Authors: Michael Erard
In 1990, his life took a new turn. He related the contest and his sudden rise to fame in tones of alternating exasperation and pride. He was teaching German and some French at a Lerwick school whose headmaster told him about the Brussels contest. I think you should go in for it, he told Derick.
“I said ‘No, I haven’t a chance,’”
Derick replied.
No, Derick, you try, the headmaster said.
“So I did. I applied.”
Soon Hermans called and said they would call in a week to ask him questions in up to ten languages. “It was quite difficult to participate in this conversation,” he said, “just one language after another without a pause. It was like being under machine-gun fire.” But he did well enough and was invited to Brussels.
Like Johan Vandewalle and Helen Abadzi, he didn’t keep many languages cranked up for use. “In the last month before the contest, I had to do a lot of concentrated swotting. I used to get up two hours earlier than usual every morning and just work through one language after the other, and when I came home at night I did the same again. I did that day in, day out until I was absolutely sick of languages.”
He laughed.
When the contest day of multilingual conversations was over, the contestants all went out and revealed facts about themselves. A lot of us were born in the middle of the summer, Derick said. Quite a few of us are left-handed.
“Are you left-handed?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
Later that night, he learned that he’d won, scoring points in twenty-two languages, and had more minority
languages than any other contestant. There was bad news, too. His polyglot feats weren’t over: as the winner, he had to produce a speech, in nine languages, for the very next day. And it was already ten o’clock. Exhausted, Herning started working, even though he was also “absolutely fed up with languages.” By 2:00 a.m. his speech was written, but the excited Scotsman couldn’t fall asleep. At the ceremony,
he received a bronze sculpture, which he seems to delight in complaining about, along with the other parts of the experience. “I took the sculpture back to the hotel, they didn’t even give me a box, it was sharp, I had to carry that blooming sculpture through three airplanes.”
“Do you still have it?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “My wife uses it for hanging her hat.”
Derick was inducted into
The
Guinness Book of World Records
in 1991, and his record stayed until 1994, until Ziad Fazah’s spectacle. In Lerwick he’s known as the “man who knows every language,” an exaggeration he no longer tries to correct. To the “intelligent people,” he says he has a “nodding acquaintance” with more than thirty languages but only twelve that he “speaks readily”—the rest he’d need to give himself a crash
course in in order to use. But even these twelve aren’t so handy, and in order to establish this, I found myself chasing the hyperpolyglot around the bush.
“How many languages would you say that you can speak readily right now?”
“Well, twelve. Twelve, let’s say.”
“Without any crash course?”
“Oh, we’ll say ten. I don’t try to keep up with these languages—it’s impossible.”
I ask, “So you’re
actively keeping up ten of them?”
“No, no,” he said, laughing. It depends on the language. In some he’d have to read some things to reactivate his memory, but in German, Dutch, and Russian, he wouldn’t need to warm up. For French he says he’d want a few hours. Gaelic he uses frequently. The others? He’d have to prepare to use them, I surmise.
“It’s fairly easy for me to learn a foreign language,”
he said. “I have to recognize that for most people it’s exceedingly difficult.”
“Would you say that anyone could do with languages what you’ve done?” I asked him.
“Probably not,” he replied.
“Why not?”
“Hmm,” he said, and paused for a long time. “You could say, most people seem able to swim. I can’t swim very well. I’m a hopeless swimmer. You think it would be natural, just like where some
people take to a language like a duck to water, while I don’t take to water like a duck. I take to water like Derick Herning and wave my arms about and sputter. It’s just something that I have.”
Chapter 19
W
hat does it take for someone to learn many languages at a very high degree of proficiency?
This question was posed to me by Andrew Cohen, an applied linguist at the University of Minnesota who happens to be also a hyperpolyglot. A muscular, balding man in his late sixties, he’s a quick, voluminous talker who has learned four languages to a very high level (of the thirteen he’s studied),
mostly to take advantage of opportunities to teach and lecture around the world. When I told him about the hyperpolyglots I’d met, he insisted that I pay attention to what they can actually do. His gold standard is working professionally in his languages, teaching and giving lectures, as he’s done.
