[轉貼] 我是怎麼自學20種語言的？ Why I Taught Myself 20 Languages - and What I learned about Myself in the Process

紐約青少年杜納(Timothy Doner)，靠著聽唱片和線上線下聊天和字典，自學20種語言，被稱為最年輕的人肉翻譯機。媒體的閃光燈模糊了焦點，學習外語不是為了耍酷，而是讓不同文化的人交流，跨過文化的界限，找到不同文化中共同的特性和好的特質。

During the past few years, I’ve been referred to in the media as “The World’s Youngest Hyperpolyglot” — a word that sounds like a rare illness. In a way it is: it describes someone who speaks a particularly large number of foreign languages, someone whose all-consuming passion for words and systems can lead them to spend many long hours alone with a grammar book.
在過去的幾年裡，我一直被媒體譽為『世界上最年輕的人肉版世界語言翻譯機』，一個聽起來像一種罕見疾病的名詞。其實它是用來描述一種，可以講非常多種外國語言的人。除此之外，這種人對語言的熱情，足以讓他的獨處時間都被文法書占滿。

Timothy Doner

But while it’s true that I can speak in 20 different languages, including English, it took me a while to understand that there’s more to language than bartering over kebabs in Arabic or ordering from a menu in Hindi. Fluency is another craft altogether.
雖然我可以說20種語言（包括英語）這件事情是真的。但是我花更多時間了解的是，語言不只是為了讓你在阿拉伯買烤羊肉串時可以討價還價，或是為了看懂寫著印度文的菜單。語言除了這些用途以外，還有語言背後的歷史文化，你要夠了解，才能夠很流利。所以，語言的流暢，這就完全是另一回事了。

I began my language education at age thirteen. I became interested in the Middle East and started studying Hebrew on my own. For reasons I still don’t quite understand, I was soon hooked on the Israeli funk group Hadag Nachash, and would listen to the same album every single morning. At the end of a month, I had memorized about twenty of their songs by heart — even though I had no clue what they meant. But once I learned the translations it was almost as if I had downloaded a dictionary into my head; I now knew several hundred Hebrew words and phrases — and I’d never had to open a textbook.
13歲，是我語言學習之旅程的起點。那時我對中東產生興趣，因此開始自學希伯來文。但是我自己怎麼唸，都感覺還是有些地方不太對。

接著，我迷上了以色列的一個放克（funk）樂團—Hadag Nachash的專輯，每天早上必聽一遍。過了一個月以後，裡面的20 首歌，我可以一字不漏地全部背起來，雖然我根本不知道他們在唱什麼。

但是，當我終於有一天去查了歌詞的翻譯以後，我的頭腦就好像自動下載了一本希伯來文字典，一一將歌詞和字義對上。就這樣莫名其妙地，我突然懂了幾百個猶太文的單字和片語，這過程中沒有透過任何一本教科書。

I decided to experiment. I spent hours walking around my New York City neighborhood, visiting Israeli cafés to eavesdrop on people’s conversations. Sometimes, I would even get up the courage to introduce myself, rearranging all of the song lyrics in my head into new, awkward and occasionally correct sentences. As it turned out, I was on to something.
這個經驗讓我決定做個實驗。在紐約的家附近，我四處閒晃，偷聽附近幾家以色列咖啡廳裡的人們在說什麼。有時候忍不住我還會突然跑去介紹我自己，用我在歌詞裡學到的單字和片語，亂七八糟的拼出幾個很少時候會正確的句子。

實驗結果證明，我竟然真的開始會講了。

IF THE STANDARD OF SPEAKING A LANGUAGE IS TO KNOW EVERY WORD — TO FEEL EQUALLY AT HOME DEBATING NUCLEAR FISSION AND CLASSICAL MUSIC — THEN HARDLY ANYONE IS FLUENT IN THEIR OWN NATIVE TONGUES.
如果世俗對一個人會講一種語言的定義是知道每一個單字和詞彙，討論質子分裂以及古典樂時都可以用正確的學術或商業用語，那麼就算連以色列也沒有任何人能夠流利地說自己的母語希伯來文。

I moved on to Arabic, which I’d study every morning by reading news headlines with a dictionary and by talking to street vendors. After that it was Persian, then Russian, then Mandarin … and about fifteen others. On an average day, I’d Skype with friends in French and Turkish, listen to Hindi pop music for an hour and eat dinner with a Greek or Latin book on my lap. Language became an obsession, one that I pursued in summer classes, school, web forums and language meet-ups around the city.
後來我又把注意力轉到阿拉伯文上，怎麼做呢？每天早上我會帶著一本字典，研究每一天寫著阿拉伯文的新聞頭條你的內容，然後跑到路上找是阿拉伯人的攤販對話。照這樣的模式，阿拉伯之後是波斯語，俄文，然後中文.....，外加另外15種。

幾乎每一天，我都會和在法國和土耳其的朋友線上Skype，然後聽一小時的印度流行歌曲，然後吃晚餐實在放本希臘文或拉丁文的書在我的大腿上邊吃邊看。語言讓我著迷，暑期課程，學校課程，網路上論壇提供的課程，還有我們紐約市裡的語言交流團，我一個都不放過。

