Failing to learn languages is easy. Read this, and you can fail to learn 17
of them in 5 or 10 minutes, and still seem to know them all. Just disclaim any
knowledge, but come out with the odd sentence here and there, and the odd
useless fact. People will be impressed by your knowledge and your modesty.

No doubt you have tackled French already, and have been driven up the wall
by Le and La. “Le mouche,” said an Englishman when he saw a fly on the
ceiling. “La mouche,” corrected the Frenchman. “My God, you’ve got good
eyesight,” was the reply. What other answer did he expect? All flies are
female, it seems. So are all chairs, and all beards. How can a chair be
female? Genitalia, OK, but you’ll find that the male ones are feminine and the
female ones are masculine. Apart from Le and La, French is easy (unless you
have to pronounce chirugien).

Hungarian is very like English. In some respects. In one respect, at least.
One word is the same, anyway: “see ya” means goodbye. They spell it
“szia´” for some reason. They spell everything else wrong too, so you
can’t make head or tail of anything.

Scandinavian languages have wisely merged masculine and feminine, but they
had three sexes to start with, so they are still left with two – common and
neuter – which are even more useless than those in French. They have two
rather attractive features, though: the definite article is stuck on the end
of the noun, and verbs are made passive by adding an S. Mad, food; Maden
spises: the food is eaten.

Germans are proud of their linguistic prowess, so you won’t have to know
any German. On the other hand, German is the language of science. Long words
abound, and all the verbs pile up at the end of the sentence: an ideal medium
if you want to impress people without fear that anyone will actually read your
work. I suggest the Zentralblatt fu¨r Bakteriologie Parasitenkunde,
Infektionskrankheiten und Hygiene, Abteilung II Naturwissenschaftliche
Mikrobiologie der Landwirtschaft, der Technologie und des Umweltschutzes. Or
you may prefer the English journal, Gut.

Having failed one language you will find it easier to fail another. In most
languages, some words will be familiar. Even in Arabic, for instance, you find
alcohol, algebra and sugar. Every Arabic word is based on three root
consonants. Vowels and prefixes are then scattered among them to make
different forms. For example, K, T and B give you uktub, write; kitaab, book;
kutub, books; kaatib, writer; maktab, office, and so on. Children have to
learn to recognise the root consonants, and to spot the connection between
(for instance) bugra (cow), and abgar (cows). Vowels are unimportant to Arabs.
They use many but recognise only three: A, I and U. Short vowels are not
written. Mohammed, for instance, is written MHMD and you can more or less
insert whatever vowels you like.

Arabic leads on to Swahili: safari, journey, and kitabu, book. In 1964, a
year after Kenya’s independence, I bought a kitabu called Up-Country Swahili.
It was written by a colonial for colonials, who needed only to know how to
give orders to their servants: “Boy! Prepare my bath. Not too hot this time!”
I keep it as a relic of a lost culture. Swahili has not only prefixes and
suffixes, it has fixes in the middle of words, which give tenses, moods,
negatives, and so on with astonishing brevity: naona, I see; wasikuone, so
that they do not see you.

At least Swahall uses a script recognisable to Westerners. Azerbaijani is a
dialect of Turkish, and like Turkish it used to be written in the Arabic
script. Early in this century it switched to the Latin alphabet. Then Stalin
changed it to the Russian script. Now the Azeris are talking about changing
back to the Latin. No wonder there is civil unrest.

The worst is Russian. I’m not complaining about the new letters – they can
be learned. I’m complaining about those that are simply wrong. “Restaurant”
for instance is pronounced more or less the same, but is written PECTOPAH. In
handwriting the letters are different again, and even more wrong: “doctor” is
pronounced doctor, but is written gokmop. Worse is to come. There are three
genders and six cases: every adjective has a long and a short form, and has to
agree with the noun in number, gender and case: so for each adjective you have
72 endings to choose from … and we haven’t got beyond chapter 3 yet. A verb
comes next. I’m sorry, but you have to have a verb. In fact you have to have
two verbs, a perfective and an imperfective, each of which has a different
ending for each person. And if your verb has anything to do with movement you
are in real trouble. For each kind of movement there are two imperfective
verbs – the definite and indefinite, and for each of them there is one for
moving on foot and another for moving by transport. Suppose you have to leave
a PECTOPAH to go to the gokmop. You can’t just go. You have to choose from a
periodic table of verbs, all of which mean “go”. No wonder the Russians never
let anyone out of the country: they could never find the right verb.

In 1917 they had a revolution, and slashed their alphabet from 36 to 32.
Meanwhile, Tahitians do very well with only 13. Here’s a useful phrase for the
next time you’re in Tahiti and you want to tell someone “Has been carried
rapidly this sick man to the doctor so that be treated well he”: Ua afai oioi
hia teie mai o te taote, ia rapaau matai hia oia.

When you find yourself in a Thai restaurant, ask for “cow”. It’s rice. If
you want fried rice, ask for “cow pat”. If you are a male and you want to
thank the waiter (or waitress) say “cop coon crap”. Females have to say cop
coon something else, I’ve forgotten what.

Another key sentence to help you around the world is “Il cappello dello zio
e` nel fiume”, which is useful when your uncle’s hat is in the river and
you want an Italian to know about it.

If you wish to look foolish, learn the swear words. They are the gems of a
language. They carry immense power, and if used by a novice, expose him or her
to ridicule. It is safer to know no words, just irrelevant facts. Let people
know that Spanish has two imperfect subjunctives. Nobody will volunteer that
they don’t know what a subjunctive is, let alone an imperfect one. After all,
the British won their empire without any imperfect subjunctives. Didn’t
they?

