Freeman's Quotes

“But all arrivals are departures too. Like two mirrors put face-to-face, the leaving and the coming swallow each other at a thousand points, lost eventually in the black border of each other.”
― Colum McCann, Freeman's: Arrival

“I’m thinking about words all the time as I continue this project. Words on their own. Words in sentences. The histories and changing meanings of words.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I occasionally return to some very basic, mathematical thoughts: There are only so many letters in our Roman alphabet. It is then by the power of the math—the infinite (or not strictly infinite, but huge) number of combinations of letters—that we have so many words. But then, further expanding the number of possibilities, truly to infinity, one word (one combination of letters) can have multiple meanings. Further multiplying the number of meanings, even within one given dictionary definition of a word, is the effect of its context, both immediate and larger, which can endow it with, again, an infinite number of subtly differing shades of meaning. Further enriching the single word, within and beyond its contexts, is one’s own personal associations with it, either from one’s reading or from one’s life experiences. And even in one’s own native language, there are a great many words, meanings, and shades of meaning that one simply doesn’t know and may never encounter.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I am still trying to figure out whether a beginner in a language understands a surprising amount, considering she knew so little a year ago, or whether she understands vastly little. Or maybe, contradictorily, the answer must be: both.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“The homeliest thought: I see, as I do this, how doing a little each day, if it is done regularly, adds up to a lot.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“Was my Solstad-Norwegian language project a misguided one? Should I not have been doing it? Did I not have other things I had planned to do? What things will I now never do because I did this?”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“About the question of whether it is a novel, he said that the project itself seemed like an interesting challenge: how to narrate factually and yet get “the lift of fiction.” After he said this, I thought about the word “lift,” since it seemed he was pointing out something that fiction might give and that nonfiction might not give.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“It is satisfying to us, the readers, after having witnessed so many of his ancestors from afar, in little fragments, to be in the presence of a flesh-and-blood forebear of his.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I realized, now and then, that because my attention was mostly on learning the language, I was not reading the book with the wider, and deeper, and more thoughtful attention with which I would have read it in English: I was not absorbing it effortlessly while at the same time thinking about it, as I would have been doing in English.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“As in English, one word can have several meanings, and one phrase can have several meanings. But whereas I take this for granted in English and am completely used to it, it surprises and frustrates me when I am trying to learn a new language.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I tended to keep mixing up pairs of words that looked somewhat alike, such as, at first, også and altså, later enda and ennå, våre and være, enke and ekte, vist and visst, skjedde and skjebne, jul (Christmas) and juli (July), nettopp and neppe, and må, mål, måle, mat, måte, måten, måtte. To a Norwegian, these words are miles apart in meaning, perhaps, and it’s laughable to mix them up. But I mix them up because, after all, the first thing you encounter, looking at a page of unfamiliar language, is not the meaning but the appearance of the words, the way they look.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“In June, I thought skiftet meant “funeral.” But in November, I decided it meant something like “will,” though by the end of the book I still wasn’t sure what it meant, because there were contexts in which both “funeral” and “will” made sense, but others in which neither of them did.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“Last names became fixed in at least one family line, Solstad says, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Why then? Why not before, and why not after?”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“What about the dropped w in their ord, “word”—or is it that we added the w?”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“my method of figuring out the words: contexts”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“One of the tricky ones was som, which could mean “who” or “which,” but also “as.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“The first reading of a word or sentence might reveal nothing at all, and leave me mystified. But with just the small increase in familiarity that came from reading it a second time, the words would begin to suggest themselves. I wondered what happened in the brain between the first and the second reading.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“The first reading of a word or sentence might reveal nothing at all, and leave me mystified. But with just the small increase in familiarity that came from reading it a second time, the words would begin to suggest themselves.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“spelemann is probably “play-man,” if I choose to trust the German cognate spiel, meaning “play,” and therefore could be a gambler, actor, or musician. But the context here decides it: this spelemann is in demand at weddings—so he isn’t likely to be an actor or a gambler, and must be a musician.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“In this case, I’m not sure, but the possibilities are at least limited by the context: either hog or goose.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I learned the words from cognates and also from their context.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“For most of the book—324 pages—I had trouble with i tillegg til. Then at last (why after so long?) I understood it: “in addition to.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“But it wasn’t possible, of course, that his characters kept poisoning themselves and then having children.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“One of Solstad’s regular “connecting” statements in his narrative is: “Vi skal komme tilbakke til . . . ”—“We shall come to-back to . . .”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I had bought the CD because I wanted to know more about how Norwegian sounded.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I have a feeling its root has something to do with solving, but that may just be because I am so occupied with trying to solve the problem of this word.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“Another word that I more recently separated the wrong way was a word in a poem by Olav H. Hauge: snøkvelden, which I separated into snøk and velden.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“As I read along, I had to keep reminding myself, and saying “the” aloud in my head where it didn’t seem to appear with the word.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“Although I knew long ago, before I began this, that in Norwegian and other Scandinavian languages the definite article (the) is usually tacked onto the end of the noun, it is still one of the hardest things for me to grasp “instinctively” or automatically.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“It is far more satisfying to have one’s own urgent question answered by learning a point of grammar than to have to memorize that point of grammar before you actively want to know it, as in conventional language instruction.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival