不替孟明的替:《打通巴别塔》：揭秘语言达人的疯狂生活

译者：Nasca

译文链接：http://select.yeeyan.org/view/58460/246290

为什么有些人要学十几种乃至几十种语言？迈克尔·艾哈德在其新书《打通巴别塔》中给出了答案。以下摘录了其新书的部分章节，作者将带我们走近一位将外语学习推向极致的语言达人。由于学过的语言太多，此人甚至不求门门会说。

在寻访最强语言达人的过程中，我在网上碰到了一个神级语言大师——亚历山大·阿圭列斯，他邀请我去加州伯克利，到他家里做客。这是我第一次走近当代语言达人的生活。每天日出之时，亚历克斯往往在家狂练写作——汉语、阿拉伯语、拉丁语、俄语、波兰语、德语……各种语言轮番上阵。练习完毕后，他会戴着随声听来到小区附近的公园，在贫瘠的山间一边越野一边听磁带中播放的德语有声读物（目前他对MP3比较抵触）。马拉松对他来说完全不是问题。据说有一次他在林间迷了路，结果跑了30多英里（注：48公里）才出了林子。体力之强可见一斑，当然，跑完后他也感到眩晕。后来有人告诉他，长跑的人每隔两小时必须吃点东西，这是一项科学发现。但他对碳水化合物也比较抵触，觉得它们黏糊糊的，令人反胃。

一天早晨，他偶然步入一所神学院的校园，觉得这里环境清雅，最适合建一所语言学院，专门培养各种多语种人才。他做梦都想开办这样一所学校。校园里散布着布道院复兴风格的低矮建筑，周围红杉、桉树环绕，微风习习。亚历山大指了指远处直切山底的防火道，说那里是做影子训练的好地方，影子训练是他掌握语音语调的方法：将磁带放入随身听，一边闲庭信步一边模仿跟读。跟读时不一定要听懂磁带中的对话，因为之后还要回过头来阅读翻译，译完之后再做一遍影子训练。对他来讲，先掌握语音语调、再弄清词义是比较有效的学习方法。大声跟读还能纠正语音错误，避免日后由于口音不正贻笑大方。

我原以为，他想把所有感兴趣的语言一网打尽，达到脱口而出的地步——要不然怎么会做影子训练呢？又或者，他喜欢跟人打交道，所以才要学那么多语言。结果证明，这两种想法都错了。攻克各种语言的最终目的，是要博览世界各地的文学原著。无论是古典著作，还是当代名篇，都应尽可能欣赏其原汁原味的风貌。他给我看了一本新出的小说，作者是荷兰人。“看这些小说能让我感受到异域的生活气息，了解语言背后的文化内涵。”说着，他晃了晃手里的书，“毕竟，我不能直接跑去阿姆斯特丹，找一间咖啡馆进去坐坐，点一份坚果巧克力蛋糕，让人觉得我就像个当地人，而不是从美国远道而来的游客。”他将每种语言都看作一种生命实体，悉心感悟，用心收集与之相关的一切深奥知识。“我学的外语大多是‘哑巴外语’，可能一辈子也说不上一句，”他说，“但我觉得无所谓。能说当然好，但我们平常用母语对话都不见得有趣，外语就更别提了。”

说话间，我们已经走到一座庭院，阳光洒在地面上，庭院中央有一口干裂的喷泉。看来是时候往回走了。“依我看，”他说，“通晓多门语言的人分三种。一种是终极天才，这种人少之又少，他们样样精通，只不过其中一项恰好是语言。

《打通巴别塔：寻访举世无双的语言达人》，作者迈克尔·艾哈德，320页，自由出版社，定价25.99美元。

“第二种是有语言天赋的专才。”一个典型的例子就是19世纪的意大利红衣主教约瑟夫?卡斯帕?梅佐凡蒂，据说他会72种语言；我在博洛尼亚查到过关于此人的文献资料。“再有就是像我这种类型的人：没天赋，但肯下苦工，而且是非同一般的苦工。所有收获都是在艰辛付出中得到的。你最感兴趣的应该就是这类人，他们通常会有一些值得借鉴的学习经验和学习方法。”

