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Tim from the US (PolyglotPal) on YouTube | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 57 of 204 03 April 2012 at 1:44am | IP Logged | ||
I think this and other posts are unfair to the Chinese lady. She has made no claims about her own language abilities. She is merely carrying out the job assigned to her, which is to honestly evaluate the guy's Chinese ability based on a fifteen second conversation. Her level of English is completely irrelevant, and has no bearing on her job of evaluating Tim. Also, Tim is appearing on these shows as a language learning wonder who speaks 26 languages. The expectations are accordingly rather high. And his accent did not meet her expectation. If he were to instead say he could speak 5 or 6 languages, and had studied another twenty, people would be a lot more forgiving about his weaker languages like Chinese. But that would probably put a damper on the media attention. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Rob_Austria Heptaglot Groupie Austria Joined 4999 days ago 84 posts - 293 votes Speaks: German*, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Croatian, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic (Written), Turkish | Message 58 of 204 03 April 2012 at 2:17am | IP Logged | ||
I do agree with you as regards the media attention. I don't see Tim as the "hyperpolyglot" and "genius" he sometimes is portrayed as. I think he gave a reasonable explanation of his varying levels of proficiency in different languages in this forum. He is a young man who spends a lot of efforts and time to learn languages and as far as I could tell based on his videos and some e-mail exchanges he is also very much interested in other cultures. That is what I like about him. While I do think that he has achieved a remarkably high level in many languages I heard him speak in, I am not here to judge his knowledge. I enjoy communicating with people like him. And I have never heard him call himself a genius, hyperpolyglot or claiming he could do things others are not capable of. (....) Her level of English is completely irrelevant, and has no bearing on her job of evaluating Tim. (...) I beg to differ. She obviously knows what it takes to study a language (time and lots of effort) and based on that knowledge she could not have possibly expected him to speak flawless Mandarin. And to be honest, I don't think his accent or tones (she did not really say what she did not consider "bad") were worse than her accent in English (and the three Chinese friends who listened to him agreed with me). Knowing how much effort it probably cost her to achieve her own - as you yourself called it "far from perfect" - accent, should have made her more sensitive to his level of Mandarin. Again, that is just my opinion. Of course, you can always judge a person's abilities without taking into consideration the underlying circumstances (I would not expect anybody who has studied German for a year to be as fluent as somebody who has been speaking it for 10 years or so and yet both may rightly claim they "speak" the language). The bottom line may be that there is too much of a hype when it comes to polyglots now. Maybe all this rating, judging, comparing and labelling should give way to a more amicable exchange of ideas and experiences. When I first used the term polyglot (after I had watched Richard's and Luca's videos) I thought it was a good term to use for people who would like to promote the idea of multilingualism based on their own experiences. I might have been wrong and maybe we should stop using that term altogether since it seems to cause a lot of confusion. Edited by Rob_Austria on 03 April 2012 at 11:25am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Rob_Austria Heptaglot Groupie Austria Joined 4999 days ago 84 posts - 293 votes Speaks: German*, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Croatian, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic (Written), Turkish | Message 59 of 204 03 April 2012 at 2:51am | IP Logged | ||
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| Zorrillo Pentaglot Groupie United States Joined 6381 days ago 41 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, French, Sign Language, Spanish, Polish Studies: Greek, Georgian, Indonesian | Message 60 of 204 03 April 2012 at 5:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I personally found the Chinese lady a bit rude in her response to Tim; she could have phrased it a little more gently. But I also understand that Tim is placing a big bullseye on his back by doing these media appearances- particularly when native speakers are involved as "testers" of his proficiency. They will be quick to eviscerate you for every minor mistake, and will be unforgiving about accents (although many of us feel accents are overrated.) I think Translator2 makes a fair point, though, because the general public has no idea of what it really means to "speak a language". They may see a polyglot on TV speaking 20 languages at a decent conversational level and be amazed, but be less impressed by the polyglot who speaks 5 at near native levels with extremely deep vocabulary. I think both are worthy accomplishments, but the uninformed masses out there will be quick to lionize the 20-language speaker and forget the 5-language speaker. Really both are worthy of admiration. And I don't mean to imply that Tim has only minimal skills in his languages. I'm sure he is quite skilled in several of them. In fact he gave a good summary of his various levels earlier in the thread. I personally think he is fantastic. He speaks well, appears to be polite and respectful, and admits his shortcomings. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4668 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 61 of 204 03 April 2012 at 9:14am | IP Logged | ||
I'm amazed by this comment. Here‘s the response that everyone is talking about: What do you think of his accent? Can be a little bit better. Sorry... Judging from the laughter all around and Tim's response, this was a polite, friendly assesment of his accent which was interpreted as such. There were some initials and finals that weren't too standard, but the real sore thumbs were pronouncing the first tone as a 4th tone, or something resembling a 4th tone, in these words: 中文 中国人 北京 Edited by Wulfgar on 03 April 2012 at 9:16am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Rob_Austria Heptaglot Groupie Austria Joined 4999 days ago 84 posts - 293 votes Speaks: German*, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Croatian, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic (Written), Turkish | Message 62 of 204 03 April 2012 at 11:31am | IP Logged | ||
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(My apologies to those who already read this entry on another forum where I previously published it).
