Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb, translated by Ádám Szegi and Kornelia DeKorne

    What a fantastic book! Instructional books can be so boring but Polyglot is this amazing memoir/instructional combination that is informative and entertaining. She is so interesting since she only started her language learning journey when she was in her thirties, after training to be a chemist. Lomb gives the reader the story of her life through lessons in adult language learning. This book is not for a new language learner so much as it is for ALLs, or Adult Language Learners, who are striving to learn multiple languages. So more for someone learning their third, fourth, or fifth, not their second language. I picked it up because I saw passages from the book on the internet and was interested in some functional tips, and I couldn't put it down because Lomb's voice just makes the book really readable and fun. She writes relateably and she writes beautifully, from "Could it be possible to build with such diamond bricks the thought bridge that spans the space between minds?" to funny stories about inviting a French tourist to the Budapest tourism office where she worked...but accidentally describing it as a brothel (or when she brags about going to the movies 17 times on a three-week trip to Moscow, becoming such a regular that they held a movie five minutes for her because she was running late). She also calls the central Hungarian plain a "mirage-haunted flatland," which I've never heard before.

    Lomb is insistent that she does not have any special aptitude for language learning (despite being fluent in 16 languages) and that anyone can do what she can do. She even writes out a formula:

Invested Time × Motivation/Inhibition⁠ = Result

But I am skeptical that anyone can do it. She describes pure elation at perusing dictionaries, and staying up late to tune her radio to foreign airwaves and taping broadcasts she likes. Basically, she may not have had an aptitude, but her motivation was beyond what almost anyone would do. She is unique, though. She discusses signing up for advanced Polish classes without knowing a word of Polish: when the instructor is astonished that she is at a totally basic level, Lomb replies, "those who know nothing must advance vigorously." She is just an indefatigable character.

    The beauty of foreign language study, she writes, is that it is one of very few things worth doing poorly. Dabbling in medicine, science, or law won't get you into an OR, a laboratory, or a courtroom. But having just a little bit of a foreign language provides huge marginal benefits over lacking any familiarity. Knowing enough to get directions somewhere is a massive improvement over being lost abroad.

    Lomb advises starting a new language by just picking up a dictionary and exploring it. As an ALL advances in learning, she advises them to use the dictionary, but not to abuse it by immediately jumping to it. Instead, ALLs should try to use context clues, and if they must use the dictionary, should write down not just the meaning of an individual word, but the meaning of the context in which it was used. After that initial dictionary perusal, she recommends picking up a textbook and starting to teach oneself (she definitely didn't have access to the internet for language learning in 1970). She then recommends picking up books and just starting to read. If she doesn't know a word, she tries to just learn from context and keep going unless she becomes completely lost without the word, and then she opens up a dictionary. The point of reading is to enjoy the language, not to stop to look up each word, which ruins the experience. To practice listening, she listens to news bulletins in foreign languages.

    Lomb gives the reader some rules she calls the Ten Requests. Paraphrased here, they are:

1. Spend a little time working on the language each day, especially in the morning 
2. When your enthusiasm is low, don't stop studying, switch to another form (e.g. listening instead of reading).
3. Never learn isolated units of speech, learn in context.
4. Write phrases in the margins of your text and build prefabricated phrases to use as crutches in conversation.
5. Translate random billboards, ads, and numbers you see in daily life.
6. Don't memorize anything that hasn't been reviewed for accuracy.
7. Always memorize idiomatic expressions in the first person (e.g. I'm pulling your leg).
8. Foreign language is a castle that must be besieged from all directions: newspapers, radio, movies, technical or scientific papers, textbooks, and conversation.
9. Don't let fear of embarrassment stop you from making mistakes, and don't let pride get in the way of being corrected.
10. Have faith that you are a linguistic genius, and that it's the pesky language's fault, or the dictionary's fault, but that you are smart enough to do it.

