Mircea Eliade shares his secret technique of learning a language in 12 hours (well, sort of...)

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einzelne
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Mircea Eliade shares his secret technique of learning a language in 12 hours (well, sort of...)

Postby einzelne » Mon May 03, 2021 8:17 pm

Sorry but I couldn't help but using the click-baity caption.

This is the quote from Mircea Eliade's Ordeal by Labyrinth : Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet (pp. 37-38):

R. How did you set about learning Sanskrit, first with him, then with the pandit?

E. Well, as far as learning Sanskrit is concerned, I applied the method of the Italian Indianist Angelo de Gubernatis, which he describes in his autobiography, Fibra. It consists in working for twelve hours a day with a grammar, a dictionary, and a text. That’s how he did it himself, in Berlin. Weber, his teacher, had said to him (this was in early summer): “Gubernatis, here is the situation: my Sanskrit course starts in the fall, but it’s a second-year course, and we can’t start at the beginning again just on your account. So you’ll just have to catch up.” Gubernatis shut himself away in a summer cabin, just outside Berlin, with his Sanskrit grammar and dictionary. Twice a week someone came to deliver bread, coffee, and milk. He was right, and I followed his example. Besides, I had already gone through two similar experiences, not quite so extreme, but still. . . . When I was learning English, for example, I used to work for several hours nonstop. But this time, right from the outset, I worked for twelve hours a day and on nothing but Sanskrit. The only exceptions I made were to take a walk now and then and to use my tea and meal breaks for improving my English: I could read it very well, but I still wasn’t very good at speaking it. And while I was at Dasgupta’s house, he would occasionally put questions to me or give me a passage to translate, just to monitor my progress. And, if it was rapid, I believe that was the result of my determination to study nothing other than Sanskrit. For a period of several months I didn’t so much as pick up a newspaper or a detective novel— anything. And that exclusive concentration on a single object, Sanskrit, produced amazing results.

R. All the same, isn’t there a risk, using that method, of failing to acquire the subtlety and flexibility of the spoken language?

E. Certainly. But at the outset it was a matter of acquiring solid foundations, of absorbing the grammatical structures and concepts, the basic vocabulary. Later on, naturally, I applied myself to Indian history and aesthetics, to poetry and the arts. But to begin with, it is essential to aim at a methodical and exclusive acquisition of the rudiments.
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Re: Mircea Eliade shares his secret technique of learning a language in 12 hours (well, sort of...)

Postby Sumisu » Tue May 04, 2021 1:00 am

It's good to be reminded that someone as brilliant as Eliade wasn't just born that way. This shows an incredible discipline and work ethic. I'm not sure I could manage a single day of 12 hours of language study, but this inspires me to push a little harder.
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Re: Mircea Eliade shares his secret technique of learning a language in 12 hours (well, sort of...)

Postby einzelne » Tue May 04, 2021 3:01 am

Sumisu wrote:It's good to be reminded that someone as brilliant as Eliade wasn't just born that way. This shows an incredible discipline and work ethic. I'm not sure I could manage a single day of 12 hours of language study, but this inspires me to push a little harder.


I think it's not his love for languages by mainly the insatiable desire for knowledge. Further he describes his 'failure' with Tibetanю I can relate to this since this is my motivation as well. But damn, I wish I had even 10% of his discipline and dedication!


Whenever I have attempted to learn a new language, it has been in order to acquire a new working tool. A language, for me, is the possibility of communicating: reading, speaking if possible, but, above all, reading. But there came a point, in India, in Calcutta, when I saw attempts being made to achieve a much broader comparative approach—comparing, for example, Indo-European cultures with pre-Indian, with Oceanic, with Central Asian cultures—and when I saw such extraordinary men of learning as Paul Pelliot, Przylusky, Sylvain Lévy, who knew not only Sanskrit and Pali, but Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, and even the languages that were at that time termed Austro-Asiatic; and I was fascinated by that vast new world opening up to research: not just Aryan India but aboriginal India, and the opening-up of Southeast Asia and Oceania as a source of cultural material. I tried to make a beginning in that direction. Dasgupta dissuaded me. He was right.

His intuition was right. But I did start to learn Tibetan from an elementary grammar, and I became aware that because it wasn’t something I really wanted passionately, the way I’d wanted a knowlege of Sanskrit and English—or Russian and Portuguese later on—I didn’t make very much headway. So then I got angry with myself, and I gave up. I told myself that I was never ever going to acquire the competence of a Pelliot or a Sylvain Lévy; that I was never going to be a linguist or even a real Sanskritist. The language as such, its structures, its development, its history, its mysteries, didn’t have as much attraction for me as . . .

R. As the images, the symbols?

E. Exactly. Language, for me, was merely a tool, an instrument of communication, of expression. Later on I was very glad I stopped where I did. Because linguistics, after all, is an ocean. There is never any end to it: you have to learn Arabic and, after Arabic, Siamese; after Siamese, Indonesian; after Indonesian, Polynesian; and so on. I preferred to read about the myths, the rituals associated with those cultures; to try to understand them.
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