The only thing that’s imperfect about English is the spelling. Millions of
kids every year are told that “inuf” is “enough”. Intelligent kids conclude
that their teacher is a nutcase, and thenceforth disregard anything he or she
says. So they find themselves at the bottom of the class, and more great
brains are lost to civilisation. Meanwhile those at the top of the class
become linguists, and seek to preserve this idiocy to safeguard their own
jobs.

So how was it? Just to check on your progress, translate the following into
Tahitian: Naona le cow pat dello gokmop spises nel PECTOPAH, cop coon crap,
and don’t forget the imperfect subjunctives. Szia´.

CORRECTION: In “How to wrap a rabid rabbit” by Martin Gregory (Forum, 22
January) it was stated incorrectly that “African languages have only five
vowels”. It was in fact the author’s “class of African students” who had only
five vowels. The error was editorial and not the author’s.

We all have deaf spots – not just those strange sounds that we cannot
pronounce, but the differences that we cannot hear. That we cannot hear
them is incomprehensible to native speakers of the language where such differences
matter.

Through no fault of my own, I was once teaching biology to a class of
African students. They all spoke three languages – Swahili, English and
their mother tongues – while I could claim only English. ‘I’ll fix them,’
I thought, and wrote ‘Hut hat hurt heart’ on the blackboard. To them they
were all haat; African languages have only five vowels. The Italians, too,
have only five vowels, and the difference between ‘sheet’ and ‘shit’ can
be deduced only from the context. Danes have myriads of vowels which all
sound the same to me. But ask them to repeat ‘rapid rabid rabbit wrap it’,
they say rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit.

Children do not learn languages faster than adults, but they learn them
better. This is partly because their brains are still in the programming
stage, building a repertoire of sounds which they will be able to recognise
and reproduce for the rest of their lives. Once programmed, that’s that.
New sounds cannot easily be accommodated. The deaf spots start to appear
when children learn to read. It is as if they stop using their ears. The
sounds in their program become firmly attached to certain letters, and they
stay attached. When as adults, they see a word in a foreign language, they
want to pronounce the letters as their childhood program tells them. Some
people cannot change the program, no matter how clearly another pronunciation
is demonstrated – even if the correct sound exists in their own language
represented by a different letter. They imagine they hear something other
than what is said. In effect, they are deafened by the written word.

‘What is the difference between dock and dock?’ I was asked by a Dane.
Some Danes do not hear the difference between ‘dog’ and ‘duck’ because of
the way these words are written. ‘Duck’ rhymes very well (to my ears) with
tak spoken by a Dane. But knowing how it is written, they refuse to hear
it as it is spoken. The outcome can be hilarious. I once apologised (in
English) to a Dane for being delayed by the fog. ‘You were delayed by what?’
he asked.

‘Danish is easy,’ I was told by an Englishman. ‘You just put a hot
potato in your mouth and speak Norwegian.’ It is true. The written language
is very similar to Swedish, and virtually identical to Norwegian, but Danish
sounds totally different to both. It is what I call a rebel language. The
Danes wished to sound different, so they put hot potatoes in their mouths.
‘Oxford’ English is another – a dialect that arose because, it seems, some
people, consciously or unconsciously, wanted to sound distinguished. French
is related to other living Latin languages, such as Italian, Spanish and
Rumanian, but its pronunciation is bizarre. Cockney seems to be another
rebellious offshoot.

As far as their pronunciation goes, English and French are now way off
the beaten track, with the result that both we and the French tend to find
other languages difficult to pronounce. A Norwegian called Host once checked
into a French hotel. The concierge was defeated. To a French speaker the
H is not pronounced, neither are the consonants at the end, so that left
only the o, which had been crossed out, so there was nothing left to pronounce.

The letter h doesn’t represent a proper sound to the French (or to the
Italians). It is just a puff of hot air. In desperation they scatter h sounds
at random as they speak English, in the hope that some of them will land
in the right place. We find it unfathomable that such a simple sound can
cause so much difficulty. I once tried to follow a French news bulletin
which had much to say about a Monsieur Iss, of whom I had never heard. It
was Mr Heath, the former prime minister.

Arabic must be a nightmare for the French. There are, in fact, three
different h sounds, and four different ths. The first h is like ours; the
second is like the Spanish; the third is like the German ch in Bach. (I
am sure the French could pronounce the last one if they realised it was
just their own r unvoiced. They are deafened by the way it is written.)
The Arabs have the French r but because it is transliterated as ‘gh’, the
French again think they cannot pronounce it.

The Arabs laugh at the English for being unable to distinguish between
their two t’s, two s’s and two d’s. And yet with all these consonants they
have no v and no p. The b sound takes p’s place, and bees are bicked in
bods. ‘Mr Peter’ tends to be Master Bater, and in the southern dialect ‘John
Major’ emerges as Goon Nugger.

Many Africans share with the Japanese a delightful confusion of the
English l and r. A Kenya Airways hostess announced on arrival in London:
‘We hope you have a good fright, and that you will fry with us next time.’
Perhaps it isn’t surprising they have problems when it comes to a general
election. Moreover, Africans tend not to distinguish between d and nd or
between b and mb. Given also the tendency to follow consonants with an i,
blood becomes brandy, and Land-Rover becomes Randy Lover.

My wife has the solution to such international misunderstandings. Play
every baby a recording of the world’s major languages daily before breakfast,
between birth and their fourth birthday. Not to be confused with bathday,
if you’re African.

Martin Gregory is a veterinary epidemiologist, formerly based in the
Yemen and now in France.