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Twenty Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| noriyuki_nomura Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5285 days ago 304 posts - 465 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1 Studies: TurkishA1, Korean | Message 33 of 117 15 November 2010 at 8:12pm | IP Logged |
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Realistically in the next 5 years, I think I could/would aim for 10 languages (that I personally like) at the C2 level, since I would love to be able to speak these languages, read literature/books/newspapers in these languages, listen/watch news in these languages, and to communicate/discuss with native speakers (and speakers of other nationality) on a wide range of topics in these languages, and the ten are (in alphabetical order):
1. English 2. French 3. German 4. Italian 5. Japanese 6. Korean 7. Mandarin 8. Russian 9. Spanish 10.Perhaps Dutch/Portuguese/Indonesian However, as the thread is on 20 languages, the additional 10 languages would be: 11.Amharic 12.Arabic 13.Cambodian 14.Cantonese 15.Greek 16.Shanghainese 17.Portuguese/Dutch/Indonesian (since already quoted above) 18.Thai 19.Turkish 20.Vietnamese Edited by noriyuki_nomura on 15 November 2010 at 8:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sigiloso Heptaglot Groupie Portugal Joined 6724 days ago 87 posts - 103 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, PortugueseC1, Galician, French, Esperanto, Italian Studies: Russian, Greek | Message 34 of 117 15 November 2010 at 8:53pm | IP Logged |
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:LOL I am with Numerodix, these people are insane :)
Why dont you arrange your languages by families (roughly) so that we can perceive the difficulty of the task? Patuco's list, and the others are similar in spirit: French Portug uese Italia n Catalan German Dutch � � ; Danish Swedish Russian Polish Mandarin Cantonese Japanese Korean Arabic Hebrew Hindi Swahili Xhosa Zulu Obviously, and I know you from years ago when I spent some time here (greetings, Patuco, Journemyer, you still here! :) good to see some things never change) you are passing the time can I criticize, no harm intended? :) just for a bit of controversy. We are talking here normal people, who have to work for a living and have no butler at home, and look to this as an investment decision (it is), not Prof. Argüelles or other freaks (:) said with affection). I see many families and isolates, many minority languages, some from undevelopable countries, or meaningful only if one belongs to a particular ethnicity, some losing speakers who have second languages anyhow, I see a recipe for failure, waste of time, frustration, not being accepted by speakers, not finding reading and listening material enough to reach the necessary level of exposure, I see a technical imipossibility that anybody can have motivation that diversified realistically, and no motivation, drop out is forseeable. That doesnt mean 20 is not a feasible plan if one is endowed with a long life, but I think the list has to be more intelligent. I would start from these assumptions: -Minority languages are indeed studiable but only if you were born or live in the area, or any other kind of scholarly, personal or other very specific motivation; rarely can be more than one or two. Otherwise is a complete waste of time and their situation is a constant challenge to motivation, exposure, and funny enough, often have variation and standardization problems -One has more interest and learns better from own cultural area, civilization -In other civilizations and linguistically far away, only major ones can be considered So from the point of view of a Westerner, -in Germanic family, stand out Engish and German, the rest is nonsense - in Latin, Spanish and French; those being thorough, Portuguese and Italian can be considered - in Slavonic, Russian; some can add Polish - then there are our two classic Latin and Ancient Greek those inclined and on the nerd side - and in other civilizations stand out M.Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Hindi; I know there are a few more demolinguistically to be considered, but they are rather far away,; beside, with only those four biggies all civilizations of the planet are virtually covered. End of the story, this is all there is that you can do without special motivation or circumstances. The rest is nonsense. So would be: English German Spanish French (Portuguese) (Italian) Russian (Polish) (Latin) (Ancient Greek) (Chinese) (Japanese) (Arabic) (Hindi) If someone is a Westerner and wants the 20 feat, I would take these 14 and then select some 2 minority from where I was born or live, then some 3 profiting from family relationships above, and 1 as something weird out of curiosity. But that is the most you can fool around. Good luck with Zulu, Hebrew, Swahili and all the rest of it. Tell us 20 years from now! :) I know you were kidding all along. Edited by sigiloso on 23 November 2010 at 4:18pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6087 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 36 of 117 16 November 2010 at 1:20am | IP Logged |
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Sigiloso, why do you criticize what others want to learn? I may not agree with the people who have listed Amharic or Vietnamese as I have no intention of learning these languages myself, but I certainly respect their choice to study whatever they like.
For my list, I'm excluding ones that I already "speak," so here are my twenty: 01. Swedish 02. Dutch 03. Romanian 04. Welsh 05. Russian 06. Czech 07. Hindi 08. Persian 09. Arabic 10. Hebrew 11. Turkish 12. Finnish 13. Hungarian 14. Japanese 15. Mandarin 16. Swahili 17. Georgian 18. Indonesian The last two are very hard to decide... I have quite a few that are all vying for those spots. How can I possibly choose? Latin Old English Icelandic Polish Slovenian Lithuanian Bengali Korean Nahuatl Esperanto As I already "speak" seven, if I add in these twenty more, I'll have 27, which is a favorite number of mine. Edited by ellasevia on 22 November 2010 at 2:52am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5290 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 37 of 117 16 November 2010 at 2:19am | IP Logged |
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sigiloso, we all indeed do not share the same expectations and priorities. Some people live in order to "upgrade" cell phones or cars every couple of years and to accumulate (mostly unnecessary) material possessions. Others would rather collect knowledge, culture and insight, not to mention languages, an indispensable means to approaching the former.
10 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6648 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 38 of 117 16 November 2010 at 11:09am | IP Logged |
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I didn't see Sigiloso's message as a criticism, but as a cautionary remark from a truly pessimistic angle. However Paranday gave us the antidote against such pessimism: just get an implant. And until then just go head and prove Sigiloso wrong.
