Aug 14
What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers.
Martina Horner, President of Radcliffe College
Ziva David loved learning. More specifically, she loved learning new languages.
While Tony alternately whined at her abilities and begged her to translate what a suspect was saying, she enjoyed simply having them to hand if she required them. She did not think her Hebrew was of much use in America, but neither was her French if it came to that. And her German was practically worthless over here. Perhaps someday she would have to relocate to Europe to get the most out of her skills.
Americans made her laugh. They spoke one language and struggled with that one. She was definitely not the best English-speaking person in America, but she was not the worst by far.
She had grown up in a land where three languages were spoken at all times. She would regularly start a conversation in Hebrew, switch to Arabic and end in English, or some other combination of the three. Other European languages had been spoken at home and she had happily picked them up.
Some people could not understand how she spoken so many fluently. What she did not understand was why people struggled so much – by about the third language, it was easy to pick up the main rules behind the foundation of a language and apply them to learning the next, and the next.
Today, she was going to start on Hungarian. While she doubted she would ever use it in the field, she had always been fascinated by all the consonants. Today, she was going to challenge herself to figure out why they existed in this language.