For writing, Mandarin uses Chinese characters that are reportedly very difficult to learn and memorize, even for native children—and there are two sets of characters, “traditional” and “simplified,” which are basically what they sound like. Finally, Mandarin is a tonal language, which means that the way you say (or really, almost sing) the words can drastically change their meaning. We do this in English to communicate sentence structure sometimes—like the way you lift your tone to ask a question. Just imagine four distinctly different ways of doing that tone alteration for every single word you say, with the meaning of your words changing from something like horse (m) to mother (mā) depending on how you pronounce it. I underlined tonal language three times for effect.
Mandarin was going to be tough, that was for sure. It was by far the most daunting to me, not least because I knew so little about Chinese culture. I had never been to China, and I had no sense of what it was really like. Was the pollution that bad? Was the whole country really crowded? What did people do for fun? Were there lots of old temples or just skyscrapers? How did people live? In tiny apartments? Shared homes? Did they eat rice for breakfast?
All these details had no effect on learning the language, but not knowing the answers meant landing in a country where I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t even know what real Chinese food looked like. I had to imagine they weren’t actually eating sesame chicken and fortune cookies—a hunch I had because in every country I visited, “Chinese food” seemed to be interpreted differently. There were some consistent themes—soy sauce, rice, noodles—but other than that, the phrase seemed to be a cultural shorthand for anything exotic. In Serbia, “Chinese food” incorporated a lot of oregano. In Colombia it was salty and sweet.
I stepped back from my Wall of Languages. It was beginning to look a little like A Beautiful Mind meets The Beach: From this angle I could see the swimming pool below and the Lanna-style pool house just beyond my whiteboard brain dump.
It was a big project—that was for sure. Now the only question was this: How does one even begin to learn three languages to fluency?
Three
Being the obsessive reader that I am, I downloaded as many books on learning languages as I could find, searching for some clue as to how to proceed.
Bilinguals are exceedingly common. All it takes is two cultures to bump up next to each other, whether that’s through colonialism, occupation, or geography. Sometimes they are created through the process of trying to consolidate languages. In India, Hindi is the official government language, but regionally, there are hundreds of individual languages. Those languages are spoken in the home; Hindi is taught in the schools and used in movies and television. Voilà, you have a nation of bilinguals.
There’s a common misconception that being bilingual is a sign of intelligence or advanced education. Sometimes it is. But it doesn’t take any special education to learn a second language. You just have to be exposed to it and have a need to use it, and then your brain does the rest of the work. In theory you can artificially create this kind of situation. The Department of Defense has an intense language immersion program where they forbid English and just drill the target language until it takes effect. For the rest of us, there are second-language education programs that try to teach the language through a variety of methods, all of them imperfect when compared to growing up in a language-rich environment, but that could, in theory, work. I just had to pick the right technique.
I read the graduate textbook Language and Bilingual Cognition by Vivian Cook cover to cover and sent him an e-mail. Would he talk to me? He quickly got back to me with a yes and in fact, he wouldn’t mind doing a video chat. I sat down with the professor, who peered out at me from my computer screen from his office in the United Kingdom, a line of books visible behind him, his hair a shock of white. Professor Cook was one of the foremost respected second-language acquisition academics in the world, was the 2014 EUROSLA Distinguished Scholar, and has written dozens of textbooks. Plus he was charming. His eyes lit up when he talked about languages. I wanted to talk to Professor Cook about how to best learn a language and the concept of immersion.
The idea of learning a language by immersion was popularized by Stephen Krashen, a linguist and second-language acquisition expert who wrote several papers on the topic in the 1980s, most notably his 1982 paper, “Second Language Acquisition.” Krashen no longer gives interviews on the topic, so I wasn’t able to speak with him directly. Still, when it comes to second-language learning, Krashen’s theories dominate the field.
When I asked Cook about Krashen, he said, “The first thing that Krashen did was capture teachers’ imaginations. He said things that reflected their experience, of the classroom and second-language learning.”
Before Krashen, the conventional understanding of second-language learning was that it relied on four stages—speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Krashen made waves by contesting that assumption. He suggested that there are only two stages: acquisition and learning. Acquisition is the subconscious absorption of a language, which is how babies gain their first language. It’s often said that children are like sponges for new languages, and for Krashen, acquisition is just soaking in the language. For children, learning comes later, in the form of classroom education, and in second-language schools that’s the method they prefer. It’s studying the grammar, memorizing vocabulary lists, and learning to translate. Krashen’s theories were groundbreaking because he dismissed the speaking, listening, reading, and writing framework and instead broke it down into two major categories. We absorb, and we learn. That’s it. Often not at the same time. In fact, Krashen thought traditional rote memorization and grammar studies, long a basic staple of second-language learners, could actually hinder second-language learning. He argued that real understanding of grammar was intuitive and gained only through use and exposure (in other words, Krashen’s “acquisition”).
