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Interview with

Karen Landmann

Name: Karen Landmann
Nationality or Ethnicity: Canadian, American, German
Where do you live?: New York City
Languages: English (native), French, Spanish, Russian, German, Dutch (fluent), Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian and Sranan Tongo (conversational). Many others at a basic level.

Member since:

2024-08-01

1. What’s your story? How did you get into all these languages?

I have had the good fortune to be exposed to foreign languages from an early age. When I was five years old, I lived in central Mexico (Marfil, Guanajuato) for a year with my family. I had friends from the local village and I attended kindergarten immersed in Spanish. By the time the year was over, I was speaking with great proficiency. And I just loved it. When we returned to my native Canada, I received daily instruction in French at my elementary school. I remember often mixing up French and Spanish in those early years, but the love of acquiring foreign tongues was by then well-instilled in me. In addition, my father’s side of the family are German Jews. German was spoken at times with both my father and my grandparents, so by the age of eight years old, I could already speak 4 languages rather well.

My formal language studies continued throughout high school and university. I studied Latin in grades 8-10 and ancient Greek for two years in university. This solidified my fascination with how roots of ancient language led to today’s modern tongues. The Canadian government paid for me to study French in an immersive setting at Trois-Pistoles, Québec for 6 weeks after high school. I will say that being born in an industrialised country has brought with it a great many opportunities to which persons from developing nations may not have access. For that I am extremely grateful. A political commentary on geopolitics is naturally beyond the scope of this essay, but suffice it to say that I hope I have made the best use of the resources with which I have been gifted.

The next languages followed swiftly along, again, coupled with tremendous opportunities. I went to Uppsala, Sweden, in 1984 where I studied Swedish. It is my habit, when approaching immersion, to study 1-2 years’ worth of university-level language content independently before immersing. I therefore did some self-study then went directly into second-year Swedish immersion in Uppsala. I used the same approach in a Russian immersion summer program for two summers in Vermont (in between 2nd- and 3rd-year university), and then on a four-month study visa in Moscow, USSR after I received my baccalaureate degree. The following year I applied to Canadian Crossroads International (a cultural exchange program aimed at educating Canadians and persons from developing countries about international issues. I was sent to Suriname, where I promptly acquired Dutch, Sranan Tongo (a creole language: the lingua franca of Suriname) and a little Saramaccans and Aukaans. After my stay in Suriname, I travelled for 6 weeks in Brazil, where I learned Portuguese. One could say with confidence that I have mastered “portuñol” (!!).

I took some time from learning new languages for many years did work on due to life circumstances. I was not completely dormant, however, as I gradually bettered my Hebrew, learned the Arabic alphabet, and dabbled in various Asian languages. Is. But in the past few years, I have gone after new languages with a vengeance. I am currently working on Japanese, Mandarin, Norwegian, Danish, and Modern Greek, among others. I employ Duollingo and other internet resources to do this, but I really long for a community in which to practice, learn from, share with, and give to other language-learners.

There is, of course, more to this story. These are the highlights that I can think of. It would appear that I have been blessed with an ability to learn languages, with a relative amount of ease, but it also takes concerted effort. It is, however, a labour of love: an endeavour I deeply enjoy. I find that now that I know so many languages, studying new ones is becoming easier, even if they have a very different structure.  I deeply desire to keep learning foreign tongues for as long as I still have life left in me,which I trust will be for some time to come.


2. Which language(s) do you wish you could spend more time practising?

I just started Japanese last year for a two-week trip to Tokyo and Kyoto. I am ok at the alphabets (not so much kanji) but I can’t really say I speak it much yet.  I am struggling with the cadence and rhythm, even though it is not a tonal language I desperately want to delve deeper into the grammar, especially those fascinating verb forms. I have found JapanesePod 101 useful in this regard. I really like the radical system of the kanji. Genki has also been useful to me. When I can afford it, I hire a one-on-one tutor for my languages, which for me is the ideal way to study.

I am hoping that this initial entry into Asian languages via Japanese will help me get deeper into Mandarin and perhaps Cantonese. I am currently listening to the audiobook “Language Families of the World”, a series of entertaining lectures given by linguist John McWhorter, PhD.. It is fascinating, and is opening my mind into whole new worlds of language. I am very thrilled and excited! I would really like to better my Hebrew (Biblical and Modern) and Arabic. I love fountain pens and am getting into calligraphy, so the beauty of written Arabic appeals to me a great deal. I deeply desire to advance my Hindi past the general alphabet stage.


3. What are some languages you’d like to learn in the future?

I don’t think that there is a language I do not want to learn. I’m pretty interested in the Khoisan languages, although I haven’t picked one yet. I like that they have had the clicks for so long (centuries or even millennia). I would not be opposed to getting further into Zulu or beginning Xhosa, however.  Not to mention Vietnamese and Turkish. Other interests are Mongolian, Navajo, K’mai, and Albanian. I have also always wanted to learn Inuktitut, partly because I was born in Canada and have never been to the North of my native land, and in addition because the alphabet is beautiful. It seems like a fascinating language, but then again, I guess I’d say that about any language, to be honest. When I do travel to the North of Canada, I want to be able to communicate with the community and have some experience of being an “insider”, even be it to a small degree, not just another tourist peering at an ancient culture with ignorant eyes.

I am very interested in learning more from HYPIA members about how they learn languages, what are the newest ways to use technology as a benefit, and hopefully also to teach a language (or some words) to interested HYPIA members and achieve instruction in return. I would like to learn Quechua as well, and some languages from Australia. I know a couple of words in Luganda, but I would really like to broaden my knowledge of major African language families (Niger-Congo and others) in order to have a more well-rounded language background. I started learning a bit of Twi and I would like to become fluent in that tongue as well. Which brings me to another point: what does fluency mean? It is a word bandied about by many, but for my purpose here I will define it as basic conversational proficiency.


