Can a new language be learnt with a Bible and a Dictionary?

I tried this over lent, that is, over the course of 40 days, for roughly 2 hours a day. I can say the answer is emphatically yes for any and every person, with some serious considerations necessary. If you don’t want to read my prose, skip to the last heading for a summary.

But Why Though?

In the field of second language acquisition, there is a theory that has been developed by the very popular academic Stephen Krashen. His theory is that skill in a language is generally determined by the amount of comprehensible input taken in by a student. For instance, somebody who has successfully read and understood ten novels in a particular language will likely have a much greater grasp of it than a person who has read one.

From my prior experience, this seems to be generally true. As somebody who had spent, prior to this test, a few years studying Latin it seemed as if it improved when I read a lot more text. One of the things that I noticed while studying Latin was that one of the easier texts for beginners to study was the Vulgate Bible.

This led me to think “Why not try this with some other language?”, after all, there are a great deal of advantages in using the bible as a language learning tool.

Why the Sacred Scriptures are such a good didactic tool

Aside from teaching excellently the nature of God, Man and of reality, the scriptures are also a great tool for connecting various languages together. Almost every language under the sun has a translation of the bible, and some have many. Although these vary widely, and some are poisonous due to their warping of the intent of the authors of the sacred books, the connections across languages enable us to compare, and hence to learn, new words in our language of study.

Each translation mirrors essentially the same content, and short of some textual variants, we can look at two versions and see how the idea present in one version is expressed in another. In other words, I know what the Latin of the Clementine Vulgate means based on reading the Douay Rheims for the same verse.

Therefore, I should be able to take two versions of the scripture and learn the other language by looking up unclear words and inferring the meanings of the rest. This is especially good since according to Stephen Krashen’s hypothesis, as there is a huge amount of content in the bible. For instance, the Vulgate Bible is about 890,000 words. This gives us a lot to work with, and therefore develop our grasp on the language.

How Did I Do It?

As an Englishman, I live in a very monolingual society, so there is not much on the surface that would drive me to learn another language. However, my wife is from a society that was dominated by Portuguese for quite a long time. Since Portuguese is well respected by my wife’s family, and because of the commonality between it and Latin, I grabbed an English and a Portuguese version of the Bible and started reading.

I read the following books in the 40 day period, and read them in this order:

• Leviticus
• 1 John
• John
• Genesis
• Ezekiel
• 1 Samuel
• 2 Samuel
• Haggai

For reference, this is about 140,000 words, which is quite a lot. I can now read Portuguese with a dictionary at about the speed I read Latin, which I have studied for 5 years.

I picked these books based on an algorithm I wrote to try to calculate their difficulty. It was not a very good piece of code, so I’ll tell you a method I’d recommend here.

Basically, I picked books with a lot of repetition and words that don’t vary all too greatly, as well as words that are common across the bible. What I would do in future is also factor in the length of the words and sentences, but that wasn’t realised initially and only the sentence length was incorporated before the end of Lent.

For you who can’t program, start with 1 John or John, you cannot go wrong with those. I picked Leviticus because in Portuguese it’s quite repetitive. However, in Latin this is not the case, and I imagine this is probably the case with many other more inflected languages (Greek, Russian etc.). I would also recommend seriously picking up a commentary on Leviticus, because if you’re a not a theologically learned person then Leviticus may lead you to do some silly things (I.E. Don’t go and sacrifice a lamb).

This, ironically, reflects some traditions that exist in Judaeo-Christian literature. For instance, in the Ethiopic Tradition, young people are typically trained in 1 John, John and the Psalms. In addition, it is said that Hillel the Elder, a Rabbi contemporary with Christ, began a gentile disciple of his with the book of Leviticus after teaching him the Alephbet.

What was the Process Like?

For the first two weeks, it was a slog. Latin was a lifesaver, because many of the grammatical concepts in Portuguese are very similar to Latin. Agreement of Adjectives, Conjugation of verbs, and even the weird presence of what felt like an ablative tense were all there. However, I needed to grunt in the structure of the language, and Leviticus did a good job of that. I went from reading 2 short chapters in 3 hours on the first day, to reading at roughly twice that speed and eventually faster than that in the two weeks (read 10 days) that it took me to finish Leviticus.

