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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 49 of 58 17 March 2007 at 6:38am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm with patuco and Journeyer on this. You're a beacon of accomplishment and humility. I understand that. There are a couple areas of my life where success came relatively easy, so I don't take much credit for it. Nonetheless, I have to at times exercise caution, as someone who has struggled to move a much shorter distance down the road may be proud of their accomplishment because it involved overcoming large obstacles. Everyone has some talents that others find difficult to master. For example, some have no problem maintaining a healthy weight, some are good at math, some make friends easily, some have good health, some have a knack for sports or music or reading or directions or controlling their temper or being happy or keeping a job or making money or learning languages or empathy or caring for others or explaining things. The list goes on and on. It comes down to a simple question. Are you proud to be a .......? My answer is, why should I be proud? I was born ....... There was no effort. Now do I feel good about something I had to struggle to attain a more modest level of success? Yes! Anyway, I appreciate your valueable contributions to the forum. We can all learn something from those who have a knack for learning languages. You have either great talent or came upon learning tactics that helped you to enormous accomplishment, or worked diligently. In any case, you have something we can all benefit from; whether it is inspiration, methods, experience, or hand holding. Edited by luke on 17 March 2007 at 6:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Roger Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6594 days ago 159 posts - 161 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Indonesian | Message 50 of 58 17 March 2007 at 7:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree with these lot, i'll be immensley proud of myself when I can just speak fluent Italian, let alone all the one's you yourself 'linguamor' have acheived.
What are your reason's (If any, I hope I don't sound rude) for not wanting to learn another language? Is it because you speak 10 language's, you feel maybe it would all be to time consuming to maintain and learn more? Edited by Roger on 17 March 2007 at 7:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6620 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 51 of 58 19 March 2007 at 4:24am | IP Logged | |||||
The main reason is that I can't find any language that I am sufficiently motivated to learn. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7017 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 52 of 58 19 March 2007 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Really? Doesn't one of the harder languages (e.g. Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, etc) fascinate you since it would be so different from the languages you already know. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6620 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 53 of 58 20 March 2007 at 7:38am | IP Logged | |||||
I have learned a little of each of these languages, but I know that it would take quite a lot of time to learn even one of them to an advanced level. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 54 of 58 20 March 2007 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Not to take anything away from linguamor (it's admirable that she's managed to become fluent in 9 foreign languages. If nothing more it points to a high level of discipline to sit down and just learn the stuff. A lot of us still have problems as demonstrated by the posts about hitting brick walls or plateaus.) but I think that I understand why she feels that learning/mastering Romance or Germanic languages isn't as great an acheivement as one would think. If I were as proficient as linguamor in those languages, I too would feel the same way. We know that the Romance languages (apart from Romanian) are rather similar to each other and knowing one will give one an advantage or "discount" when learning another one. The same principle applies to the Germanic languages (indeed, it's arguable whether Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are separate languages. Certainly, someone who knows Danish, will be "cheating" when he/she takes on Norwegian or Swedish because they're all very similar.) Thus I would feel that while I would be a polyglot (i.e. the "quantity" is wide), I would be the first to admit that I've "cheated" a bit since I would have focused on languages which are divided into only two groups (i.e. the "quality" seems a little narrow). Within each group, you can argue that most of the languages are part of dialectal continuums. (e.g. Portugese ~ Spanish ~ French ~ Italian; Danish ~ Norwegian ~ Swedish; English ~ Dutch ~ German) All that I have to do is to think about those FSI ratings which are geared to the viewpoint of a monolingual English-speaking candidate in the foreign service school. There's a reason why German, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch are considered "easy" (+1) and Chinese, Arabic and Korean are considered "very hard" (+4). In much the same way with me and Slavonic languages, I don't think that my tackling of Czech after learning some Polish and Slovak was a big deal. Slovak and Czech are still very similar, and it wasn't that much of an effort for me to start picking up Czech given my knowledge of Slovak. While to outsiders it seems impressive that I've taken on some Slavonic languages, the truth is that Polish, Czech and Slovak form their own dialectal continuum and that knowing one will give a big advantage or discount when starting to take on another. I'm sure that speakers of Russian would not find it to be a big deal to take on Belorussian or Ukranian, but if they are fluent in those three languages, then they are triglots. What I find somewhat comical but also a little sad is when I think of people who speak the successor forms of what was called Serbo-Croatian. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, once monolingual speakers of Serbo-Croatian vaulted into bilingualism or multilingualism by being able to claim to speak at least two of Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and now Montenegrin (assuming that he or she picked up some of the regionalisms of the successor states in the past.). I remember once coming across a CV of a Serb and he proudly stated that he was multilingual by claiming to be fluent in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian in addition to English. To me, that's virtually cheating your way to polyglottery. In my estimation, a Balkan tetraglot (now Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian) is not the same as a tetraglot who is fluent in English, French, German or Italian; and even further removed from someone who is fluent in Icelandic, Arabic, Turkish and Mandarin. What about people who speak Chinese "dialects"? Is their acheivement of speaking Mandarin and at least another "dialect" worthy of being included in bilingualism or multilingualism? When considering polyglottery I like to consider the background of the speaker and put it into perspective. I know very well that a native English speaker who takes on Swahili as ger first foreign language will be in for a tougher time than another native English speaker who takes on French as his first foreign language. Likewise, a monolingual native speaker of Arabic can probably pick up Hebrew much more quickly than if he were to try taking on Tagalog or Welsh. For myself, the fact that I'm a diglot of English and French is not on the same level as a diglot of Maori and English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6945 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 55 of 58 20 March 2007 at 10:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
