Translator: Susana Coto Yakovliev Reviewer: Kristaps Kadiķis
[TEDxPerm]
[The Art of Being]
[Dmitry Petrov]
I am a simultaneous interpreter by profession.
In addition, I teach people
foreign languages, various languages.
In addition to that I also teach simultaneous translation to translators.
It has it's own specifics.
Interesting that at a certain point
my goal of learning foreign languages
went beyond the rational:
I started to learn not only the languages
that were required for my job,
to make a living,
but, strangely enough,
I developed a passion for ancient languages
or very small and rare languages.
Trying to understand why all of this happened,
I found the answer: As it turns out I really wanted to understand
how a language becomes what it is now.
Language as a whole, global.
What made it that way?
I realized that despite all the rules of dialectics,
that we have all studied at some point,
the language develops, not from simple to complex,
but from complex to simple.
If we take all the ancient languages,
ancestors of the existing languages,
they were many more times complex,
universal, rich, diverse in forms.
Therefore, Latin is richer than Italian,
Old English richer than Modern English,
Sanskrit richer than Hindi.
This gave me a lot to think about.
I thought, how could the ancient people come up
with such complex languages?
Their lives were simple and monotonous enough.
They had to survive and continue their species,
as well as find food and escape from dangerous predators.
But it's not that simple.
The languages of the ancient people
were rich in quantity of forms and inflections.
Even today it is seen
in the examples of the aboriginal languages,
of the non-written languages.
I started thinking.
Given that I am not an expert in the exact sciences,
I allowed myself to go beyond and set foot on the most sacred of grounds.
A little bit of physics, a little bit of mathematics, I thought:
I guess there should be common principles
that unify all our knowledge system.
That is, I started to perceive language
as something inherent to the Universe, to the Being.
We can talk not only about English,
Latin, or Russian; but also about the language of mathematics,
physics, chemistry.
The same reality can be not only described, but also transferred
from the language of biology
to the language of mathematics,
from the language of physics to Latin and so on.
Initially I believed that these thoughts
didn't make any sense, that they were totally groundless.
But they gave me rather pragmatic results.
How can I use it?
Again, in a somewhat insolent way,
I took the concept of waves and particles, and thought:
Can I apply it to the process of learning languages?
What's the connection?
If we consider a particle as a word;
and the wave as its surroundings,
every thought, images,
feelings that orbit around the word;
we get one voluminous unit that's much easier to understand.
Here's an example that I can give.
Recently, anthropologists observed
aboriginal tribes somewhere in the Amazon Jungle.
Each member of the tribe knows at least 10 different languages.
Tribal languages, of course, but languages nevertheless.
A member of the tribe was asked to explain
how he learned the language of the neighboring tribe.
He answered: "I don't understand what you are talking about".
"Well, how do you speak the language of a neighboring tribe?"
He didn't understand the question.
"All right, how do you say 'axe' in the language of your neighbors?"
"I don't know."
"But you bought them an axe,
you talked to them, laughed and discussed something..."
And he said: "Oh! In order to speak that language
I have to cross the river, enter the village,
look at their faces, their palms,
the shore, and then I'm in the environment where I can speak the language.
But if I leave the village,
I'm sorry, I can't speak the language anymore."
This means, the environment shapes our linguistic abilities.
How can I apply this to the methodology of teaching?
First, it's necessary to recreate the system of images and sensations,
given that we cannot follow the example of this aborigine.
This system shapes for us the concept of each language.
Therefore, when I teach Italian,
I tell my students to close their eyes
and imagine Italy, Italians, and the Italian language.
What does the imagination evoke spontaneously?
Each one will have their own ideas, images.
Someone will hear songs by Celentano,
someone will remember the smell of a hot pizza,
someone will remember traveling to some kind of a sea resort.
Each will see different images.
But in any case, there will be something in common.
Italy will be exactly that for the person.
We should perceive a language not in a linear fashion,
as a set of words, grammatical rules.
Instead, it's a voluminous space
that has its own flavor, aroma, color, and generates various emotions.
This is what allows small children
of 2 or 3 years to learn their mother tongue
in an active way, in little time,
without any type of formal education.
I tried to use this
in my teaching methodology with adults.
Another thing: you won't find anybody
who denies the opportunity of learning another language or two.
But we know that some people,
that study a foreign language for years,
sadly are not always satisfied with the results.
