nenyrbaev: переводы

→It’s the way I’ve finally grown into and the way I hope you will proceed in order to get the absolute most out of your language learning dollar and your language learning minute.

→I’d do it the way I’m doing it now, the way I will detail in this book.

→If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it at all the way I did then.

→In fact, I feel like one of those hardened convicts who’s occasionally let out of jail under armed guard to lecture the sophomore class on the importance of going straight.

→I’m the only one who knows how much of my language learning time has been wasted, how little I’ve got to show for all those years of study, considering the huge hunks of time I’ve put into it.

→” Others may look at me and see someone who can, indeed, carry on a creditable conversation in about eighteen languages.

→P A R T T W O
The System

Do as I Now Say,
Not as I Then Did
A wise man once said, “I wish I had all the time I’ve ever wasted, so I could waste it all over again.

→I was clearly a beaten boxer on the comeback trail. Why was I all of a sudden doing so well in Italian after having done so poorly in Latin?

→I bought Hugo’s book and went through it like a hot knife through butter. I could have conversed in Italian within a month if there’d been anybody around who could have understood – a learning aid which the Greensboro of that day, alas, could not provide.

→There was no nominative-genitive-dative-accusative in Italian. Not a trace, except in a few pronouns which I knew I could easily take prisoner because we had the same thing in English (me is the accusative of I). Italian verbs did misbehave a little, but not to the psychedelic extent of Latin verbs. And Italian verbs were a lot easier to look at.

→Arrividerci, Latin

→That summer, in Will’s Bookstore on South Green Street back in Greensboro, I walked past the foreign language section and spotted a book entitled Hugo’s Italian Simplified. I opened it, and within ten or fifteen seconds the “background music” started again.

→I exchanged addresses and correspondence with my main Chinese mentor, Fan Tung-shi, for the next five years. Sadly, his letters stopped coming when the Chinese Communists completed their conquest of the Mainland. (He and I were joyously reunited exactly forty years later when a Taiwan newspaper interviewed me and asked me how I learned Chinese. One of Fan’s friends saw his name in the article.)

→The sailors adopted me as their mascot. We met every afternoon in Bayfront Park for my daily immersion in conversational Chinese. A young teenager surrounded by

→You don’t have to win a war to get a hero’s welcome. The Chinese naval units stationed in Miami seemed suddenly to have two missions – to defeat the Japanese and to help me learn Chinese! A great side benefit to learning foreign languages is the love and respect you get from the native speakers when you set out to learn their language. You’re far from an annoying foreigner to them. They spring to you with joy and gratitude.

→They decided to provide the help.

→It sounded extraplanetary to the Chinese sailors, but at least they understood enough to get the point that here was no Chinese American, here was no child of missionary parents who’d served in China. Here was essentially an American urchin hellbent on learning Chinese without any help.

→I waited. Sure enough, in late afternoon the park filled with Chinese sailors. I picked a clump of them at random and waded on in, greeting them in phrases I’d been able to learn from the book my parents had bought me. I’d never heard Chinese spoken before. No records, tapes, or cassettes. I could hit them only with the Chinese a D student in Latin could assemble from an elementary self study book in Chinese conversation in Greensboro, North Carolina.

→Everybody knew the Chinese sailors were billeted in the old Hotel Alcazar on Biscayne Boulevard. After their training, I was told, they gathered in groups and strolled around Bayfront Park.

→When we got to my grandparents’ hotel, I gave them the quickest possible hug and kiss, ran out, took the jitney back over the causeway to Miami, and started asking strangers if they knew where the Chinese sailors were.