Then she also gives a list of things one should not do when learning a foreign language:

1. Do not postpone learning.
2. Do not expect your fellow language-learners to be good partners for conversation.
3. Do not believe that taking a class is all you need to do. You need to work outside class.
4. Do not obsess over words you don't know, build comprehension on what you do know.
5. Do not forget to write down your thoughts in your own words by using familiar expressions.
6. Do not be deterred from speaking by fear of making simple mistakes.
7. Do not forget filler expressions like "My French is kind of shaky" to use in conversation.
8. Do not memorize anything outside its context.
9. Do not leave newly learned structures or expressions hanging in the air--use them and practice them as soon as possible.
10. Do not be shy of learning poems or songs by heart.

    Lots of her language advice is also life advice. She writes how she "heard from a swimming coach that how soon children learn to swim depends on how much they trust themselves and the surrounding world. I [Lomb] am convinced that this (self) confidence is the precondition of success in all intellectual activity." All in all, I loved this book and would recommend to anyone learning a third language.

Pedro Páramo por Juan Rulfo

    Pedro Páramo es un cuento de fantasmas. Cuando Juan Preciado viaja al pueblo de su madre fallecida para enfrentarse con su padre, se informa que su padre ya está muerto hace muchos años. Lo que encuentra el protagonista es un pueblo lleno de fantasmas de su padre y de todos la gente del pueblo, y los fantasmas cuentan o actúan los acontecimientos importantes en la vida del pueblo y del padre de Juan Preciado, Pedro Páramo.

    Algo interesante de la novela es su influencia en Cien años de soledad, que salió mas de una década después. El libro relata el declive del pueblo de Comala, que termina desierto, y también tiene temas de incesto, una falta de desarrollo económico, y memoria como Cien años de soledad. Comala hasta suena parecido a Macondo. 

Russia in Review

    I decided to start this year with a focus on Russia, and I read five books about Russia: War and Peace, Collapse, Stalin, Doctor Zhivago, and The Future is History. Two were fiction, works of acclaimed Russian literature, and the other three were non-fiction, including one biography. Four of the authors were Russian, and the other one, Stephen Kotkin, is an American of Belarussian-Jewish descent. I also watched Come and See, a Belarussian movie from the 1980s about a boy's experiences in World War Two in Nazi-occupied Belarus. The books covered, in the order listed above (which is also the order I read them in), the 1800s-1810s, the 1980s-1990s, the late 1920s to 1941, the 1900s-1940s, and 1984-2015. So this was largely a focus on Russia in the pre-WWII Stalin era and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    The biggest theme in my readings was war. So I came away with a feeling of Russia as a civilization facing hordes of enemies within and without, constantly in a struggle to survive. It is hard for me to say whether this is some deeper truth about Russia or just says more about my interests. I think it would be hard to find a time when Russia was not in some deep conflict. The entire existence of the Soviet Union it was either in conflict with itself or with America or Germany. And then the one book I read set in a pre-Soviet time was set in Tsarist Russia's wars against Napoleon. It would be interesting to read about Russia in more peaceful times.

    With all this war and conflict, Russia felt very bleak. And that, to me, is a truth about Russia's last century or so. The Soviet Union dealt a huge injury to Russian civilization from which it has not recovered. The initial Revolution and Civil War obviously killed millions, but the collectivization of farming and the subsequent purge under Stalin were even worse. Communism took away Russia's best minds and put the whole society under tyranny for generations. It was amazing how different War and Peace really felt as a book compared to all the others that were set during Communist rule. Soviet Russia was really right up there with Nazi Germany but was allowed to linger on for decades after the Nazis were toppled. The resulting structure left in the 1980s was totally hollow because everyone, even the leaders, understood that the Stalinist tyranny was totally beyond the pale.

    While I didn't really love Doctor Zhivago, something striking was how Russia produced so much good literature, especially before Communism. Between Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Nabokov, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn, it's just an unbelievable run of legendary authors. I would love to read more of them. And it is really apparent how the best of them were either before Stalin (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), ended up disillusioned with Stalin (Gorky), had their work suppressed by Stalin (Pasternak), or went into exile because of Stalin (Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn). And since then, my impression is that great literature has basically been extinguished in Russia. Russia has seriously declined from being a cultural powerhouse before Communism to being what Masha Gessen called a place without a future in The Future Is History after Communism.

