On my Foreign Office travels I have picked up a goodly selection of ‘European’ languages to add to my distant A-Level French and Latin and O-Level German and Spanish.

First, back in 1981 I learned lot of Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian (then called ‘Serbo-Croat’).

After that I reached a reasonable standard in Afrikaans – one of very few diplomats in South Africa who learned it.

Then I had a crash course in Russian, but I never quite got on top of it; the Russian vocabulary is just too wide, not to mention the extra layers of grammar piled on to the usual Slavic basics. I nonetheless ended up being able to muddle my way through meetings in Russian with Russian diplomats at the MFA as long as they did most of the talking.

And then finally in 2003 after some eleven weeks of feverish tuition I learned Polish, to the point where I could read the newspapers and follow TV and even get through official meetings at a high level without an interpreter from Polish into English.

I suspect that Polish is the hardest Slav language. It has a wide vocabulary, most of Russian’s grammatical quirks plus all sorts of other unique features drawing deep from Poland’s courtly past. 

Thus Poles usually do not address each other as ‘you’ ("may I offer you a cup of tea, Mary?"). They instead talk to each other in the third person, even to work colleagues whom they have known for years:  "Would Madam Mary like a cup of tea?" All a bit linguistically and even psychologically … heavy to most outsiders.

My Conclusions after that lot?

1)     The most valuable subject I did at school was Latin. It opened the way to picking up lots of French and Spanish fairly easily, plus the grammar gave me a strong head start in all the Slav languages.

2)     Language text books are alas written by language teachers, not language learners.

Language teachers are rather serious about their subject. They also are snooty about how utterly unlike any other language ‘their’ language is. So when I started to learn Russian it was obvious to me that knowing masses of Serbo-Croat helped. But the Russian ladies teaching the course sniffily dismissed that background as primitive irrelevant ‘Church Slavonic’.

This meant that I lost precious weeks being kept with other FCO colleagues starting from scratch. When I finally nagged the system into letting me have personal lessons, the teachers were amazed at how much faster I progressed – they had not wanted to accept that Serbian gave me excellent chances of making intelligent guesses in Russian.

3)     Where language teachers and textbooks go wrong is in treating those new to the language as dimwits who must laboriously work through the language in a linear fashion, one step at a time. One is stuck with fatuous vocab: Juri is a boy. He eats bread. I like bread too. And Natasha likes bread. We all like bread.  

This seems to me to be wrong in principle 

My old Afrikaans teacher happened to love Latin. He told me how he had coached a sixth former from zero Latin to degree standard within a year. They had started by spending two hard weeks poring over the whole of the grammar in one go, looking at the patterns of endings. That accomplished they had gone straight into Julius Caesar, learning the real language from interesting texts. 

4)     Language teachers are perfectionists who hate short-cuts and approximations, and so fail to spend proper time describing the shape and structure of the language as a whole. If students know something about that they can much sooner start to make reasonable guesses and communicate faster, if not necessarily always accurately.

Think about a pointillist painter who first covers the canvas with dots of blue, then dots of red and yellow and so on. The overall pattern and sense of the final picture will start to emerge fairly early on, even if much of the detail is blurry until late on.

Contrast this with a computer which prints out all the coloured dots of a picture micro-line by micro-line – each line will emerge 100% perfect but only after half the work is finished will it become clear exactly what is being depicted.

5)     Another typical failure of Slav language teaching is not to teach the language by looking first at the 500 or so key roots and how they are used to make up words, not least because many of the deep core roots for words are basically the same across the Slavic language space. By spotting the roots and the numerous prefixes and suffixes which might be battened on to them, one more quickly (again) spots patterns.

In English the equivalent is a bit like learning that the root letters urb (from the Latin!) have something to do with cities. Knowing that one can start spotting the root in urban, suburban, suburbs, urbanisation, urbane and so on.

6)     Nothing is better than fear in getting someone who has a decent passive grasp of a language actually to start speaking it. I was not going very far in real-life Serbian with all its witty slang until I was sent off as a junior Second Secretary to tour Bosnia for a week and come back and report.

Almost no-one there whom I met spoke English. I was on my own. And the words started to babble out, far from accurately but well enough to be comprehensible.

7)     But one soon hits a plateau. When one is able to get by well in a foreign language, people very rarely point out errors. Partly through normal politeness. And partly because many smaller nations are amazed that anyone has bothered to learn anything at all about their language, which of course is invariably one of the hardest in the world. 

So it gets harder and harder to improve on the finer points, even if one’s vocabulary tends to increase. Silly errors get embedded.

Sta da vam kazem?