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How fluent to be a Polyglot? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| puellanivis Pentaglot Newbie United States Joined 6610 days ago 11 posts - 12 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanC1, Swedish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Latin, Mandarin, French | Message 33 of 49 19 October 2006 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've generally found it fairly easy to become familiar with a new language, although I rarely get to a level where I myself don't see a difference between native speech and my own.
Fluency is such an annoying target to "hit", as everyone treats it different. When I talk to people and they ask me what languages I know, it's like, well, I'm fluent in English and German, but nothing else. Honestly, any of my other languages I would have to tell the native speaker to slow down a bit, and let me catch up. Although, in the short period of a month with just one hour a week with a native speaker, I've pretty much picked up American Sign Language with no difficulty. I surprise people learning it in a class, because they have no doubt been working hard to learn it, but I just seem to pick up new signs every day, much similar to a small child. But I never know what someone would define fluent as, and heck, when I got to Germany and started crying because I was struggling so much, I reverted to "I only know English" for awhile. I think one could avoid "free lunch" knowing a language with can you be productive in the language. If I can just read another language because I studied a language similar to it, then that doesn't count, I would have to be able to produce something that would be recognized as part of that language. But beyond vocabulary, I rarely have any difficulty learning new languages Oh, and as far as translation goes, I could care less about that, because I can hardly translate from German to English at all. (From what I hear, this is supposed to be pretty uncommon.) I can fully understand the German, but I stutter and fumble trying to read it, or translate it to English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lengua Senior Member United States polyglottery.wordpre Joined 6683 days ago 549 posts - 595 votes  Studies: French, Italian, Spanish, German | Message 34 of 49 20 October 2006 at 3:00am | IP Logged | ||
Very true. And in the end, we learn these languages so we can use them, and not so we can bestow titles upon each other based on the number of them we know. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6658 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 35 of 49 24 October 2006 at 9:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Perhaps a helpful term might be "functional polyglot."
If you can engage in an intermediate conversation (more advanced than greetings, the weather, etc. but on the other hand not so advanced as to include technical jargon or obscure subjects or slang), you probably would qualify. I think some reading knowledge would be necessary. Even if your listening and speaking skills are excellent, you would probably need at least some basic reading and writing skills in most places. You'll want to be able to find the right restroom and read such signs as "danger" and "no admittance" and so forth. You wouldn't necessarily need to read advanced literature or technical material. Some writing ability would also be desirable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Guanche Hexaglot Senior Member Spain danielmarin.blogspot Joined 7045 days ago 168 posts - 178 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, GermanC1, RussianB1, French, Japanese Studies: Greek, Mandarin, Arabic (Written) | Message 36 of 49 24 October 2006 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||
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We can also use the European Council Language Levels: from A1 to C2.
I think a fluent speaker should have at least a B2 or C1 level. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| puellanivis Pentaglot Newbie United States Joined 6610 days ago 11 posts - 12 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanC1, Swedish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Latin, Mandarin, French | Message 37 of 49 24 October 2006 at 1:07pm | IP Logged | ||
I would have to agree. If one knows a language well enough that presented with a native speaker of that language they would be able to talk and discuss any particular topic that happens to come up. Although, in this case I prefer the term "coversational". Although, "functional" certainly fits just as well. And it should be noted that reading/writing is only necessary when the language HAS such a reading/writing system. Likewise conversationality is only necessary for non-literary languages. (As such, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit, are formal writing, and can hardly be considered reasonable for conversation, in as much as formal English is a very poor way to have a conversation.) In the European Council level, I would include B1 language skill also. Honestly, if I can converse sufficiently with someone in that language then, I don't hardly care what other people think about my ability, it's sufficient for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 38 of 49 24 October 2006 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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In my opinion, a polyglot is an able-bodied person who can speak, write, read and understand at least 5 languages (at B2 level as an absolute minimum)
Naturally, things change a little bit for handicapped people, but for ease of argument, we won't get into it here. I'm fine with being called a diglot even though a lot of people who meet me think that I am a true polyglot (give me time, give me time...). I know that I can hold a basic conversation in the languages that I have at the intermediate level in my profile and get around when I am travelling there. However, I would never say that I have basic fluency in those languages (and hence be more than a diglot) because I know that my skills are quite uneven (e.g. I can read Croatian better than I can write it, I can write Polish better than I can speak it, etc.) Nor do I have no physical handicap that hinders my ability to speak, write, read, hear and understand any language. Thus I feel that I need to satisfy use of the 4 applicable senses up to at least the standard of B2 or high-intermediate before saying that I have basic fluency in the target language. Perhaps it's a little conservative, but I feel most comfortable having it set up this way. I don't feel that I'm in a race to impress others or acheive polyglottery by merely adding languages to my profile after only elementary instruction. I remember coming across a while ago some threads here where the speakers claimed to have Basic Fluency on their profiles, but the posts in the target language by these people were full of grave mistakes. When I would read the post aloud, it sounded OK, but in print I could see that the endings were often wrong and definitely wouldn't cut the mustard in formal or even informal correspondence. The mistakes indicated deep misunderstandings of grammar and there were just too many of them. I would not consider such mistakes as the mark of someone with Basic Fluency as the skills in writing were presumably far behind those in speaking, listening and understanding. I don't advocate perfect grammar since I and many other native speakers butcher the language, but some of the mistakes that I saw would be on the par to those in English as saying "I will buy last year the book." I think that the standards as set out by ALCS or European Council of Language Levels are better than nothing and help to bring a little bit of order in what it means to be fluent or a polyglot. Edited by Chung on 24 October 2006 at 4:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 39 of 49 25 October 2006 at 9:17am | IP Logged | ||
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The main problem with the notion of fluency is that things like active versus passive language, oral versus written language, fluency (in the narrowest sense), correctness and 'breadth' are all assumed to develop in parallel, but in practice we all know that they don't. When Chung demands that you have the ability to speak, write, read, hear and understand up to at least the standard of B2 or high-intermediate before claiming basic fluency in a target language I understand the basic idea and support it, - you have to have a generalized knowledge to claim fluency in the broad sense. If for instance your active use of the target language is minimal, but you can read even complicated texts, then you shouldn't claim fluency in general, but only passive fluency (or even passive visual fluency). Or oral fluency, if you can speak Mandarin or Thai but never bothered to learn the writing.
My only reservation is that the word "fluency" in itself stresses the 'streaming' quality of language production, so for me this must be the defining criterion. Then according to degree of correctness, native-like use of idioms and other elements you can differentiate between basic and (near-)native fluency. People who cannot produce a steady stream of words or only can do so by filling out the gaping holes with nonsense or wild guesses don't qualify for fluency, not even basic fluency. Edited by Iversen on 25 October 2006 at 9:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 40 of 49 25 October 2006 at 10:17am | IP Logged | ||
Even though we mostly have formal writing in the works preserved from the ancient cultures there are enough exceptions to give us glimpses of ordinary daily talk in at least Latin and Ancient Greek (I don't know about Sanskrit). The problem is not whether we could reconstruct the true classical smalltalk - leave that to the scientists - but whether we could find anybody to talk to. Personally I think it would be easier to remember a 'dead' language if it was approached as a modern language, but bad old habits and lack of suitable study material keep us from doing that. Edited by Iversen on 25 October 2006 at 10:20am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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