    It is really clear to me now how Moscow is the center of a Russian world that extends to the Baltics, Poland, the Carpathian Mountains, Transcaucasia, and Siberia. The Russian people are at the center and all the other peoples around them are really just dealing with it. It reminds me of how Mexico and the Caribbean sort of exist in the hinterland of the United States and are forced to deal with whatever America does. Russia also is similar in the way it intervenes in those countries, usually without any foreign countries saying anything about it, which shows why Russia is so offended by NATO expansion and Western support for Ukraine. Russians really view places like Crimea as something even more integral than the United States views Latin America, since Ukraine and Belarus were not just formerly part of the Soviet Union, but also Slavic peoples, known as "Little Russia" and "White Russia," respectively. All in all, this sort of unit on Russia left me much more interested in Russian history, Russian people, and especially Russian literature. 

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

    This is really a horror novel. Jacobsen simulates the worst-case scenario of nuclear war. North Korea shoots a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) out of the blue at Washington. Washington responds by launching dozens of nuclear missiles at North Korea. In the middle, North Korea also hits the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in California with a nuclear submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). American missiles pass over Russian airspace and the Americans can't get in touch with the Russians. The Russians launch a massive counter-response at the United States, which responds by launching every nuclear missile it has left. In the meantime, North Korea also detonates an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) over the United States (which is basically just using a nuclear bomb out in space for its shockwaves that knock out electronics down on Earth) and also shoots chemical and biological weapons at South Korea. All of this happens in under an hour.

    In 1946, the American nuclear stockpile was just 9 nuclear bombs, growing to 13 in 1947, 50 in 1948, and 170 in 1949. In 1949, the Russians exploded their first atom bomb, almost an exact copy of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki four years earlier. By 1950, the US had 299 and Russia 5. By 1951, the US had 438 and by 1952, the US had 841 and the USSR had 50. In 1952, the thermonuclear bomb, or hydrogen bomb, was invented, which uses one nuclear explosion to trigger a larger nuclear explosion. The prototype thermonuclear bomb created in 1952 had the explosive power of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding all at once. When tested, it completely obliterated an island called Elugelab in the Pacific, leaving only a crater in its place. By 1953, the United States had 1,169 nuclear bombs in its stockpile, and 1,703 by 1954. The United States manufactured 1.5 nuclear weapons per day and reached 2,422 nuclear bombs in 1955, including three new styles of thermonuclear bombs, and 3,692 bombs in 1956, making 3.5 nuclear bombs per day. By 1957, it was five a day for a total of 5,543 bombs, then 7,345 in 1958, 12,298 in 1959, 18638 in 1960, and an all time high of 31,255 in 1967. Today, both the United States and Russia each have around 1,700 deployed nuclear missiles, and China has a stockpile of 500, with Indian and Pakistani stockpiles of around 165 and 50 in North Korea. The US only has 44 missiles meant to intercept them.

    The book does an excellent job of conveying the difficulty of reacting to a nuclear launch. At best, the President has about a half an hour to react, but really a lot less since there is time to confirm that there is a nuclear launch and that also assumes that the president is immediately available to make the decision. The timing could be as short as seven minutes from launch to detonation if a sub parked itself 600 miles from our coastline. It would not be possible to fire a torpedo from another sub quickly enough to sink a sub launching nuclear missiles. Submarines are uniquely dangerous in the world of nuclear weapons, and that's why North Korea maintains one of the largest submarine fleets in the world. In shallow waters, where echoes make enough noise for subs to be undetectable, submarines can move hidden to launch nuclear weapons from anywhere.

