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Your personal polyglot ideal

 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots Post Reply
125 messages over 16 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 15 16
skeeterses
Senior Member
United States
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Joined 6621 days ago

302 posts - 356 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: English*
Studies: Korean, Spanish

 
 Message 121 of 125
24 March 2012 at 6:17pm | IP Logged 
I suppose if the second languages are close to your native tongue, you could probably reach fluency in several
languages in less than 10 years. But I was thinking more along the lines of having complete mastery over several
languages that are difficult or very different from your native language. For example in my case, if I learn another
difficult language after Korean, I don't plan to do it at the same time period that I'm doing Korean, just because a
difficult language requires a great deal of concentration.
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
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9753 posts - 15779 votes 
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Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

 
 Message 122 of 125
24 March 2012 at 8:20pm | IP Logged 
I admire anyone who didn't need 20 years even more than those who did :p
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Midnight
Diglot
Groupie
Czech Republic
Joined 4642 days ago

54 posts - 111 votes 
Speaks: Czech*, English

 
 Message 123 of 125
24 March 2012 at 8:36pm | IP Logged 
True. If you choose a language close to yours. You can learn to speak it fluently let's say 4 years. But different alphabets or difficult grammar may take you twice as much time.

I've been studying English for 6 years but my wordstock is still only 75% of average native speaker's of my age. Now with my experience I can easily learn Dutch (in 3 or 4 years), but it would not help me in Korean (except for words like system).

Alphabets are to consider. Cyrillic and Greek one are easy as pie. Korean and Hebrew are ok. Thai is difficult, but possible. Japanese with thousands of kanji plus two sets of kanas and Onyomi vs Kunyomi takes itself years of study.
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Torbyrne
Super Polyglot
Senior Member
Macedonia
SpeakingFluently.com
Joined 6098 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 124 of 125
24 March 2012 at 9:12pm | IP Logged 
hrhenry wrote:
clumsy wrote:

Going back to the A1.

I think you can do a lot with it!

if you are lost in Thailand with A1 Thaiyou can somewhat do there.

Polyglot: me boy Italy.
Thai: me girl Thailand.
Polyglot: me want buy this (points at a bread)
Thai: (gives the bread) 100 money items
Polyglot: (pays), thank you!

So that's 45 seconds down, 28755 seconds in an 8 hour day to go.

Seriously, buying bread - which is probably the only or close to only food item you know at an A1 level - is fine, but hardly "a lot".

I suppose you could make the case that while you're in the store, you begin to read labels and start learning more words by association, but that's immersion, not any hard A1 level.

At A1 you won't be able to maintain anybody's attention long enough to have a meaningful conversation.

R.
==


I am about to complete my A2 course in Turkish soon. At A1, we did 72 hours of contact hours with native teachers and work outside the classroom. I learnt pretty much everything I could at that level and I could certainly ask for more than a piece of bread in Tarzan language. Granted, I was not going to be entering any TV quiz shows in Turkey or study a doctorate conducted in the language, but many times I see this level in a language unfairly reduced to almost nothing.

When I went to Turkey and engaged with people in my A1 level Turkish, they were very kind and did not get bored with me. In fact, I could hold some nice little conversations with the structures and vocabulary I had picked up at A1.

Doing a full A1 course and the exam that follows really opens your eyes to what it involves. There is also obviously a difference between someone who passes with the minimum 61% and someone who gets closer to 100%, granted. Still I maintain that the full level, studied properly, is nothing to be sniffed at.

Just my 2 cents. :)     
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Midnight
Diglot
Groupie
Czech Republic
Joined 4642 days ago

54 posts - 111 votes 
Speaks: Czech*, English

 
 Message 125 of 125
25 March 2012 at 11:32am | IP Logged 
Thank you for your input. I think everybody who learns how to count to 100, buy some bread or introduce themselves consider being A1. Then we'd have millions of people who speak A1 Japanese, because they know Konnichiwa, Ninja and Karaoke.


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