By the time of the opening of Eastern Europe my ability to hop seamlessly between languages had – during 25 years – opened doors to many interesting assignments. The company in which a was project manager at the time was negotiating a deal with Poland, but communication was not easy.
Even calling there by phone was a major challenge as no switchboard operator spoke anything but Polish or Russian. At the time language courses with audio cassettes were very popular in Scandinavia. I found an old Linguaphone Russian course I had bought previously under an ad that promised it could easily be used while driving a car.
“Well, that was just a lie,” as the Hound Dog lyric goes. I tried, but it did not work for the simple reason that if I turned my attention to a bus or a pedestrian, the tape kept rolling and I lost track. There was no question of winding the tape back to somewhere that was anyway hard to find, while keeping my hands on the wheel. So, no Russian words to help me call Poland. I put the course away.
I had a double-deck radio cassette player at the time, though. One rainy Sunday I loaded the first Russian course cassette into the left-hand slot and an empty one into the other. Then I re-edited the text into manageable clips in an overlapping pattern, so as to avoid having to wind back the tape if another bus turned up. I had a half hour drive to work and listened to the tape in the car for a couple of weeks. It was only ten or twelve sentences long, so it was no big deal to memorize the content. However, I did not know what the voice was talking about. Trying to find that out amounted, in terms of the time it would take, to the equivalent of a full university course, the alphabet being the first hurdle, and one that I did not need for a simple phone call. So I put the course away for a second time. I was annoyed. This should have been possible.
Then, after a while, it dawned on me, why not add an extra cassette and get the translations spoken out loud? Even that could be edited in a repetitive pattern that would embed the new language into the listener’s brain while both hands stayed firmly on the steering wheel. I did. And it worked. But not soon enough to be of use for the Polish connection.
/Karl Hofsö
The Hofsö Method 