    My biggest criticism of the book is just that it is about a worst-case scenario, not a realistic scenario. When the President reacts to the North Korean nuclear launch, he launches dozens of nuclear ICBMs from Wyoming in addition to SLBMs from the Pacific Ocean. But these ICBMS must pass over Russian airspace, alarming the Russians. I have to think that the Department of Defense has already gamed out how to shoot nuclear weapons at North Korea from subs in a way that would show both the Chinese and the Russians that the nukes aren't directed at them. But the biggest issue is the quantity. No one would start a nuclear war with just one nuke, since it would invite counter attack. If you're launching against a nuclear power, you want to hit all their nuclear capabilities first. So if North Korea launched a "bolt out of the blue" nuclear attack against the United States, it would make sense to respond with one, two, three, etc. SLBMs, not dozens of ICBMs. Launching dozens would look a lot more like a decapitation strike against a nuclear power if the trajectory could be mistaken for that, one or two not so much. Additionally, the book assumes that the Russians don't know about the North Korean launch and aren't in touch with the Americans (maybe not the most ridiculous assumption), and therefore don't understand that the United States is responding to that. Finally, after Russia responds with dozens more nuclear launches, the United States chooses to launch the rest of its arsenal, which basically ends the world. Use them or lose them.

    The situation of massive nuclear destruction that Jacobsen describes would cause a global temperature reduction of 27 degrees Fahrenheit, and a drop as large as 40 degrees in America. Nuclear winter would last for as much as ten years, and in places like Iowa and Ukraine, temperatures would not rise above freezing for six years. The ozone layer would also lose as much as 75% of its shielding power, pushing human life underground to avoid the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. Maybe bugs inherit the Earth.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Carbon dioxide from a nuclear explosion sinks, so cellars and subway tunnels are death traps for asphyxiation. But maybe that's one of the better ways to die in a nuclear war given the circumstances.
• Cars with electronic ignitions can't start after an EMP detonation. A nuclear detonation 300 miles over Omaha would cover the entire contiguous United States.
• The nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima was ten feet long and weighed 9,700 pounds, which is about as much as an elephant. To achieve the same level of explosion, the US would have needed to drop 2,100 tons of conventional weapons.
• Until 1960, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force each controlled their own stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
• At a 1960 meeting to discuss strategic use of nuclear weapons, the only objector to a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union that would cause nuclear fallout in China was Marine Commandant General David M. Shoup, who said, "All I can say is, any plan that murders three hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way."
• The nuclear triad is the combination of three ways that America can launch nuclear weapons. 400 ICBMs on land, 66 nuclear capable bombers in the air, and 14 nuclear-armed submarines at sea (and also 100 tactical nuclear bombs at NATO bases in Europe).

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen

            In The Future Is History, Masha Gessen follows a couple individual Russians to tell the story of Russian politics from over the 30 years from the beginning of glasnost and perestroika though the first invasion of Ukraine and its effects. The individuals who are centered are mostly Russian elites either through their relationships to major politicians or are political activists.

            The Russian world that Gessen describes can be bizarre. There is a transition from an intense communist ideology to an intense nationalist ideology. She describes one child who attended an elite communist preschool waking up from a nap by being fed caviar and being called a “Future Communist,” and how portraits of Lenin and Marx were prominently displayed in the school. But the nationalism was always under the surface. Immediately after that description of communist preschool, she describes “coffins,” which were questions on standardized tests just for Jewish students. These students would be pulled for additional examination and asked questions that were usually impossible to solve.

            While I was reading the book, I started to think of Russian and French civilizations as similar in receiving mortal wounds from left-wing revolution. They both went into revolutions that destroyed their previous, aristocratic ruling class. And then the revolutions were both betrayed by men who would become dictators. But where Napoleon was defeated by a European coalition, Stalin got to be a part of the coalition that destroyed Hitler. But then they both ended up on the losing end of a hegemonic struggle- France with Germany and Russia with the United States. Maybe Vladimir Putin would have seemed more like Napoleon III if his invasion of Ukraine had led to his downfall. France finally lost all claim to European hegemony in WWII, and Russia lost it in the fall of the Soviet Union. But unlike France, Russia wasn’t brought into the US-led international order. Instead, Russia has joined a Chinese-led opposition to the Pax Americana, so the story is going in a pretty different direction now.

