Random Thoughts on My Inability to Learn Languages



Robert Roth

1.

I first saw Arnie, my oldest and dearest friend, at a Free Speech rally at Queens College in New York City during a student strike.
I think it was in 1962.
This beautiful and intense figure moved from person to person, group to group, listening, speaking, engaged in the event with a seriousness much different than anyone else seemed to have.
It was as if a spotlight followed him everywhere he went. Wherever he stood, it seemed as if something historic was at stake.

The next time I saw Arnie was in Spanish class.
He looked spaced out, dazed, lost in some deep internal chaos.
The only person more spaced out than me.
Each day we would go around the room and have to translate a sentence from English to Spanish.
Arnie was always the ninth person called on.
I was always the twelfth.
Neither of ever got the answer right.
One day I saw that the translations were in the back of the book.
So I started memorizing answer 12.
But Arnie never knew answer 9.
So it really was answer 11 that I would have to give.
Finally it dawned on me to memorize answer 11.
Of course, that was the one time Arnie got the answer right.
To this day we have never figured out how he did it.

2.

For nine years I went to Hebrew-speaking camp.
Instead of learning Hebrew, I went off by myself shooting baskets.
Even after 9 years, I could say maybe 25 words.
I couldn't say something as simple as "Please pass the sugar."
I could read Hebrew to a degree, though I didn't know what most of the words meant.
This is true of many Jews who pray.
They can say and chant the prayers but don't know the literal meaning of the words.
For three years running I was given the same primer to study from in camp.
The only thing different was the technique of the teachers.
The warm, embracing, encouraging technique of one of the teachers, while no more successful in helping me learn a word, has, as I write this, left me with a fond memory.
And possibly some regrets in the frustration I must have caused.

3.

A friend from Japan entirely panicked at an anti- apartheid demonstration in Central Park.
The sound system was awful.
It was impossible to understand a word.
She thought it was because her English was bad.
Afterwards she just sat down in the street and started to cry.
I've noticed that people when they are drunk or angry often speak a blue streak in a language they otherwise might have difficulty with.
I suspect that a person in a strange country during a moment of heightened sexual arousal might get various languages all jumbled together.

4.

My father was a person not comfortable in any language.
He came to the United States as a young boy from Hungary.
He never really fully spoke Hungarian, though he was able to communicate okay in it.
He never fully learned English, though he ran a business here.
He was able to read newspapers and books in English.
His problem was more in speaking and writing.
And he could speak a smidgen of Yiddish.
I often wonder what language his thoughts were in.

My father had to rely on his smarts.
If he didn't know mathematical formulas, he could add and subtract and multiply and divide very quickly in his head.
For his purposes, this was good enough.
There was a point, of course, where this wouldn't be sufficient.
My cousin, a young and gifted mathematics professor, could not match my father in certain mathematical exercises.
But by knowing the formulas, she could figure out certain problems that were way beyond the sheer force of my father's intelligence.

My mother was "better educated" than my father.
She became an art historian.
She writes English beautifully and speaks fluently with a heavy Hungarian accent.

I think it is from my father, who by his wits could run circle around more "educated" people(I'm not talking about my mother here), that I developed some of my resistance to learning.

My resistance to language learning extends to computers, mathematics, physics, the social sciences, street slang, almost any and every language.
Like my father, I can pick up things, just enough at times to get a sense of what is going on.
But not enough to converse or move beyond the point where instinct and intuitive grasp can take me...

5.

My problems with English, my native language, are pretty acute.
Only every so often can I write anything that makes any sense.
Usually it is incoherent fragments written in a totally illegible scrawl that even I can't read.
The scrawl translates itself into incomprehensible combinations of letters if I am attempting to write by hand.
It is only very rarely that I am able to enter the space where I can communicate with written words.
When I can, I can.
It is almost as simple as that.

As I mentioned before, my father was never comfortable in any language.
My friend Paula, on the other hand seems more comfortable in Italian than her native English.
It is as if she had been born into the wrong language.
I remember seeing her, actually spying on her from a distance, speaking Italian to a friend.
Her hand gestures, her facial gestures, her body language seemed so much more at home in Italian than in English.
I spoke to her about what I had observed.
She said yes, it was true.
It is amazing to see people and the changes they go through with the language that they are speaking, how their gestures, the timbre of their voice, the depth of their laughter, their body language are affected by the language they are speaking.
Sometimes these changes occur from one moment to the next.

6.

I was taught French in high school.
I remember enjoying reciting a poem in class once.

Three years of Spanish in college.
I visited Argentina a couple of years ago.
Spanish made more sense there than in the classroom.
In a limited way I was actually able to speak and understand it while I was there.
I attend a poetry series in Brooklyn where a lot of the work is read in Spanish.
While I don't understand much of what is read, I usually get real pleasure out of the event.
This is also true of lectures and poetry readings in English, as well as various types of concerts.
My mind rarely focuses in on what's in front of me.
But often something important does enter my consciousness.
This is why I'm never hurt if someone falls asleep at a reading I am giving.

I learned Hungarian from my cousin's mother as a child.
My parents spoke English, not Hungarian, to each other at home.
I think if I lived in Hungary for a year, Hungarian would be a language that I could learn to speak.

I can understand it when my relatives speak it.
I have a much harder time when strangers speak it.

Hebrew? I still can't speak it.
My ability to read it has diminished.
But when I go to the synagogue to mourn my dead father, the sounds of prayer connect me deeply to him.

As for speaking English, it astounds me when I hear myself on tape to think that anyone can understand a word I say.
Mostly sounds, a few expletives, a few key words, a bunch of you-knows, and that's about it.
People have to work hard.
Maybe that's the key.
Or you know maybe they just I don't know.
Anyway.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
"Random Thoughts on My Inability to Learn Languages" by Roth, R. from Ogulnick, K. (ed.), Language Crossings, (New York: Teachers College Press, © 2000 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved.), pp. 101-104.
To order copies of this book, please contact Teachers College Press at www.teacherscollegepress.com

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