“I’m good at memorizing vocabulary,” he said, “and figuring out the grammar. I’m an extrovert—I’ll
go out there and practice. I can retain stuff and I’m willing to be laughed at. Part of the talent shows up as a talent for having words, for finding the words and not being at a loss for words. Fluency. For learning the grammar so it’s functional, so that I can use it, being interested in the pragmatics of the language and practicing that pragmatics once I’ve used it, so I know how to apologize
and complain, to try to fit in and be more of a chameleon. I have a talent for finding things to talk about.
“But,” he added, “a lot of it is hard work. It’s just being willing to put in all those long hours and study the language.”
Despite the fact that he’d answered his own question, I replied anyway. Based on my observations, you need three things, I said: some neural hardware that’s exceptionally
suited to the activity of learning languages and to the ability to use many of them; a sense of mission about learning languages; and an identity as a language learner. This “hardware” is a set of either structural or anatomical features that act as precursors to exceptional outcomes—if they are recruited by the right sorts of practice in the right sort of context (one, say, that recognizes
foreign language abilities as a desirable trait). These precursors might include a high-performing phonological loop; an anatomically larger primary auditory cortex, which enables the learner to hear distinctions in speech sounds in the non-native language more easily; differences in the hippocampus that enable the learning and easy recall of new language material; some as-yet-unidentified ability
to control multiply represented languages; or some variations in hormones or neurotransmitters that may increase plasticity and encourage the building of language circuits.
Maybe it’s not as definitive an answer as some people might like. But there are still lessons to be drawn from hyperpolyglots for other foreign-language-learning adults.
If you want to get good at languages, you should find—or construct—your niche.
As the Hippo Clubs know, being a linguistic outsider isn’t easy; what you need to do is create a social inside. There, you can all be outsiders together.
Belonging in this way might have helped my gawky preadolescent self be more than a French speaker
manqué
; it would have also helped me retain my other languages when I returned home. Even better if you can be driven by
your own goals. I admire people who were such fans of Japanese anime that they took up the language. Living and working in a context where multiple languages are used, and where learning and using them are socially and materially rewarded, are big assets, especially if that place respects a “something and something” view of
languages—where one’s capacity in languages, at whatever level, is regarded
as meaningful multilingualism.
This observation comes from hyperpolyglot lives. In the library and at the Propaganda Fide, Mezzofanti constructed his niche; Helen Abadzi found hers at the World Bank; Graham Cansdale at the European Commission. When I first met Alexander Arguelles, he was nicheless and a bit bereft; ever an iconoclast, he wants his own polyglot college. He seems happier in Singapore
among multilinguals who appreciate his languages and his seriousness.
But it also comes from what I saw in south India, where some strata of the society are so fluidly multilingual, there seems to be no other way to live your life.
If you want to be better at languages, you should use native speakers as a metric of progress, though not as a goal. Try to get a sense of what it is that bilinguals you admire can do in their languages. Embrace your linguistic outsiderness—it’s the way of the world.
A language isn’t reserved for the perfectly calibrated native speaker. Words have currency even if they’re not perfectly wrought. We don’t need to pretend that those cooks in the Manhattan Japanese noodle restaurant whom I overheard or the billions of other people who speak (or even sign) some
amalgamated code are locked in a mute, fruitless shuffling of feet, saying “Tan, tan.” In fact, they’re dancing quite happily.
Does this mean that speaking like a native is no longer important? It depends on the language. Take English, which, thanks to Mickey Mouse and General Patton, has become a global lingua franca. Belonging to everyone, a lingua franca will be spoken and written in a vast
array of ways that will have to be tolerated—and learned—by everyone, even native speakers themselves. Of course, some versions of English will continue to have more status than others. I recently heard about Australians and Irish who must acquire American accents if they want to get English-teaching jobs in South Korea. The point is, we live in a world where there are many different types of Englishes
and English speakers.
