Sie sind auf Seite 1von 4

Experience: I can speak 50 languages

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/mar/16/i-speak-50-languages-experience

I've been obsessed with languages for as long as I can remember. My family travelled a lot when I was
young and my dad, a self-taught polyglot, would talk to everyone we met with apparent ease,
confidently switching between languages. His abilities made a big impression on me, but I was
intimidated by him, and he didn't encourage me to follow his lead.
I wasn't a natural language learner. Aged 11, I made slow progress with French at school and almost
gave it up. But things felt different when I took on German at university loving many German writers
in translation, I wanted to read them in their native tongue, and that's been my main motivation for
learning new ones since. It can be a real revelation when you start to get it. Once I got German, I was
hooked; French, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit quickly followed. The idea of having an encyclopedic mind
a comprehensive overview of the world has always fascinated me, and acquiring languages seemed a
good way of achieving that. By my 20s, I'd set my heart on devoting the rest of my life to learning as
many as I could.
I'm often asked what the secret is, and whether some people have an aptitude for absorbing words and
phrases. The truth is, predictably, it's down to endless hours of concentration reading, studying and
practising grammar, as well as my own technique called "shadowing", which involves walking briskly
outdoors while listening to a recorded language and repeating it out loud. For five or six years, before I
married and had children, I would study for 16 hours a day. I'd transcribe Irish, Persian, Hindi, Turkish,
Swahili. Gradually, all these wonderful languages started to swim into focus, and ever increasing
numbers of great works became accessible.
It's hard, but the rewards can be thrilling. When I started studying Spanish, for example, there was a
moment when the living language which I'd heard spoken around me when I was growing up
suddenly revealed itself to me, as if the wax was falling from my ears. That's the moment I crave it
comes to me quickly with European, Germanic or Romance languages and it's very addictive.
Something similar happened when I first went to Sweden I'd never studied Swedish, but when I heard
it spoken around me, it seemed to combine elements of languages I was familiar with. All it took was
three weeks and I was able to hold my own in complex conversations. That's as much as most people
would want, but as far as I'm concerned, at that stage I'm still in the foothills. Climbing the mountain
achieving native fluency is always going to take years.
Now, I can read about three dozen languages and speak most of them fluently, and I've studied many
more. The more of them you know, the more you see how inter-related they are.
Exotic languages can be more of a challenge. I worked as a professor in Korea for eight years and it
took almost a decade to get my Korean skills close to native level. We live in Singapore now, and at

home I speak French with my sons, unless my Korean wife is there, in which case we'll use English. If
we don't want the kids to understand everything we're saying, we use Korean.
I'm not a naturally forthcoming person and I used to be wary of talking to native speakers in their
mother tongue. But to have the language come alive you have to speak it, to live it. Now, I find when
I'm immersed in a language, I have another, more garrulous persona.
I think I'm much richer for that it makes me more confident. If I were kidnapped tomorrow and
dropped in an unknown region, I think there are only a few very remote areas I'd struggle to make
myself understood.
I'm increasingly drawn to dead and endangered languages, and want to set up a polyglot academy where
people with similar interests to mine can flourish. I've studied Esperanto, and although I can see the
benefits of a world language, I do think the loss of so many quirks and colours would leave the world a
less intriguing place. It would be like visiting a botanic garden where there was only one type of plant
that thought horrifies me.













