I asked some language professors and preceptors, “How did you first fall in love with language learning?” And not one of them objected to the phrasing “fall in love.” Each of our language faculty have a full-on neural-net entanglement with languages that are beautiful relationships indeed.
Dr. Paul Peterson reports that he first fell in love with language learning as a child of 6 or 7 years old. “I was at an international soccer tournament and heard other kids speaking dozens of languages. When I met the Swedish girls team (probably a little older team of 9 or 10 year olds, singing Swedish pop music), I was determined to study Swedish and I never looked back.”
As a kid, Dr. Carl Anderson wanted to be able to understand foreign words, phrases, and whole movies without subtitles. For him, “I think that was an independence thing: it was OK to have others tell me what they were saying, but I really wanted to be able to do it without relying on others.” As a teen, he reports that languages felt like a puzzle or game: how do I figure this out? “Especially for older, historical languages, there was almost a sense of time travel: people said (or wrote!) these words hundreds or thousands of years ago, but I can receive their message right now. A message from another world. (Even if it is still often a puzzle! )”
The magic didn’t happen for Dr. Isaac Schendel until college: his secondary education really didn’t inspire him in his Spanish classes. “It was only once I had a college German professor who could explain how the language, or indeed language in general, worked in a bit more detail that everything took off.”
Between them, one wonders whether one can ever truly master a language and another expresses that he’s an expert in an entire language group — a delicious difference that speaks of both the wonder of constant new discovery and the earned sense of pride in accomplishment after hard work. Both of these experiences are available to our students of Philology!
The lineup? They have the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, a strong mastery of Nordic languages, and they specifically name Modern German, Middle High German, Old Saxon, Old English, Old Norse, Modern Icelandic, Norwegian, Middle Low German, Pennsylvania German/Dutch and Modern Dutch.
But that’s not all! Paul has been brushing up lately on Modern German, Dutch, and Faroese. Carl’s experience of language education has been less one of formal education and more of “Oh, I need to understand the plumber’s explanation of what repairs are needed, but I don’t know the vocabulary of plumbing in Spanish!”, or “Oh, someone wrote me a lengthy email in Swedish, but I’m 20 years out of practice on Swedish and can’t remember half the vocabulary that they’ve used!” And “I still feel like I’m learning English (ostensibly my native language)!” Isaac has gone back to get solid Middle English as he wanted to fill what he perceived as a “Bildungslücke” (gap in education).
Carl adds that “having English as a first language provides a bit of a head-start [in Germanic language studies], and then, of course, once you start learning other but closely related languages, they unlock themselves more quickly. If you know English, it certainly takes an effort to learn Old English, but also certainly less effort than, say, learning Mandarin. For example, once you know Old English, then it’s not too terrible trying to add, say, Old Saxon or Old (or Middle) High German. And Old Norse isn’t that far away, either.”
Isaac has a favorite: Modern German, “but I would like to mention as a second favorite Pennsylvania German, both because of the grammar and because the language has one superficial similarity with the development of English: the dual vocabulary from a language with more social prestige. Whereas English has the ‘dual vocabulary’ of Germanic and Latinate, PA Dutch has a ‘dual vocabulary’ of German and English.
In sum, Carl Anderson asserts that the languages “themselves are the masters: one learns from them.”