SOURCE: THE NEW YORKER
Immersing yourself in another language can often be a liberating and enlightening experience. Part of the appeal, as the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri notes in her essay “Teach Yourself Italian,” is leaving the familiar behind. “Every new construction seems a marvel, every unknown word a jewel,” she writes. This week, we’ve gathered a selection of pieces about the art of mastering a foreign language. In “Love in Translation,” Lauren Collins writes about falling in love abroad and learning to communicate with her husband in French. In “Talk Like an Egyptian,” Peter Hessler moves to Cairo after the Arab Spring and examines the evolving relationship between Egyptian culture and the Arabic language. Calvin Trillin travels to Ecuador and discovers a link between culinary and linguistic journeys, and Judith Thurman considers the mysteries of hyperpolyglots, people with the ability to speak dozens of languages. Finally, in “Why Did I Teach My Son to Speak Russian?,” Keith Gessen recounts his endeavors in raising a bilingual child. Taken together, these pieces offer an intriguing look at what it means to find a new voice.
“Teach Yourself Italian”
“Whenever I can—in my study, on the subway, in bed before going to sleep—I immerse myself in Italian. I enter another land, unexplored, murky. A kind of voluntary exile.”
“Love in Translation”
“French is said to be the language of love, meaning seduction. I found in it an etiquette for loving, what happens next.”
“Maltese for Beginners”
“The word ‘hyperpolyglot’ was coined two decades ago, by a British linguist, Richard Hudson, who was launching an Internet search for the world’s greatest language learner. But the phenomenon and its mystique are ancient.”
“Speaking of Soup”
“One of the difficulties of taking one-on-one conversational Spanish lessons, I remembered from earlier attempts, is that either the teacher or the student has to come up with something for the conversation to be about.”
“Talk Like an Egyptian”
“There has never been a great variety of materials for teaching Egyptian Arabic, whose status is best conveyed by its name: ’ammiyya, a word that means ‘common.’ ”
“Why Did I Teach My Son to Speak Russian?”
“I liked the feeling, when I carried him through the neighborhood or pushed him in his stroller, of having our own private language.”