Yesterday I had the opportunity to text chat with Tim for about 1 1/2 hours in German. He said he had been studying German for about three weeks. He seems to have some knowledge of Yiddish because his grandparents used to speak it. Maybe that helps even though I doubt it is much of an advantage especially since he does not seem to be fluent in Yiddish himself. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to him. He is friendly, open-minded and very intelligent. Never ever did I have to try and adapt my wording in German to make sure he understands what I meant. He kept saying that he still struggles with German grammar and that he lacks vocabulary and apologized for not writing as fast as I did (I have to add that I write extremely fast and I think he was not slow at responding at all). All I can say is that we talked about language learning in general, my planned trip to the US (I hope to meet up with him in person in NYC), our hobbies, the impact Yiddish had on Austrian German and so on. Of course, he made grammatical mistakes, struggled a bit with the German syntax (who wouldn't after three weeks of studying) but those were minor issues and did not hinder our communication. I was surprised at how well he expressed himself. He was really, really good especially if you considered his functional ability and did not try to focus on the mistakes he made. I was intent to converse with him and his command of German certainly made for a lively discussion. I think that is the kind of attitude needed to enjoy talking to each other and motivate each other. If it had been my intention I could have come up with a list of things he struggled with (mind you, it would have been a very short list) and make him look bad in the eyes of those who relish in seeing others fail by their standards. Instead his enthusiasm kept me up until 4 am. No small accomplishment considering I had to get up at 8 am today for work ;-) Besides, he asked very interesting grammatical questions, often making correlations with other languages he has studied. I can honestly say I was truly impressed. It simply was a very pleasant experience. I think it is important to mention these more personal things after all the hype about him. To me he is a very intelligent, friendly, polite young man who obviously enjoys studying languages and spends an enormous amount of time doing so. Even if in some of his vids he says he studied a language for 3 to 4 weeks only, we should not forget that he refers to an extremely intensive period of studying with up to 15 hours a day. Add to that the fact that he now can draw on a lot of other languages when tackling a new one, his achievements seem to become more plausible. He told me he frequently studies late at night. So, he certainly is very serious about what he does. He also mentioned that he will upload ten more language vids soon (in different languages). And I offered to help him practise his German and may make a video with him in German as well. As I have said in another forum, personally I don't think that it is possible to maintain a very high level of proficiency (like one which you would need to work as a translator for example, even though translators certainly are not perfect either when it comes to their knowledge of languages) in more than 6 or 7 languages on a long-term basis. I think you will have to sort of "juggle" with languages if you keep adding new ones. But I can totally imagine people learning 20+ languages at a functional level and "upgrading" or "downgrading" (by focusing on other languages) them as they need. I don't think I will be able to do that because of time constraints or maybe it is just a lack of motivation because I prefer dedicating some of my spare time to other activities. And, who knows, intellectually I might not be in the same league as Tim or similar people. I have no problem whatsoever with that. Tim never claimed to be fluent, perfect or whatever in 20+ languages, he said he "speaks" them. And if he manages to express himself in all his other languages the way he talked to me in German yesterday, I can only say: hats off, young man! Way to go. He is not a genius, no "language God" but a very hard working person who produces impressive results. 19 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Pisces Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4619 days ago 143 posts - 284 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish*, French, SwedishC1, Esperanto Studies: German, Spanish, Russian | Message 63 of 204 03 April 2012 at 11:43am | IP Logged | ||
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The previous post was very interesting. It would be interesting to hear what Tim plans on doing with languages in the future, e.g. what he plans on doing with them at university or in his future occupation. That is, of course, if he wants to share this with us.
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| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6916 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 64 of 204 03 April 2012 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think you can have it both ways. There is absolutely nothing wrong with learning small parts of dozens of languages rather than studying a few in depth (and then perhaps going back later and filling in the gaps). However, if this is the case, then when the TV or print news calls and says they want to interview you about how you speak 25 languages, you say, sorry, I don't really speak them yet.
You cannot claim humility in your private life and then not expect to receive extreme criticism when you appear on the media making outrageous and misleading statements. I don't think it is studying multiple languages that is the problem (and at least in his case, unlike the autistic guy, I believe he really does know them and is really good at it), but I think that experienced language learners who have spent years and years studying have a problem with the hyperbole surrounding people who the media portrays as learning so many languages so quickly as something that is so easy that it can be done in a fortnight (and of course his young age also makes him an attractive story for the media as well - "60-year old man speaks 23 languages" would not be nearly as exciting for a headline). There are many examples of good polyglots who are careful to not allow the media to misrepresent their abilities. However, given that the current trend is to learn a lot of things really fast and nothing in depth, I think we will be seeing a lot of Wunderkinder in a variety of fields. Our generation simply never conceived of showing off a talent or skill we only cultivated for a few weeks or months. After all, if you can learn to speak a language in two weeks, why go to college for four years. I studied ONE language for four years in high school and then another four years in college and eighteen years later, I am still learning things in and about that language. When you spend 4-5 hours a day for 20+ years doing something, how can you not have a negative visceral reaction when the media portrays (and I understand he is not claiming this) that it is possible to do 3 times as much in just two years? It makes you feel like a complete failure who has wasted their life. Edited by translator2 on 03 April 2012 at 5:10pm 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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