Krashen’s theory is a sexy one, to be sure. It deemphasizes traditional classroom education in favor of more immersive situations: listening to a native speaker, having conversations or interactions in the target language, watching movies. I wanted it to be true. I didn’t want to spend hours upon hours studying tedious grammar and drilling vocabulary by myself. I’d love to focus instead on making local friends and talking to them. But how could I know for sure which way was better? I asked Cook about it and he confirmed my fears:
“The problem is that there is no way to test it. It’s impossible to break down language learning into those two areas in a way that we can test. I worked on it with a group of graduate students and we couldn’t figure out a solution. That’s been the main criticism of Krashen in general. There’s no empirical evidence to support his claims, and Krashen has stopped defending them. Still, they are very popular.”
Over the years, I had seen countless ads for “immersive foreign language programs” in various countries. It’s a popular experience for tourists, and that’s the kind of program I did when I was in Guatemala a few years earlier, living with a Guatemalan family who spoke no English. My host mother would make me breakfast every morning and we’d talk about politics in Spanish. I’d go to the school and spend four hours a day one-on-one with my language tutor, and she would teach me some grammar, but completely in Spanish. We’d also walk around the town, go to the market, pick up lunch, and we’d chat the entire time in Spanish. By the end of the day my head would be throbbing and I’d collapse in my bed, exhausted, to meekly highlight words in my dictionary that I needed to practice for the next day. I wrote essays about my life in Spanish. I translated the newspaper. I talked to other students only in Spanish. And it worked. After just one month of immersion, and no classroom drilling or homework, I was conversational, I could get by. Was that the power of immersion or just a lot of work on my behalf?
I explained my plan to Cook, and finally asked the question I had wanted to ask all along. “Professor Cook, if you were in
my position, how would you learn these languages?”
He sat back. “If I were doing it seriously myself, I would do a combination of trying to find an environment where I had to use the language and at the same time studying the academic knowledge of the language.”
Okay. So the expert on second-language acquisition would do immersion plus instruction. That was good to know.
• • •
AFTER SPEAKING TO COOK, I reached out to a number of so-called polyglots, people who speak three or more languages. One in particular, a thirty-year-old German woman named Judith Meyer, had studied twenty languages and speaks twelve of them at an intermediate or advanced level, including my target languages of Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish. I asked her about her habits, the way she learns languages, via e-mail and I also read a few articles she had put together about her language learning history.
The first thing I noticed was that she was always studying—although not all the languages at once. She had been working on second languages since learning English in school, then Latin, French, Italian, and Mandarin all before turning eighteen. Once I started to unpack her language learning history, twenty languages came into perspective. She had been doing this for twenty years. At eighteen she won a scholarship to study Mandarin in China, and later she stayed with a family in Quebec who spoke French. She majored in computational linguistics and made it a large part of her life. She now organizes the largest meeting of polyglots in the world, the Polyglot Gathering. At any given time she was studying one new language, then reinforcing the others by talking with friends in that language, reading books, listening to radio, or watching movies.
Even within that context it surprised me that she would fit in between one and five hours of language study on average per day, with more on the weekends. The catch was that she wouldn’t study all the languages all the time—instead, she’d pick one to focus intensely on, and a few others to do maintenance work on.
When I asked her for advice for my project, the first thing she suggested was to get out of the beginner stage as quickly as possible. She told me, “It’s easy to forget a language completely if you pause while you’re at the beginner stage, but if you take a break from it while you’re at the intermediate or advanced stage, you won’t forget as easily. Real life has a way of interfering sooner or later, forcing you to pause your studies, so aim to be beyond the beginner stage by then. Work intensively at the beginning, using any opportunity to do another few minutes of your target language, and then you can relax once you’ve hit the intermediate stage.”
At the same time that I was speaking to polyglots about how they learned their languages, I was reading up on the second-language acquisition literature available. There were generally just three types: textbooks with a focus on learning one language, usually in a classroom; commercial products that promised fast results (like Rosetta Stone); and anecdotal writings by polyglots, the only ones who seemed to address how to combine multiple languages at the same time. Despite their lack of empirical research, I tended to trust the polyglots’ methods, because, to be blunt, they weren’t trying to sell anything.
Only 20 percent of Americans are bilingual, and many of those people inherited their second language from their parents. In the United States, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of interest in learning one new language, never mind three. The materials available even at the university level for multiple orders of languages were scant—historically, linguists focused on monolinguals and only recently (in the last twenty years) have bilingual studies become the norm. There simply wasn’t any work being done on speakers of higher multiples of languages. Even Noam Chomsky once said that in order to study the mind and cognition, you don’t want to muddy up the water with additional languages.
So it was with rapt attention that I read through Meyer’s polyglot guides and jotted down notes on how she approached her own language studies. She wrote that she didn’t take classes but would hire a tutor for occasional assistance, maybe once a week or every other week. I chuckled when she wrote this: “I hate Rosetta Stone. They are ineffective and are way overpriced, tricking people who don’t know any better.”
