. And you’ve looked in the eye of the Ur-language that lies buried in our heads and radiates its timeless mystery. And yet, when asked why you can do what you do, you cannot say one syllable! Speak, brain!
If Alexander didn’t entertain my interest in his cranium’s contents, he was downright discouraging when it came to my interest in Ziad Fazah. Clearly he disapproved of the way Fazah had sullied polyglottery with spectacle. Or so he perceived it. A couple of days into my visit, he revealed that when he lived in Beirut, he found out things about Fazah that he’d never revealed to the polyglot forum. Fazah had said he’d learned his many languages from sailors, but “there just aren’t that many sailors,” Alexander said. “Are there Azerbaijani sailors walking down the street in Beirut? You just don’t find them.”
Fazah also claimed to have gained notoriety among local diplomats
. Thirty years later, no one in Beirut had ever heard of Fazah, Alexander said. You’d think that someone who had made that sort of splash would have been better known. “I had some acquaintances who were journalists, and I asked them to look in archives there over the past couple of decades and see if there had been any reports,” he said. “They couldn’t find anything.”
“Whatever else is going on, there is one patent lie,” he added, “that he got the materials that he needed to do this from the public library in Beirut. There was no public library in Beirut when he would have been living there. The resources were not available. I think the whole thing is a Borgesian fiction,” he concluded. I thought, to be honest, all of you could have been imagined by Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote about people with perfectly accurate memories who are crippled by remembering, and about an infinite library of Babel that contains translations into all languages of every book that had ever been and would be written. A man who knew every language ever spoken and invented yet could say nothing to anyone? Seems like a quintessential Borges character. So was the case of one polyglot judging another polyglot, not by going head-to-head with languages, but by circumstantial evidence.
He told me about a blogger named Ryan Boothe, who had actually gone to Brazil and met Fazah. “He believes in Fazah,” Alexander said. That’s interesting, I thought. Was hyperpolyglottery a matter of belief and not fact, in the same way that one can continue to believe in Bigfoot or UFOs? Later, Boothe told me that he didn’t believe that Fazah speaks fifty-nine languages fluently, but, as he said, that’s not the point: “It’s not that he speaks fifty-nine languages fluently or that he doesn’t speak any languages at all.”
He added, “To be frank, those who claim to speak dozens of languages are being misleading unless they qualify their abilities with phrases like, ‘I’m fluent in three, conversational in twenty, and can read another thirty quite comfortably.’ Conversely, it would be nice if people were a little better informed and understood that speaking a foreign language is a skill much like playing the piano. Once you’ve acquired the skill it’s actually not too hard to reacquire it after years of neglect.”
Boothe had offered to test Fazah, to which Fazah at first agreed, as long as he could make some money at it, but then they fell out of touch, and Fazah again disappeared.
From afar, the hyperpolyglot is a glowing example of the sort of human being who, in myth, all humans once were and whom we should all aspire to be again: someone who builds towers in hopes of encountering the divine.
Then see this figure up close, as I did. See him sitting in his sunlit study. See his spreadsheets, his tapes, his books double-stacked on the shelves, and his living room empty, his refrigerator bare. Alexander may be a language god, a kind of archi-polyglot, but the truth about his life is far from the divine. His family was traumatized by their narrow escape from Lebanon. Alexander taught for a few semesters at a small college shut down by the financial crisis of 2008, and he’d cashed in some long-term investments to pay daily expenses. When I met him, he was living on unemployment checks and Korean translation work.
As for me, I felt abandoned by him in the labyrinth of this topic, since he wouldn’t help me with Fazah and wouldn’t agree to a test of his language aptitude. Then, after visiting him twice and transcribing hours of our interviews, we developed a jokey relationship, and I came to consider him a holy man. Others do yoga; Alexander does grammatical exercises. He tracks his linguistic progress through the hours as saints once cataloged their physical self-sacrifices. And like a linguistic whirling dervish, he inspires by the excess of his ecstasy, a man who doesn’t need schools or corporations but will make a place, a home, for hyperpolyglots. No wonder his YouTube channel has thousands of subscribers, and his online friends, many of them hyperpolyglot hopefuls, respect him and seek his pronouncements: they want to touch him, and thereby gain a piece for themselves of what he represents. I was not immune.
Alexander, the hyperpolyglot guru, asked me, “What language do you want to work on? We could work on something while you’re here.” He radiated optimism that I could, in fact, do this.
“I’ve done Spanish and Mandarin before,” I said. “Hindi’s caught my eye, for some reason.”
“You can definitely do all of that,” he said.
I hadn’t told him about Russian yet.
A couple years back, I felt that my brain needed a certain type of exercise I knew I could get from studying a language, which had to be a language I could read. Russian fit the bill, and I signed up for a class at the community college, excited to be there and to work hard. The teacher, a part-timer, wasn’t a native speaker. He was a short man in his sixties, probably someone who’d dropped out of a doctoral program and been hired for his Muscovite accent. I nicknamed him Mr. Bombastic.
