Department No. III · Room 3 · Floor 2 · Study room
A small room with twelve chairs, one table, and no examinations. Read the ordinances, choose a tongue, and begin badly — everybody does.
This room makes no claim to precision — figures are estimates, pronunciation is approximate, and progress is unmeasured. The only admission requirement is one tongue at a time and a willingness to mispronounce it in good company.
First visit: take the Atlas phrasebook trio of your chosen tongue and learn the hello before Thursday.
The following ordinances are posted by the door and enforced lightly, except on Thursdays, when they are enforced with enthusiasm.
Thursdays, six to seven, the room may be heard from the corridor. The format is fixed and has not changed since the room opened.
First quarter: the Secretary reads the week’s tongue aloud — the Atlas trio of hello, thank you, and goodbye — and the room repeats it, all together, twice. Second quarter: each chair in turn attempts the week’s ordinary sentence; applause is brief and compulsory. Third quarter: pairs practise across the table, one tongue only, while the Secretary corrects from the slips box. Final quarter: the room says goodbye in all twelve tongues in catalogue order, stands, and leaves quietly.
The fastest queue is for Spanish on Thursdays; early arrival is advised. The slowest queue is nobody’s business.
Which tongue to start, honestly, one paragraph each.
Shelf 01
Start here if you want the quickest useful sentence, since teachers, textbooks, and practice partners are everywhere. The honest cost is the spelling, which must simply be memorised, and the embarrassment of being corrected by everybody.
Shelf 02
Start here if you want the largest reward for the steepest first hill: tones and characters look forbidding, then turn orderly. The honest cost is daily practice — the tones fade within weeks of neglect, and the menu in the Atlas will test you.
Shelf 03
Start here if you like regularity, since Devanagari is pronounced as written and grammar is consistent once learnt. The honest cost is persistence: fewer evening classes than Spanish or French, so bring your own Bollywood.
Shelf 04
Start here if you want the kindest beginner’s slope: clear pronunciation, steady spelling, and Thursday company in the fastest queue. The honest cost is nothing at first and everything later, when the subjunctive arrives and stays.
Shelf 05
Start here if you are drawn to the script and to a written standard that spans continents. The honest cost is diglossia: the classroom teaches one Arabic and the street speaks another, and both are correct somewhere.
Shelf 06
Start here if you value abundant classes, clear milestones, and Thursday neighbours. The honest cost is the gap between spelling and sound, which closes slowly and then all at once, usually mid-sentence.
Shelf 07
Start here if you want beauty with your regularity — a logical script and a literature worth the climb to Tagore. The honest cost is scarcity of materials outside Bengal, so expect to share the shelf’s single grammar.
Shelf 08
Start here, especially via Brazilian resources, if you already hold some Spanish and want a second Romance tongue at reduced effort. The honest cost is the nasal vowels, which Thursday regulars describe as humming politely while speaking.
Shelf 09
Start here if you want a new alphabet with a quick reward, since Cyrillic yields to a week of practice and unlocks a shelf of novels. The honest cost is the stress, which moves freely and is never marked.
Shelf 10
Start here if you like systems within systems: two syllabaries plus characters, each with its job. The honest cost is the long climb to literacy — spoken Thursdays come quickly, the newspaper takes years.
Shelf 11
Start here if you already hold some English and want grammar made explicit at last. The honest cost is the cases and the verb at the end, which Thursday regulars describe as suspense, grammatically enforced.
Shelf 12
Start here if you want the gentlest introduction to a non-European tongue: regular spelling, welcoming classes, and Thursday company. The honest cost is nothing the room has yet discovered, which worries the Secretary slightly.