Authors: Michael Erard
Helen Abadzi talking to school principal. Gambia, 2010. (
Courtesy of Helen Abadzi
)
Overall, Helen says, she’s studied nineteen languages to at least an intermediate level, and she says she gets her analytic skills from her father, who learned Turkish, Bulgarian, and German, all without books.
She uses Greek, English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese (the last four official World Bank languages)
every day. Others she keeps on ice until she goes on overseas missions. Some she learns anew, building an extensive linguistic patchwork all her own. For an upcoming mission to Tanzania, she’s learning Swahili for the first time. But a trip to Cambodia will intervene; she has to put down Swahili to pick up Khmer. Speaking local languages isn’t a job requirement, but she finds that it makes her
more effective, because she can talk to teachers and students and follow along when they demonstrate their reading abilities. It also allows her to circumvent local bureaucrats who might try to sanitize the reality by presenting it in English. Two things stymie her. One is not having enough time to practice. The other is her age. She’s fifty-nine, and finds that retaining material for the long term
isn’t as easy as it once was.
One of her age-defying tricks involves a machine called a digital language repeater. Made in China, it’s a square silver box with a tape player. Instead of playing the tape directly, it stores the sounds in a digital buffer that can play snippets over and over at different speeds. She looks for language materials with audio recordings or pays local people to record
texts, then listens to them at least fifteen times, until she knows all the vocabulary and grammatical expressions. She also uses other technologies: an old Sony PDA and an iPod.
Even with the language repeater, Swahili has been a challenge for her. Other languages she’s learned all have suffixes, so words are easy to look up in dictionaries when she doesn’t know the grammar. But the Bantu logic
of Swahili means there are prefixes that are affixed with changing meanings, so one has to know the grammar to translate them. She rails a bit against this. On the other hand, “At my age, as I like to say, it’s good to do the things you
don’t
usually do. These have become antiaging exercises! I have three centenarian relatives, so maybe I have good genes, maybe I don’t”—she laughed—“and so we
have to keep the mind sharp. And the way to do this is to keep learning challenging things.”
“If you knew it would be so hard when you were younger, what would you have done differently?”
“I would have learned fifteen more languages,” she quickly replied.
Another strategy she uses is called “timed review”—going back to review previously learned material at regular intervals. (She likes to ride
her bike while listening to audio files.) One such “memory schedule” was developed by Paul Pimsleur, of the Pimsleur method for learning languages. He recommended reviewing any learned material (words, grammatical rules, and the like) at intervals of five seconds, twenty-five seconds, two minutes, ten minutes, one hour, five hours, one day, five days, twenty-five days, four months, and two years.
These intervals were based on the natural rate of memory decay; with successive reviews, the time span extends between reviews, because each subsequent review slows the overall rate of decay.
The mind retains a certain amount of material without timed review. Psychologist Harry Bahrick once tested native English speakers who had studied Spanish as long as fifty years before. Not surprisingly,
the better grades someone had earned back then, the more Spanish they could access now. What is surprising is that what one remembers doesn’t decline steadily over a lifetime. Rather, what you remembered after three to six years would stay with you for decades.
Hyperpolyglots seem to have superior recall. One unusual feature of Christopher’s memory abilities is that his recall improves after
a delay; for most people, delaying without rehearsing means that recall fades.
*
One woman said that half a day of exposure to written material is all she needs to revive some of her languages. Someone else told me, “The enemy of the language learner is forgetting. You can only prevent this by regularly studying. It’s not revolutionary.”
Another key asset for the hyperpolyglot, from Mezzofanti
to Abadzi, is an ability to monitor what they say before it comes out of their mouths. This is the thing that Robert DeKeyser, the linguist I consulted before going to Bologna, had predicted would be the case. Hyperpolyglots can also keep bits of a sentence in mind as they are heard, a related ability.
