Babel No More (16 page)

In the second book about Christopher’s
BSL, Smith and his coauthors appeared to agree with that assessment. They now wrote that his abilities “are only partly linguistic” and that his case “provides no relevant evidence” for language talents. Inexplicably, they continued to describe him as “mastering spoken languages” and as “supremely gifted at learning new languages.” They disputed the notion that Christopher
is merely a good pattern
recognizer—he fails to recognize them in music and games. And he got stumped when trying to learn an artificial language with a word whose meaning depended on where it was placed in a sentence.

What does this remarkable man have to do with the rest of us? To Smith and Tsimpli, his case means that language learning doesn’t require some traits we take for granted, such as good general learning
abilities, average cognition, and a theory of mind. Critics suggest that the only people who would want to perform like Christopher would be those who’d be satisfied with calquing their mother tongues—even though many language learners would happily accept his memory and skills at parsing and assembling words. This shows why language learning isn’t purely a memory feat: you have to make word orders
more automatic than you can consciously retrieve through, say, a mnemonic.

With such profound asymmetries, Christopher couldn’t be the exemplar of a talented language learner. Certainly not the hyperpolyglot. Yet his case forecast a lot about what I should expect to find at the upper limits of language learning: superior abilities in one area accompanied by deficits in others, mainly. That imbalance
might be in intellectual skills. It could also be in areas of language itself—good with words and word forms, Christopher was relatively bad at syntax. Yet it also showed that eroded social and pragmatic skills would be a bigger handicap than poor syntax. A foreign-language speaker who calques all the time can bridge communication gaps in other ways. Even if your pronunciation isn’t perfect,
if it’s good enough to clarify and repair, then you’re communicating.

I could not escape the notion there was someone Mezzofanti-like out there. My search had to continue.

Erik Gunnemark, who was eighty-nine when he died, had written
The Art and Science of Learning Languages,
a very nearly complete handbook about how to become a polyglot. In the foreword he even quotes a black magic spell to
learn many languages: “Catch a young swallow. Roast her in honey. Eat her up. Then you will understand all languages.” Did Gunnemark roast swallows? Probably not. He seemed like someone
who took his own practical advice, which was to build activities for learning around concentration, repetition, and practice. He called these the “three pillars” of language learning.

Many people have an aptitude
for doing this that may not emerge until adulthood, Gunnemark wrote. That’s just as well: he considered them better language students than children, because they’re more disciplined and make better use of time. “A child has to learn about the world and a language, an adult only has to learn about a language,” he wrote. Children have the advantage of living in a world mainly composed of concrete
objects that can be named by caretaking adults who are also patient listeners. Adults, who dwell in realms of abstractions, could compensate by observing languages in the environment.

Intriguing ideas. Sensible, even familiar. However, they provided no clue as to why he had told me that Mezzofanti was a myth. Had he read Russell or Watts? Had he found them overdazzled by thin shreds of evidence?
Their judgment stretched too thin?

Gunnemark’s rejection was overprudent, I thought. As packaged in spectacular display as Mezzofanti was, there was some genuine feat there. The cardinal
did
accumulate many languages, I would have said to Gunnemark, and a good number to a very high standard, and all to the degree that he needed them in the sphere he worked in, even if he couldn’t, in many of
them, match what a native speaker could do.

But, okay, say I ignore Mezzofanti. Who was the best candidate for the world’s most accomplished hyperpolyglot? Gunnemark’s letter to me contained a pantheon of polyglottery, a list of “modern superpolyglots”:

Eugen M. Czerniawski (b. 1912)

Ziad Fazah (b. 1954)

Arvo Juutilainen (b. 1949)

Donald Kenrick (b. 1929)

Emil Krebs (1867–1930)

Lomb Kató (1909–2003)

Pent Nurmekund (1905–97)

Why these seven? Why only one woman, Lomb Kató
*
? Gunnemark didn’t explain.
†

I’d first encountered Lomb Kató, a Hungarian hyperpolyglot, in a 1996 article by Stephen Krashen, a University of Southern California linguist and an expert on language acquisition. In 1995, Krashen had been teaching in Hungary, where Lomb lived and was locally famous. She’d also
written a memoir,
Így tanulok nyelveket,
or
How I Learn Languages,
which was first published in 1970—only in Hungarian. When Krashen interviewed the eighty-six-year-old, she was learning her seventeenth language, Hebrew.

Lomb Kató. (
Courtesy of Lomb Janós
)

“What Lomb Kató had was a heroic drive to get comprehensible input and to retain it,” Krashen told me, holding her up as a triumph
of dedication. She worked hard; she wasn’t afraid of failure; she read prolifically.
*
What’s also notable about her is that she took her place in an area dominated by men. Lomb’s case supported Krashen’s theory of second-language
acquisition, especially the central part of it, the “comprehensible input hypothesis,” which he first proposed in the mid-1970s. Krashen argued that people can both subconsciously acquire and consciously learn language, but that the former is more important. Acquisition happens, he said, when we understand what we read or hear—not when we speak or write it, memorize vocabulary, or study grammar.
This is how children get their first language—they “acquire” it. So do massive multilinguals like Lomb.