4. So let’s be honest, what’s the sexiest language?

Good question. French classic (the Mirabeau bridge) ally gets the prize on this one, and if you listen to Serge Reginnani’s voice/musical interpretation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Le Pont Mirabeau” (“The Mireabeau Bridge”), you might be inclined to agree. But to me, the clear winner is Russian. It has a lyrical sound and a cadence and rhythm that French lacks. The tenses, the verb constructions, the cases of the nouns, and the phonology simply exit the mouth without effort. The geauty of its compactness and flexibility of word order simply add to the appeal for me. I find that, despite the lack of nasal sounds, the way Russian rolls off the tongue is simply sublime. Naturally, Spanish and Portuguese (especially Brazilian) are also top contenders, no v moyom mneniye, russi yazik sami romanticheski yazik b mire. Ya vovshe vlyublilas kak romanz etovo yazika  buikhodit iz ulib c kazhdova slova. (In my opinion, the Russian language is the most Romantic language on earth. Ijust love how the romance of this tongue exits the lips with every word).


5. What’s the greatest pleasure you get from speaking so many languages?

There are so many ways that speaking languages gives me joy. I love the feeling my brain has when I am acquiring a new language. When I start to be able to put words into a sentence, for example, most recently with Norwegian, it feels like putting the last pieces of a puzzle into place. I think I actually get a kind of a “natural high”, an endorphin and an adrenaline rush when I start to be able to speak. I was just randomly listening to music on youtube the other day when a Norwegian folk song “Unnskykd Agnetha” (“I’m sorry, Agnetha) came on and I understood it! I felt on top of the world. I was both alert and relaxed at the same time. It was just great.

Perhaps an even more important and value I get from speaking languages is that they can be and usually are the key to getting an “in” to other cultures. I believe it was Alexander the Great who reportedly once said: “If you conquer a language, you conquer a people”. I feel this in the opposite way. When I was living in Suriname, I was speaking Dutch and Sranan Tongo on a regular basis. But when I went into the interior, all of a sudden, I was immersed into first Saramaccans and then Aukaans, languages evolved from West African tongues before 1492 and preserved in the remote interior of Suriname by the Maroons, escaped slaves who made their home in the rainforest. I found that by even speaking a few words of these languages, trust was built. People immediately smiled at my clumsy attempts at the tones, and we had a great laugh when I would mispronounce mbee (hair braiding) for mbé (loaf of bread) and when they knew I wanted my hair braided they brought me a slice of bread. It was truly joyful. Even with only a few shared words between us, we were bonded in a way that would not have been possible without the language. As far as greater Surinamese culture is concerned, speaking both Dutch and Sranan Tongo helped me make friends and flow more seamlessly into the culture, even though I still stuck out like a sore thumb. It was very, very fun!


6. Some people say the world is really just going to have a few languages left in a 100 years, do you think this is really true?

There are two opposing arguments that can be made about this issue. The first is that the unprecedented pace of globalisation and the rise of English as a/the world language is contributing to the erosion of many cultures and, with it, their languages. There is certainly evidence that this is the case with many more endangered languages now. However, I think there are more subtleties to this issue than the initial line of thinking about language dominance would appear to allow. With increased globalization comes also more access to and subsequent interest in foreign cultures. As well, movements now exist towards preservation and increased use of endangered languages. A good example of this is the renewed interest among the Navajo nation in the southwestern United States to preserve this language and culture, with an emphasis on passing down linguistic and cultural wealth into emerging generations and engendering interest and fascination with cultural roots that the American government systematically almost succeeded in erasing. If anything gives me hope, these movements would be it. While I am not from an indigenous culture, nor am I a native speaker of an endangered language, I have hope that somehow my language abilities can be used as a catalyst to help preserve these precious tongues.

My personal feeling is that in 100 years, we will rest somewhere in the middle. I often hope that the dominance of English, alongside technical developments, will facilitate more people communicating who would not otherwise have been in contact. I dream that this will lead to renewed interest in other cultures, including their language. The fact that I can just pull up the Peace Corps manual on learning Hausa is to me in a most basic google search seems a very positive development. As more materials become more readily available, and as different pedagogies for language instruction emerge, I believe that more and more people will speak multiple languages. Certainly, natural aptitude varies among individuals, but it is my core belief that anyone can learn a foreign tongue.


7. What is your message to young (and not so young) people out there who are interested in studying multiple languages?

YOU CAN DO IT. If you didn’t do well in languages at school, that may very well be because of the way languages are usually taught in academic settings. The majority of people do not acquire languages well in traditional language instruction settings. But there are so many resources out there! It is true that cost may make some of these prohibitive for persons of limited means, there are more and more free apps and tutors available. Find your learning style. New theories are emerging daily, but classically there exist visual, oral, and kinaesthetic learners. Often people are a combination of two or more of these. This may be by trial and error, but whatever you do, don’t get disheartened. Whatever you do, don’t believe that you are incapable. It’s about finding the right fit.

It is possible to acquire new language (s) at any age and in any context. Learning a new language does take effort, but it need not be a chore. Think of it as opening a door or finding a secret key to a magical closet. And the more you learn, the easier it is to learn more. Just don’t give up. f you struggled with learning foreign tongues in high school, blame the way they were taught, not your own intellect. Believe in yourself and persist.

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