Barry Farber – Book – How to Learn Any Language

Description

It started for me when I learned that the Norwegian word for “squirrel” was acorn. It may have been spelled ekorn, but it was pronounced acorn. Then I learned that “Mickey Mouse” in Swedish is Mussie Pigg. Again, the Swedish spelling varied, but so what? As delights like those continued to come my way, I realized I was being locked tighter and tighter into the happy pursuit of language love and language learning. My favorite music is the babble of strange tongues in the marketplace. No painting, no art, no photograph in the world can excite me as much as a printed page of text in a foreign language I can’t read-yet! I embraced foreign-language study as a hobby as a teenager in 1944. When I was inducted into the army in 1952,
I was tested and qualified for work in fourteen different languages. Since then I’ve expanded my knowledge of those languages and taken up others. Whether fluently or fragmentally, I can now express myself in twenty-five languages.