István Dabi
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István Dabi, Sr. (June 12, 1943) is a Hungarian translator. He became famous at the age of 18, by which time he had acquired 18 languages in which he corresponded with 80 partners from 50 countries of the world.
He worked as a correspondence clerk, guide, interpreter, translator and consulting editor. He mostly published his poems in Polish. In 1970, he married a language teacher of Polish origin from Lithuania; they have a son (István Mikołaj, 1971) and a daughter (Mária Rozália, 1973). He is a resident of Budapest, but he lived between 1971 and 1980 in Gdańsk.
He has always been interested in languages in order to know the literature and culture of nations.
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[edit] Languages
[edit] Translation
He divided languages he translates from into four categories:
- Practically without dictionary (20): Russian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Kashubian, Sorbian, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Bulgarian, Macedonian
- With insignificant dictionary use (33[counting the two Mordvin languages as one.]): Slovene, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Romanian, Portuguese, Romansh, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Turkmen, Chuvash, Tatar, Bashkir, Finnish, Komi, Mari, Mordvin (Erzya and Moksha), Yiddish, Arabic, Maltese, Hindi, Persian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Buryat, Kalmyk, Armenian, Dari, Tajik
- With somewhat more dictionary use (24): Greek, Latin, Nepali, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tuvan, Altay, Yakut, Nanai, Evenk, Karachay, Adyghe, Kabardian, Avar, Lak, Karakalpak, Albanian, Japanese, Indonesian, Malay, Udmurt, Sanskrit, Bengali, Georgian
- With considerable dictionary use (26): Welsh, Irish, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhalese, Swahili, Lingala, Malagasy, Amharic, Fula, Hebrew, Chinese, Burmese, Tagalog, Nenets, Abkhaz, Chechen, Ingush, Pashto, Hausa, Tibetan
These are 103 languages in total (the two Mordvin variants counted as one), without his native Hungarian. He can translate from these into Hungarian, Polish and Russian.
[edit] Speech
Out of the above, he fluently speaks Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, German, English, French and Lithuanian and after a few days' brush-up he could speak 14 more (Ukrainian, Belarusian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Sorbian, Latvian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian).
[edit] His language learning method
- He chooses 1000–1500 basic words (from the topics of family, work, everyday life etc.) and learns them along with the most important grammar (declension, conjugation, pronouns and word order).
- He starts reading fairly easy texts with a dictionary, in accordance with his interests. (The texts may be newspaper articles, specialized texts or whatever else.)
- For some people it is needed to write out and keep repeating the unknown words; for others, it is enough to read them. His experience is that it is much easier to learn new words by means of conclusion (inference), i.e. through their context.
- If possible, he starts correspondence with people, possibly those with the same job and interests, whose native tongue is the one he is studying. (It is important so as to avoid taking over mistakes from anyone who only learnt it.)
- He starts listening to foreign language radio broadcast, even if one initially doesn't understand practically anything, since one will gradually get used to the sounding of the foreign language.
- He considers it essential to deal with the language every day at least 15–20 minutes. (If it seems impossible, one should first learn how to budget one's time.)
[edit] Bibliography
- (In this list only his own works are mentioned, his translations are not.)
His poems appeared in Polish, Macedonian and Belarusian-language Polish newspapers.
He published a book in Hungarian in 1995, entitled A nyelvekről – nyelvtanulásról ("On languages and language learning"), ISBN 963-450-921-5.
His bibliographical novelette was published in 15 serials in 2004 in a Hungarian-language Romanian periodical (Romániai Magyar Szó, [1]), titled Ötvenöt év viharai ("Fifty-Five Years' Storms").
