“I started working through the course but I wasn’t convinced that I could repeat this ‘random’ collection of sounds and people in Spain would understand me. I said, ‘Can I have it, dad?’.”Īnd so it began. He stuck it out for a day before getting annoyed and throwing it on the coffee table,” Bagnall laughs. “My dad went to WH Smiths to buy a Berlitz ‘teach yourself Spanish’ course. “On my council estate in those days, that was unheard of!” he adds. But by the end of the week, he’d got a job in the other steelworks – so, after being out of work for about four days, we were sorted.” They celebrated with a holiday to Spain. “My dad was a crane-driver in one and he got made redundant. “There were two steelworks in the town I’m from in north Wales,” he explains. A working-class boy from Wrexham, he developed a love of languages in unusual circumstances.
Navy linguist mod#
Winner of the Institute’s new MOD Award for linguistic achievement, Bagnall was neither born to linguists nor raised internationally. Good luck deciphering those languages without studying them!” Well, Hungarian is written in the same alphabet as English. “People think I’ll understand it because it’s written in the same alphabet as Russian. Yet the two languages aren’t related: Chechen is a Northeast Caucasian language using Cyrillic script. As well as Hebrew, Arabic, Pashtu, Farsi and Serbian, Bagnall can thankfully read and speak the Russian required for learning Chechen. Not content with his tally, he’s currently adding two more: Romanian “because my family love going there on holiday” and Chechen “because I want to branch out into less-spoken languages”. Fortunately for Bagnall, he’s linguist extraordinaire for the Royal Navy, speaking a mind-boggling 15 languages – seven proficiently, and the rest to conversational standard.
The only solution is to learn one language via the other.
Linguists looking for a challenge could try studying Chechen – particularly tricky for English speakers, as “there are no language-learning resources from English they’re all from Russian,” explains Warrant Officer First Class (WO1) David Bagnall. Military linguist David Bagnall tells Jessica Moore why a career in the Navy has been his dream job
0 kommentar(er)
