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Stories of unusually rapid progress? | ||
Tags: Success Story | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5337 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 17 of 19 01 January 2015 at 11:21am | IP Logged |
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Wow. I have never found my name on the same list as Mezzofanti before.
I went from zero to native level in those 6 months, but keep in mind that it was a pretty extreme experience. Not a lot of people gets dumped in an unknown family in a village where almost no one speaks anything but the local language, in a swim or sink situation at the age of 11. And I did not have access to any input in a foreign language. I spoke Norwegian twice a week with a tutor, but otherwise it was all Spanish, all the time. No Internet, no Norwegian books, and my survival quite literally depended on my ability to communicate. I cried myself to sleep for three months, though, so I did not get it for free. However if we go for speed, I think my Italian experience going from zero/passive A1 to B1/B2 in three weeks would be more relevant. That was of course only possible because I was already fluent in Spanish and French. I started 'talking Italian' on my first day in Italy using 5% Italian and 95% Spanish, and then I just increased my percentage of Italian until it became Italian with a little Spanish in it. That too came at a cost though. I lost my active Spanish skills for 6 monts. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 01 January 2015 at 11:21am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6154 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 18 of 19 02 January 2015 at 3:31pm | IP Logged |
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Spookily topical. Having never really studied Portuguese for long, I found myself talking to a Brazilian last night about political corruption, educational reform and Carnaval. The one major caveat I should add is that I’ve no idea how much Portuguese I was actually speaking as opposed to speaking Spanish in a Portuguese accent. He seemed to let it slide though.
[EDIT] I just did a quick check on some of my bluffing vocabulary and I got a few things wrong. Spanish: Una tarea exigente (a demanding task) Portuguese: uma tarefa exigente Edited by DaraghM on 02 January 2015 at 3:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 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 19 of 19 03 January 2015 at 8:33am | IP Logged |
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The thing Solfrid Cristin and DaraghM mention about passing through ever increasing percentages of a related languages to reach a passable level in your intended target language also rings a bell with me. I have just found a discussion from 2009 of my word list method, which was cursorily dismissed because a message in Swedish in my log was written in a mixture of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Well, in 2009 I never even spoken a sentence in Swedish so it would be strange if I had been able to write in squeakingly clean Swedish back then. I hope my level has improved, but if it has it isn’t due to those who expect totally correct utterances from the start. I do think I’m rather conservative when it comes to speaking at an early stage, but that’s not the same thing as waiting until you have reached the C2 stage. Edited by Iversen on 03 January 2015 at 8:33am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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