I have not made a list of 20 languages because the notion of a fixed number of languages is downright silly. There will always be a ladder from your native language down to those where you just can count to three (yksi, kaksi, kolme in Finnish). There will be languages and dialects which you understand passively because you know something related, - for instance Afrikaans shouldn' be too hard if you know Dutch. And if you are reasonably good at understanding such a language then you can probably also reasonably fast activitate it. So where is the limit between learning such a language or dialect and just tweaking something else? Which is why dialects should be learned as languages if you really want to count them on your list. So I don't have a list over precisely twenty languages I want to learn, but a somewhat fuzzy collection of past, present and future projects. I want to know/learn all Germanic languages for which there are sufficiently good sources, and that includes at least English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic (which allows sufficient access to Faroese and Old Norse), High German, Low German, Dutch and Afrikaans. I would like to add Swiss German, but don't have the sources. Jiddisch, .. well, probably not. Frisian? No, ... to few sources and to many dialects. But Old English and Old High German yes, though only as passive languages. I want to know/learn all Romance languages for which there are sufficiently good sources, and that includes at least French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese (which allows sufficient access to Gallego), Italian and DacoRomanian (but not the other kinds of Romanian). Italian dialects? Sicilian? The dialect bundle known as Romantsch? Modern Occitan? Maybe to some extent as passive languages, but there are not enough sources to make them active, and there are other projects which are more enticing. Ancient French and Ancient Occitan will also stay passive. But Latin: a resounding yes, and it is to some extent already in the bag as an active language. In principle I want to learn all Slavic languages for which there are sufficiently good sources, but so far I concentrate on Russian. After that I would like to add at least Bulgarian, Serbian (because of the alphabet, but with Croatian as an added bonus), Czech (and maybe Slovak) and Polish. Old Church Slavic? So far no interest, but who knows.. I have gained a foothold within the Celtic group with my rudimentary Irish, but I don't know whether the whole group will ever be an item. Greek? Modern Greek is already in the bag (kicking and screaming), so the question is whether I'll ever have time to add Ancient Greek. Koine is not on the list - leave it aside or interpolate. Esperanto - which may be artificial, but it is based on the Indoeuropean languages. Already in the bag, but not much activity. And then the odd man out (being non-Indoeuropean): Bahasa, of which there are two variants: the Malaysian one and the Indonesian one. I hope that I one day can learn enough to clearly differentiate between them, but I make good progress these days. I did some work on Tagalog/Filipino grammar last year, and maybe I can get back to that language after Bahasa - they are in the same family. But not Javanese, Balinese etc. - too many complications based on degrees of politeness. Those are the things I already have touched in some way or another. Future hit list: it is really a disgrace that I don't know any Finno-Ugrian language yet. Finnish would be priority no. one, Hungarian no. two, and Estonian at least passively (using Finnish as a stepping stone). The Baltic languages? Tempting, but far out in the future. Albanian? Not totally out of question - I have studied some parallel tourist booklets, and it doesn't seem totally impossible. Besides I already own some dictionaries and a textbook/grammar. Basque? Probably only on the theoretical level, and the same with Georgian (in spite of those pretty letters). Turkish, Armenian and maybe Azeri? Could be fun, but no plans here and now. Chinese? No. Japanese? No. Korean? No (even though Hangul is dead easy). The overwhelming array of Indian languages from different families? Well no, but maybe an alphabet or two just for fun. Arabic? No ... though the alphabet might be worth learning. Swahili? No, I have checked out the sources, and I wasn't impressed. Other Asian, African, American, Oceanic or fictional languages? No way. No clicks, no tones, no ideogrammes. Until I decide otherwise, at least. Never say no! No! Edited by Iversen on 16 November 2010 at 6:00pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lindsay19 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5766 days ago 183 posts - 214 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC1 Studies: Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic | Message 39 of 117 16 November 2010 at 1:02pm | IP Logged |
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My realistic goal for my life is 2 become very fluent in German and Swedish with at
least basic fluency in Icelandic and Faroese. There are other languages I really do like, but have put off every learning until I've gotten the others in grip, which might take a while, as I'm more concerned with quality than quantity. But if it really were possible to learn that many, this is what my list would look like: German Swedish Icelandic Faroese Dutch Finnish Romanian Welsh Irish Spanish Frisian Hungarian Czech I can't even come up with 20 though, because I don't really care about having a set number.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6415 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 40 of 117 16 November 2010 at 2:32pm | IP Logged |
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I think sigiloso is just making the mistake of taking himself as an example and saying
that that's how this forum's language geeks should be / should think. For example, there are language geeks that think that there's more to learn from far- away cultures rather than from those close to one's own (more differences -> more new thoughts), or who specifically enjoy exotic grammar features. There are language geeks that are interested in the languages of immigrants to their area, making Cantonese, Punjabi, Polish, Turkish or the like all sound like more logical choices than French or German. There are language geeks that are interested mainly in literature. For those, Persian, Swahili, Vietnamese and even Esperanto might be better choices than Arabic. These are not special cases, they don't learn "just one or two" unpredicted languages and they will not have trouble maintaining their language knowledge. In my experience, learning a language has always given me the chance to use it, rather than the other way round. Before my second year of Latin, I never thought I'd enjoy reading ancient texts, so Latin was essentially useless for me (a required school subject). When I learned Italian, I didn't have a concrete use for it, but then I got invited to do an exchange in Italy. When I learned Esperanto, I certainly thought that it was just an intellectual endeavor, that I wouldn't have any practical use for it, but it has turned out to be one of the most useful languages I learned, providing me with several free trips, countless important acquaintances, three interesting paid projects and my dream job. 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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