On the other hand, speakers of less widespread languages won’t be familiar with such accommodations. Japanese, for instance, is spoken
by a good number of people—around 127 million—but only about one million speak it as a second language. Polish has the twenty-third largest group of native speakers in the world but no measurable number of second users at all. You’ll never
sound like a native to these native speakers, so unused are they to hearing their language spoken by foreigners. So the pressure should be off.
If you want to improve at languages, you should manage your dopamine.
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that operates in the brain’s reward circuit. When we do certain things, a little dopamine is released in our brains, telling it that we just did something
pleasurable, which ensures that we do that pleasurable thing again. People who learn many languages do it because they’re attached to the pleasure of it. More than 95 percent of all the respondents to my online survey reported, “I like languages” as the reason they could learn languages more easily than other people.
I’ve argued that this liking is brain-related, as in “I like what happens to
my brain when I’m studying languages.” Of course, someone who says she “likes languages” could be covertly admitting that she likes the social status conferred on people who have many languages. I didn’t get this sense from my survey, though. “Learning a language is an utmost pleasure to me,” one person wrote on the survey. “The pleasure of a large interior world,” someone else wrote. “Appreciating
the beauty of human speech sounds.” “Exercising the brain just for the fun of it.” These don’t seem to be people motivated by climbing the social heap—they enjoy the neurological rewards of learning.
If you want to promote brain plasticity, you should find flow.
That the respondents appear to be hooked on a brain chemical suggests that they can promote flow states in order to learn languages.
I recall that when I first met Alexander, he seemed a bit distressed to be taken from his scriptorium; he craved studying. Derek Herning reported a physical need to be speaking in other languages. Helen Abadzi exercises and listens to language tapes, which heightens the sensation of flow as she
learns. Others have said similar things. Generating these flow states is a way to use the body’s own
power to lift the brakes on brain plasticity—perhaps this is why some commercial language-learning programs are so popular, because their simplicity and repetitiveness can put anyone into a zone.
If you want to improve at languages, you should build executive function and working memory skills.
Numerous studies have shown that individuals have cognitive skills like executive function to varying
degrees, and that these skills run in families. Geneticist Naomi Friedman gave executive function tasks to nearly three hundred same-sex twin pairs (divided between identical twins, who share all their genes, and fraternal twins, who share half of the same genetic material). She found that nearly all of the differences between individuals’ skills could be explained by what they’d inherited genetically.
In an email, Friedman was careful to say that people can still improve their executive function through training. But the raw material of training is genetically determined, as is one’s capacity to be trained. Call it one’s plasticizability. Working memory can also be trained—somewhat. The problem is, the improvement is not dramatic. You can get better at performing a single task over and
over, but you’re not likely to transfer that skill to other areas.
If you want to improve at languages, you should develop a feel for language.
Hyperpolyglots say they have a “feel for language.” Graham Cansdale said, “I can see some of the people in my Arabic class—they fundamentally don’t get the feel for the language.” We were sitting in his office, and he held his hand out, rubbing his fingers.
This “feel” for the language he called the
Sprachegefühl
(literally, “language feeling”). “In each language,” he said, “you have to take it at its own terms. When you ask ‘why?’ you demonstrate that you don’t get it. You can only ask why in the language’s own terms.”
Lomb Kató probably put it best: “Spend time tinkering with the language every day.”
Tinkering
. I love it.
Some of this
Sprachegefühl
is an expectation of how languages behave—they’ll have nouns and adjectives, for instance, but in which order? Maybe there are prepositions, or they’re postpositions (as in Japanese, where “on the bark of the young tree” is literally “young tree of bark on”). Ever attentive to common constructions found in each language, the hyperpolyglot will, when working within a language family, group commonalities
and separate exceptions. (Emil Krebs once said that when one knows twenty-five languages, the twenty-sixth comes without much effort.) When working between families, the hyperpolyglot asks: Will the adjective be before the noun or after the noun? Will the gender of the adjective be changed to the gender of the noun? The way to get
Sprachegefühl
is by learning how languages behave, and one way
to do this is by studying a lot of them.