走在亚历山大身边，我开始感到压力山大，整个人被镇住了，不知是自己不小心走进了四次元，还是他根本就活在古代。我问他怎么看待只会一种语言的人，他说，真心为他们感到遗憾，每个有教养的人都应该掌握6种语言。他是个讲究礼节的人，每次看到别人的来信中没写正式的称呼语就闹心。他不喜欢论坛帖子，认为它们“不学术”。他欣赏欧洲启蒙运动时期的人物——他们发明创造、吟诗作赋、投身科研、钻研外语，开时代风气之先。相比之下，现代社会缺乏这样的饱学之士，他认为这是人类文明衰落的标志。因此不难想象，亚历山大这样的人与当今学术机构格格不入。读研的时候，有位教授告诉他，一门心思打通巴别塔只会让他成为浅尝辄止的庸才，而非术业精进的学者。这句话刺痛了亚历山大，直到今天依然如犹在耳。几十年来，他一直想证明教授是错的。

回到车里，我问他会不会通过读报学外语。印象当中语言达人应该是那种熟知各地时事的人。

不料他来了一句：“你知道‘报纸’用希腊语怎么讲吗？Ephimerida（注：可能跟Ephemeridae蜉蝣这个词有关）。”没想到他这么容易生气。

“那就是不读咯，”我说。“不读。”他也比较抵触报纸。

亚历山大视自己为叛逆者，当全世界的人都在朝着越来越专的方向发展，亚历山大却想拥抱全世界的文明。在他深恶痛绝地抵制专业化的同时，自己却将专业化推向了极致。虽然他懂很多语言，但学语言几乎成了他生活的全部。不信的话，看看他的时间表就知道了。每一门外语的学习时间都精确到了分钟。

亚历山大拿出一台笔记本，放到清理过的案桌上，给我看他的时间表。几年前他正式开始多语种修炼的时候，还喜欢用古日耳曼字母和中文数字排列语言项目，现在则用Excel表格和阿拉伯数字。表格中有一行记录了他誊抄外文书籍的页数，每页按15分钟算，他就能算出一天之内在各个语种/语系上花了多少时间。你要问他写了多久德语，他也能马上告诉你，是57小时。此外，看过多少小说故事、长跑时听了多少有声读物、做过多少语法练习、复习了多少语言知识、做了多久影子训练他都了然于胸。我注意到，他从不说自己喜欢什么语言点或者爱干什么事情。问他有没有喜欢的元音、动词结构或者辅音，他一脸茫然。开口闭口都是花了多少时间、做了多少练习，这就好比一个热爱美食的人，不谈食物的美味，却大谈其中的卡路里。

那么，我们的男主人公到底学习了多长时间呢？在过去的456天——即10944小时当中，亚历山大花在语言上的时间为4454小时，约占总时间的40%。根据学习时间的长短，我们将亚历山大学过的语种列举如下：

英语—456小时 阿拉伯语—456小时 法语—357小时 德语—354小时 拉丁语—288小时 汉语—243小时 西班牙语—217小时 俄语—213小时 韩语—202小时 梵语—159.5小时 波斯语—153小时

希腊语—107小时 印地语—107小时 盖尔语—107小时 波兰语—102小时 爱尔兰语—83小时 捷克语—57.50小时 塞尔维亚-克罗地亚语—57.50小时 瑞典语—51小时 加泰罗尼亚语—44小时

古诺尔斯语—40小时 意大利语—39.50小时

葡萄牙语—37.50小时 土耳其语—34.75小时 日语—30小时 罗马尼亚语—26.25小时 古希腊语—22小时 中古高地德语—17小时 丹麦语—17小时 古英语—14小时

古法语—14小时 南非荷兰语—12小时 挪威语—12小时 奥克语—12小时 斯瓦西里语—12小时 乌克兰语—10小时

新诺尔斯语—8小时 越南语—4小时

上表中还有67种语言没有列出来。这些语言的学习时间在半小时到3小时之间。“我可能这辈子都弄不懂哈萨克语”他说，“但我希望自己能够听出来。假如有人在街上讲这种语言，我至少要能够反应出来，知道他们在讲哈萨克语’。

           原文阅读：

Why would someone learn 20 or 50 languages? In an excerpt from his new book, 'Babel No More,' Michael Erard meets a hyperpolygot who doesn’t even want to speak the numerous languages he’s learning.

