HOW MARX LEARNED FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Karl Marx was born in Germany, and German was his native language. When he was still a young man, he was forced to leave his homeland for political reasons. He stayed in Belgium for a few years; then he went to France. Before long he had to move on again. In 1849, he went to England and made London the base for his revolutionary work.

Marx had learned some French and English at school. When he got to England, he found that his English was too limited. He started working hard to improve it. He made such rapid progress that before long he began to write articles in English for an American newspaper. In fact, his English in one of these articles was so good that Engels wrote him a letter and praised him for it. Marx wrote back to say that Engel’s praise had greatly encouraged him. However, he went on to explain that he was not too sure about two things -- the grammar and some of the idioms.

These letters were written in 1853. In the years that followed, Marx kept on studying English and using it. When he wrote one of his great works, The Civil War in France, he had mastered the language so well that he was able to write the book in English.

In the l870s, when Marx was already in his fifties, he found it important to study the situation in Russia, so he began to learn Russian. At the end of six months he had learned enough to read articles and reports in Russian.

In one of his books, Marx gave some advice on how to learn a foreign language. He said when a person is learning a foreign language, he must not always be translating everything into his own language. If he does this, it shows he has not mastered it. He must be able to use the foreign language, forgetting all about his own. If he can not do this, he has not really grasped the spirit of the foreign language and can not use it freely.