"Sometimes Kenneth Hale was asked how long it would take him to learn a new language. He thought ten or 15 minutes would be enough to pick up the essentials if he were listening to a native speaker. After that he could probably converse; obviously not fluently, but enough to make himself understood. To those whose education, however admirable in other respects, had provided only rudimentary language skills, Mr Hale seemed a marvel.

And so he was. He had a gift. But he was also an academic, a teacher of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was aware that many otherwise clever people are dunces at learning a second language. He sought to find laws and structures that could be applied to all languages. As well as studying the common languages, French, Spanish and so on, the search took him into many linguistic byways, to the languages of native Americans and Australian aborigines and the Celtic fringes of Europe. As many of these languages had no written grammar or vocabulary, and indeed were spoken by few people, Mr Hale picked them up orally. His tip for anyone who pressed him for advice on learning a language was to talk to a native speaker. Start with parts of the body, he said, then common objects. After learning the nouns, you can start to make sentences and get attuned to the sounds. Still, there was much more to language than that."

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