In 1941, Lomb and her husband moved into a room whose previous Russian tenants had left behind trashy romance novels. Using her beginner’s Russian (pried from two ratty dictionary volumes), she began deciphering them, improving her Russian to the point that she could read literature like Gogol’s
Dead Souls,
a book she had to sew into a Hungarian encyclopedia in order to disguise it from disapproving eyes. Later, she started Spanish by reading a translation of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
—she didn’t read solely classics, in other words.

Krashen liked Lomb because she didn’t claim to have a talent for doing what she did. “Her last words to me changed my life,” he once said in an interview.
“‘Stephen, you are so young. So many years left, so many languages to acquire!’ (I was fifty-four at the time.)” Afterward he “plunged” into languages—reading novels in French, German, and Spanish. His admiration aside, more would later come to light both about Lomb’s methods and about the extent of her abilities.

In 2008, when Lomb’s
How I Learn Languages
became available in English, non-Hungarians
could finally read about the famous Hungarian
for themselves. Lomb’s prose is spry, often sardonic. “One of my goals in writing the book was to remove the mystical fog surrounding the idea of an ‘innate ability’ for language learning,” she says in an early eye-catching passage. “I want to demystify language learning, and to remove the heroic status associated with learning another language.” What
makes one successful, she says, is interest driven by motivation, perseverance, and diligence. One important point seems to be to pump yourself up: “Be firmly convinced that you are a linguistic genius.”

Lomb doled out advice to the readers she encouraged to be geniuses. “The language learning method that is good is the one that enables you to learn the most reliable patterns relatively quickly,”
she wrote. Then you must internalize the forms to make them automatic; to do this, you must encounter them as often as you can. One way, she said, is to practice monologues or invent private language games, such as “how many synonyms for a certain word can you find?” On long train rides, she played against herself.

Though Krashen’s early portrait is of someone who mainly reads (“Dr. Lomb is clearly
a reading enthusiast,” he wrote), Lomb in her memoir also stresses speaking practice, even if it was mainly with herself. “If I talk with myself, I am relieved that my partner will not be indignant at long hesitations, grammatical agreements difficult to manage, and vocabulary gaps completed in the mother tongue,” she wrote, adding that “all I suggest is that monologues be silent.” She also
urged people to seek correction of errors.

(Krashen noted to me that the comprehensible input hypothesis predicts that monologues and similar kinds of practice don’t do much good. Others disagree, saying that output is crucial because it builds automaticity by reinforcing neural connections. It also forces people to pay attention to grammatical structures, especially in the real-time bustle of
conversing. As one researcher puts it, it’s the difference between finding entertainment from watching an elite tennis player take a swing and visually dissecting the parts of the swing in order to emulate it later.)

Don’t bother with grammar rules, Lomb also said. “I will sooner see a UFO than a dative case or subjective complement.” Her message is clear: the fancy terminology gets in the way,
so don’t bother with it. “One learns grammar from language, not language from grammar,” she
writes. One can almost hear the thousands of language teachers gnashing their teeth in Hungary’s direction.

Krashen’s theory doesn’t predict how many additional languages one can acquire. The implication is that, as long as you can keep getting comprehensible input, it’s potentially infinite. Yet Lomb,
who had no deficit of linguistic gumption, felt close to only five of her languages. Clearly, there
are
limits. Russian, English, French, and German “live inside me simultaneously with Hungarian,” she wrote. This “living inside” she defined as the ability to “switch between any of these languages with great ease, from one word to the next.” And here, age was at work: Hungarian, German, and French
were the earliest ones she’d learned. The others came later; she embarked on English at the age of twenty-four, Russian at thirty-two. By contrast, to translate in Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Polish, her five “surge” languages, required her to brush up for half a day. Her other six languages (Bulgarian, Danish, Latin, Romanian, Czech, and Ukrainian) she knew only through translation
work.

When I mention this aspect of Lomb’s profile, some are impressed: “She needed only half a day to reactivate her languages!” Others appreciate that an adult could be so confident and active, especially so late in life. What struck me when I got my hands on her memoir was her admission of a language limit. She didn’t say it was because she lacks time to practice. She didn’t say it’s because
she couldn’t travel. In fact, she gave no sense of why. The limit was unavoidably there.

She was often asked, “Is it possible to know sixteen languages?”

“No, it is not possible,” she replied, “at least not at the same level of ability.”

Again, no explanation. No matter how much time the learner has, no matter how strong her ambition, there are unavoidable limits, as final as gravity. Yet I
expected a language repertoire closer in size to Mezzofanti’s or Burritt’s or Burton’s. Lomb, though a fascinating character, wasn’t the linguistic summit I sought.

At this point, what I knew for sure was this: You can learn numerous languages over a lifetime, at a variety of proficiencies. Yet no matter
how large the repertoire gets, there appears to be a limit to how many languages you can
keep active at a very high level at once. You may also have a number of languages that are kept less active. It also appears that you can reactivate many more of your latent languages, at least for brief periods of time. But you could deploy even constrained vocabularies in real settings if you needed to.

Later I read a letter from Gunnemark explaining how you should be skeptical of anyone claiming
to be able to speak twenty or more languages. Was he policing who gets to call him- or herself a hyperpolyglot? Why? Maybe he distrusted Mezzofanti, I thought. After all, he distrusted the grandiose claims of others, as he too insisted that speaking so many languages all at once wasn’t possible.