When Meyer is studying, she tackles the language from multiple directions: She reads each lesson from a textbook, reviews the grammar, does the exercises, memorizes the vocabulary, studies the dialogues, listens to the dialogue audio several times, and sometimes repeats it aloud. But she doesn’t get too hung up on any one step, and that’s only what she does at home alone. Then she goes out and finds as many supplemental materials as possible and talks to as many people as possible.
This did sound pretty different from Krashner’s total-immersion, no-textbooks method. But it had clearly worked for her. It was apparent to me that there wasn’t going to be a cookie-cutter approach to learning three languages that I could just apply. I was going to have to learn how to learn.
• • •
OUR THAI APARTMENT was getting crowded. My whiteboards competed for space with the notes and printouts I’d taped to the wall. I had purchased some Thai alphabet wall hangings—why not, I thought, maybe I’ll learn a little Thai while we’re here—but in the end, I was so distracted with my research that I barely looked at them. I had picked up some Mandarin language-learning books at the used bookstore, I had index cards outlining the history and timeline of modern linguistics starting at Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir and ending somewhere with researchers like Ellen Bialystok and Patricia Kuhl, who were looking at the effect of bilingualism on the brain (in the elderly and babies, respectively). These wouldn’t help me as I went about day-to-day language study, but it was interesting to read about their ideas and theories nonetheless.
Drew watched my tunnel vision with learned patience. After a few months of planning, reading, making lists, and crossing things off, I came up for air.
“Are you ready to go to Beijing?” I asked Drew. Cole was watching Thai cartoons whose characters sang about colors and the letters of the alphabet in cheery Thai that was unintelligible to me.
“Yes!” Drew grinned. “I can’t wait for winter.”
That week I had purchased our first winter jackets since leaving Boston, from a used clothing market in Thailand. My L.L.Bean coat cost $4 and no doubt had been discarded by a tourist traveling through, since Chiang Mai never dropped below fifty degrees.
“Okay, I think we’re ready. I have a plan,” I said, looking over my whiteboards for the millionth time.
“You always do.”
• • •
BEFORE WE LEFT, I pulled up Marco Polo’s book and biography. At seventeen, the son of an Italian merchant, Polo left home to see the world. He traveled overland to China, lived there for seven years, and then returned home at age twenty-nine. He didn’t have a guidebook, a plane ticket, or any idea what lay ahead. He later wrote about his journey in a book called Il Milione (The Million), or as it’s been adapted to English, The Travels of Marco Polo. That was seven hundred years ago.
Polo’s adventure was so epic that it inspired generations of explorers. Two hundred years later, Christopher Columbus would take a copy of Polo’s book across the Atlantic. It also generated its fair share of doubters, who in Polo’s lifetime nicknamed the book “The Million Lies,” as the content seemed so improbable. Consider this: A story we take for granted now, as cultural canon, seemed so far-fetched, so unlike anything Europeans had known before, that they doubted any of it was true.
Fast-forward to today and it’s still not easy to get to Beijing from Venice. There are no direct flights. But if you’re willing to have a layover in Germany or Belgium, you can get there in about seventeen hours. Not grueling enough? You can travel overland following the old Silk Road, although instead of merchant caravans, you’ll be on highways. You’ll cross from Italy into the Netherlands, to Germany, then into Turkey. You’ll officially cross from Europe into Asia in Istanbul, a city straddling both contin
ents, cut down the middle by the Bosphorus strait. From there you’ll travel across Syria, Iraq, Iran, central Asia, and finally China.
Such a trip today would be choked with logistical issues that simply didn’t exist in Polo’s day. Crossing international borders, getting the correct visas, importing a car if you’re driving, or arranging ground transportation, all require a level of skill, but one that is mostly bureaucratic. It speaks to our modern lives that today, replicating the most daring adventure in the last thousand years would start with reams of paperwork and waiting in line at various consulates. The world has not only been discovered, it’s been regulated; borders have been constructed, both legal and physical, and the travel industry has sprung up in every corner of the world, ready to take your credit card and give you a room and breakfast.
So what did intrepid travelers of yore do differently? They traveled slowly. They relied on locals. They adapted to the customs and ate the food. They left themselves at home and let the new place change them. If the travel bubble was the framework that held up my notions of self that allowed me to travel untouched as “Christine from America,” then to be successful, to learn these languages, I was going to have to step outside that comfortable framework.
I made one last call to Dr. Dan Everett, an American linguist and the dean of arts and sciences at Bentley College, to ask him about the line between culture and language. Everett wrote the book Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, an account of his many years spent traveling and living in Brazil with his family to study an Amazonian tribe of people known as the Pirahã. Everett was the first person to fully document the tribe’s language, learning the language the way travelers must have long before bilingual pocket dictionaries. He painstakingly noted every new word, the pronunciation and meaning as best he could cobble together from gestures and miming until he gained fluency in the language. It’s an incredibly rare thing, to learn a language blindly in this way, as an adult. As a linguist, he also had the academic understanding of how languages worked. I wondered if my ideas about learning a language would match Everett’s experience.
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