Hyper-Polyglot, Greek Translator Speaks 32 Languages


BRUSSELS Inside a gray office building in Brussels, Ioannis Ikonomou's workload is marked in
different colors on his computer screen. The 49-year-old Greek translator manages the work himself,
which in the next two weeks alone includes two long texts from German and French into Greek. It's a
little boring, he says in perfect German, "but it's my contribution to Europe."
More exciting are three special requests: The EU Commission urgently needs translations of
confidential documents from Hebrew, Chinese and Azerbaijani. Very few of the EU's 2,500 translators
can handle that. Ikonomou is the best of them all. He speaks 32 languages virtually fluently, including a
pair of dead languages. What his brain has managed to achieve is perhaps unique on the planet. How
can a human being learn so many languages? And how does he live with that?
Ikonomou regards questions like that as "funny." He's never asked them of himself. He also doesn't
know whether 32 languages would put him in the Guinness World Records Book. As he sips his green
tea, he says his career developed out of curiosity. "That's a keyword for my life."
On the beaches of Crete, the young Ikonomou heard tourists speaking various languages, but he didn't
understand them. He didn't play soccer, and most school subjects bored him. He preferred to delve into
the world of unknown words.
Curiosity started early
He learned English at age five, German at seven ("Frau Rosi, a German lady on Crete, taught me"),
Italian when he was barely 10 ("a school friend started to take it, and I wanted to be better than he
was"), Russian at 13 ("I loved Dostoyevsky"), East African Swahili at 14 ("just for fun") and Turkish at
16. "I didnt want enemies," he says. "I wanted to be able to talk to people." At the time, there were no
Turkish textbooks in Greece. "So my parents found Mrs. Ayse, an architect who had emigrated from
northern Cyprus. She was strict."
But it wasn't just his curiosity that turned Ikonomou into a language nut. Nor was it his intellligence,
which won him membership in the high-IQ society Mensa International. "My friends all listened to the
same Greek songs and ate souvlaki," he says. "But I wanted to get away from souvlaki, from my
culture, from my roots. I was the opposite of Odysseus." So Ikonomou kept up his travels through the
languages and cultures of the world and continues to do so to this day.
After Turkish, he learned Arabic and became a Sufi, which is to say an Islamic mystic. "The rules of a
language are only the beginning for me," he says. "I want to understand everything the food, the
music, the religion, the traumas of a people." Then he took a quantum leap: Ikonomou suddenly
became fascinated by India, and studied Urdu, Hindi and Sanskrit. For 18 years, he was a strict
vegetarian and lived by Hindu rules.
"But my mother went crazy," he recounts. "She said, 'Enough with this Indian music. And why do you
have to eat with your fingers?' My parents always supported me, but too much was too much.
Sometimes I think they would have been happier if I'd been completely normal and listened to Greek
pop music."
Despite this, he pursued his interests. "At some point, it became clear to me I'd never be a real Hindu."
Today Ikonomou no longer believes in any god, eats meat to his heart's content, and occasionally
drinks alcohol. "What's important is doing some good," he says.
Unique the world over?
Ikonomou speaks 21 of the total of 24 official EU languages. "I forgot my Lithuanian, and I didn't have
time for Gaelic or Maltese." He understands not only modern languages, but also various old ones

Latin, of course, but also Old English, Mayan, Old Irish and Old Iranian. Ikonomou wrote his Harvard
dissertation on a text by the prophet Zarathustra written in Avestan, a form of Old Iranian.
"Language is like love," he says. "When you really fall in love with someone you also want to know their
whole story, meet their parents, visit their old schools. A language is not just the present for me but also
the past."
Ikonomou recently made a discovery. He found out that the word "rain" in all Slavic languages comes
from Old Iranian. "That got me so excited I would have loved to discuss it with somebody," he says. "I'd
also love to talk about the ancient Mayan inscriptions in the museum in Mexico City or the teachings of
King Darius, who lived 500 years before Christ. But I can't think of anybody to have the discussions
with. Sometimes I feel lonely, but that's the way it is."
Ikonomou is not, however, alone. He has friends and family and is married to Tomek, who is Polish.
"Im not a geek," he says. "I have friends that have never even heard the words Old English or Sanskrit.
We go out and have a good time." But at some point, when the friends are gone and Tomek has gone
to bed, Ikonomou disappears into his world. On his PC, he watches Chinese or Hungarian TV, anything
that's on. He chats for hours in Russian, Turkish, Bulgarian and even with Amharic speakers from
Ethiopia.
It's that way every night. Around four in the morning he goes to bed and sleeps for four or five hours,
which he knows is not good for his health. "But it's the way I keep up with the languages," he explains.
"I don't have to keep practicing my vocabulary. I'm not a student anymore. I'm somebody who makes
use of these languages in real life."
Total dedication
Ikonomou's work requires him to translate primarily official documents, but he listens to worldwide
chats, Internet TV, radio on his iPod in the mornings and evenings on the way to and from work, always
in different languages. Lately he's been keeping up with the news in Chinese. "That's particularly
important for me." The EU Commission requires ever more translations from the Chinese. In his office
there's a board with Chinese characters written on it.
"Chinese is my favorite language," he says. "It's completely different, the Mount Everest for
Europeans." Hes been to China a few times, and learned more of the language each time. The costs
are borne by the Commission, mostly. There are some countries whose languages he speaks that
Ikonomou has never visited, including Ethiopia and the Congo. "I just dont have the time."
He now wants to learn Albanian. The country recently became a candidate for EU membership. "I
always need an incentive," he says. His goal is to understand the news on Albanian radio within three
months. He doesn't need a vocabulary book for that, instead preferring electronic dictionaries and the
Internet.
"For several months I've been focusing on Albanian, learning words, making cross connections. Then I
store them and use them right away in chats or when I read the newspaper." He calls this method "total
dedication."

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen