The Importance of Friendship in Language Learning

For me, a language is like getting into more friends, having, making a friend. So with languages, it's very much like friends. And just like friends, there's always some kind of accidental looking, but in retrospect, some kind of faithful sort of encounter. I never learned language just for the sake of learning a language. Later on when I became a professional philologist, that's the term that I use in preference to linguist. It's the what is called the field of classical philology. Philology means etymologically of course love of languages, but this is the word that used to be current in the 19th century.