Another paradoxical point:
I discovered that each person
that complains about hurdles and difficulties
in learning foreign languages
is always capable of localizing the problem
in their own body.
I have even categorized these people.
They are those that tend to analyze the information too much.
They think a lot constantly.
They combine who knows what to construct a phrase.
Then they dig through the virtual dictionary,
they go to an archive of forgotten words.
And only after all that mess, they manage to form a phrase.
Then there's another kind of people.
They do not have any problems with constructing phrases,
building texts or a construction.
They have a good memory.
But their blockage is here.
I know and understand everything,
but "can't say a word."
There is also another category that feels that blockage,
the linguistic pain here.
People that always fear, "God forbid I say something wrong!"
"What if I blurt out something, everyone will laugh...
what a nightmare... what if they misunderstand me!"
So, to facilitate the learning
of new information...
That, of course, applies not only to learning foreign languages,
but to any information in general —
it's necessary to tune in the mind
in this new information.
If a person speaks or uses a number of languages,
they often talk of this adjustment
as a change of radio frequency.
Now, for an example, we speak Italian,
and then... we switch to Russian.
Furthermore, we start to adopt gestural characteristics
and facial expressions that belong to the people of the language
that we are studying or trying to speak.
I remember one time when I was talking to an Italian,
and suddenly I grabbed his hands.
What happened? He was speechless, he couldn't say a word.
And the man really liked to talk.
But when I let his hands go, he went like this.
(Laughter) (Applause)
It's necessary to take such things into account from the very beginning
when studying and trying to feel like a native speaker.
For example, if you study the American version of English,
you need to try to feel like an American. (American accent)
Understood? (Laughter)
If you study Italian, then you need to...
Something invisibly changes,
unclear on which level,
in which part of the body,
but you start to act like an Italian,
while also remaining yourself.
The other side of the coin: How do we perceive the reality
that manifests in the languages?
It changes the register of our perception.
Here's a simple example.
Let's each imagine a computer keyboard.
The majority of the computer keyboards, at least in Russia,
have both Cyrillic and Latin characters on them.
When you need to write a text in Russian,
you have a specific strategy in mind.
According to the way you'll write the text,
you choose the letters on the keyboard.
Suddenly, you have to write something in English.
Your eyes are the same, the same screen, and the same keyboard.
But something changes. You start to see different letters.
Now I say this, but think,
when you really have to do it,
write in two languages,
you know that on the conscious level, almost nothing happens.
That is, we are capable of perceiving reality
in a different way, from a different point of view,
just by changing the register of perception.
Another important thing is, obviously, motivation.
You won't get far without it.
It's not only useful in learning languages.
I remember an event from my life.
When my oldest son was almost 3 years old, he started talking.
But at the time, he lived in Mumbai,
not in the poor neighborhood, but not that far from it.
And I was working in another country.
When I visited him a couple of months later,
he already spoke fluently.
But he spoke Hindi,
and I didn't speak it.
(Laughter)
Obviously, children won't tolerate such things;
they know you, they want to talk to you.
And if you don't understand, that's your problem.
That was one of the motivating factors
that literally forced me to learn the language
in the period of one week.
First, I achieved his level,
then, after a week, I spoke it fluently,
bargained in the Hindi market and got crazy discounts.
Sometimes they even gave me
the things I wanted to buy, for free.
I was so eager to tell them: I just learned it!
And they'd say: "No, obviously, you have lived here your whole life..."
But my pride and sense of superiority
quickly vanished when I realized
that any merchant in Mumbai fluently speaks
at least 8 languages
and they don't consider themselves polyglot,
they don't shout it from the rooftops.
It's just a matter of motivation.
A German politician, I think it was chancellor Brandt,
once said:
"If you're selling me something and I'm buying it,
we speak in German.
But if I'm selling and you're buying,
we speak in your language."
It's the kind of indicator of motivation
that's inevitable in the modern world.
It's important to keep in mind that languages
differ not only between different nationalities,
but also between different professional groups.
I think that in the future, there'll be greater linguistic differences
not between the languages of different nationalities,
but between the languages of different professions
and even different corporate groups.
We have to be prepared.
And the principles that I tried to explain work in these cases as well,
because all the languages that we talked about
are a manifestation of a single language:
the language of the Universe we all live in.
Thank you. (Applause)