Conquering the world — one language at a time
Toronto university student, fluent in four tongues and counting, wins title in Chinese competition
KATIE DAUBS
STAFF REPORTER The phone rings in a Madrid dorm room. “Hola,” Luc Pokorn says before he switches to Mandarin.
“Here I have some Chinese friends too,” he explains.
Pokorn, 21, speaks French, English, Spanish and Mandarin, and has friends in each language — one of the secrets to his success.
“For me, I like to talk and use it as much as I can,” he says. “Yesterday I went out with my Spanish friends, even though my Spanish, it could be better . . . I fully plunged into the danger of not being able to communicate with my ideas.”
Pokorn, who grew up in North York and is now studying in Spain, has a knack for language. This summer, he competed in the “Chinese Bridge” Chinese Proficiency Competition — a sort of American Idol/Amazing Race hybrid contest of linguistics for foreigners. Students around the world qualify, and if they keep winning, they go to China. Over the course of a few weeks, people are eliminated through a series of zany events, cultural sketches and speeches, judged by a jury and televised in three instalments.
Pokorn made the top five. It’s a pretty big deal for a guy who only knew “hello,” “goodbye,” “thank you” and “how much?” two years ago.
He was pretty close to being the world champion — but he “sort of blanked out” after a few sentences of his final speech. He still received a fairly epic title for his linguistic efforts: Champion of the Americas.
While he was in China, Pokorn was recognized a few times on the street, achieving the status of minor celebrity. “If I mentioned it to people, automatically people would take out their phones and take a picture with me and post it on Chinese Facebook,” he says.
Pokorn grew up in a bilingual home, speaking French and English, and learning Spanish in high school. In 2011, after his first year of international studies and Hispanic studies at York University’s Glendon campus, he decided to go to China and tackle Mandarin.
“He said to me one day, ‘Mom, I really want be a polyglot; I want to learn more languages; if I don’t do it now I’ll never do it. You have to get them in by a certain age,’ ” recalls his mom, Yolanta Stachow.
Her son has always been tenacious, even stubborn — not a kid who threw tantrums, but a kid who knew what he wanted, she says.
As a toddler at the zoo, his brother was tired and was due for a turn in the stroller. Pokorn refused to vacate, and when he was finally moved out by his aunt, he sat in the middle of the path, not budging, as the family threatened to move on without him.
“In the end they wound up having to go back,” his mom remembers.
Learning Mandarin requires the same kind of single-minded persistence. It is a tonal language — meaning that one syllable, intoned different ways, can mean different things. Pokorn told his tutors to correct him every time he erred.
He was “pretty horrible” in the beginning, making tonal mistakes and consonant errors, turning garbage bin into garbage soup, paying way too much for pineapple skewers because, although he knew “how much,” he didn’t know numbers.
He was supposed to return for his second year at York in September 2011, but he decided to stay in China. He enrolled in a Chinese study program at Tsinghua University for a semester, and then a private school, financing the lot through work as an English teacher. He had friends in the expat community, but he spent most of his time with locals.
“If you open up to their culture and show interest, and you’re happy and try to crack a few jokes every once in a while, they open up to you, they like you,” he says. “The next step is just taking their numbers and going out with them.”
Even when in Toronto, he speaks Mandarin whenever possible, his very proud dad, Daniel Pokorn, says.
“Anywhere on the subway, he’d say hello to Chinese people.
“You would see the people in amazement, they couldn’t believe it.”
The elder Pokorn, a French translator, took his sons to French theatre when they were young.
“They’d say, ‘Daddy, Daddy, I don’t want to go.’ I’d say, ‘If you understand 10 per cent, that’s huge; maybe next time it’s 15, 20; sooner or later it will be 60, 70. And after a while, it will be 100 per cent,’ ” Pokorn says. “If you never start, you won’t go very far.”
Karen Shi, a Chinese language professor at York’s Keele campus, helped Pokorn prepare for the Chinese Bridge contest, along with student volunteers. When she lived in China, Shi was an instructor and adjudicator for a mandatory pronunciation exam that Chinese entertainers, teachers and people who work in the service industry have to pass. She is attuned to the smallest movements people make without thinking — where the tongue is for every syllable, how the teeth are used for certain consonants.
Like many English speakers, Pokorn had trouble with J, Q and X, which involve different tongue placement than English speakers are used to, she says.
“Now his pronunciation is perfect,” she says. He’ll return for his fourth year at York in 2014. Because he made it to the top five in the contest, he won a scholarship for a study program in China. In a few years, he’ll be back in China for a master’s degree, possibly in theatre, maybe in diplomacy. He’d like to learn Polish, Slovenian and Japanese, among “countless others.”
“I love all languages. It’s kind of like when people ask me, ‘What’s your favourite food?’ I don’t know,” Pokorn says. “I love food. I can’t pinpoint one specific dish.”
“If you open up to their culture and show interest, and you’re happy and try to crack a few jokes every once in a while, they open up to you, they like you.” LUC POKORN