How to Master Successfully Any Language of the World 5
If somebody told me a dozen of years ago, that one day I would speak ten languages and
teach four, I would probably consider that a mean joke. Well, speaking many languages
has been my childhood dream. But TEN languages – that would be TOO much. I could
not imagine myself being THAT smart or having THAT much time for learning – finally,
I had my life to live, my job to work at, my family and friends. After all, one has to be a
genius or an academician to learn even one language perfectly, and I’m not like that…
Well, I always had that approach: If anyone on Earth has done it, then there is no reason
that I can’t do it, too. There are people, who have mastered perfect French. Or German.
Or Chinese. There are people, who have mastered a few languages. These people may be
few, but they exist. And if THEY could, so I can. After all, I have two hands, two legs
and one head, just like they do! Well, they may KNOW something that I don’t know yet.
So, I should better learn their experience, and then I’ll do it even faster.
Nearly a decade ago I could not call myself a multilingual. But something had happened
to me then. It was none of those dramatic life-changing events. My family remained in
good health, I wasn’t dismissed and I didn’t leave my engineering job. These were
personal considerations and decisions. So, I started a new way as a language learner, and,
finally, as a tutor.
I wanted to know MANY languages. I wanted to be able to speak to ANY person on this
planet. Well, learning ALL the languages of the world would be unreal. On the other
hand, knowing just a couple of “world” languages would be too little. So I have carefully
selected a few languages that I wanted to know at the native speaker level, then a few
languages that were of somewhat lesser importance to me, and so on. I have finally
selected six certain languages to learn up to the native speaker level, and at least ten more
just to be able to hold a good conversation, express myself and understand the other, but
not much more than that.
I knew English from school, so the first language I started to learn myself was German.
Actually, German was the first language I wanted to learn since I was a child. I remember
myself, an 11-year-old boy – it was a Russian winter night, I was with my mom and my
grandfather at a railway station in Moscow. We were waiting for a train that would take
us to our hometown in Belarus, then a Soviet republic, located to the west of Russia.
Suddenly they announced another train, that was departing from Moscow and headed to
Berlin. They had already made different announcements before, but this Moscow-Berlin
train drew my attention. That train was going abroad! From Russia, through Belarus, then
it was supposed to cross the border to Poland and finally it would arrive to Germany.
ABROAD! In the Soviet Union “abroad” stood next to “paradise” – absolutely unreal,
fascinating, interesting, somewhat scary – all at once. I imagined myself, grown up,
getting on that train to Berlin… Probably I had to be a translator or an interpreter. Or,
maybe a diplomat!.. I decided I definitely wanted to speak German.
Copyright © 2012 Dmitry Slomov. All rights reserved.
Dmitry Slomov is a language learning consultant, a tutor and the author of the Russian Language Course – Lessons with Dmitry
Contact Dmitry at: http://www.courseofrussian.com/en/contact.html
