I can say without hesitation that foreign languages have been closely connected with my life since early childhood. I was born in Gemer, a part of Slovakia where there is a substantial Hungarian minority, although there are also places where Slovaks predominate and villages that are entirely Slovak, such as Kameňany, Rákoš, Nandraž, Sirk, Ratková and Jelšava. These places belong to the Revúca district. At the time this text was written, Revúca had nearly 15,000 inhabitants, and my sister lived there with her family. Many Slovaks know that the first Slovak Lutheran grammar school was founded there in 1862.
I spent my entire childhood in Kameňany, where people speak a distinctive local dialect that includes a few German and Hungarian loanwords. I read that almost 2,000 people lived there in the nineteenth century. Even villages that are relatively close to one another may have noticeably different dialects.
My mother, who died of cancer when I was fifteen, spoke several foreign languages, although very few people knew this. She came from the more southerly part of Gemer, where the Hungarian population is stronger. In addition to Slovak she spoke Hungarian, German and French, and some Russian. Hungarian was the language she knew best, and she spoke it to me from the first moments of my life. My father spoke Slovak to me, so I grew up bilingual. My mother also taught me some German and French. She herself had learned these languages from her father, my grandfather.
My aptitude for languages and my strong visual memory began to show when I was about ten. My father bought an atlas of mushrooms for the family and I started leafing through it. After some time I asked him to test me. He could hardly believe that I was able to identify not only the Slovak names of many mushrooms but also their Latin names. I remember learning German vocabulary at primary school: some words were already familiar to me, but even words I saw for the first time often stayed in my memory immediately. It was similar at secondary school.
During one summer holiday in those years I spent about a month learning Romani. At first I had to write everything down, but I learned at least three hundred words and a good deal of grammar. My father also bought me atlases of animals and plants, and in a relatively short time I was able to memorise much of the fauna and flora in them, including the scientific Latin names.
I have lived in Prešov since the beginning of the 1980s. Before I married, I rented a room on the outskirts of the city in beautiful surroundings, far from urban noise. It was an ideal place for studying. I devoted almost all my free time, especially at weekends, to foreign languages and poetry. The chess season usually lasted from roughly October to April, so I did not always have an entire weekend free, but I did not mind. I loved chess too. When the weather was dry, I often studied outdoors in nature.
By then I was no longer a beginner in language study. I will say something that reflects my personal experience of the period: many people around me had little interest in foreign languages and often repeated the slogan “In Slovakia, speak Slovak.” This attitude was even more noticeable during the communist era. I felt very differently. I wanted to learn many languages.
In Prešov I bought a self-study English textbook. It was my first serious contact with English, which I regarded as the world's number-one language, and I tried to master it as quickly as possible. Many people may not believe me, but within about two months I had worked through the entire book and committed an enormous amount of it to memory. After about a week I told myself: “This is as easy as the multiplication table. Artúr, you will study two languages at the same time.” So I obtained a Spanish textbook. It was not designed for self-study, but that did not discourage me. Later I bought a German self-study textbook because I wanted to improve my German. My collection of language textbooks gradually grew.
In a bookshop in Košice I discovered a particularly fascinating book, a Japanese textbook by the Czech author I. Krouský. I remember the moment as if it had happened yesterday. My heart started beating faster. I had never seen anything like it; Japanese seemed wonderfully exotic to me and I was genuinely delighted. I learned about one hundred characters as well as hiragana and katakana. I worked through roughly half of the textbook and knew the material very well. I was fascinated by the structure of Japanese, including its use of particles and its writing systems.
After that I bought self-study textbooks for French, Italian and Serbo-Croatian and learned the material quite quickly. I married in 1985, and before then I had also studied Finnish, Hindi and Arabic. I borrowed the relevant textbooks from the city library. I learned the Arabic script quite quickly and also the more complex Devanagari script used for Hindi. I am not a linguist, but from my personal point of view Arabic and Hindi grammar seemed easier than Slovak. I would not say the same about Japanese.
At the beginning of the 1990s I passed the state language examination in English after my former wife encouraged me to take it. Before choosing the language, I wrote four languages on four slips of paper: English, French, Spanish and German. I mixed them thoroughly and drew English. So English it was. The examination course lasted two years.
