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Hello Everyone & 15 Languages Intro | ||
Tags: United States | Introduction | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Members profiles |  | |
| FashionPolyglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3888 days ago 39 posts - 73 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese | Message 17 of 41 14 February 2014 at 1:38am | IP Logged | ||
I'm a huge dreamer & a very passionate person, but I also know when it gets to the point where it "Gets out of hand". I know reality is a pain in the butt, and that's why I did reconsider my language choices & life in general. I approach passion with practical solutions. I don't plan on spending a lot of money on language learning materials. And I don't plan on going to an expensive university for my future career. Right now, I am attending a community college, & plan to enroll in a cheap university for my 3rd & 4th year. Although the cheaper universities aren't the best, I just hope that future employers don't focus on "Where I graduated" too much when hiring employees. I don't ever plan on piling up too much debt. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FashionPolyglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3888 days ago 39 posts - 73 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese | Message 18 of 41 14 February 2014 at 2:09am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for the tip! After reading your experience with German, I did decrease my goal to 11 languages now. I'm not discouraged at all. You actually gave me more motivation to learn languages. I just needed to be a bit realistic that's all. I will never lose my optimism and passion for language, no matter how many discouraging comments I see. From 15 to 11 languages, I think I can achieve & maintain fluency in a shorter time period. I mean, I don't plan on spending my entire life just on learning languages, otherwise I won't have time for anything else. Life is more than just language, so thank goodness I came to my senses. If I remained stubborn, and still have 15 languages on my list, I won't have time to master fashion skills, travel around the world, or do any other fun things. I wouldn't be able to enjoy life. I don't want to make language learning my entire life. I plan to quit learning languages at the same time I will quit my job (age 65). I want to enjoy life to the fullest, traveling countries & exploring new cultures with someone special. I'm sure every language learner wants to do that someday. And my definition of fluency is, "Being able to speak in any conversation you wish, without hesitation". That means I don't have to learn BIG science words or medical terms in a foreign language. I don't have to learn those words because it's not like I would be having a conversation about "Science" or "Medicine". If your vocabulary in a language is extensive, and you can talk about topics "You're interested in", then that means you're fluent. Not being able to converse about "Topics I'm not interested in", doesn't make me less fluent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5477 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 41 14 February 2014 at 4:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello, FashionPolyglot! Here's a big list of French resources for you, since you asked.
Looking at your first post, I see that you've learned two languages, each while living in the country, and you've forgotten one. And you'd like to learn a whole lot more, to at least to an upper-intermediate level. One thing that you may discover is that if you're not naturally immersed, you'll need to need use somewhat different techniques to learn a language. There are many ways to do this. You can certainly take an AJATT approach, and try to change your environment to create a "linguistic bubble". You can arrange your life so that you get to travel to lots of countries (in which case you need to figure out how to make living on the road, and avoid people who speak English). You can buckle down with some grammar books. Or you can use some combination of the above. So really, your first order of business is figuring out how you can learn a language "artificially", without being immersed all the time. This will be different than how you learned Tagalog or English! And it might be a very good idea to pick just one language, and focus on that until you can more-or-less survive in the language, and until you can read books for fun even if you don't understand everything. Because you learned both of your languages "naturally", you're still like a first-time language learner in some ways. And first-time language learners are more likely to succeed if they get one language under their belt before they try to become polyglots. Later on, you'll know whether you can study more than one beginner-level language at a time. (Serpent can. I can't.) I can't even begin to tell you much my experience with French has helped me in learning Egyptian (even though the two languages have nothing in common). And Benny Lewis said that Spanish was the hardest language he ever learned, because it was the first. So that's why many people do better if they throw all their effort at that first, hardest barrier. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| FashionPolyglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3888 days ago 39 posts - 73 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese | Message 20 of 41 14 February 2014 at 5:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you emk for the great advice!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5243 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 21 of 41 14 February 2014 at 7:10am | IP Logged | ||
As others have said, try to learn one language, maybe the entire "I will be a fantastic polyglot"-bubble will burst much sooner than you expect. Why not start with Tagalog? I am sure any person who is serious about such a project would have done that long before going public with, well, nothing ... Edited by lingoleng on 14 February 2014 at 7:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6542 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 22 of 41 14 February 2014 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | ||
I should point out that my first experience with two beginner languages was...hm.. German + Latin in high school (aged 14), after 5+ years of learning only English. I went to a good lyceum at 13 and that's where I started German and later Latin - and we didn't learn all that much Latin, frankly speaking. And then at 15 I started Finnish on my own, and I could've juggled it easily with these two, but honestly I just didn't care much about anything else. I craved for Finnish and I needed it. In fact, my first truly successful experience with several beginner languages at once was perhaps with Portuguese and Indonesian, some more years later. And most of my good experiences are about starting as passive only. Indeed, I'm doing exactly what other people mentioned here - devoting my life to language learning. In this I see one of the meanings of life, even a path to immortality if you will. I love it (obviously), and while that's not how I see it, I can't help remembering a quote from HP, about choosing between what's right and what's easy. With the attitude you described, you'll be facing this choice again and again. And ironically, exactly when it could become a bit easier, after retirement, you're planning to stop, and you're already kinda looking forward to it. This reminds me on the advice for aspiring writers - if the most important part of your