The second Christmas season after I started learning Swedish, I took a class where we read the story “Julklappsboken” (“The Christmas Gift Book”) by Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’m not sure how autobiographical the story it, but it tells of a young girl who desperately wants a new book to read for Christmas. She receives a series of practical gifts for a girl of the time, mostly related to sewing.

At the last moment, she’s given a book-shaped package. When she unwraps it, however, she discovers that it’s a book of fairytales in French, a language she has little knowledge of. Initially she’s disappointed, but she falls in love with the beautiful pictures inside. The next morning, she finds a French dictionary and starts working through the book. In the process, she learns more French than she ever learned in a class.

I just finished the book Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kato Lomb, a Hungarian woman who taught herself many languages and worked a teacher and interpreter. One of her preferred methods of language learning is through reading. She describes a book as a “language lab” that one can use to investigate a language:

A book can be pocketed and discarded, scrawled and torn into pages, lost and bought again. It can be dragged out from a suitcase, opened in front of you when having a snack, revived at the moment of waking, and skimmed through once again before falling asleep. It needs no notice by phone if you can’t attend the appointment fixed in the timetable. It won’t get mad if awakened from its slumber during your sleepless nights. Its message can be swallowed whole or chewed into tiny pieces. Its content lures you for intellectual adventures and satisfies your spirit of adventure. You can get bored of it–but it won’t ever get bored of you. (pp. 76-77)

I hate to admit to cheating on Swedish, but I’ve been making eyes at French of late. Inspired by these two authors, I picked up a book in French that’s far, far beyond my skills: La Peste (The Plague) by Albert Camus. (I haven’t read it in English, but I’m curious about it. One of Lomb’s essentials for language learning is “interestedness,” or “motivation”–you need to choose reading materials you find interesting.) I’ve gotten as far as the first page of the book, which begins with a quote from Daniel Defoe, probably from Journal of the Plague Year. And I stopped by the Alliance Française open house on Saturday and left feeling inspired to learn more French. Soon.

There’s a documentary on YouTube called Six moins pour apprendre la français (Six Months to Learn French) about immigrants to Canada taking an intensive French course. Part of me wonders what I could learn in a few months, if I really dedicated myself to it. But I worry about overwriting/crowding out Swedish. One of the books about language learning I read recently (possibly Becoming Fluent by Roger J. Kreuz and Richard Roberts) talked about how speaking a new language isn’t just a question of remembering the words but also suppressing the other language(s) one knows. I already have enough distractions rattling around in my head. Do I really want another language in there?

Of course I do!

Going back to “Julklappsboken,” the first line the main character translates from her new book is “Il y avait un roi,” which she translates into Swedish as “Det var en gång en kung.” Or, as I translated into English, “Once there was a king.” This reminds me of a storytelling card game called Once Upon a Time, which exists in a number of different languages. The German version, which I was given long ago, is called Es war einmal, and the Swedish version is Det var en gång. When I was little, my dad used to tell us “once-upon-a-times” before bed. It’s a tradition of storytelling shared across cultures and languages. The more you learn about other languages and cultures, the more you learn how similar we all are.