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Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6934 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish
| Message 33 of 121 14 March 2012 at 3:24am | IP Logged |
manish wrote:
No offense to the hyperpolyglots out there, but...
Am I the only one who finds these videos demoralizing? :D |
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I find them inspiring, because I know these guys were once where I am, and I feel
motivated to catch up to them :)
1 person has voted this message useful
| Torbyrne Super Polyglot Senior Member Macedonia SpeakingFluently.com Joined 6080 days ago 126 posts - 721 votes Speaks: French, English*, German, Spanish, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Czech, Catalan, Welsh, Serbo-Croatian Studies: Sign Language, Toki Pona, Albanian, Polish, Bulgarian, TurkishA1, Esperanto, Romanian, Danish, Mandarin, Icelandic, Modern Hebrew, Greek, Latvian, Estonian
| Message 34 of 121 25 March 2012 at 10:58pm | IP Logged |
Just wanted to add in Luca and Steve's chat in various languages:
English
French
Spanish
German
Italian
Swedish
Russian
Chinese
Hope you enjoy it all! :)
7 persons have voted this message useful
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4700 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese
| Message 35 of 121 25 March 2012 at 11:41pm | IP Logged |
Those were really awesome videos. I've already told him on Facebook, but Luca's Russian is impressive. Not to mention the other languages that I'm not familiar with.
4 persons have voted this message useful
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6567 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German
| Message 36 of 121 26 March 2012 at 8:53am | IP Logged |
Sometimes I find these sorts of videos demoralizing, but the more I listen to this guy the more I get inspired. He's got a fantastic ability in all of these languages, and it makes one feel a bit down, but when I listen to the languages in which I'm strong (Swedish, English and Mandarin), I notice a bit of an accent (very slight) and maybe a strange way of putting something or a grammatical mistake. It's never even close to enough to get in the way of communication, and it doesn't take away from his amazing achievement, but what it does for me is, it makes him human. Had he a perfect accent, vocabulary and grammar in all of his languages, I'd have hated him for it. As it is, he's "only" extremely good, and I love him for it. Go, Luca!
7 persons have voted this message useful
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4692 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish
| Message 37 of 121 26 March 2012 at 12:18pm | IP Logged |
Yeah, his French and German accents are really good and his English accent is SLIGHTLY (but only really slightly) foreign and his fluency, rate of speech all correspond to that of a native. It's very impressive. From what I can tell his Russian sounds very good too.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Midnight Diglot Groupie Czech Republic Joined 4624 days ago 54 posts - 111 votes Speaks: Czech*, English
| Message 38 of 121 27 March 2012 at 11:17am | IP Logged |
My mind's just got blown. I understood only their English, German and Russian and a bit of Spanish, but it's crazy how good they are. I agree with them that Russian is more difficult than Chinese (except for the writing part) for an English speaking person. You have to do the right declension depending on case even with the numbers. But of course for me as a Czech speaker, it ain't so difficult, especially with the accent markers in the workbooks. Keep up the good work. Anyway I think Luca, Steve and Torbyrne are among my favorite hyperpolyglots. Moses hasn't proved anything yet. I mean anybody who masters the pronunciation and basic grammar can make a short video in the key language.
3 persons have voted this message useful
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4653 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali
| Message 39 of 121 27 March 2012 at 5:59pm | IP Logged |
His English is good (but he still hesitates between the Cot-Caught merged and NCVS accent). Furthermore, I haven't really heard him use a phrasal verb or a word/phrase which is not in the list of the most common 5000 English words ;) That's what makes him sound non-native. When I listen to native speakers of English, I can learn a new word/phrase in almost every monolog/dialog. He has a slight Italian accent (like Joey from Friends), ;) He reminds me of Tony Danza (from ''Who's the boss'').
I would like him to give Portuguese a try.
I still haven't heard anyone who speaks both Italian and Portuguese perfectly (except from Italians born in Italy to Brazilian mothers).
Remember that many polyglots have problems translating (Ziad did).
It's not difficult to be fluent and have a good accent.
Americans in high school have a vocabulary of 20K words.
These are some words from the 20K most frequent words list that are ignored by non natives:
''glade, banister, ordnance, prong, smoldering, enjoin, constable, melee, wintry, cajole''
;)
In speech you can limit yourself to the 5k vocabulary, but when you are given a sentence (or a passage) to translate, it is very awkard when you don't know a word 16 year old native speakers know. ;)
I learned German for 9 years but I don't have it in my list of languages because I find my performance subpar: yeah, I know the Grammar perfectly, and have a 5-6k vocabulary, but still, I can't translate everything I hear from German into Croatian.
I can read it with a native accent, and I could record myself speaking German too...what the hack, it's not that difficult to learn a text by Heart. In India, actresses from Northern India can ''speak'' Tamil or Malayalam very well for the purpose of making of a movie, they learn the script by heart, and many can pronounce the South Indian languages to perfection. But they don't speak these language. ;) It's all for the show.
Edited by Medulin on 27 March 2012 at 6:31pm
2 persons have voted this message useful
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4700 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese
| Message 40 of 121 27 March 2012 at 10:07pm | IP Logged |
In my opinion, measuring fluency in a language by number of words known is like choosing the best football player of all time by using "number of titles" as your only criteria. That way, Cafú (a great former right-defender) would be better than Maradona, Messi, Cruyff, etc...
It's just silly.
Edited by fabriciocarraro on 27 March 2012 at 10:09pm
5 persons have voted this message useful
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