Fiction involving language learning

[golyplot]

And in the young adult realm, the Artemis Fowl series usually includes a minor language-related plot point in each book. Of course, Artemis is always conveniently fluent in whatever language he needs to be, including Taiwanese (in which vanishingly few foreign speakers even attempt fluency, let alone reach it).

Artemis Fowl also defeated a grandmaster at chess in an implausibly small number of moves. He can basically do whatever a media sterotype of geniuses can, regardless of how much sense it makes.

This is also a series where digital messages are traced by analyzing isotopes in the wires they were transmitted through. But at least that bit of nonsense hacking was done by magical creatures.

Come to think of it, there's a brief bit in the first book where Artemis deciphers the Faerie language. So I guess that's the closest you'll get.

[DaveAgain]

In "Horblower and the Hotspur", to gather information Hornblower has informal conversations with french fisherman.

There is some mention of taking care to formulate his questions given his limited vocabulary (his french language education was weekly private lessons with an emigre as a teenager), then having to puzzle out the meaning of some french phrases. I think "en flûte" was an unarmed warship: a troop carrier for an invasion!

[MamaPata]

It's not actually fiction, but sharing anyway because I love it. In Vikram Seth's biography about his family Two Lives, he discusses his experience learning German.

[zenmonkey]

Shaka, when the walls fell.

Sokath, his eyes uncovered.

Temba, his arms wide.

I did not recognize the source and was a little afraid you were all having some sort of oddly-related mental breakdowns. I could see a good Twilight Zone episode in that....

A quick google will let you know about the ST episode. One of the best linguistic themed ones.

Fiction & Language - I'd suggest

Babel-17
The Dispossessed
We
Left Hand of Darkness
Snow Crash
A Clockwork Orange
Language for Time Travelers
The Book of the New Sun
Elgin
Omnilingual
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
The Embedding

To name a few ...

[Cavesa]

The Rivers of London series by Aarnovitch includes it a lot. The training of a wizard definitely requires Latin, with some other languages being very useful and occassionally needed. I hope this won't be considered spoiling, but the new book includes a funny bit, where teaching someone to write the terminology in Cyrillics with abbreviations instead of Latin in full words is seen as a bad practice and something to worry about. The main protagonist is starting Greek now in book 7 and needed bits of German with a dictionarya few times in past. And I guess his Master may push him to French and German learning one day too, who knows, especially German The learning process is not unrealistic here, with the busy supernatural policeman having to find time for his grammar translation based studies.

Star Trek Enterprise is the opposite, with Hoshi Sato not just learning, but also decyphering completely new languages in a few days. A few hours, if the destiny of the whole crew, Earth, or the universe depends on it

A wonderful Czech scifi trilogy Propast Času (the Time Abyss) by Bureš is about a catastrophical event, in which various time periods get mixed. Like a patchwork, where the individual pieces of various periods are suddenly neighbours, people can travel across the borders and they have to live together or perish now. A Czech archeology student suddenly finds her Latin (which she has to improve significatnly, through immersion), English, and German skills crucial for her survival (and a few more languages would be very useful in her situation), rise to power, and building a new world. The other characters need to learn too, as they are suddenly living in a widely multicultural society, and some of them struggle in an amusing way. I don't want to spoil it for any random Czech learner (I know there are a few and this trilogy is one of the very best our fantasy can offer you know. I've recently updated my knowledge of the contemporary authors), but there are a few awesome scenes we all know damn well, when someone doesn't know you can understand and talks absolutely horribly in your presence, thinking they're protected by the language barrier Hey, I can't resist it,Czech learners look away: there is a scene, where our heroine sits on the throne of the New Rome she's built (consisting mainly of ancient romans) and a British delegation (from the colonial era) arrives. And they talk very openly in English about how they're gonna profit from yet another stupid barbarian queen and abuse and drain the country. What a surprise, when the Roman Empress speaks a bit more modern version of English and she also knows all their strategies.

Yes, I thought of Artemis Fowl too. Sure, he is stereotypically genious, but I think that is fun and definitely not harmful. It's a fantasy book for older kids, it doesn't have to be realistic, the kids don't take any harm from it. And it definitely shows being clever and educated as a desirable and fun quality, which is always a good thing.

The Thirteenth Warrior, a movie based on a novel, where an Arab learns Norse by listening to others around him talking for a long time.

[rdearman]

Riverworld, they all learn Esperanto in order to communicate with each other. All humans who've ever existed are revived on "Riverworld".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverworld

I think in the Stainless Steel Rat series he also learned Esperanto in order to infiltrate some planet or other.

I should re-read these two series actually, they are very good.

[Speakeasy]

There was a skit relating to translation of a dog's thoughts on SNL, but it gets political ...

Gary Larson’s take on the subject is apolitical … to most people.

What dogs hear.jpg

[Dragon27]

I think in the Stainless Steel Rat series he also learned Esperanto in order to infiltrate some planet or other.

This is from A Stainless Steel Rat is Born

His eyebrows shot up at this and he leaned close. "You did not understand us?" he asked."I didn't take foreign languages in school." "Foreign!" He looked shocked. "What a backward part of that porcuswine-rearing planet you must have come from. That was not a foreign language, dear boy. That was Esperanto, the galactic language, the simple, second language that everyone learns early and speaks like a native. Your education has been neglected, but that is easily repaired. Before our next planetfall you shall be speaking it as well. To begin with, all present tense verbs in all persons end in as. Simplicity itself…"

So it was more like a widely spread "universal" language. In fact, in The Stainlees Steel Rat Wants You even invading aliens learned to speak Esperanto "as the simplest, easiest and most efficient form of communication".
In The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted the protagonist gets to speak with a robot Mark Forer, who claimed to know every language. "Fourteen thousand six hundred and twelve of them." He (Jim) tests his knowledge of languages by speaking to him in Danish first (which the robot knows), and then in some long-forgotten ancient language:

But there was one that I was sure Mark had never heard of. An ancient language called Latin. Spoken only by a secret society so secret I dare not say more about it.
"Nonne c'ognoscis linguam Latinam?"

To which Mark answers with a huge passage in pure untranslated Latin, adding afterwards:

"Did you catch all those nuances, Jim? About what a pure Ciceronian I am? Each word carefully chosen, the composition of sentence structure, the contrast of cases and tenses, phrases and clauses…" He, or rather it, went on for quite a while like that. Bragging.

Apparently Harry Harrison was very fond of languages.

[Iversen]

Of course, Artemis is always conveniently fluent in whatever language he needs to be, including Taiwanese (in which vanishingly few foreign speakers even attempt fluency, let alone reach it).

I'm not quite sure what language this refers to. But if I'm correctly informed there actually still are a few speakers of a number of Austronesian languages on the Eastern coast, so I presume mr. Artemis have learned one of those languages. And in doing so he has accomplished something which even the general Taiwanese population hasn't done (people there mostly speak Chinese).

[languist]

I remember the book ‘Metropole’ by Ferenc Karinthy having an effect on me. It’s about a Hungarian linguist (and also written by a Hungarian linguist) who accidentally ends up in a mystery city after somehow getting the wrong flight, and his nightmarish struggles to understand this new place’s impossible language and culture.

I read it during my first ever trip east of Europe, when I went to Turkey for a few weeks as a teenager. It resonated with me because I was also dealing with a new, unfamiliar place where I couldn’t understand 99.9% of the signs, the things being called out to me on the street, or the old man who sat with me every night and told me stories in a language I didn’t understand.

The book is very claustrophobic, and as far as I remember, awkwardly translated. However, I’m a fan of Kafka, Camus and the like, and loved it.