As an "achievement", 10 languages from two language families obviously do not require the same number of hours of study as 10 languages from 10 different language families would. However, there is another angle on this, what I would call a "polyglot" versus a (perhaps very motivated) "language learner". The distinction is mine, and I realize that not everyone will agree with it, but somehow when I see someone with a list of French, German, Mandarin, and Spanish, it's impressive and all, but I see a language learner there who went for prestige and global coverage. Not that there is anything wrong with that. A polyglot is the one who, having learned French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguse, loses his sleep because there is still Romanian out there, with its lexical and grammatical idiosyncracies. It's interesting that both Ardaschir and Iversen seem to be like that, and Linguamor's language list is suggestive to me of her being in that crowd, and not in the crowd of the "regular" language-learners. Edited by frenkeld on 21 March 2007 at 10:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| glossika Super Polyglot Pro Member China english.glossika.com Joined 6538 days ago 45 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, German, Italian, Russian, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Tok Pisin, Malay, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Romanian, Croatian, Serbian, Icelandic, Georgian, Indonesian Studies: Czech, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Latvian, Persian, Arabic (Written) Personal Language Map | Message 56 of 58 27 March 2007 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sorry I've been busy for the last month or so and haven't had the chance to post a response or read the threads until now.
I'm in complete 100% favor of Linguamor's methods. It makes absolutely so much sense to me with the way I have acquired languages thus far. Your understanding of the target language is paramount to your progress. I've used these methods to acquire a wide range of languages outside of Germanic and Romance. Chung raises a question regarding Chinese dialects just two posts above this one. (BTW, isn't the name "Chung" Chinese?) I would like to give you an analogy. Let's assume China is Europe and Mandarin is the equivalent of French, as it stands with its historical development. I would say that some languages like Wu could be the equivalent of Portuguese, Min the equivalent of Russian, Gan/Hakka/Cantonese distant relatives equivalent to that of Greek or German. But in this analogy the whole nation of China is required to learn "French" to communicate with each other. I've found that the native "French" speakers are proud of the fact they already speak "French" but there's confusion there too, because their own dialects differ so much that you have a hard time understanding the Alsatian varieties from the Provencal, etc, even though they all claim to speak "French" natively. In fact some of the other language speakers who are forced to learn "French" in school tend to speak "French" more accurately (at least pronunciation-wise) than the native speakers themselves do. Is the distance between them as great as the analogy I use, such as Russian and French? Well, yes, but lexically sometimes even greater. Using Ethnologue's records on lexical distance and other studies published, we find that French and Russian have similarities in the 20 percentile range, whereas Min and Mandarin are in the 10-20 percentile range (see my website for a complete breakdown for comparison between Chinese languages and dialects therein). French and Portuguese may come in at around 75% similarity, but Mandarin and Wu come in at around 31%. I think the numbers speak for themselves. I have reached competent levels in three: Mandarin, Southern Min, and Wu, and have varying degrees in the other languages. Now, referring to dialects, I can understand several dialects within each of the three but not everything. For example the Wu that I know is based on Shanghai. But when compared with Hangzhou and Shaoxing, I understand Shaoxing people a lot better than Hangzhou (and they're only less than an hour's drive away from each other by freeway). Heading further south in Zhejiang it just gets harder and harder to understand what people are saying, although these dialects are still considered "Wu". I haven't been to Suzhou, but I'm sure I'd be able to understand about as much as I could Shaoxing. I've met native "Mandarin" speakers from all reaches of the country and it's always an uphill struggle trying to make out what they're saying, partly because of the fact they already insist they speak the national language. Only problem is they're using their local pronunciation to speak it, which is a huge hindrance to communication. To stay congruent with the Chinese example, this is equivalent to saying, you're learning Italian, but can you understand Romanian, French, Spanish or Portuguese, not to mention local varieties like Sicilian, Friulian, Sassarese, etc. Back to your original question: Is their acheivement of speaking Mandarin and at least another "dialect" worthy of being included in bilingualism or multilingualism? Depends on your definition of a dialect which is undoubtedly different than mine but has more to do with your education on the matter. I don't call these Mandarin/Wu/Hakka/Cantonese/etc. distinctions "dialects" but rather "languages". I call "Jiaoliao", "Jianghuai", "Zhongyuan", "Xinan", etc. large dialect areas of Mandarin as a language, but I don't consider Mandarin itself a dialect. The same applies to the others, "Taihu" is a dialect area within the Wu language. Which makes sense because that's why I can understand Taihu speakers of Wu and not speakers of other areas. I hope this helps clear up the issue on Chinese Dialects. Edited by glossika on 27 March 2007 at 2:40pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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