On a quest to find the person we could say spoke the most languages in the world, I stumbled on the online personae of a language learning guru and hyperpolyglot, Alexander Arguelles, who invited me to Berkeley, California, where he was living at the time. It was my first introduction to the life of the contemporary hyperpolyglot. On many mornings, once Alexander has greeted the sun doing extensive writing exercises in Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Russian, Persian, German, and other languages, he goes for a long run in the arid hills of the park above his neighborhood, while listening to a German audiobook tape on his Walkman. (So far, he eschews the MP3.) Marathon lengths are easy for him—once, he says, he got lost in the woods and ended up running more than thirty miles, though he felt faint. Later someone told him that long-distance runners have to eat every two hours, which came as a revelation; he finds the carbohydrate goo disgusting. He eschews that, too.

One morning, he discovered the campus of a theological seminary that he now covets for a polyglot academy he dreams of starting. The school was made up of low, Mission Revival–style buildings surrounded by redwoods and eucalyptus trees stirred by the wind. Alexander pointed to a fire trail cutting down the hill, saying that it would be good for shadowing. Shadowing is how he gets to know a language’s sounds: put a tape in the Walkman and, while briskly walking and arms swinging, you shout the sounds as you hear them. Though you won’t know what the words mean, later you read the dialogues and translate them, then you shadow the same material again. For him, parsing the sounds first then adding meaning later makes it stick. Shouting now is also an inoculation against embarrassment later.

At first, I assumed that his ambition was to speak all of his languages—otherwise, what’s the point of shadowing? This turned out to be wrong. I also assumed that he might like to talk to people. That, too, wasn’t right. His goal is to read literature from all over the world, classic and contemporary, in the original languages. He had shown me a recent novel by a Dutch author. “Reading this puts me in tune with the living spirit, the resonance of the language,” he’d said, waving the book, “not being able to go to Amsterdam and go into a café and get a hash brownie and have them think that I’m one of them, not an American tourist.” He wants to explore his consciousness, to encounter a language as a living entity, and to collect the esoteric knowledge of these encounters. “Most of the languages I’ve studied I’ve never spoken, and I probably never will,” he told me. “And that’s okay with me. That’s nice if you can do that, but it’s rare that you have an interesting conversation in English. Why do I think it would be any better in another language?”

Zoxox Digital / Getty Images

As we walked around the seminary grounds, he pointed out a cloister, also a good space for shadowing. He cut the air with his finger, imagining himself the school principal: here he’d put Korean, here Chinese, over there Japanese, letting students drift from area to area. He’d do this, he said, because he encounters languages not as finite, divisible things, but as fuzzy clouds. Labeling something “French” or “Italian” is a convenience, not a reflection of the reality he perceives. His students should have that experience, too. What the rest of us call a “language” is, to Alexander, a minor variation on a broader linguistic theme. “For me to learn any Romance or Germanic dialect, just put me in the environment, and it would come alive,” he said. “It would be building upon thousands and thousands of hours of active conscious study of other languages.” Even if he were to set out today to learn a language unrelated to one he already knows, he said, “I would have to put in fewer hours than compared to, say, you.”

A sunlit courtyard with a dry, cracked fountain at its center beckoned us to stop. “The way I see it,” he said, “there are three types of polyglots. There are the ultimate geniuses, the ones who are so rare, the ones who excel at anything they do, and one of those happens to be languages.

Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners By Michael Erard 320 pages. Free Press. $25.99

“There are people who are only good at languages for whom it comes very easily." One of these was Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, a 19th century Italian cardinal who used many languages (some say 72); I had excavated his archives in Bologna and discovered other facts about him. "Then there are people like me: we’re willing to work very, very hard, and everything we know, it’s because we’ve worked to get it. I would think those would be the people you’d be most interested in: what sort of strategies do they have that they can teach everybody else?”

Walking next to Alexander, I began to feel stupid, soft, and modern. I asked him what he thought of people who have only one language. I feel sorry for them, he replied. He maintains that every educated person should know six of them. Informality makes him uncomfortable. He gets a lot of emails that don’t have formal salutations, which bugs him. The forum posts he doesn’t like because they’re not “scholarly.” He admires figures of the Enlightenment who invented things, wrote poetry, made scientific discoveries, and learned lots of languages. That contemporary society lacks comparable polymaths he takes as a sign of civilization’s decay. Understandably, he has a hard time fitting in to modern institutions. As a graduate student, a professor told him that an ambition to learn more languages would mark him as a dilettante, not a scholar. Decades later, that comment still stings Alexander so badly that he longs to prove that professor wrong.

As we got back in the car, I asked if he reads newspapers to practice his languages—I had imagined the hyperpolyglot to be someone conversant in the current events of a dozen cities.

“You know what the Greek word for ‘newspaper’ is? Ephimerida,” he replied. His prickliness surprised me.

“So, no,” I said. “No.” He eschews them, too.

Alexander sees himself as a rebel. Over there is the world, which drives people to specialize in ever-narrowing areas of knowledge. Over here is Alexander, who wants to embrace all literatures, all peoples. Yet he’s an exemplar of the very trend he decries. Though he knows many languages, studying them is nearly all he does. For proof, look at how closely he’s documented every minute of every deliberate encounter with a foreign language.

He pulled out a laptop on the neatened kitchen table and showed me how it works. Years ago, when he first started on his polyglot path, he wrote on paper in runes or Chinese characters; now he uses Excel spreadsheets and Arabic numerals. In one column go the scriptorium pages he’s completed; figuring fifteen minutes a page, he calculates a total number of hours per language and language family, broken down by minutes per day—ask him how much German writing he’s done, and he can tell you in the blink of an eye (fifty-seven hours). He also accounts for reading narratives, listening to recorded books while running, doing grammar drills, reviewing, and shadowing. I noticed that he never talks about parts of language or the things that delight him, and when I asked him if he has favorite vowels or verb structures or consonants, he seemed to be baffled. He talks purely in units of time, of labor. He’s like someone who loves food but mostly discusses it in terms of its calories rather than its flavors.

How much time are we talking about here? Over the last 456 days, according to Alexander’s spreadsheet, he’s spent 4,454 hours (about 40 percent of the 10,944 hours of those 456 days) on languages, arranged in descending order by the total number of hours of study:

English—456 hours Arabic—456 hours French—357 hours German—354 hours Latin—288 hours Chinese—243 hours Spanish—217 hours Russian—213 hours Korean—202 hours Sanskrit—159.5 hours Persian—153 hours

Greek—107 hours Hindi—107 hours Gaelic—107 hours Polish—102 hours Icelandic—83 hours Czech—57.50 hours Serbo-Croatian—57.50 hours Swedish—51 hours Catalan—44 hours

Old Norse—40 hours Italian—39.50 hours

Portuguese—37.50 hours Turkish—34.75 hours Japanese—30 hours Romanian—26.25 hours Ancient Greek—22 hours Middle High-German—17 hours Danish—17 hours Anglo-Saxon—14 hours

Old French—14 hours Afrikaans—12 hours Norwegian—12 hours Occitan Proven?al—12 hours Swahili—12 hours Ukrainian—10 hours

New Norse—8 hours Vietnamese—4 hours

He’s spent between half an hour to three hours studying another sixty-seven languages. “I’ll probably never know Kazakh,” he said, “but I want to know what Kazakh sounds like. If I hear people speaking Kazakh on the street, I want to know, ‘That’s Kazakh.”