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by the policeman on the corner much better than the speech
of her erudite colleagues. For the sake of language learning,
she even visited some churches and listened to sermons. (I
wouldn’t ever miss this old trick: you can study the language
and rest your sightseeing-blistered feet at the same time.)40
Well, this friend was despairing because she didn’t understand
a single word from the sermons she heard in London.
Out of curiosity, she brought home the texts of the sermons
handed out after services. We examined them a bit and
saw that the priest almost always favored words of Norman
(French) origin. We had good fun retranslating the English
text by replacing every Norman word with its Germanic
equivalent (e.g., “commence” with “begin”).
Stratification is less palpable in descriptive words that
depict the background of the action. This language is much
more homogeneous. It doesn’t show, for example, the differences
required by various levels of politeness in spoken
language. It is a refreshing achievement of our age that the
usage of over-polite expressions, such as “dearest,” “taking
the liberty” (of doing something), or “having the honor”
(to do something), is decreasing. (On the other hand, it is
regrettable that we begin to use less of Tessék! 41 It is a pity because
if you consider its original meaning, you should find it
kind from the viewpoint of the psychology of language. The
only nicer way of offering the thirsty traveler a glass of wine
may be the one in Transylvania: Szeresse! 42)
For a valuable “dictionary” of spoken language, you can
use today’s plays or the dialogues of novels. Classical works
are not suitable for this purpose. I asked my young German

friend who was raised on Jókai43 how she liked her new
roommate. “Délceg, de kevély,” 44 she replied.
Why do some words become comical in a couple of decades
while others remain unchanged? We don’t know and
we also don’t know why we accepted some words from the
age of the Language Reform45 and why we rejected others.
We use zongora 46 and iroda 47 without any kind of aversion
but we don’t even know anymore for what purpose tetszice 48
and gondolygász 49 were proposed. Kórtan,50 put forward by
Pál Bugát, became a full-fledged word, but éptan 51 didn’t;
out of Bugát’s innovations, we accepted rekeszizom 52 instead
of diafragma but we don’t use gerj 53 and we rejected
fogondzat 54 for magzat.55 Habent sua fata verba—words, too,
have their own destiny.
Course books and even today’s popular phrase books
are often written in stilted language and are thus not reliable
sources of live speech compared to a modern literary
work. I leafed through a travel dictionary recently (it wasn’t
published in Hungary) and I couldn’t help laughing when
I imagined the dialogue recommended for learning in the
context of today’s life: “I would like to get acquainted with
the places of historical interest and the important agricultural
products of your country.”
It is much more likely that the conversation will sound
something like this:
“Hey, how ’bout getting a cup of joe around here?”
“Oh, slower please, I don’t understand. Getting what?”
“A cup of joe!”
“What is it? A cup of coffee?”
“Of course!”
“Sorry, I can’t, I have to go back to the…uh, what do
you call it?”
“To the hotel? Well, see you!”
I admit that a course book cannot teach and an instructor
cannot recommend using the words “hey,” “oh,” “well,”
“y’know,” “huh,” “kind of ” and the like. However, they occur
much more frequently in everyday chats than well-bred
“dictionary words.” So I return to my soapbox: until you
naturally begin to acquire such words through usage, you
can learn such colloquialisms from today’s prose in the most
painless way.
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How We Should Read
≈
AT FIRST, we should read with a blitheness practically
bordering on superficiality; later on, with a conscientiousness
close to distrust.
It is especially my male and technically minded fellow
students whom I would like to persuade to do this.
I frequently see men reading the easiest pulp fiction,
armed with heavy dictionaries. They will read one word in
the book and then look it up in the dictionary. No wonder
they soon get bored of reading and end up sighing with relief
when it is time for the news so they can turn on the TV.
Conscientiousness is a nice virtue, but at the beginning
of language learning, it is more of a brake than an engine.
It is not worth looking up every word in the dictionary. It
is much more of a problem if a book becomes flavorless in
your hands because of interruptions rather than not knowing
whether the inspector watches the murderer from behind
a blackthorn or a hawthorn.
If a word is important, it will come up again and its
meaning will become apparent from the context. This kind
of vocabulary acquisition, which requires some thinking,
leaves a much more lasting impression than reaching for the
dictionary automatically and acknowledging the meaning of
the word absent-mindedly. If you reach understanding at
the expense of brainwork, it was you who contributed to cre86
/ POLYGLOT: HOW I LEARN LANGUAGES
ating the connection and you who found the solution. This
joy is like the one felt completing a crossword puzzle.
The sense of achievement sweetens the joy of work and
makes up for the boredom of effort. It incorporates the most
interesting thing in the world even into an indifferent text.
You wonder what it is? Our own selves.
It was me myself who gleaned the word and me myself
who deciphered the meaning of the sentence. It deserves
some subconscious self-recognition, a secret little self-congratulation.
You are compensated for your invested work,
and you have the motivation for further activity right away.
It is proven by experience that initial dynamism is a
good way to start reading in a foreign language, since a habit
can be made of it like every other human activity. The main
thing is to not get discouraged by the unfriendly medium of
the foreign language text.
Who hasn’t felt a mild shiver when throwing oneself
into the cool waters of a lake? Who hasn’t desired to climb
back to the sunlit sand? And who hasn’t been happy after a
minute or two, after getting used to the cold of the water,
for resisting the temptation? An interesting foreign language
text should help the “swimmer” over the initial aversion and
discouragement of reading.
But if the engine is running properly, one has to learn
how to brake as well. When you have worked yourself
through a text and you have put the book down with the
uplifting feeling that you have understood what it is about,
literature should become the raw material of learning.
To my knowledge, aside from Kosztolányi’s story “I Read
in Portuguese,” there is only one other work in Hungarian
literature that deals with language learning: a charming tale
by Mikszáth called “Aussi Brebis.” The main character in the
story hires a French tutor for his sons. The teenagers want to
evade this girl (and learning) at all costs, so they invent the
excuse that she doesn’t speak French. They have their father
promise to let them stop learning once they manage to catch
How We Should Read / 87
her ignorant. In order to expose her, they keep browsing
the dictionary and the grammar book until they acquire the
language themselves without noticing it.
Let’s be sly and suspicious ourselves, too, in this second
stage. Let’s regard words and sentences as touchstones to see
if the writer breaks any rules.
I can predict the result in advance. It will turn out that
André Maurois speaks better French than you, Vera Panova
better Russian, and Taylor Caldwell better English. In this
fight, you cannot prevail but you can win. Your knowledge
develops and becomes consolidated. By the way, I didn’t
mention these three specific authors by chance. Their fluent,
natural style makes them very suitable for warming up.
To those who don’t dare to embark on original, unabridged
literary works immediately, I can recommend
adapted texts with all my heart. The classics of world literature
have been rewritten, for language-learning purposes,
into simpler sentences with a reduced vocabulary. They are
available in every bookstore, and they can be borrowed from
libraries for free, but I don’t recommend the latter. Course
books are for scrawling. When they have come apart by too
much use, they can be bought again.
Language is present in a piece of writing like the sea in a
single drop. If you have the patience to turn the text up and
down and inside out; break it into pieces and put it together
again; shake it up and let it settle again—then you can learn
remarkably much from it.
Lajos Kossuth,56 whose orations are given as models in
20th-century English rhetoric books, learned English in an
Austrian prison. He used 16 lines of a Shakespeare play as a
starting point. “I literally had to surmise English grammar
from them. And once I had and perfectly understood the 16
lines, I knew enough English so that I only had to enrich
my vocabulary.”
56. Hungarian politician and freedom fighter of the 19th century.

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Reading and Pronunciation
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LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE

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