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You are not a real polyglot if... | ||
Tags: Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4708 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes  Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 9 of 299 09 October 2013 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Agreed. I really don't see the need of constantly reworking what the word polyglot means beyond its strictly literal
definition (one who speaks 3+ languages). I can simply accept that some polyglots' accomplishments are more impressive than others without taking away from the value of the word itself. It's like how I can accept that professional soccer players are athletes even though none of them are as great an athlete as Usain Bolt. Yeah, their achievements might not be as impressive as Usain's, but they meet or exceed a common standard. Edited by Hekje on 09 October 2013 at 11:10pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 299 09 October 2013 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | ||
I've certainly been occasionally frustrated by the long tail of language learning. A "long tail" is when you have a huge number of things which are individually quite rare, but which when taken together, happen all the time. For example, let's say you're looking for words which only appear once every 2,500 pages. Generally speaking, you don't need to look very far to find one. And even once you have a big vocabulary, you probably want to know the collocations, the idioms, the figures of speech, the cultural references, and so on. Now, since I'm learning French, which is closely related to English, I will often find weird idioms that translate almost exactly. But just as often, the French version is completely unexpected. And I find it fairly delicate to keep the details straight, especially which prepositions go with which rare verbs, and which adjectives tend to hang out with which nouns. Now, none of this is a real obstacle to speaking a language fairly well, even in a professional setting. Nobody will really care if your adjectives are slightly "off" now and then. And closing the gap between "really good" and "flawless" obviously requires a staggering amount of work. But when I meet somebody who can function seamlessly in English and in French, to the point that I can't confidently guess which language they used at university, I'm in awe. And that's just a diglot speaking two related languages. So yeah, I think that racking up multiple C1/C2/near-native languages is terribly impressive, even if they all come from the same family. And yes, this means I'm impressed by tons of people here at HTLAL. :-) 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4693 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 11 of 299 10 October 2013 at 12:07am | IP Logged | ||
Presumably this view would accept, e.g., English-German-Japanese-Arabic-Russian as a combination that passes muster, yes? But I ask myself, what level of mastery is then demanded in these cases? Does this hypothetical person demand "Advanced Fluency" or merely "conversational competency" (e.g., ~B1 level)? If the former (which is what you seem to suggest for your own hypothetic Germanic-language master), I think the best you can say is that there's no reasoning with a crazy person. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5771 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 12 of 299 10 October 2013 at 12:31am | IP Logged | ||
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As for closely related languages being perceived as more difficult: That's probably caused by different attitudes towards those languages. That's why I gave up on ... err, postponed Dutch, but not Japanese; I expected Japanese to be difficult.
And when it comes to someone belittling other people's achievements, when those people did not go around bragging about their achievements and being a general PITA ... well, fragile self-esteem anyone? How do you deal with people trying to maintain a position of perceived superiority, or those trying to prevent others from achieving more than they believe they can achieve themselves? How do you tell people what Hekje wrote; that somebody may be better than somebody else, but that the relative difference does not diminish the overall achievement of either of them? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5929 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 13 of 299 10 October 2013 at 1:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with Bao about the different attitude toward closely related languages. I also "postponed" Dutch after January 2011 6 week challenge. I got frustrated when my tendency to confuse Dutch and Afrikaans when trying to write Dutch led to some embarrassing mistakes. I am undecided on whether I will ever learn Dutch again.
I don't like spending too much time on what constitutes "a real polyglot", as this is usually a waste of time. If you claim to speak 3 or 4 languages and want to call yourself a polyglot, I'll probably just ask you which languages you speak. Edited by mick33 on 16 October 2013 at 9:56pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| cpnlsn Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 6178 days ago 22 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English*, French, German | Message 14 of 299 10 October 2013 at 3:51am | IP Logged | ||
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Not only do I not look down on people for only knowing languages from one family (all my
languages are indo-european) I think learning at least a second language from a language family, even at a lower level, or even just for reading, is a very good thing that should be done more commonly. In a sense I want to release the inner polyglot in a lot of people, of being able to add one or two languages from groups they already know. That said, I have enormous respect for people learning languages with different writing systems, which is awesome. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5771 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 15 of 299 10 October 2013 at 5:28am | IP Logged | ||
The word you were looking for is 'insane', my brain insists after a force-fed lesson of Cyrillic. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4258 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 16 of 299 10 October 2013 at 8:26am | IP Logged | ||
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I am annoyed by what has become of the word polyglot. It's become yet another pigeonhole box for people to cram themselves in there and for other people to complain that they don't deserve to go in that box and blah blah blah. Even if I spoke all the languages in the World I would probably not call myself a polyglot just out of spite due to the amount of controversy that seems to surround the word nowadays. This has already happened with "fluent".
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