When George P. Fletcher was born, his parents, Hungarian immigrants to America, determined to spare him the trauma that his older sister faced when she went out to play with the neighborhood children and found them speaking an unintelligible language, English. Until then, her whole world had been in Hungarian. To shield him from that experience, George’s parents spoke to him only in English.
In his remarkable new book, My Life in Seven Languages: a linguistic memoir (Jerusalem: Mazo Publishers, 2011), he expresses his resentment at his parents’ decision. They not only deprived him of native fluency in an additional language - he would, in any event, have learned English, just as his sister had - but it also cut him off from his family's language of intimacy.
This early deprivation, reinforced by the humiliation and frustration he felt when, as a child, he was unable to communicate with his visiting grandmother, may have formed, he suggests, his passion to learn additional languages. Not counting Italian and Japanese, which he has learned only to a superficial degree, he has mastered six languages: German, Russian, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Spanish. He’s learned each of them well enough to establish serious personal relationships in them and to use them at the highest professional level. His competency is far beyond that needed for purposes of tourism or, for that matter, beyond what most American students acquire in foreign-language classes. As his title suggests, he’s lived in each of these languages.
He’s a man of parts. Tango dancer, long-distance cyclist, novelist, and television commentator, he is also Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia University and an internationally recognized authority on comparative criminal law and legal philosophical issues. My Life in Seven Languages describes the contribution made by his multilingualism to his intellectual and professional development. It also takes us behind the scenes of some of the well-known legal cases, foreign and domestic, in which he has participated.
My interest in his book was two-fold. First, I count myself privileged to be his friend, so I was keen to read this intensely personal narrative. Second, I have not lost all concern for my former career as sociologist of language. I wanted to know how he managed to learn all those languages.
He acquired the rudiments of German and Russian in high school and college classes, a good beginning but by no means sufficient for mastery. The other languages he acquired with little if any formal instruction. (He writes of dropping a Berlitz French course in disgust after the third lesson, in which his teacher insisted on imparting the names of French flowers.)
Here are some of his language learning strategies. He makes lists of new words, memorizes them, and uses them whenever he can. He seeks native speakers with whom to converse and talks to them as much as possible. He memorizes sentences and then uses them in various combinations. He initially focuses on vocabulary within a limited field, waiting until he’s absorbed the language’s syntax before trying to expand his lexicon. He forces himself to speak the language even when he knows he's making mistakes. He reads in the target language. In short, he creates and exploits opportunities to use the language. “Typically,” he writes, “I imitated Eliezer ben Yehudah, the man credited with reviving modern Hebrew, by switching to a language and pretending to know no other. This is annoying sometimes to the people who would rather speak English. Sorry, there is no other way to learn a new language.” This may be an overstatement, but there’s no denying his success as a learner.
So, aspiring language learners, you need both the opportunity and the determination to learn. George Fletcher has shown you how to create the former; it’s up to you to provide the latter.
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