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REAL multi-languages fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Donaldshimoda Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 4089 days ago 47 posts - 72 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Russian | Message 9 of 102 11 September 2014 at 6:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for all your replies, but...I merely asked how many languages you speak almost
like your native one. I'm well aware about the accents being often not the priority of polyglots and learners, I didn't mean to argue about that. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 10 of 102 11 September 2014 at 6:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Two. The rest is hobbyism.
5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 11 of 102 11 September 2014 at 11:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
Interesting. I find the French accent (when speaking English) one of the more attractive "foreign accents", but I had never considered that it might work the other way around. As others have suggested though, to remain cute, it has to be accompanied by pretty faultless grammar, and free of major vocabulary howlers. I suspect that people like Sacha Distel and Maurice Chevalier actually exaggerated their French accent, because they knew it was found to be attractive and charming.
None, I'm afraid. Edited by montmorency on 11 September 2014 at 11:17pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5235 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 12 of 102 11 September 2014 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Ditto for me. None, and it isn't for a lack of trying! 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 13 of 102 12 September 2014 at 12:40am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not a fan of the tone of this way of talking about polyglots. Very few serious polyglots claim to speak more than a few of their languages at a level comparable to educated native speakers. In fact, some psycholinguists have argued that there's no good evidence that anyone can become truly indistinguishable from a native speaker if they start learning a language in adulthood. As I've said before, fluency does not mean you are the same as a native speaker. Fluency also has little if anything to do with accent. Real fluency means you can express yourself without difficulty. On the other hand, perfection is something learners cannot ever reach. Every time polyglots document their skills, a certain number of people will pooh-pooh them and point out how there are errors, how the accent is obviously non-native. This will always happen no matter what degree of command the polyglot has over their languages, and even if they clearly state the limitations of their ability. Most polyglots aspire to a limited degree of proficiency in most of their languages. For some, this means they can comprehend books and movies at a level somewhere in the normal range of native speakers (not necessarily as well as they comprehend their native language, as polyglots tend to be more literate than the average person), and speak well enough to be understood. Some polyglots don't care much about keeping all their languages active, and would be content to have dormant languages they can understand, but would need a few days of practice to regain speaking fluency in. Some polyglots are satisfied with being at the level of a typical foreigner using the language of the area they've moved to- clearly lower than native but good enough to communicate. Almost all of us are in good faith and try to be honest about this. To answer the question, I'm not aware of any documented polyglot having native-like skill in a double-digit number of languages. However that doesn't make polyglots fake in any way. Most claims of insane numbers of native-like languages are not made by the polyglots themselves, but are exaggerated reports. It's well documented that some polyglots can speak double-digit numbers of languages at a reasonably high level, e.g. sufficient for things like social conversation and reading books. Most polyglots additionally have two or three languages that they master really well. Many have a long list of languages they've studied but don't speak well at all. Some of these go on to become fluently spoken languages and others don't. There is nothing not "real" about this picture. We don't learn languages to impress naysayers with flawless pronunciation and native-like deftness of the tongue. We learn them to use them in various ways, depending on the person. Personally, in addition to my native language I have one at a native-comparable level, another two that are fluent but not perfect, another six that I can hold a conversation in but obviously have some limitations, and another ten that I have some knowledge in but can't maintain a normal, full-featured conversation. I'm not the world's greatest polyglot, and I'd guess this is pretty typical. I am still young and improving though. Some people have a higher % of languages in the first two or three categories, but no one to my knowledge has made a serious, well- documented claim of having a very large number of languages all in the highest category. Edited by robarb on 12 September 2014 at 12:40am 15 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 14 of 102 12 September 2014 at 7:35am | IP Logged | |||||
OK, I'm going to make my usual rant about the poor usage of the word fluency. Need I really point out that the word fluency should not be confused with proficiency as a general-purpose term to describe language skill. A very common combination in adult learners is fluency, i.e. fluid speech, with lots of mistakes, i.e. low accuracy. On a general note, when we speak of native-like proficiency, most of the time we refer to native-like speaking accent and native-like fluency. This is what impresses people most. We rarely look at reading and writing skills. We also know that adult language starters generally never attain native-like pronunciation. True native-like proficiency requires a lot of resources, as emk has pointed out here, and particularly a very large vocabulary, as emk would certainly also add. You can't expect the polyglots to multiply all these vast resources for many languages. Although I don't want the thread to get riled up over a different topic, I have always argued that polyglots are very good at using relatively limited resources in each language and with a decent accent. The results can be surprisingly good but nothing native-like 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Donaldshimoda Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 4089 days ago 47 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Russian | Message 15 of 102 12 September 2014 at 8:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd like to point out that in any way my porpouse was to understimate any kind of
achievement obtained by these polyglots nor I expected polyglots to "master" all their languages. The whole question started because I was sincerely curious about your achievements and I've always wondered how realistic is to be "really fluent" in more than one or two languages..I mean, let's just think about bilingual people, that's per se just amazing. Would it be realistic to add a third language at that level?? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4098 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 16 of 102 12 September 2014 at 10:20am | IP Logged | |||||
The accent probably has to be pretty subtle, too. I somehow doubt the French find it infinitely attractive when Brits speak decently fluent French but pronounce every single cognate as if it were English, which I've heard a fair bit of. Not accents, but related enough... here's a recent infographic for an eDarling poll showing which foreign language most seduces the French. OK, that's enough off-topicness from me. I'll behave now. :) 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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