“The first thirteen or fourteen take a long time. After that, it goes a lot faster.”

The expression “The first thirteen or fourteen take a long time. After that, it goes a lot faster.” is a humorous account of cumulative language learning, recalled by a formerly blind Greenlander who says he heard it from his university teacher, Louis Hjelmslev. Its numbers make a formidable achievement sound almost matter-of-fact: the first languages demand effort; thereafter, experience itself becomes an aid.

The Saying and Its Origin

The speaker introduces the line while explaining how he came to languages after beginning as a theologian. He says his work as a pastor gave him excellent opportunities to listen to people, and that for most of the preceding forty years his work had been with languages. At university, his teacher was Louis Hjelmslev, a professor of comparative linguistics who knew forty or fifty languages and had learned and forgotten just as many.

The speaker remembers being young and surprised by Hjelmslev’s range. When he asked how Hjelmslev had learned so many languages, the professor answered with the saying. The punchline compresses a lifetime of scholarship into an easy progression, but it does not pretend that the first stages are easy: thirteen or fourteen take a long time. The humor lies in the scale of the number and the casual confidence of what follows.

Language as Accumulated Experience

The line appears in a conversation that has already made language feel like evidence of a life. The speaker tells Smilla that an utterance carries the sum of a person’s linguistic past. From her speech he infers that she grew up around Thule, arrived in Denmark as a child after acquiring Greenlandic, and later encountered several Danish sociolects and accents. Smilla confirms that his account is basically true. His skill at listening is not presented as abstract virtuosity: it allows him to recognize histories embedded in speech.

That idea of accumulation gives the saying a second resonance. The later languages do not simply arrive as isolated accomplishments; they follow a long beginning shaped by exposure and practice. The speaker’s own account supports this view: theology trained him to listen, while decades spent among languages built on that habit. The maxim’s apparent lightness rests on sustained attention and accumulated experience.

Language, Respect, and Loss

The novel places this learned remark beside Smilla’s own account of language attrition. As a child in Denmark, she was placed in a class to learn Danish; later, Greenlandic-speaking pupils in Qaanaaq encountered teachers who neither knew Greenlandic nor intended to learn it. School promised that academic success would bring a route to Denmark and a degree, but that ascent would take place in Danish. Greenland was officially made Denmark’s northernmost county, and Inuit were called Northern Danes and told they would be educated to the same rights as other Danes.

Smilla compares the loss of a language to the corrosion of safety carabiners tested on Disko Island. They looked reliable after three months in sea fog, yet could be pulled apart with a fingernail. In the same way, she recalls, a mother tongue can seem secure after migration, until an ordinary word suddenly cannot be found. Her attempts to relearn Greenlandic later leave her neither fully successful nor wholly unsuccessful. Against that slow erosion, the saying’s brisk assurance that learning accelerates after the first languages sounds less like a guarantee than one side of a larger contrast: linguistic ability can grow through experience, while a language can also weaken under the pressures of displacement and schooling.

Respect also travels through language in smaller exchanges. Smilla remembers a Danish-speaking boy, Baral, changing his manner toward her after learning she was a girl; his helpfulness became courteous. She finds a similar formality in Isaiah, who sometimes switches to Danish to address her with the polite form De after he understands the respect it conveys. These episodes show that language does not only store knowledge or mark education. Choices of address can recognize another person, even as language policy can make a mother tongue vulnerable.

The Speaker Behind the Maxim

The saying also characterizes its teller. Smilla recognizes him only after he mentions that, less than ten days earlier, she saw him bury Isaiah; his pastoral robes had served as a complete mask. He sometimes still assists Pastor Chemnitz, though his career has largely been devoted to languages. When he recounts Hjelmslev’s reply, he imitates the professor’s severe overbite and then laughs heartily, pleased both by the story and by the demonstration of his own listening and linguistic intelligence.

The exchange ends with another disclosure: he has been totally blind since the age of twelve, and he enjoys Smilla’s sudden stiffness when he tells her. The line about language learning thus belongs to a speaker whose account links listening, memory, and expertise, while its delivery reveals his playfulness and delight in surprising his interlocutor. It is not merely a maxim about mastering many languages; it is a small inheritance passed from teacher to student, and a fitting expression of the novel’s attention to how histories remain audible in speech.