During my life I had several opportunities to use my language skills, both in Slovakia and abroad. In 2007 I decided to go to the United Kingdom, specifically Scotland. Through an agency I found work near the English border in Dumfries and Galloway. For five months I lived in a holiday area near a small village and shared a caravan with a Latvian. Can you guess which language we used with each other? Russian. I had studied Russian as a compulsory subject from the fourth year of primary school until my school-leaving examination, and it had never caused me much difficulty.
English was, of course, essential in Britain. I used it with my employer, with colleagues and in everyday life. On my days off I travelled to Dumfries, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a beautiful city, and it was there that I saw the sea for the first time in my life. I visited the city three times. It was about 52 miles from where I was staying. I also found that communication in Scotland could sometimes be challenging because some older people used Scots, which differs considerably from standard English. I generally had no difficulty communicating with younger people.
Knowing the Lord's Prayer in approximately one hundred languages has also been very important to me as someone who loves languages. It allows me to compare them. Two languages may be geographically close yet very distant in their ancestry and structure. Examples that interested me include Spanish and Basque in Europe, Turkish and Armenian in Asia, and Zulu and Sotho in Africa. Even related languages may use quite different words for the same concept. Conversely, surprisingly similar words may sometimes appear in languages that are geographically far apart and belong to different language groups.
Of all the non-European languages I encountered, the ones that sounded most beautiful to me were some North American Indigenous languages, especially Navajo, which seemed almost like a language from another galaxy, and also Hebrew, or Ivrit. I also liked the sound of Malayalam, spoken in the Indian state of Kerala. This is, of course, entirely subjective. For most people, their own language is naturally the most beautiful.
Among European languages there are many that I enjoy listening to. This is only my personal opinion, and I know others will disagree: to my ear Slovak, English, French and Hungarian are particularly beautiful. I also like German and Finnish. I care deeply about good Slovak and have often been frustrated by careless pronunciation or language use in public life and the media. Language accompanies a person throughout life, so I believe it deserves care and respect. I know that frank opinions can be uncomfortable, but on questions of language I have always been demanding and uncompromising. I have also wanted to write openly about other matters that I regard as important. Artúr loves truth and hates lies.
Added on 6 April 2018
Life circumstances made me return to this subject after a longer pause. Several years earlier I had decided that when I reached sixty I would stop playing competitive chess, a game that had filled my life for about fifty-five years. In my later years I found competitive games psychologically difficult because many other problems were weighing on me, and there were times when I felt unable to play anywhere near my best. I do not intend to describe those problems here; they belong to my private life.
In December 2017 I decided that from the New Year onward I would study Hebrew and Chinese. Since the age of fifteen I had wanted to know or be able to do something that very few people could. I had already achieved a few unusual goals in the past, and I did not consider myself too old to continue. I borrowed suitable textbooks from the State Scientific Library and began studying these two languages, which I find beautiful and fascinating.
From my own experience, and leaving the writing system aside, Chinese grammar seemed much easier to me than Hebrew. Chinese has no conjugation and declension in the way Slovak does. The writing system, of course, is another matter altogether. Chinese characters are extremely demanding. The textbook I was using stated that there are around thirty thousand characters, that reading a newspaper requires knowledge of several thousand, and that basic literacy requires a much smaller but still substantial number. I would have been satisfied to learn a few hundred because spoken language was more important to me.
Modern Hebrew, or Ivrit, seemed considerably more difficult to me. For example, verb infinitives often have to be learned as individual forms. At the same time, Hebrew sounds exceptionally beautiful to my ear. Its grammar and writing contain several features that I find paradoxical and therefore all the more interesting. Hebrew is written from right to left, as Arabic is. I had studied Arabic many years earlier and, from my personal point of view, Hebrew seemed somewhat more complicated. By then I had already learned the Hebrew script.
I firmly hoped that Hebrew and Chinese would help me overcome the many problems that were part of my life. My plan was eventually to practise by saying a sentence in Hebrew and then trying to translate it into Chinese. I also had another goal, although I did not know whether I would reach it: I wanted to study Icelandic. Not long before, I had finished another period of studying Finnish. In my personal assessment, Finnish seemed far easier than Hebrew.