I eventually took about half a day to read 1 John and it was largely plain sailing after that, especially after I stopped relying so much on looking up words in Wiktionary and just worked them out via context.

Granted, there was a lot of confusion between words. For instance, verbs for “To see” and “To come” seemed very similar. There were also longer words that I had issues distinguishing between that meant totally different things. I think this would have been worked out eventually, but this was a real issue. However, I went solidly at a speed of perhaps 2000 words per hour after the first couple of weeks. Genesis took about a week, and so did Ezekiel (although Ezekiel was a lot harder than Genesis). 1 and 2 Samuel I picked as I had just finished them in Latin, and although I found these quite boring reading, they weren’t all that bad.

In all, I would say after the first two weeks it was fairly smooth sailing, although occasionally boring.

What did I actually gain?

As people who are polyglots can probably ascertain, not all that much. Learning a language takes a lot longer than the 80 hours that I spent with it constantly reading. According to Steve Kaufmann, this is about the amount of time it takes to recognise the language, and this is about the level that I am at with it.

After a little bit (perhaps a couple of hours) of listening to Portuguese actively in songs and through the pronunciation being explained a little bit to me, I can now recognise Portuguese being spoken to some extent.

Am I fluent? No, I cannot speak, I struggle with listening, and reading requires a dictionary, although I can get a lot of words. Does this method work? I think so. It takes a lot longer than 40 days of reading to become fluent. I think if I had finished a bible in the language (which I suspect is somewhere in the region of 1–1.1 million words including Deuterocanon for Portuguese) I would be much better equipped to speak it. I am fairly certain I would have finished the bible easily within a year, even if I persisted at the 4000 words per day rate that I stated earlier on.

Quality of Life Improvements?

One of the most irritating things I found is that I found a lot of constructions that I didn’t have names for. For instance, “do que” I now recognise as comparative. However, I had to make this up in my own mind. Life would have been a lot easier if I didn’t have to figure out on my own that sometimes the object of a sentence is thrust into the verb, which is still deeply weird for me.

This would have been made much easier if I had access to some sort of grammar. As much as people in language learning communities like to complain about how ineffective Grammar Translation techniques are, I could have killed for a textbook just to make the grammar a bit clearer. I say this for Portuguese, a simplified version of Latin, which is a language I already had a grasp of. Now imagine the same situation with Russian, where it would have been very difficult, and Japanese, which I would expect would have been nigh impossible.

Additionally, a lot of words repeat in the scriptures, but because of their length, I couldn’t retain them very well. I got them confused with other words. I have a theory that this could have been solved with Anki, taking the problematic verse, highlighting the word, and then simply drilling it into my head over the course of time as a flashcard. This would be grouped by book, so that I didn’t have 50 billion different verses and overwhelm myself when using Anki to drill. These ought to be words you’ve seen a few times, since there’s no sense doing this for words that only occur once or twice in the entire bible.

Finally, although the bible does use a lot of words that are useful for everyday situations, there is, of course, no drilling of this in reading the bible on its own. Therefore, if you want to be able to have conversations in the language, which I suspect is to an extent possible using the Bible, preformulating sentences and drilling them is likely a way to go.

Conclusion

Right now, I am doing something similar with Latin. I am slowly working my way through the Vulgate in much the same manner. I estimate where I currently stand that this’ll take me at least 4 months. Next year, I am planning on attempting this again with a more alien language. This could be Modern Standard Arabic or Syriac, as I am interested in engaging more with Muhammadan Intellectual Culture and the Eastern Church. I suspect that by that point next year my other contenders, Hebrew and Greek, will be at a level where I can’t really reenact this test to receive more accurate results.

Summary

• Start with the writings of St John the Apostle (Including the Book of Revelation)
• Word Length matters a lot more than I thought
• Knowing related languages is a lifesaver
• 40 Days is not enough, 6–8 months are needed
• Get a grammar or a textbook, and do that first in such a way that you have a little bit of a grasp. Don’t spend too much time on it.
• DO NOT listen to the bible initially. Reading goes at the speed that you want, which means you will be able to grasp what the words mean without rushing.
• I suspect Anki would have been very useful, taking a particular difficult verse and boldening the important words to learn them. Make sure they’re reasonably frequent so you don’t waste your time. Group these verses by book so you don’t get swamped.
• For speaking practice, try to form sentences using the words you’re comfortable with