Author: jonathanleelindell

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

An episode in London comes to mind. At the age of 19 I found myself at Hyde Park Corner together with a bunch of backpackers of different nationalities. In a break between two speakers, we chatted and wondered where we all came from. When my turn came, I said “Norway” whereupon the Canadian guy who had asked burst out: “No way”. I insisted – and so did he. He said: “Nobody can speak English like that and claim to be from Norway – of all places.” I insisted again and he repeated his “no way” and the other youths came nearer. I was somewhat of two minds. On the one hand I did not like that people did not believe what I said. On the other hand, I was flattered. So, I dug out my
passport and let it circulate among the group until the Canadian guy handed it back to me with one word: “Amazing”. Then he added: “How come”? I did not have a short answer and shrugged my shoulders saying that it just came out that way.

It was some years later that the answer dawned on me. The accent part was easy. That was the product of countless hours of taking down the lyrics of heaps of pop songs over several years.

The fluency part was different, though related. In junior high school the curriculum in English was crammed with new words that I was unable to learn by any known method. At midterm I got bored and gave up. Instead, I started to read sections of the homework pages in a high and clear voice. I looked up the new words, every one of them, but I did not write them down. Then I read the section again and looked up the words I had forgotten, one more time. This developed into a routine of ten readings per section. By the tenth repetition every word had been memorized. It took far less time than rote learning of single words and – I did not realize this at the time – I got the grammar and the sentence structure for free. I practiced the same procedure with French later. It worked equally well. I even tried it with Arabic some years after that again, but this time it was not so easy, as Arabic script does not include short vowels, so that one cannot know fully what a word sounds like unless one has heard it before. That set me back a bit. For example, the city name “Tunis” is written without the /i/ (تونس.) So, unless you have already heard it, it may easily be Tunas or Tunos as well as Tunis.

/Karl Hofsö

This period was one when NATO forces ran huge joint military maneuvers in the northern area where I lived. Big warships would come to our town and stay for a few days. They were under orders to be friendly to the “natives” and held “open ship” days for civilians to come onboard. For us kids it was like paradise, being permitted to climb to the top of big anti-aircraft guns and be shown live how they worked. No shots were fired, though.
The soldiers showed us tricks with cards and coins and engaged in small talk with us and gave us chewing gums that we had not seen before. I remember I found two of the guys easier to talk to than the others. They were from the state of Tennessee, they had said. Only years later did I realize that so was Elvis and understood that those two soldiers probably spoke much the way he did. We had even seen the film King Creole and heard him speak as well as sing. Probably, by then I had developed a keen sense of hearing the minute details of spoken sounds.

/Karl Hofsö

When I was about thirteen years old, the songs of Elvis Presley had reached the remote part of the world where I lived. We were all captivated by his music and many of my pals were given guitars to practice on by their parents. I was intrigued by all the words that were projected into my ears by his unique voice and rhythm. I saved money and bought my first record. It may have been King Creole with Dixieland Rock on the other side. I listened and listened again and wrote down very carefully the few words that I thought I recognized. I had a small pocket dictionary to help me find out what the words meant. Not easy though. In order to find the words in the book, I had to find out how to spell
them. In school I was only into my second year of learning English, so a period of trial and error followed until I broke the code. Then it became much easier, and taking down new song texts became an absorbing hobby. It gave considerable prestige among my friends to be able to say or sing the words where they mastered only the melody and a handful of half-words per song.

/Karl Hofsö