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Polyglots, when did you start? | ||
Tags: Time to learn | Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6141 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 17 of 29 04 January 2010 at 9:03pm | IP Logged |
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- My family is Greek so I picked up little bits of Greek from the time I was very young.
- I started at a bilingual elementary school where Spanish was taught when I was five and continued there until third grade, when it closed. - When I was seven, my cousin in Greece taught me the Greek alphabet and some basic Greek, but I wasn't very motivated. - In seventh grade (I was twelve) I found Teach Yourself Beginner's Chinese, which someone had given to me, and started going through it. I was studying Mandarin (which I liked) for about a month or two before I quit because I found the tones too difficult. - In eighth grade, I started to learn French and Portuguese, both of which I have pursued to a level of basic fluency (and I intend to get them up to advanced fluency by the end of this year). - In November 2008 (my ninth grade year), I started German, and a month later I started Italian. - In May 2009 I started Japanese and Russian, but dropped Russian in August for lack of time. - In September 2009 I started Swedish. So, I got started learning a foreign language when I was very young (Greek and then Spanish). The first language I tried to self-study was Chinese, and the first language I self-studied to a level of fluency was French (and then Portuguese). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| XGargoyle Bilingual Triglot Groupie Spain Joined 5955 days ago 42 posts - 93 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, EnglishB2 Studies: GermanA2, Japanese, Russian | Message 18 of 29 07 January 2010 at 4:26pm | IP Logged |
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- I am a bilingual speaker of Spanish and Catalan
- In sixth grade (11 years old), I began my mandatory English classes - In High School, when I was 13, students are required to pick up a secondary language. In my school, the choice was among English, French and German. Obviously, I chose German :) - A year after, I was forced to do my 1 year mandatory Latin course. A bad teacher forcing the students to memorize tables and tables of declension systems and verb conjugations with no explanation on their purpose/function just made me hate the language. On the same year, I began studying Japanese and French by myself. I eventually dropped my French to focus better on my Japanese. - From year 1996 up to year 2008, that is from 16 years old to 28, I put my language learning on hold due to lack of motivation, time, real life issues and a long list of excuses. The sad thing is that during this period, my German and French were almost forgotten and I just kept some knowledge on Japanese due to my interest in Japanese manga and videogames. - In year 2008, and thanks to the discovery of this forum, I made up my mind and resumed my language learning. I decided to relearn German from scratch. - This year, being 30 years old, I continue with my German learning and started learning Russian. Also, I've made plans to begin learning Swedish, Thai or Hebrew in the future once I get some fluency with Russian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| NielDLR Bilingual Diglot Newbie South Africa thelinguaphile.com Joined 5434 days ago 11 posts - 17 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans* Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 19 of 29 07 January 2010 at 8:20pm | IP Logged |
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I was born bilingually with Afrikaans and English. Throughout my school years I never
learned new languages. I can understand Flemish and Dutch due to the strong similiarities it has with Afrikaans. In 2008 I started learning Mandarin at University. Currently going to third year. My main focus is Mandarin. I've also started learning Na'vi, the new conlang from the movie Avatar. It's a fun language! In 2010 I aim to start learning Na'vi, Japanese and Spanish and also try and catch some Flemish and Dutch to make them near native-like. Edited by NielDLR on 07 January 2010 at 8:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| gogglehead Triglot Senior Member Argentina Joined 6074 days ago 248 posts - 320 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Russian, Italian | Message 20 of 29 07 January 2010 at 8:42pm | IP Logged |
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My first serious study of any foreign language was Spanish at the University of Buenos Aires in 2004, aged 24. Before then my only knowledge of the language were the rudimentary tourist phrases when on holiday, but suppose everything adds up as far as language experience is concerned.
After that I began to teach myself Portuguese, age 27, with a few trips to Brazil to serve as both motivation and practice. I have yet to see how advanced/terrible my Italian has become! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5923 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 21 of 29 07 January 2010 at 10:13pm | IP Logged |
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I don't think I'm a polyglot yet, though I hope to become one.
