The Hyperglot Blog

Now this is something that I taught myself from music when I was trying to learn tones in Vietnamese many, many years ago. I would take my hands and direct the way that the tones should rise, fall, punctuate, break and what not. I would over exaggerate the pronunciation, slowly at first, then progressively faster. But each time I would use my right hand to “direct” my voice as a conductor would direct an orchestra or a brass and woodwinds band. This helped in my learning tones in Vietnamese quite well. In fact, I would say remarkably well. I sometimes try to use a similar approach when learning non-tonal languages as well but the problem with that is I don’t seem as naturally inclined to do it. (Maybe I should consider ways to reverse this?)

Now I came across an old article in the Science Daily where I see that a Psychology researcher, then at the University of Rochester but now is at the University of Iowa, Dr. Susan Wagner Cook, found that students who gesture when doing algebraic problems retained far more of their lessons three weeks later than students who did not gesture.

Why does this not surprise me at all?

I believe that these findings of Dr. Cook are definitely related to why the language shadowing technique, which Alexander Arguelles so believes in, and the sign language used in the fluency game of the Language Hunters seems to work so well. With anecdotal evidence one can see that using gestures and body movement while studying can help you not only to retain languages, but from my own experience to more rapidly learn languages as well. And even though from what I am reading about this study, while it focuses on teachers in classrooms, I think it works just as well, if maybe not even better with the autodidactic learners (like myself).

Actually, I don’t know how I missed this research as I try to keep up on things like this. The story was even covered in the Washington Post. And the next year a similar study, entitled Gesture Gives a Hand to Language and Learning: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology and Education, which was focused specifically on foreign language acquisition was also published by three psychologists.

Oh, and if you would like to read specifically about Wagner Cook’s research you can find it at the National Institute of Health’s public access section of the NIH website.

I find this all fascinating and you’d better bet that I plan to experiment with this personally a bit more often now. And I will report on what I find out.

One of my all time favorite authors is Ukrainian born Pole Joseph Conrad (née Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski). This immigrant to the United Kingdom, who became one of the greatest writers in the English language of his time, was a story teller extraordinaire in a language that was originally foreign to him. I always held the strong opinion that his mastery of English story telling was unparalleled in his day. I recently finished Gaspar Ruiz and thoroughly enjoyed it. I have also read Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and The Secret Agent. Today I was reading through some of his letters in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: 1908 - 1911. In a letter to the Abbé Joseph de Smet, a Belgian from Ghent who translated Conrad’s work Nostromo into French and wrote the first biographical piece about the author in the French languages. Apparently wrote to Conrad asking about how Joseph had learned English, though we unfortunately don’t have the letter from de Smet to be sure. When I read the mid-section of this letter I was a bit flabbergasted. Just last night I was speaking with a new member of a polyglot group that I belong to telling him how I admired Joseph Conrad’s prose and that it was so hard to imagine the man having not learned English until he was an adult (though by his own account, in contrast to his expansive writing abilities, he did carry a heavy accent with him throughout life).

I want to share the quote from Conrad to de Smet here. Keep in mind that Joseph Conrad was born in 1857 and only arrived on English shores in 1878:

“My first English reading was the Standard newspaper and my first acquaintance by the ear with it was in the speech of fishermen, shipwrights and sailors of the East Coast. But in 1880 I had mastered the language sufficiently to pass the first examination for officers in the merchant service, including a viva voce of more than two hours. But ‘mastered’ is not the right word; I should have said ‘acquired’. I’ve never opened an English grammar in my life.”

This so much reminds me of one of the first posts I wrote in this blog about a Polish immigrant friend of mine in California, Mariusz Pufal, who had nearly perfect English and also claimed never to have studied in any class or course, but only by reading newspapers then graduating to magazines and books.

I want to focus also on the verb that Joseph Conrad used when describing how he learned English. He says in the letter to de Smet that he “acquired” the language. This is exactly the same feeling I get after a period of time having regularly read the news in my target languages. Vocabulary that I don’t really know because apparent by the context. Grammatical forms become reinforced and embedded. And I can say that this works no matter what level I currently am in the language I am reading in. And another thing that I see with this method of language practice or study is that when I read an article and I just stumble through quite often when I am not understanding what I read I can go back and re-read the article and, SHAZAM!, I can understand clearly what I couldn’t before. And this is without further study or consultation of a dictionary or grammar book.

I hope sharing this quote from a master of English, such as Joseph Conrad, will serve as more proof that regular input in learning languages is an extremely important tool.

I think it was about two years ago that I discovered author Michael Erard’s website. I believe I was first alerted to this site by his Twitter account. One of us followed the other and eventually we both wound up mutual followers. It was during this time that I found out about Michael’s then upcoming book, Babel No More. I can remember with clarity that when I found out I would have to wait more than one year for this book to be release I felt that this time had cheated me of a jewel. It was as if a subject that I had always found myself engrossed in, while simultaneously not knowing consciously even existed, would be uncovered for me personally by a saintly Samaritan I had yet to meet.

Sure, that sounds a bit dramatic, well, quite dramatic. But for people who don’t work at becoming polyglots, let alone hyperpolyglots, they might not know how committed one has to be over a long period of time to achieve such lofty goals in language learning. We find ourselves looking for every morsel of information that we can find about others like us. We feel inspiration when we read of successes in these aims and we are repelled when we run across linguistic con men who make vainglorious claims which are alas found to be false. So when I was shopping for a birthday gift for my son and stumbled across the published final version here in Bangkok I was thrilled. I wound up buying myself a birthday present as well - even though my birthday isn’t until March!

Michael Erard’s Babel No More leaps through and around the subject of what it takes to be a hyperpolyglot. He pretty much starts us off with the story of Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, which coincidentally enough, I have recently finished reading 502 page long The Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti by Charles William Russell, of which I still owe a review. Rightly or wrongly Mezzofanti has become the de facto gold standard for hyperpolyglots so Mezzofanti is a natural place for the adventure to start. From there Erard runs the tables in an attempt to define exactly how it is that hyperpolyglots come to be. Are they made by natural selection or are they self made?

In his quest Michael Erard was able to go through Mezzofanti’s belongings, look into Emil Krebs’ brain, bounce around the globe from Texas, to California, to Italy, to India, to Belgium, to Germany, etc., and meet many experts about this human phenomenon - both researchers as well as hyperpolyglots themselves. I must admit that I have been familiar with many of these subjects with whom the author introduced, but this was after decades of following the subject informally myself. I have watched the films about Daniel Trammet and Christopher Taylor. And I have read Kató Lomb’s Polyglot: How I Learn Languages. But I found that Michael Erard’s perspectives on this flowed back at me like a good conversation - the kind that I treasure more and more as time goes on.

I would go on and on about what I found out in this book but personally I think it is better left unsaid by me because Michael Erards has already said it better. I will say this though… The author’s final revealed discovery about Mezzofanti’s language learning methods was indeed something that I expected all along. And I am glad that I had to read happily the entire book to find this out.