            The Soviet Union itself probably weakened Russian society significantly. There are many big, obvious reasons, like land collectivization and the purges. But also some things that are less atrocities and more just the way Communists ran the country. Like a lack of social mobility: groups were formally segregated by the types of work they did, and artists lived with other artists, Politburo members went to dachas with other Politburo members, etc. And the birth rate plummeted while abortions shot up. Abortion was a common contraception method, and in 1984, there were nearly twice as many abortions in Russia as there were births. The official recognition of various nationalities also divided people and focused on promoting national minorities into the power structure in order to coopt the elites of that group. The national republics would form the seams for the breakup of the Soviet Union.

            After the Soviet Union broke up (very well documented in Collapse), the new democracy was not all it cracked up to be. First of all, it wasn’t a very healthy democracy. Civil society and elections were never seriously established, and all through Yeltsin’s presidency, Russians dealt with a bad economic situation. People got nostalgic for the certainty of the Soviet Union, which the majority had not wanted to collapse. There was even a cable channel that showed only old Soviet television 24 hours a day—it was called “Nostalgia” and put a hammer and sickle in the corner of the screen. That nationalism and nostalgia helped form the movement of Alexander Dugin, a chief ideologue of Putin’s Russia. When he formed a new political party to advocate for Russian chauvinism, he named it National Bolshevism (not too distant from “National Socialism” either). The basis of the ideology was an opposition to “open society,” as advocated by Karl Popper and popularized further by George Soros in the 1990s. Gessen writes that the Soviet Union may not have offered a real vision of the future, but it offered an ability to know one’s future, and to make small-scale decisions about it. Russia from the collapse of Communism to the rise of Putin was unpredictable and chaotic for the average Russian.

            Something I learned from the book was how big the scapegoating of gay people is in Putin’s Russia. In the 2010s, when Russia broke out in major protests that were sweeping the world, Putin brought the hammer down on gay people, and Russia passed several anti-LGBT laws. Something that I’ve seen in America is that it became popular for normal people to film their own “to catch a predator videos” in which they claim to identify pedophiles. In Russia, they would turn them into the police, but according to Gessen, these were often just gay men who were targeted for being gay. I have seen the same videos in America, but they don’t get sent to the police, they get beaten up. There is no way to know if they are really pedophiles, since the videos just show them getting beaten up and forced to confess. This is not a good substitute for the legal system.

            Those protests in Russia failed because protests aren’t actually that strong of a way to topple a government. They don’t work if the government can muster massive force against protestors and do it without fear of democratic backlash against the government. But protestors in 2010s Russia thought they might be successful because they had seen that exact form of protest topple the Soviet Union—why would this be any different? The difference was that Putin is a harder man who had no qualms about using force against the protestors. In 1989-1991, Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders were directionless and couldn’t justify using force to themselves. Putin, on the other hand, had a faith in his nationalism and knew he had the support of the country. And if he didn’t, it didn’t matter, they couldn’t remove him in an election. Gorbachev had wanted to be removeable by elections, which is a much weaker position to operate from. The guy who takes democracy and turns it into authoritarianism is always going to be stronger than the guy who takes authoritarianism and turns it into democracy. Yuri Levada sees these protests as a continuity in Russian history, in which the society enters a state of arousal, protesting, and needs to be crushed by the leader so that all can feel secure again in the knowledge that their leader reigns supreme. Importantly, these same protests that failed in Russia succeeded in Ukraine, and led directly to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

            Gessen takes issue with the term “illiberal democracy” because it is too generous with the regimes it describes. Putin’s regime, she writes, is authoritarian, and should be called that. It may have elections, but so did Stalin’s Russia. The elections are just a sham in which no serious opposition can exist since they will be jailed. The only difference is the existence of a carefully-managed number of minority parties in today’s Russia, whereas Soviet Russia had an official one-party policy. She also distinguishes totalitarianism from authoritarianism by adopting Ekaterina Shulman’s definition that “a totalitarian regime demands participation: if you do not march the march and sing the songs, then you are not a loyal citizen. An authoritarian regime, on the other hand, tries to convince its subjects to stay home.”

