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How We Should Read
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AT FIRST, we should read with a blitheness practically bordering on superficiality; later on, with a conscientious- ness close to distrust.
It is especially my male and technically minded fellow students whom I would like to persuade to do this.
I frequently see men reading the easiest pulp fiction, armed with heavy dictionaries. They will read one word in the book and then look it up in the dictionary. No wonder they soon get bored of reading and end up stating with relief that it is time for the news so they can switch on the TV.
Conscientiousness is a nice virtue but at the beginning of language learning, it is more of a brake than an engine. It is not worth looking up every word in the dictionary. It is much more of a problem if the book becomes flavorless in your hands due to interruptions than not learning if the inspector watches the murderer from behind a blackthorn or a hawthorn.
If the word is important, it will come up again anyway and its meaning will become apparent from the context, as it is called. This kind of acquaintance, which needs some thinking, leaves a much more lasting mark than reaching for the dictionary automatically and acknowledging the mean- ing of the word absent-mindedly. If you reach understand- ing at the expense of brainwork, it was you who contributed
to creating the connection and you who found the solution. This joy is like the one felt completing a crossword puzzle.
The sense of achievement sweetens the joy of work and makes up for the boredom of effort. It incorporates the most interesting thing in the world even into an indifferent text. You wonder what it is? Our own selves.
It was me myself who gleaned the word and me myself who deciphered the meaning of the sentence. It deserves some subconscious self-recognition, a secret little self-con- gratulation. You are compensated for your invested work, and you have the motivation for further activity right away.
It is proven by experience that initial dynamism is a good way to start reading in a foreign language, since a habit can be made of it like every other human activity. The main thing is to not get discouraged by the unfriendly medium of the foreign language text.
Who hasn’t felt a mild shiver when throwing oneself into the cool waters of a lake? Who hasn’t desired to climb back to the sunlit sand? And who hasn’t been happy after a minute or two, after getting used to the cold of the water, for resisting the temptation? An interesting foreign language text should help the “swimmer” over the initial aversion and discouragement of reading.
But if the engine is running properly, one has to learn how to brake as well. When you have worked yourself through a text and you have put the book down with the uplifting feeling that you have understood what it is about, literature should become the raw material of learning.
To my knowledge, aside from Kosztolányi’s story “I Read in Portuguese,” there is only one other work in Hungarian literature that deals with language learning: a charming tale by Mikszáth called “Aussi Brebis.” The main character in the story hires a French tutor for his sons. The teenagers want to evade this girl (and learning) at all costs, so they invent the excuse that she doesn’t speak French. They have their father promise to let them stop learning once they manage to catch
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her ignorant. In order to expose her, they keep browsing the dictionary and the grammar book until they acquire the language themselves without noticing it.
Let’s be sly and suspicious ourselves, too, in this second stage. Let’s regard words and sentences as touchstones to see if the writer breaks any rules.
I can predict the result in advance. It will turn out that André Maurois speaks better French, Vera Panova better Russian, and Taylor Caldwell better English than you. In this fight, you cannot prevail but you can win. Your knowl- edge develops and becomes consolidated. By the way, I didn’t mention these three specific authors by chance. Their fluent, natural style makes them very suitable for warming up.
To those who don’t dare to embark on original, un- abridged literary works immediately, I can recommend adapted texts with all my heart. The classics of world lit- erature have been rewritten, for language-learning purposes, into simpler sentences with a reduced vocabulary. They are available in every bookstore, and they can be borrowed from libraries for free, but I don’t recommend the latter. Course books are for scrawling. When they have come apart by too much use, they can be bought again.
Language is present in a piece of work like the sea in a single drop. If you have the patience to turn the text up and down, inside out, break it into pieces and put it together again, shake it up and let it settle again, you can learn re- markably much from it.
Lajos Kossuth,58 whose orations are given as models in
20th-century English rhetoric books, learned English in an Austrian prison. He used 16 lines of a Shakespeare play as a starting point. “I literally had to surmise English grammar from them. And once I had and perfectly understood the 16 lines, I knew enough English so that I only had to enrich my vocabulary.”
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Reading and Pronunciation
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LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE consists of understand- ing others and making yourself understood. The aim of language learning is to acquire these two abilities, in both speech and in reading/writing.
Conceiving the meaning of texts and speech is an ana-
lytical process. Communicating a message in speech or in writing is a synthetic activity.
If you neglect any of these four skills you have only ac- complished part of your goal. In practice, however, short- shrifting one or more often occurs. It is usually not for mat- ters of principle but for lack of time.
The four skills are interconnected and they enhance each other but it is proven by experience that less than complete mastery of them can still be useful. I met a hotel reception- ist in Rome who negotiated in seven languages with perfect pronunciation (even in Hungarian) but couldn’t write prop- erly in any of them (not even in Italian). On the other hand, Arany and Petőfi,59 who presented us with eternal values of
translation, had no idea of pronunciation. For example, the rhythm of “The Bards of Wales” by Arany demands that “lord mayor” be read as “lord ma-yohr.”
Books, alas, cannot teach you exact pronunciation. I