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You are not a real polyglot if... | ||
Tags: Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5344 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 299 09 October 2013 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Generally I try to not let myself be bothered when people present views I disagree strongly with. With the
differences in culture, language, age and temperament in a community of this size, you are bound to have literally hundreds of different views on every issue, and 99 out of a 100 cases I find that stimulating and refreshing. There is one view which irritates me no end though, and that is the view presented by some that you are not a "real" polyglot if your languages come from the same language family. I find that view exceedingly uninformed and arrogant. If I met someone who could speak English, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic and German to a high level and with a good accent I would be very impressed indeed. I think we grossly underestimate how much effort it takes to learn a language properly. Any language. A Norwegian actor has just spent 6 years in Denmark, and only now is he remotely able to sound like a native. And that is a language which is extremely close. I would be equally impressed by someone who could do Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian to a high level and with good or native like accents. In my view that would be a huge accomplishment. Understanding these languages passively or being able to do an A2 in each, would not be quite so impressive, but to really learn those languages well - that takes skills. If your languages were eg. the six UN languages it would of course be even more impressive, given the difficulty of some of those languages, but saying someone is not a polyglot because they have chosen languages from the same group makes zero sense to me. I will only listen to people who make that sort of statements if they have those skills themselves - and can prove it. Having a monoglot, or someone who knows English and a little Spanish, make that kind of broad statement is so ridiculous that I do not even have the vocabulary to express it. In English or in any other language. 32 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7166 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 299 09 October 2013 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To me the only time the phrase applies is when I see claims of multilingualism by virtue of competency in what are effectively variants of something pluricentric (I may harp on this example for some people, but I'll never get out of my head that time when I got a candidate's resume for a job indicating multilingualism via fluency in English, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. Bilingualism yes, but that candidate came upon the wrong guy to pull that stunt).
Apart from that I agree with you Solfrid and do make a distinction with being a polyglot (it wouldn't matter if I were fluent in English, Afrikaans, Frisian, Lowland Scots and Tok Pisin or English, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak) and and the effort required to become one (certainly trying to pull it off with the second set would be more taxing than with the first set, all else equal). There's this related but older thread Are we all a bunch of wusses? which touches on your feelings about "worthiness". In that older thread I also expressed in one of the posts my dislike for the hypothetical triglot who'd unduly beat his/her chest in knowing English, French and Spanish, knowing that I have a Thai friend who's fluent in English, Czech and Thai. Both would be triglots, but I find that the boasting misplaced and disrepects the effort required to take on highly divergent or unrelated languages. I couldn't resist recalling this gag from Scandinavia and the World 
Edited by Chung on 09 October 2013 at 10:00pm 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4183 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese | Message 3 of 299 09 October 2013 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
To be fair, plenty of interviewers wouldn't know whether these countries spoke the same or different languages, and so it's basically a way of saying, "If you hire me, these are the countries I can communicate with" which is what it's really about in a job application. 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5344 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 299 09 October 2013 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
Possibly, but I would not have been amused if I were to hire someone for a job in the US and got a similar application claiming multilingualism from someone listing English, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. And from what I understand the Scandinavian languages are actually even more different. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7166 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 299 09 October 2013 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's true, but as I had noted I was the wrong guy to pull off that stunt because of my background. In any case, I was also looking for competency and experience in other areas (especially ability with certain software or processes), but the linguistic puffery irked me. If I were to have been confronted by two candidates who did well in the interviews, and equal in all areas except linguistic competency with one listing English, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, and the other English, Croatian, Bulgarian and Slovenian, I would choose the latter even though to the uninformed manager each one has four items on the resume under the heading "Languages". 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5355 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 6 of 299 09 October 2013 at 10:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, I have varying degrees of knowledge of some dozen languages and hope and work hard every day to add both depth and numbers to my collection yet now that I think about it I don't believe I'll ever present myself as a polyglot given how my glottis and other vocal organs engage but in the most limited manner with this pursuit and I don't foresee much probability of it ever being otherwise.
I consider myself a student of foreign languages, classic and modern, in integral connection with their thought and literature, and no matter how little or how much I may accomplish, I'll always see myself as such given how what there is to learn will always be relatively so much greater. For me the word polyglot suggests someone who makes regular and active use of at least a few languages which are not mere dialects of each other. Since ostensibly we learn languages for reasons other than to impress strangers it should be of no impact, but I do regard it as of little consequence that someone may be fluent in tongues which are but too slight variations of each other. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4788 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes Speaks: Russian | Message 7 of 299 09 October 2013 at 10:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I personally think it is more of an accomplishment for a polyglot who has mastered closely related languages than vastly different ones. Take two languages like Czech and Slovak which I assume have quite a bit of overlap in their vocabulary, so I think the likelihood of a learner becoming confused would be much greater than if he were learning Czech and Hungarian.
The experience of learners actually bears this out. I know of a linguist in France who was studying Welsh and Breton and found himself unconsciously going back and forth between the two and found that very frustrating because of the similarity of those 2 Celtic languages. The other example is from an anecdote of a Russian actor I saw on Russian language TV. He is bilingual in Russian and English but was given a role in a play where he had to learn Ukrainian and according to him, as a native Russian speaker, Ukrainian is more difficult to learn than English, which is counterintuitive but his experience nonetheless. I don't mean to say that learning Arabic and Mandarin is easier than learning Spanish and Italian but if the languages are poles apart, the learner can concentrate more intensely on each language individually and not expect there to be any shared vocabulary between them. Better that the languages be like distant relatives instead of twins. Edited by tanya b on 09 October 2013 at 10:53pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| languagenerd09 Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom youtube.com/user/Lan Joined 5110 days ago 174 posts - 267 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Thai | Message 8 of 299 09 October 2013 at 10:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you do it to just glorify yourself and try and make yourself seem incredibly
intelligent. I've found people on other forums and chat-rooms in the past who make it mandatory for themselves to tell everyone that they're are amazing at language learning, they dedicate their whole life to it, they do everything they can to learn, but when it comes to physically trying to converse with them, they can barely get past the general conversational starters. Example being about a man on a chat-room who was saying to everyone that he's fluent in Spanish and when my friend from Mexico asked him "¿como te llamas?" the reponse was "no entiendo mi amigo". On the contrary to what I've said is because for some reason I feel like learning languages should be a community thing and should be open to being sociable because everyone is learning to speak and what better way to practice than making friendships, speaking with others and helping people along the way? Edited by languagenerd09 on 09 October 2013 at 10:49pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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