How I learned 8 languages
A lot of people dream of being able to engage in witty conversations in a number of languages. Even if a dumb person speaks a second or third language, everyone thinks he/she is smart. For many Americans, Brits and Australians – who speak the world’s dominant language as their mother tongue – there was never a need to speak any other language besides English.
I am an American, and even though I grew up in an Italian household, we were never encouraged to speak anything but English. I only learned Italian years later on my own… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Eventually, I learned some 8 languages to some degree and am fluent in a number of them. In others, I absolutely suck, but can get by. I learned them in different ways, so feel that I know a bit about this subject.
My first foreign language was Spanish, which I learned in school. Most of the other students went to the same classes I did and used the same books and still cannot count to ten in Spanish. I can sit up all night and tell jokes in Spanish and have done so – there are some tricks you know. 
I learned Spanish the traditional way – first learning to read and write. Learning the grammar and vocabulary and much later acquiring the more difficult speaking and listening skills.
Later, I met and married a Polish woman – so began to study first Russian, then Polish. In which I am also fluent. For Polish, I tried a different tack – I thought it would never be important to read or write the language, as the goal was merely to communicate with my wife’s family. Speaking and comprehension were paramount, and I ignored written Polish and grammar. This was a different experience entirely. At one point I was fluent in speaking Polish, but nearly illiterate! I later fixed this to some degree but still make many mistakes in my writing in this language.
Thus began my fascination with languages. I later brushed up on my high school French and am still reasonably fluent. Learned German and of course, Italian. For Italian, I hired a tutor to come to my office once per week for lessons.
How to Speak Any Language
Right about this time, I found an interesting book, the title was “How to Speak Any Language”. Written by a man named Barry Farber, at first I thought it was rather presumptuous when I first noticed the title, and began to read it expecting it to be dumb – but the title intrigued me. I began to read the book and could not put it down. It was a short book – one you could read in a single sitting – which I did. In it, Mr. Farber not only revealed his secrets of how he was able to learn 25 languages, but wrote a brilliant story about his lifelong journey in language learning that reads like a novel.
Most surprising for me was that Barry Farber – a man who spoke 25 languages – spent the last chapter simply raving about the latest secret weapons he found to learn languages even faster. One of these secrets was the Pimsleur method as devised by the famous linguistics professor, Dr. Paul Pimsleur. I was doubly surprised because this was the method I had been using to learn languages quickly and I had discovered it entirely by accident.
When I read that his first language was Chinese, that did it for me.
I found a Chinese teacher in my city and called her up immediately and studied Mandarin with her for a year before she moved back to China. I used the Pimsleur method along with private one-on-one lessons with a lovely Chinese lady. So in conjunction with my Chinese linguist teacher, we followed the Pimsleur method and I was able to learn the language at lightning speed.
Farber wrote about the Pimsleur language method which I had discovered some years earlier on my own. It was sort of my ’secret weapon’ to learn languages quickly. Most of my friends in Europe (I have lived in Europe for the past 17 years.) speak a number of languages, and by sheer chance, two of my closest friends as well as two of my co-workers are linguists – one of them with a graduate degree in linguistics from Harvard.
I shared Farber’s book with them, as well as the Pimsleur method, which they all immediately embraced. My friend Eric used the Pimsleur method to immediately learn Spanish and Portuguese, and within a few months he was able to communicate with me entirely in Spanish. I was amazed – but then again, he’s a Harvard linguist… and he found the secret weapon know as the Pimsleur Method.
If you are interested in learning a language the fastest possible way, there is no faster way than the Pimsleur method. Especially if you decide to learn more than one foreign language – they all follow the same basic pattern, and so this seems to help when you learn a bunch of languages as I have and my friends have.