Doing both requires what scientists call “working memory.” A frequently used metaphor for working
memory is the carpenter’s workbench,
the space for holding information required for solving problems. The size of the workbench determines how much information goes into the solution and the time taken by the process. We use working memory in all aspects of our daily lives. You have to be able to hold in mind the beginning of a sentence to make sense of its end, just as you have to hold in mind
what you intend to cook for dinner as you’re shopping for its ingredients in the market. As defined by the British psychologists who first explained it, working memory is “the capacity to maintain temporarily a limited amount of information in mind, which can then be used to support various abilities, including learning, reasoning, and preparation for action.” Working memory ability has emerged
as the best predictor of intelligence; it could also be a major component of what’s traditionally called “foreign-language aptitude.”
Helen, who lectures to audiences around the world about literacy and learning, talks a lot about working memory. It often comes up in her work on overcoming illiteracy among impoverished people.
Aha,
I thought.
Finally, someone who can let her brain do the talking.
“Imagine that you have the biggest bottle in the world,” she said. On her computer monitor was a sketch of this bottle, which represents long-term memory.
Her
long-term memory. “There’s no bottom to this, and you can put connected knowledge in here to no end. This bottle has a very narrow neck—and it will only open for twelve seconds at a time and hold seven verbal items.
“Let’s say you enter
a store, locate a box of cereal, read the price, and take out money to pay. If you read haltingly, by the time you finish a sentence on the box you may forget the beginning. If you count slowly, by the time you count all the coins you may have forgotten the price.” These are limitations of working memory, which can hold things only for a certain amount of time—and only a specific number of them.
It works this way with language, too. When someone asks you a question, she said, “You have to structure a reply. You’re doing a conscious search of what you know that you can use to respond. Those conscious searches had better bring stuff quickly.”
When you write or read, that window is less relevant than when you’re listening and conversing, activities that occur in real time. When you talk,
you’re finding four to five words every second. Let’s say someone
asks Helen, “How many students come to this school, and did they have breakfast before they went to school?” To reply, she has to be able to conjugate a bunch of verbs and do it quickly.
She boosts her working memory by making language patterns as automatic as possible: repeating grammatical patterns and lists until she can access
them with the smallest amount of conscious cognitive effort. “
I have bananas. We have bananas. You have bananas
. It drives you crazy. It’s boring, but it sticks,” she told me, with a passionate snarl that made me think,
She doesn’t find it so boring, actually.
Unlike Alexander, she admitted to using what she called “pointers,” or memory schemes. She said that her mnemonics can be etymologies
or visualizations of the actions in the words. She also memorizes songs in her various languages, which give cues to grammar or vocabulary. Once, in the Delhi airport, she was changing money and speaking Hindi with the teller. Do you come to India often? he asked her.
Kabhi kabhi,
she said. “Sometimes.” This happens to be the first line of a popular song, which the teller begins to sing.
Kabhi kabhi,
he crooned. And she crooned back:
Mere dil mein khayaal aata hai.
“So all of a sudden there is a teller in the New Delhi airport and me starting to sing this song!” she exclaimed. Bollywood is real! In the airport! “This is the stuff that really makes my life!” She laughed.
In 1990, her husband, Theodore, heard about a contest being held in Europe to find the most multilingual person.
She doesn’t promote her own abilities enough, he thought. I’ll enter her name. A few days later, the contest organizers surprised Helen with a phone call in which she talked to nine native speakers of nine languages, one after the other, to see if she qualified. She protested; she doesn’t keep all her languages active to the same level, she said, and likes to use later-learned languages one at a
time. Otherwise, she says, they interfere with each other. Even so, she received an invitation to the contest, where she was one of only three women out of twenty contestants. She was flown to Brussels, and in a large conference room she went from table to table, speaking to native speakers from embassies or universities.
This must have been the contest that Robert DeKeyser described! I thought,
I have to find out more about it. All those hyperpolyglots tested in one place.
Tested
. Had a modern-day Mezzofanti been among them?
“The winner,” she said, “his name I’ve forgotten. He had twenty-six languages.” I longed to meet the man whom I knew only as the Polyglot of Europe.
Alexander and Helen kept most of their languages in reserve. Helen is prepared to use around five on a daily basis;
Alexander uses English, Korean, and French in daily life, in addition to the language he’s focused on at a given time. From talking to both of them, I could see that their lives were structured just as Erik Gunnemark had said a devoted language learner’s should be. Their daily exercises were aimed at three tasks: improving their familiarity with the sounds of the language and their ability to
reproduce them, drilling themselves on grammatical patterns, and working hard to stem memory decay. Mezzofanti had apparently done the same, but still, he possessed one ability that they didn’t: he could switch between languages with ease, which doesn’t appear to be an ability that improves much with practice.
Someone who heard Mezzofanti speak in seven or eight languages in half an hour asked
how he never confused them.
“Have you ever tried on a pair of green spectacles?” Mezzofanti asked him.
“Yes,” replied his companion.
“Well,” replied Mezzofanti, “while you wore those spectacles everything was green to your eyes. It is precisely so with me. While I am speaking any language, for instance, Russian, I put on my Russian spectacles, and for the time, they color everything Russian.
I see all my ideas in that language alone. If I pass to another language, I have only to change the spectacles, and it is the same for that language also!”
In his biography of Mezzofanti, Charles Russell described several instances of Mezzofanti’s flitting among languages. The Bolognese hyperpolyglot had been ordered to Rome by the new pope, Gregory XVI, to join the Propaganda Fide, an official
Church body designed to bring Catholic men from all over the world in order to learn the evangelizing arts. Every January 6, the school would hold its
Accademia Poliglotta,
a spectacle in which all the students would recite poems in their native languages. It was a fitting date. In the Catholic calendar, January 6 marks
the visit of the three kings to the infant Jesus in Bethlehem. Because the
kings represented the outside world of Gentiles (or non-Jews) drawn to the divine babe, the Feast of the Epiphany was also known as the Feast of the Languages. As a symbol of missionary work, the celebration was appropriate, and Mezzofanti’s skill made the ceremony resound with a claim of global power.
When Russell attended this ceremony, the head scholar gave an introductory speech, in Latin,
to open the proceedings. Then the students each took a turn. They’d been assigned to write a poem with a holiday theme, the Illumination of the Gentiles. Students presented in forty-two languages that day. (Some years there were fifty or sixty.) Then the real extravaganza occurred.
Mezzofanti, whose presence was accompanied by restless excitement, was mobbed by students, and he spoke with them
this language, then that one, “hardly ever hesitating, or ever confounding a word or interchanging a construction,” in a “linguistic fusilade,” Russell wrote. If it seemed like a circus, it had no ringmaster. A group of young Chinese men crowded Mezzofanti; then a Burmese youth who spoke Peguan had his turn. From the flank came a gentleman with a joking complaint that he’d heard no Russian poems—which
provoked a long conversation in Russian with the cardinal. By the end, Russell had heard Mezzofanti speak no fewer than ten or twelve languages without hesitating, and he was dazzled.
For a sense of what Mezzofanti was doing, one can look at what ordinary multilinguals do when they switch between languages. One theory says that they don’t switch languages on and off; rather, they have them all
mentally activated at the same time, but put a lid on the unwanted ones. It’s the equivalent of turning on all the lights in the house, but covering up the bulbs you don’t want to shine. A speaker has to do two things: stop the response in one language, then initiate a response in the other one. A friend of mine who grew up with English, French, and Spanish said that even if only one language is
coming out of his mouth, he feels as if he’s speaking them all at the same time. The trick of the polyglot has a contradiction at its heart: to say something, many things must also go unsaid. This might explain why someone like Lomb Kató could have only five languages simultaneously. It’s not that she couldn’t
keep more than those activated; it’s that she couldn’t keep more than those
deactivated.