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Number of languages humanly possible? | ||
Tags: Number of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| wokkabomb Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5438 days ago 11 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: French, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 17 of 27 06 January 2010 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't believe that any person is really "limited" on how many languages they can learn, I think people underestimate what the human mind is truly capable of.
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| TheBiscuit Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5925 days ago 532 posts - 619 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Italian Studies: German, Croatian | Message 18 of 27 07 January 2010 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I met a guy in London who spoke 4 or 5 languages to native level. He had lived in the various countries as a child as his parents had moved around a lot. I heard him speak French, English and Portuguese with almost flawless pronunciation. I can't remember what the others were. He had a Czech girlfriend at the time so he was working on his Czech, which sounded really good. Bet you can't guess what he did for a living.
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| guolan27 Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5434 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 19 of 27 10 January 2010 at 6:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I also do not think there is a limit on how many languages a person can learn. I do think that it is very difficult to
gain the fluency level mentioned in this post in more than 3 languages though. It must be considered that many people although they can speak the language, lack in the reading and writing skill areas. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Silvance5 Groupie United States Joined 5496 days ago 86 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, French | Message 20 of 27 10 January 2010 at 7:09am | IP Logged | ||
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I remember my Spanish teaching telling us that after a child's "critical period" through age 12, they lose the ability to learn a language without having an accent. I don't know how true that is though.
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 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 10 January 2010 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Mpete 16 asked
"How many languages can a person learn up to native fluency? To be more specific: The person has an accent that is indistinguishable from a native speaker's. The person's writing skills are equal to that of an educated college graduate. The person uses idioms just like how a native speaker would. " OK, let me have a go at this.. As long as you are far from this goal you don't have to define very precisely what you mean by (near-)native fluency, - you just try to absorb as much as possible from all the native speakers (and writers) you can dig up, and then you know that you are moving in the right direction. Hurray! However when you come closer and closer to that elusive notion "native fluency" you discover that it is fuzzy at best, and probably even contradictory. Arrgh! If you really wanted to be able to fool a native speaker you might choose to imitate his/her own dialect, but even if you succeded in imitating that specific dialect you would probably still be caught out on the idioms and cwertainly on the cultural background, - and maybe even on your looks. So if I had the ambition of being mistaken for a native speaker of English my best bet would be to move to a small monolingual place in the UK and live there for some months to suck up the local dialect and some popular culture (yuck!). After that I'm fairly sure that I could fool the average person in Los Angeles into believing I came from the UK. I might be able to fool somebody from another part of the UK, but to fool a local person I would have to be a very good imitator, and I would probably also need to have the mindset of an imposter. The top imposters are probably so good that they don't get caught out, but I would personally be happy just to be caught out as someone from another region speaking another dialect of the same language. And that has happened to me in at least three languages: English, German and French. But with one exception only in situations where I first had spent some time in another X-language speaking region (the exception is English, where I once was identified as Welsh, even though I had never visited Wales at that time. I don't even know how how to identify Welsh English!). So with this somewhat relaxed requirement: what do you need to get 'there'? In the first place I can see some potential obstacles: 1) input that represents several dialects, 2) too little input, 3) your own ingrown ideas about how the target language should sound and look like. My guess is that somebody with at least basic, but preferably advanced fluency in a certain language could advance to near-native fluency after a few months of immersion, provided that that time was used efficiently (i.e. NOT hanging out with your fellow countrymen!). And theoretically you could spend for instance half a year at ten languages, plus a quick brush-up immersion of a month in each of them - then you might have a person that could fool native speakers from other locations and with other dialects in ten languages. Provided of course that you started out with a person that already had ten 'good' languages ready for the immersion experience. And that wouldn't be impossible. Personally I might have qualified if I hadn't spend the years from 1982 to 2006 doing all sorts of other things than learning languages, but as it is I don't aim for more than basic or advanced fluency in any language. I am not willing to invest 5 years in moving around the planet, and I'm not willing to give up listening to input from all available sources in my languages. But someone without those qualms could certainly have done it. So even though there must be a limit somewhere for practical and motivational reasons, it can't be expressed as a simple number - but if it could that number would have to be fairly high. Edited by Iversen on 11 January 2010 at 2:37am 2 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 22 of 27 10 January 2010 at 1:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting theory Iversen. I think it works with large languages, for people who have a knack for accents. But could an immigrant to Denmark ever fool you that he was native? Other than maybe someone from elsewhere in Nortern Europe who had made it the aim of his life? In smaller countries it's not hard to spot a foreigner. I met a few Norwegians and Danes who speak Swedish in such a way that you can't really hear that they are from those countries. And since they don't make any grammatical mistakes at all, and completely look the part I assumed they were Swedish even if I couldn't quite place the accent. But it becomes clear when you see the name written down. Edited by cordelia0507 on 10 January 2010 at 1:41pm 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 23 of 27 10 January 2010 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | ||
If he was really good I might not discover him! Maybe we are surrounded by aliens speaking our language perfectly? As for the cultural background that is one of my points: the almost good imposter would be caught out on his/her cultural background rather than on his/her language. But the cultural background can be very diversified even for other languages than English. For instance I might potentially fool a person in Angola or Moçambique or Brazil to believe I came from Portugal, simply be being lusophone AND white (though I'm not that good at Portuguese right now!). Or I might conceivably be identified as French in Quebec. The same feat might be difficult to pull off with Icelandic, for several reasons. Edited by Iversen on 10 January 2010 at 1:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 24 of 27 10 January 2010 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Oops, I was just making a change to my post when you responded.
I see exactly what you mean about the distance making the details more blurred. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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