I’d floated into the class on a cloud of good feelings; I was doing my duty as a global citizen, broadening my mind, becoming more sensitive to foreign cultures. Quickly the experience soured; instead of Russian, I learned speechlessness. There we were in the early twenty-first century, reciting unlikely sentences from a book and pointing at pictures. Is it an elephant? Yes, it is an elephant. Sixty years have gone into researching foreign-language pedagogy and second-language acquisition, and none of it had touched Mr. Bombastic, who taught Russian grammatical rules like this: write a rule on the board, give a few examples, make students recite. Voilà. Then he’d move on to the next rule. He taught like a jaded stripper. In violation of other precepts, he piled reading and writing in Cyrillic print and cursive on top of grammar and vocabulary work, as if this were a premed weed-out class. Even the girl who had lived in Moscow was crushed into silence. Good feelings evaporated.
Later, I would meet with Andrew Cohen, an applied linguist at the University of Minnesota, who also happens to be a hyperpolyglot—he’s studied thirteen languages as an adult and learned four of them to a very high degree—and he sympathized. “We’re force-fed a lot of rules that are useless. Rules for certain kinds of articles we use in English. I know that Asian students have long lists with fifty-seven rules, and they memorize whether to use ‘the’ or ‘a.’ Native English speakers just know what it is. But why waste your time and energy on that?
“When I was studying Japanese, we had a lesson on buying a tie in an elegant department store in Tokyo, and we had to memorize for the test the words for ‘subdued,’ ‘gaudy,’ ‘plaid,’ ‘polka dot,’ and ‘striped.’ In my mind I’m going, Why? When I buy a tie I never talk to anybody—I just go to the rack and take it. Why are they making me learn this stuff? There was another lesson on talking to my doctor about what kind of diarrhea I had. I said, if I’m that sick, I’m going to an American doctor, or at least someone who speaks English. When I’m sick, it’s not time for a language lesson.” Talking to Cohen and other hyperpolyglots, I realized that, unlike me, they can learn no matter what the teacher’s method.
I lasted as long as I did being tortured by Mr. Bombastic because I adapted the class to my own needs—I stopped writing homework in cursive, for instance, because I’m too old for penmanship. What would he do, fail me? I didn’t need a grade. It also helped that I sat in the back row with a sprite of a high school language nerd named Elizabeth who was taking the class for fun. When Bombastic insisted that we speak in complete sentences, “in good Russian,” as if Russians only speak in complete sentences, Elizabeth muttered, “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”
I should have quit but didn’t. I wanted to be studying Russian. So I invented some games to make the best of it—which, I realize now, is what a prisoner does. It’s common sense that when you teach the words for family members, you ask students to bring in photos of their real families, to tap into one’s emotions as a pedagogical aid; I’ve taught it myself that way, when I taught English in Taiwan. Because Bombastic did not exert such effort, we sat pointing to imaginary photos. This is my mother, she is a doctor. This is my father, he is an architect.
The best solution:
outdo the absurdity. “This is my mother,” I said to Elizabeth, pointing at an imaginary photo, reciting aloud to the class. “She is a woman who works on asphalt.”
“So is mine!” Elizabeth said.
“This is my father,” I said. “He is a veterinarian of elephants.”
“So is mine!” Elizabeth said.
Some classmates chuckled. Most were astonished. Bombastic let fly a smirk. “In the old Soviet Union, people had to meet certain production quotas. These two,” he said, “are like the guy who goes over the quota.”
Bombastic wasn’t happy with my customizations. One evening, he gave us a practice exam that didn’t test what we’d been studying, and for me this was the final straw. Furious, I told him the exam wasn’t fair, and he accused me, incorrectly, of slacking off, as if I were a freshman punk. We almost came to blows in the front of the classroom. He scurried away, and I never went back. What I am left with is the confidence that if I should find myself in Moscow, I will be able to correctly identify an elephant.
“What do you want to work on?” Alexander asked.
“Hindi,” I said.
Hindi it was.
At a nearby park, we met up with a lanky Berkeley undergrad named Justin, who had recently been exasperating Alexander, his tutor, by not shadowing as prescribed. So the polyglot sent him on a looped bit of path running down into the shade, then back up into the sun, past young women sunning in the grass. Part of the advantage of shadowing in a park is that people are going to stare, so you get used to it. The problem is, Alexander joked, that in Northern California, to get people to stare, you have to be really strange.
After several circuits, Alexander ambled next to Justin, encouraging him to shout more “Italianly.” As the two men orbited by, shouting and gesturing dramatically, as if they were declaiming opinions in the midst of some vehement argument, I spoke to one sunbather, who had wandered down the hill.
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