9 . I’ve been interested in languages for as long as I can remember. My dad was a language genius. My family traveled widely when I was a child, and my dad would talk to everyone we met with ease. His abilities greatly impressed me. I wished then that I would someday be able to speak as many languages as he had been able to.
I wasn’t a natural language learner. When I was 11 years old, I made slow progress with French at school and almost gave it up. After I entered college, I read many German writers in translation. I loved them so much that I wanted to read them in their native tongue. This desire drove me to pick up German. Once I had mastered German, I found myself in love with languages. Since then, I have never stopped learning new languages. By my late twenties, I was able to speak French, Latin and Greek.
I’m often asked what my secret is. The answer is, predictably, endless hours of reading and studying. Before I got married, I would spend 16 hours every day studying languages. I used to like walking fast outdoors while listening to a recording of language and repeating it out loud.
Now, I can read about 40 languages and speak most of them fluently. Asian languages are more difficult to master. It took me almost ten years to get my Korean skills close to native level. I live in Singapore now. At home, I speak French with my sons. If my Korean wife is there, we’ll use English. When we don’t want the kids to understand our conversations, we use Korean.
I’ve studied Esperanto (世界语). Though I can see the benefits of a world language, I think the world would be a less interesting place if there were only one language. It would be like visiting a garden where there was only one type of plant!
1. When he was a child, the author had a wish to be able to ________.
| A．travel as widely as his father had |
| B．meet as widely as his father had |
| C．speak as many languages as his father had been able to |
| D．learn languages as easily as his father had been able to |
2. According to the article, when he was learning Greek, the author ________.
| A．was still a teenager | B．had just entered college |
| C．was 23 years old | D．could already speak German fluently |
3. According to the article, the author learns new languages by ________.
| A．walking fast outdoors | B．chatting with native speakers |
| C．following traditional methods | D．doing lots of grammar exercises |
4. By comparing the world to a garden and languages to plants in the last paragraph, the author mainly wanted to show that ________.
| A．Esperanto is a useful invention |
| B．the variety of languages is necessary |
| C．Asian languages are difficult to master |
| D．there are no shortcuts to learning languages |
