I Can Eat Glass; It Does Not Hurt Me

Time for another e-mail, this one from Will, who probably needs to cut back on coffee...

Do you know other languages? If so, did you learn the other languages using books on tape? I'm seriously thinking of studying Mandarin using books on tape, but if it's an idea that's fraught with failure, I don't want to waste my time. I have this friend who memorized "hello" in a bunch of different languages so that he could say hello to everyone he met. Do you have a phrase that you memorize in as many languages as possible? Is it something like, "i'm not a spy" or maybe something more subtle like, "i like martinis"?

Um, yeah. I speak English and Russian fluently. I can speak Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Ukranian, a little bit of Tajik, and a lot of what I like to call "Bus Driver Spanish". The State Department uses the Rosetta Stone software for teaching foreign languages, and I hear it works pretty well. There's one big difference between what we do and what the State Department does:

People from the State Department don't hide the fact that they're American.

See, you can become fluent in a language and still sound nothing like a native speaker. Think about the accents in this country. There's a Southern accent and a Midwestern accent and a Boston accent... you can tell where somebody's from by the way they enunciate and pronounce their words. And you can tell if they aren't a native speaker. The same is true of any other language. If you learn Russian here, then head over to Moscow and start speaking, the people there will look at you and think, "Why is he speaking Russian with an American accent?" It's a bit of a dead giveaway.... the sort of thing that gets you a bullet to the head.

In order to sound the part, you need to get immersed, deep, with a native speaker, so you can pick up the accent. You need to learn how to shape the words... Russian is spoken from the back of the mouth (try it), but you also need to learn the slang and the mannerisms and patterns of speech. So the short answer is that we've got a system that works, but it's not feasible nor useful for John Q. Public.

As for memorizing a phrase in every language, I haven't done anything like that. But back in the day some kid at Harvard, who is probably a street mime or something similar now, compiled a list of ways to say "I can eat glass; it does not hurt me" in as many languages as possible. I found a copy of it here, on this website with an atrociously ugly background