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Motivations for becoming a polyglot | ||
Tags: Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4558 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes  Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 17 of 60 03 October 2013 at 11:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm happy that it worked out for you. I came out of high school speaking only English, and maybe German to some degree. I certainly got to a good start with Swedish and French too, but I hardly had any active skills to speak of (hah, pun intended), despite doing well in all of my classes. I guess what I'm trying to say is maybe you're not giving yourself enough credit. Personally, I've always found the word polyglot self-aggrandizing and would prefer, both now and in the future, to title myself an aspiring language hobbyist or something along those lines. At the end of the day, we're all just language learners, some further along than others—there's no magical end goal to reach. Besides, while I'm on my way there with two others, I'm really only fluent in one foreign language, so I think it's much too early for me to be putting myself on a pedestal. Edited by sans-serif on 03 October 2013 at 11:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4621 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 18 of 60 03 October 2013 at 2:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
How much weight is given to Swedish within the Finnish education system? As an official language of the country, I would imagine that everyone is required to learn the language throughout their school years? Is more time devoted to Swedish or English? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 19 of 60 03 October 2013 at 2:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Travel, good associations, friends, love. The usual stuff. At the same time the quoted question is different from the thread's title. My wanting to become fluent in Finnish, Polish and Slovak and regain fluency in German and Hungarian would make me a polyglot as a matter of course. If my goal were to become a polyglot, then I'd be smarter to take the easy way out and start cracking on Afrikaans, Lowland Scots (if we count it as a language rather than a form of English), Jamaican Patois and Haitian Creole to make the most of my existing fluency in English and French. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4487 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 20 of 60 03 October 2013 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I want to thrive here in China. Learning several languages is one of my life's goals.
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| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4307 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 21 of 60 03 October 2013 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Why does it imply that? Does "the intellectual" eventually run out of books to read in her language? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4558 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 22 of 60 03 October 2013 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Less than you probably think. Most people study it in grades 7 through 9, plus an additional three years in either high school or vocational school. Unfortunately, I have no clear picture of how many hours of classroom instruction this equates to. I think the officially stated goal is to reach B1 in that time, which very few do. For my own part, I learned most of the grammar and enough vocabulary to get started on native speaker media, but little in the way of active skills. English, on the other hand, isn't even an obligatory subject, although in practice most people choose it as their "A language", that is, one you start learning in primary school, usually in the third year. If the school offers one, it's also possible to take a second A language. Outside of the cities, English is often the only available A language, since other languages are nowhere near as popular and it would be too expensive to teach groups of only a handful of students. tl;dr Most people take 10 years of English and 6 years of Swedish. Edited by sans-serif on 05 October 2013 at 6:20am 1 person has 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 23 of 60 03 October 2013 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Somewhat off the original topic (to which I can contribute little that hasn't been said already), I was interested to discover recently that
The Prof. said one on here that he didn't like the term "polyglottery" among other reasons because he thought it was ugly. I personally find the term "glot" or "glottis" a bit displeasing to the ear, in contrast to "lingua" or "lingual" which I find pleasing. I'm not sure whether he really came up with a good alternative, but perhaps I'd like to suggest "polylingualism", and a practitioner of the art could be a "polylinguist", or if that offends self-styled "power linguist" Mr Clugston, then "polylingualist". Edited by montmorency on 03 October 2013 at 4:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5344 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 24 of 60 03 October 2013 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It means that in the course of pursuing a wide range of topics and interests languages soon become indispensable and relying on translations into one or two languages, grossly inadequate. In literature and a wide variety of other forms of writing untranslated quotes from different languages are not uncommon. In Spanish for instance and in many other languages quotes and passages in French are not rare. 19th century Russian literature is replete with them. Война и мир goes further featuring whole dialogues in French, German and Italian. A work on early Greek and Roman philosophy I read not long ago included passages in five languages besides Greek and Latin. And I just received my two volume set of the authoritative The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey from A. H. M. Jones. The second volume contains numerous original sources from Latin and Greek - all untranslated. But this represents just a first approximation. Whether your main interest is German sociology, historiography and philosophy or Indian epistemology, at one point or another you'll realize that in order to form a faithful and profound understanding of important writers translations are wholly inadequate. Contemporary reliance on translations due to today's neglect of languages brought about by a shift to a professional form of education has made the understanding in non-German circles of key but difficult works such as Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes or Heidegger's Sein und Zeit notoriously and unnecessarily problematic. And this is leaving aside the mass of materials that are never translated. I had great difficulty for instance in locating a complete edition of مقدمة ابن خلدون in English years ago. There is a wider selection of Arabic thought in Spanish, and an even better one in French. But of course all these are inferior substitutes for learning Arabic itself. Then there is Cel mai iubit dintre pământeni, a Romanian masterpiece about the evils of socialism I have a great desire to read, yet as far as I have been able to ascertain it has not been translated into any other language. Like I said, for a curious person, languages represent the first obligation. I myself was slow to recognize this and greatly regret not having begun ten or fifteen years earlier. 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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