dream is holding a book and knowing that you wrote it, seeing it in bookstores etc, re-evaluate your priorities. Fortunately, language learning has much more alternative paths than writing a book (where you can't really avoid sitting down and, you know, writing 100+ pages and editing them), so I'm not saying you should give up altogether. Just don't make long-term plans, especially before you really see what it's about (and that would be after your first foreign language that ISN'T Tagalog). The main exception is that if you want to go abroad to learn this or that language, of course it might be at least beneficial to plan this in advance, and crucial if you have a long-term stay in mind. I wrote a fairly similar post 7 years ago, and while I'm learning almost all the languages I was hoping to learn, the order is nothing I could've planned. I'm not one of those who say you should learn languages one at a time - but you should at least add them one by one, always asking yourself if you are really ready. Always following your heart and not your brain (well, unless you're moving abroad or have some other important reason). You should start a new language because you can't live without it, not because you laid out a neat plan 6 years ago. Screw plans. Nothing will go as you expected. (That's not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. Some of the changes will be positive - experience is vastly important, and you may find yourself doing things you didn't think you could) By the way, not everyone agrees that European and Brazilian Portuguese are separate languages. And in any case, you don't need to learn both (though it's much better to understand both). In fact, learning two standards of the same language is hard - do you know anyone who can easily switch between the British and American accent in English? Probably only actors and the like. There's a lot of middle ground, especially in writing. In fact, it will be annoying both for you and for native speakers if you exaggerate the differences and focus too much on them. Also, I hope you know that Europeans understand Brazilian Portuguese? The opposite is a bit more difficult, but anyone who gets upset that you didn't learn their variety of the language is not worth your time. (unless you move to said area or something, of course) For more info/ideas, you can search for posts by iguanamon and Iversen. But basically, stop thinking and planning what you're going to learn in 2020 or even 2015, and focus on what you want to achieve in 2014. Edited by Serpent on 14 February 2014 at 2:12pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| FashionPolyglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3888 days ago 39 posts - 73 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese | Message 23 of 41 19 February 2014 at 4:35am | IP Logged | ||
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@Serpent
Thank you very much for the wonderful advice. I believe that I did "Plan too much", without any language learning experience. I set myself up with the number 15, even when I don't know myself "How many languages could I possibly learn"? Only the amount of time & effort I spend can determine that. Who knows, I can possibly learn more than 15 languages. Or maybe even less than 15. I love languages so much, that I decided to NOT plan which languages I want to learn. The languages I want to learn can change over time. The order of which languages should be learned can also change over time. I stopped planning for the future, and instead, I planned which language I want to learn in the present. The language I want to learn in 2014 is Brazilian Portuguese. Sooner or later, I plan on learning European Portuguese. Portuguese is my favorite language, so I decided to learn both the European & the Brazilian dialects. I do plan on speaking both standards of Portuguese at Native Fluency level (C2). I've heard many experienced language learners advising people to aim for C2 level on the first language you want to learn. Or learn your first 2 languages at C2 level if you plan on learning 2 standards, or a standard & dialect. And since I'm learning 2 standards of Portuguese, I have to aim for C2, since their my first target languages. Aiming for your first 2 Native Fluency languages applies for Arabic as well. If you plan on learning Modern Standard Arabic/MSA (The main language of the Middle East & Northern Africa) at C2 level, it is also advised to learn an Arabic dialect at Native Fluency level (Some Arabs only speak dialect). I'm not sure when I can transition from Brazilian Portuguese, to European Portuguese. I will have to wait and find out "What year can I learn to speak European Portuguese"? I won't know the answer to that question until I achieve C2 level fluency with my Brazilian Portuguese. After all, I should add languages to my list "One by one". It's only after I finish my first target language, before I can add a new target language. And thank you for letting me know how hard it is too learn 2 standards of the same language. It is hard to transition from speaking the Brazilian dialect, to the Portuguese one. Only a few people can speak 2 standards of a language, without confusing certain words and phrases. After reading your post, I have learned to "Not plan too much into the future", as either "Plans don't work your way", or because "You might change your plans". I learned to plan for the current year only, and how doing so can help me with my language goals and life goals in general. I don't plan on a language learning retirement age. I might consider stopping my language learning journey only after I actually reached my senior years. I'm WAY TOO YOUNG to even consider plans for my senior years. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| FashionPolyglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3888 days ago 39 posts - 73 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese | Message 24 of 41 19 February 2014 at 5:11am | IP Logged | ||
Not to be rude, but what your saying sounds hypocritical, since your profile says you can speak many languages. I am learning languages one by one. I will not stop with my dream of one day becoming a polyglot. I might learn 15 languages, like what the thread title states. I might learn 5, 10, or maybe even 20+ languages. The number of languages I can amount to speaking sorely depends on: How hard I work How smart I work Time Management If I don't have any of these 3 traits above, then your right, I might as well give up on my polyglot dream. But if I'm successful with learning to speak just ONE language, then why stop there? If I'm successful with learning a language, doesn't that justify even more to learn to speak other languages as well? And about relearning my Tagalog. The reason I don't want to learn that right now is because, "I have a love/hate relationship with that language". I have too many memories of my family arguing using that language. Tagalog sounds UGLY, if spoken so angrily. I'm sure any language can sound ugly if your arguing, but I grew up with Tagalog, so I have to experience bad mouthing in Tagalog. I'm sure anyone whose had bad experiences in their native language, and had forgotten it, will hesitate relearning their native tongue. Right now, my heart is telling me to learn Portuguese. When learning a language, you should, "Follow your feelings. Not your thoughts". I feel the love for Portuguese, and there is ABSOLUTELY NO ONE who can discourage me from learning it, or any language I plan on learning in the future. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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