Start with the Big Words

An adventure in language learning (Part II)

Albert Edelfelt

The young brain absorbs whatever knowledge it encounters, building a stock of fact and fancy that will serve it well during the long winter of adulthood. The grownup mind discriminates. Before it devotes precious gray matter to a new bit of information, it takes pains to ensure that it is useful.

For this reason, it makes little sense for adults to use the “crawl, walk, run” methods so often employed to teach languages. We don’t need to fill out heads with rules, rhymes, and paradigms before we start using the new language for practical purposes. Indeed, whenever we attempt to stockpile such knowledge, our grown-up operating systems will, within days, invoke the Janet Jackson rule (“what have you done for me lately?”) and remove it from our hard drives.

With this in mind, I recently decided to ignore the advice of Maria (soon-to-be) von Trapp, choosing instead to dive directly into the Finnish language literature of my field.¹ To be more precise, I used low-density words (such as proper names and terms-of-art) to locate paragraphs that, when found and passed through Deepl, promised to provide information of interest to a series I was (and, indeed, still am) writing for my other Substack.

As you might expect, this method has resulted in many dry wells. However, in the course of digging, I began to amass a gecko’s hoard of immediately useful terms of art. When, moreover, I hit pay dirt, I was able to validate (and, at times, correct) the secondary sources I had been relying on. (As this was largely a matter of establishing the location of particular people at particular points in time, there was no need for the sort of nuance that, at the present time, translation programs frequently fail to capture.)

This experience prepared me for the greater challenge of pulling facts out of documents that were not only written by hand, but written by hand in haste, often by people who were dealing with stressful situations. As before, I found useful information by searching for proper names and terms of art. (Marvelous to say, I discovered that people will often take greater care when committing uncommon words to paper than they do when penning pedestrian phrases. )

To complement this work, I watch videos of the Finnish comedian Ismo Leikola poke fun at the English language. In addition to being highly sourificent, these sets remind me that many things that we Anglophones take for granted, such as articles and a clear distinction between s and sh, play no role in the comic’s native tongue.²

1. “Start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.”

2. While he rarely does so gratuitously, Mr. Leikola often uses language would prevent the libretto of the spiel in question from appearing in the contents section of Extra Muros.