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Negative aspects of being a Polygot? | ||
Tags: Polyglot bashing | Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| awake Senior Member United States Joined 6578 days ago 406 posts - 438 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 9 of 94 19 March 2007 at 9:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's more a drawback of living in a small town in the U.S. than being a polyglot, but I'm not around any people who share my interest in learning languages. So that limits my socialization somewhat, as the time I spend practicing/studying is time away from the people that I associate with in town. Of course, contacts on the internet mitigate that somewhat. But I think that if I lived someplace like NYC, my polyglotery :) would be an asset in terms of that.
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| mistael Groupie United States Joined 6765 days ago 48 posts - 51 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Russian | Message 10 of 94 19 March 2007 at 4:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the biggest downside is having people available to speak with in all of
the laguages you speak. I guess it wouldn't be so difficult in NYC, but people are more closed when it comes to making friends there anyways. So who knows. Not to be a bug but you spelled polyglot wrong.. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6435 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 11 of 94 19 March 2007 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When you search a job, many interviewers have the same prejudices and myths as those described in FX's article. Consequently, for some of them (%age may differ), it is a suspicious activity, unless you had an absolute necessity. "Normal" people can't do that, so they think there must be 1) uncertainty 2) dissipation of your energy 3) spending time at the expence of study/work (and nobody believs you don't like night clubs). Edited by Siberiano on 20 March 2007 at 8:19am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6810 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 12 of 94 19 March 2007 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Regarding arrogance, I will admit that I feel some pride when I languages come up. I know there are other language learners far more gifted than I am, but I'm not that bad either, and I think that one can give themselves some credit without becoming arrogant. There is a healthy amount of pride, but there is also too much of it, and also showing it in the wrong way/place.
I don't know how many languages I'll end up learning; I don't really have a set number in mind, and hope I never have to set one. My friends know that I love them, some of them even know that its not just love but also an obsession. However, I never plan on going any more public than I have would have to. I don't want to set records or show off, and I'm not doing it for attention, although sometimes I like being able to speak a language to someone when no one else understands what's going on. But another reason, besides wanting to keep my ego in check, of not wanting to make a big deal of being a polyglot, is because in many languages I hope to learn I might not be able to express things to the level that the person might expect. In other words, I want to avoid those impromptu tests; curiosity is one thing, but trying to poke holes in one's work is quite another. In the times I have listed off the languages I can "speak" I usually include "Yes, I am fluent, but only after practice, after a couple of years it's gotten really rusty" or "X is very limited" or "I only studied X for a summer out of a couple of books, and have forgotten most of what it was I learned, and besides I could only read about 60% of a newspaper article, but my speaking and understanding were much worse" etc. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6644 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 13 of 94 19 March 2007 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've started making a big deal out of the difference between the languages I've studied and the languages I know. I really only claim that I know three languages (English, Chinese, French), but I've studied more than five times that number. People aren't interested in those sort of details, though. They just want a simple answer. And the biggest "problem" I have being a ployglot is that I don't understand when people ask me, "Don't you get the languages mixed up?" I had studied five or six languages before I heard this question, so I never understood why someone would say that. Unless, of course, they've never studied a third language before in their lives. As I keep telling people, French sounds like French, Chinese sounds like Chinese, and they sound nothing alike. I don't know how I would get confused. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Andy_Liu Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong leibby.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6728 days ago 255 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Mandarin, Cantonese*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 14 of 94 20 March 2007 at 12:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes. I agree that humility is very important for a polyglot... and that it's better not to show off too much. There are always experts in every subject even though they treat their expertise as mere hobbies. And things will go wrong when they are being envied... To play safe, it may be better to say "I only understand a bit of language X" unless you have attained advanced fluency (this forum's index) in X.
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| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6810 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 15 of 94 20 March 2007 at 3:22am | IP Logged | |||||
Is that ever true. And sometimes if I feel that I'm not going to be tested, I give them that answer because I don't want to go through the hoops and possible confusion of explaining that to them, which is almost certainly far more than the bargained for to hear!
Maybe they mean code-switching, constanting going back in and forth between two or more languages in the course of a single conversation, or even a sentence. I've never really confused two languages when I've heard them, but sometimes when speaking I've said things in Spanish when I meant to do so in German, and even have spoken in another language when I intended to do so in my native English. Hey, possibly another "downside" of being a polyglot: speaking a confused creole-like language that no poor soul will be able to follow! :-) 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| curon Bilingual Pentaglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 6831 days ago 31 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English*, Welsh*, German, Italian, French | Message 16 of 94 20 March 2007 at 7:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have come across the assumption that you must be gay if you can speak several languages. I think this has been covered on another thread somewhere though
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