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Does anyone else have the same view? | ||
Tags: Number of Languages | Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5926 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 17 of 27 24 January 2010 at 9:55am | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by mick33 on 24 January 2010 at 10:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6770 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 18 of 27 24 January 2010 at 10:53am | IP Logged | |||||
Agreed. I too learned basic tourist Thai for my two trips to that country — not even Pimsleur level, just enough so that I could discuss prices and order food — and not only did that make the trip more rewarding in and of itself, the attitude of locals changed when they realized I could barter and answer them in their own language instead of broken English. BTW, off the tourist track, no one at all I met spoke a single word of English (and I had quite a lot of business to do at a couple of government offices, mostly accomplished through gestures). 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5671 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 19 of 27 24 January 2010 at 11:48am | IP Logged | |||||
If you stay in the capital cities that may work, but in many of the remote parts of Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, and Bhutan you will not find anybody who knows any English at all. So, you end up having to use mime a lot, and using what few words of the local language you have learned. This has proven time and again to be very rewarding. For example, finding out that an old lady further down the valley takes in guests and makes a fine local breakfast, or that there is a much better place behind that hill for viewing black necked cranes. These memories last a lifetime, and would never have happened if I had stuck only with English. The things is, that with language learning, sometimes demanding perfection gets in the way of good enough. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 20 of 27 24 January 2010 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have never backpacked that area off the beaten track but I am sure that you are right that there are areas where it's impossible to find an English speaker.
Obviously I would not venture into the bush without some guarantee that I'd be able to communicate with people -- that would be foolish. However I personally have never been on any really adventurous off-the-beaten-track trips to areas where I cannot communicate at all, so the question has never come up. My sister backpacked rural Cambodia and Laos with another friend and they had some kind of phrase book where they just pointed at the sentence that they wanted to say. Silly, but what can you do? Neither of them spoke a word of the language and I guess they were not interested in learning. I've had some tricky language situations of course - a few times I've had to solve them by drawing a picture of what I want. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 27 24 January 2010 at 11:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My languages range from my native Danish and my reasonably good English down to languages like Swahili where I just know how to say "thanks", "hello", "lion", "slowly" and "elephant". And I think that every level in between is represented. Of course only those in which I can participate in a discussion or read books or magazines are really useful, but I doubt that I would have learnt the better ones better if I had stayed away from the weaker ones, - after all it is a general interest in learning languages that is the driving force behind my studies, and I couldn't see myself rolling down an iron curtain between the 'relevant' and the 'irrelevant' languages.
However I have always tried to be clear about the amount of work I can spend on each language, and there will be languages which I just will have time to learn to a low level of competence. I do have high ambitions about learning a lot of words, and within my areas of interest I also think I can achieve this. But learning 1000 random words more in English may not have the same 'punch' as learning 1000 very common words in a weaker language. The criterium must be whether I'll ever need the words I learn, given that I mostly read about science and history and culture and normally just meet the speakers of other languages than Danish when I travel. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 27 25 January 2010 at 11:35am | IP Logged | |||||
I have done that at least once: when my mother and I visited Jerevan in Armenia i 87 or 88 we wanted to visit the local zoo. But we had a bit of trouble determining the direction, so we found a local citizen and I made a drawing of an elephant. He did get the point, even though the much beloved elephant had died shortly before. During my travels off the beaten track I have normally been able to find someone to speak to, also in countries like Cambodia and Laos. I have bought a number of small language guides, but never actually used them for communication purposes. Looking up suitable sentences in such a book is a very cumbersome way of communicating. Edited by Iversen on 25 January 2010 at 12:26pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5988 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 23 of 27 26 January 2010 at 10:37am | IP Logged | |||||
Going for numbers and advanced fluency at the same time seems like a losing battle, but numbers and high-basic fluency sounds like more my style. Although there are some languages I want to be really good at (like some of those spoken in my home city), I'm really quite interested in learning several other languages to a good conversational level. For these, I think you can usually get quite a decent level with maybe a year of study, and some amount of time surrounded by native speakers. If you're able to do this consistently, then I bet you could reach quite a satisfying level in a lot of languages. Even more so if you covered some related languages like all the Germanic or Romance languages. Eventually I'd like to be able to easily converse in the major languages here in Vancouver, the top 5 of which are English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish and Punjabi. Achieving this in the next decade would make me quite happy, but also with some side-projects like German/Swedish/Italian/Esperanto. I think if I reach that point, though, the difficult part becomes keeping all of them up to a reasonable level. Sure, maybe you could learn one language per year for 30 years, but how much would you remember of the first few? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| gogglehead Triglot Senior Member Argentina Joined 6077 days ago 248 posts - 320 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Russian, Italian | Message 24 of 27 26 January 2010 at 10:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have to agree with this, at least in part. In her book "Polyglot:How I Learn Languages" Kato Lomb states that learning a language is "the only thing worth doing badly" or something along those lines. She points out that a partially trained surgeon would obviously not be let anywhere near a patient, but even a rudimentary knowledge of a language can make all the difference. With no knowledge whatsoever, you could insult people, order things that you don't want, and even end up in the wrong city! I guess that lots of people have different reasons for learning a language, and every learner has their own goals. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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