I think I've always been intrigued by Spanish, but my first real exposure to it was a class I took in seventh grade. The class was not meant to teach much Spanish, and didn't, but I got a good grade. My high school required two years of foreign languages, and I took Spanish. I did fairly well in the first year class, though I learned very little. The second year I learned nothing and barely passed the class. After that experience, I ignored every language but English for about 15 years. I did regret never really learning Spanish, but not enough to actually do so and when I was 20 years old I lived in Eastern Canada and had limited exposure to French. In the summer of 2006, I became interested in learning Afrikaans and began trying to learn it on my own. When I joined this site in 2008, I was only looking for advice on how to learn more Afrikaans and thought that maybe I'd finally learn Spanish. I didn't think learning more languages was realistic for me, but what do I know? I began reading many threads here and by December 2008 I believed that maybe I could learn more languages. While writing my TAC log for 2009, I briefly dabbled in many more languages but didn't really try to learn most of them. Right now, I am studying Finnish and Swedish along with Afrikaans and Spanish. Edited by mick33 on 26 March 2010 at 10:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lamberian Newbie Poland Joined 5529 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes | Message 22 of 29 12 January 2010 at 11:13pm | IP Logged |
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When I was 3 years old, I started studying English first by watching English cartoons, in elementary school I had to study German. In 2004, I picked Modern Greek and in 2008 Slovak. Now I'm additionally studying Finnish, Slovene and Norwegian, one day I'd like to try with Irish.
Lamberian 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| yawn Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5425 days ago 141 posts - 209 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, FrenchC2, SpanishC2 Studies: GermanB1 | Message 23 of 29 17 January 2010 at 7:24am | IP Logged |
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English (native language)
Mandarin Chinese (native language) French (began learning at age 8) Spanish (began learning at age 11) German (began learning at age 13) I'm 15 years old now. :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Katie Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6717 days ago 495 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian Studies: French, German | Message 24 of 29 17 January 2010 at 11:01pm | IP Logged |
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Wow, I feel so bad!
I come from a monolingual family with absolutely no interest in languages. But, for as long as I can remember, whenever I saw/heard a foreigner speaking (either on television or on the street) I was utterly fascinated. When I was around 7 or 8 years, the closest thing to a language was the "alibi" language that I taught myself. At 8 years old, I was in a class of 9 4th graders who were put in a class of 6th graders. As a result, along with learning everything from the 6th grade curriculum, we started to study French. Apparently, mixing us with the 6th graders was somewhat controversial, and in the following year, we were put back into a 5th grade class - which mean not only covering school work which we already knew, but also meant that they almost completely dropped us out of French, but for some casual lessons here and there. By 6th grade, we 'started' French again. I began reading French children's cartoon magazines around this time. Thankfully, my French teacher picked up that I was already miles ahead of the other children (& not trying to sound like a snob, but I do think that I have a knack for languages), and always gave me extra things to do. I still had to do the 'standard' stuff, but as soon as I finished, she would give me more stuff. She only ever spoke to me in French and never translated for me, as she did with the other children. I had the same teacher in 7th, 8th & 9th grade - so she continued to teach me further on than the other kids. I never got lower than an A+ in class. But frankly, being the only one in my class who 'got it' really annoyed me. It frustrated me that kids still couldn't follow basic instructions like "sit down" and "open your book to page xx". Because of the age of the kids (& lack of good behaviour), I would finish my work for an hour long class in 10-15 minutes, and spend 45 minutes by myself reading magazines and books as the teacher had to help the other students. I quickly tired of the whole charade despite my poor teacher's attempts. Actually, I ended up hating it. By that stage, I could read and listen, but because of the classroom setting, I never had the opportunity to build my speaking skills - so I felt like I couldn't say a single thing. (By the way, I was a highly competitive gymnast at this stage, so the idea of self study never crossed my mind, nor was it ever suggested by anyone other than my French teacher, who basically just sent me home with magazines and books. Of course, training almost 30 hours a week resulted in me ignoring those books most of the time) In 10th grade I told my poor French teacher that I was not going to continue with my French studies. She was furious and never spoke to me again. She would completely ignore me if I walked past her in the hall - sometimes even look the other way. Just another reason to 'hate' French. I didn't touch it again and lost almost everything I knew. Every now and then I have tried to pick it up again - but I've never gone ahead with it. I don't know if it's from the experiences, or just a general lack of motivation towards it. Over the following years, I played around with some German, some Japanese... a little of a language which I now believe was Zulu, a very small amount of Spanish & Italian. I never continued with these languages. Some of them, such as German, I would have continued if I had opportunities to use them, but I didn't and so I lost motivation. When I was 24 I became increasingly interested in Hungarian. I played somewhat with it for about 1 - 1.5 years - not really committing much time, but giving it a go. It was only around 1.5 years ago that I really seriously started to study. I even eventually found a teacher to go to once a week. This is when I started to really learn the language. I have a list of languages I would like to study in the future, however, I have stuck to Hungarian alone for the meantime, as I would first like to reach advanced fluency. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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