            I think that Russia and China today both represent alternatives to the West and liberal democracy. Both have sham elections. Russia is more interesting to strong-executive conservatives, who like its traditionalism, official nationalism, and the strength of a strongman. China is less appealing to Americans, but has more appeal to people in the developing world who want the answers to getting high levels of growth. Europe doesn’t seem to appeal to anyone these days, and I can’t think of any other plausible civilization that people want to imitate. One description of Russia was especially interesting:

Entire civilizations in history had ceased to exist. How had life in them felt in the last decades and days? Russia and the Russians had been dying for a century—in the wars, in the Gulag, and, most of all, in the daily disregard for human life. She had always thought of that disregard as negligence, but perhaps it should be understood as active desire. This country wanted to kill itself. Everything that was alive here—the people, their words, their protest, their love—drew aggression because the energy of life had become unbearable for this society. It wanted to die; life was a foreign agent.

 

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Under Communism, the Russian city Nizhny Novgorod was named Gorky, after the writer Maxim Gorky’s penname, which he had chosen because Gorky means “bitter” in Russian. His real name was Alexander Peshkov.
• Chess champion Garry Kasparov is an Armenian-Jewish Russian from Baku, Azerbaijan. That’s a complicated ethno-national situation.
• In 1990, Bush and Gorbachev signed a trade agreement that sent lots of dark meat chicken that Americans didn’t like as much as white meat to Russia. The deal was so big that chicken thighs flooded stores and were called “Legs of Bush.”
• When asked to name the greatest people who ever lived, Russians like to pick Russians. Stalin became more popular after the end of the Soviet Union, rising from 12% in 1989 to 40% in 2003, and dropping only to 36% in 2003. Putin had risen from 21% in 2003 to 32% in 2008.
• Apparently Putin hosts an annual call-in show where he answers (carefully-selected) questions from average Russians.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney

    This is a hard book to evaluate. I did not like it nearly as much as my other work of Russian literature, War and Peace. Doctor Zhivago was similarly difficult due to having so many named characters with so many different names, but it lacked something greater that War and Peace had. Doctor Zhivago feels bleaker, and with fewer likeable characters. I found Yuri, the main character, to be pretentious and selfish. He goes off on these long soliloquies and the whole thing feels like Pasternak writing himself into the book and being obsessed with his own genius. Very full of himself for a guy who is barely able to feed himself by the end of the book.

    Part of the reason the book was so dark and depressing was that the commentary is that the old order in Russia was bad, but the new one was even worse. It covers a really dark time in Russian history, so the whole book is really depressing from the 1905 Revolution through World War Two. All the passages I highlighted are depressing. Things like, "All around, people continued to deceive themselves, to talk endlessly. Everyday life struggled on, by force of habit, limping and shuffling. But the doctor saw life as it was. It was clear to him that it was under sentence. He looked upon himself and his milieu as doomed. Ordeals were ahead, perhaps death. Their days were counted and running out before his eyes." I would say the only happy passages are describing nature or his love for Lara, the woman who he cheats on his wife with. So the whole leaving his wife and children over and over to be with Lara wasn't super pleasant in that context. 

    I'm not sure whether or not I was supposed to like Yuri by the end of the book. My dislike of him tarnished the end of the book for me because I was just sick of this guy. Doctor Zhivago was well-written and especially interesting for its criticisms of the Soviet Union, but those criticisms are less profound when the whole world agrees with them now. Doctor Zhivago the character "seemed always to be in a hurry to decide that he was not getting anywhere, and the spoke with too much conviction and almost satisfaction of the futility of undertaking anything further." There it is- he's just a boring guy. The book itself feels like it's lost some of its edge without the looming Soviet Union trying to suppress it.

Miscellaneous:

• A quote about art that I liked: "Only the familiar transformed by the genius is truly great."
• Another quote, that wraps up Lara's story: "One day Larisa Feodorovna went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's concentration camps in the north."