By March of 2012, media outlets such as the BBC and The New York Times featured stories about me, “The Teen Who Speaks 20 Languages!” For a while, it was a fantasy; it made what many thought of as a bizarre hobby seem (almost) mainstream, and gave me a perfect opportunity to promote language learning.
到了2012年3月，新聞媒體BBC和紐約時報以『會說20種語言的青少年！』報導了一系列關於我的故事。剛開始，我覺得這幾乎是夢想成真，它讓一個很多人認為是奇怪的嗜好成為了主流（幾乎是主流），提供了我提倡學習語言的最佳機會和管道。

After a while, though, my media “moments” felt more like gruesome chores than opportunities to spread the word. Most news shows were interested only in the “dancing bear” act (“You wanna learn more about the Middle East? Cool… Say ‘you’re watching Channel 2’ in Arabic!”) As lighthearted as that might have been, it left me with an uncomfortably personal lesson in modern media: when the goal is simply to get the viewers’ attention, the real importance of a story often gets lost in translation.
但是過了一段時間以後，這些鎂光燈下的光鮮「時刻」開始讓我覺得是多得可怕的雜事，而不是倡導正確語言學習觀念的機會。大多數新聞只把焦點放在放大『跳舞小熊』的節目。（跳舞熊：你想更瞭解中東？好！那麼.....快看第2台的我們！說阿拉伯文喔！）

現代媒體透過這樣輕鬆搞笑的方式，給我的其實是—令人不舒服印象。

當媒體的重點僅僅是為了獲得高收視率，這時，一個故事的真諦和重要性，就會在他們的報導中消失。

When I was beginning to discover languages, I had a romanticized view of words like “speak” and “fluency”. But then I realized that you can be nominally fluent in a language and still struggle to understand parts of it. English is my first language, but what I really spoke was a hybrid of teenage slang and Manhattan-ese. When I listen to my father, a lawyer, talk to other lawyers, his words sound as foreign to me as Finnish. I certainly couldn’t read Shakespeare without a dictionary, and I’d be equally helpless in a room with Jamaicans or Cajuns. Yet all of us “speak English.”
在我探索語言本身時，我對「說」和「流利」這兩個字有比較浪漫的觀感，但是當我意識到—當一個人說自己對某種語言可以說得很流利時，你會發現他還是會對那種語言的某些部分的構成或字彙難以理解。

舉例來說，英語是我的母語，但是其實我真正講的，是青少年的俚語和曼哈頓人的說話方式的混合體。

當我聽到我的律師父親跟其他的律師談話時，他們的談話內容在我耳中聽起來就像是在聽芬蘭語。

同樣地，我讀莎士比亞的作品時，絕對少不了一本字典。或是當我和一個牙買加人，或是一個美國南部的美國人，在同個房間談話時，我也會需要一個翻譯的人，正確翻譯出我們兩邊用字和表達方面的差異，雖然，我們大家其實都是講英文。

My linguistics teacher, a native of Poland, speaks better English than I do and seems right at home peppering his speech with terms like “epenthetic schwa” and “voiceless alveolar stops”. Yet the other day, it came up that he’d never heard the word “tethered”. Does that mean he doesn’t “speak” English? If the standard of speaking a language is to know every word — to feel equally at home debating nuclear fission and classical music — then hardly anyone is fluent in their own native tongues.
我的語言學老師是一個道地的波蘭人，講一口比我好的英文，在家裡講話時就經常像是在演講，參雜著各種專業術語像是「增加非主要母音」或是「輕上顎頓音」。但是有一天我發現，他從來沒有聽過「拴」（拴馬繩）這個詞。這是否意味著他不說英語呢？

如果，說一種語言的標準是要知道這語言中的每一種和每一個字，還可以在家用正確的名詞討論核裂變和古典音樂，那麼幾乎沒有任何人能流利的說自己的母語。

Reducing someone to the number of languages he or she speaks trivializes the immense power that language imparts. After all, language is the living testament to a culture’s history and world view, not a shiny trophy to be dusted off for someone’s self-aggrandizement.
你提高一個人會一種語言的標準，你就輕視了語言賦予我們的重要的力量。畢竟語言是文化歷史和世界觀演變的活化石，是一種見證，而不是一個需要時時被擦亮的獎盃，代表著個人虛有成就。

Language is a complex tapestry of trade, conquest and culture to which we each add our own unique piece — whether that be a Shakespearean sonnet or “Lol bae g2g ttyl.” As my time in the media spotlight made me realize, saying you “speak” a language can mean a lot of different things: it can mean memorizing verb charts, knowing the slang, even passing for a native. But while I’ve come to realize I’ll never be fluent in 20 languages, I’ve also understood that language is about being able to converse with people, to see beyond cultural boundaries and find a shared humanity. And that’s a lesson well worth learning.
語言是世界歷史，貿易，遠征，擴張，和文化相互交織的絲綢，我們每一個人，還可以在其中加入自己的特色。無論是莎士比亞的十四行詩，或是LOL=Laugh out loud(笑得很大聲)，G2G=Got to go，TTYL=Talk to you later等等，都是我們演變出來的特色，文明演變的見證。
在我被媒體聚光燈籠罩的期間，我體會到，所謂你可以「說」一種語言，可以意味著很多不同層面。它可以代表著你可以記得那種語言的動詞變化表，知道它的俚語，甚至是代表你可以和路過的當地人溝通等等。

但是，當我明白我只是會說20種語言而不是會「流利地說」20種語言時，我也明白了語言的目的是為了讓不同文化的人交流，跨過文化的界限，找到不同文化中共同的特性，和好的特質。這才是語言要傳達給我們的意義。
(熊玠非編譯)