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Guinnes record for polyglottery? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Lindsay19 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5647 days ago 183 posts - 214 votes  Speaks: English*, GermanC1 Studies: Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic | Message 10 of 32 24 December 2008 at 11:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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I can't even wrap my mind around more than 10..
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| Neutrin0 Tetraglot Newbie France Joined 5656 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: Kabyle, French*, English, Spanish Studies: Japanese, German, Italian | Message 11 of 32 24 December 2008 at 11:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Fun! :-D The point is (again) that we don't know what is the meaning of such an expression like "knowing a language" IN THE MIND OF THOSE WHO WRITE SUCH BIOGRAPHIES... Until we don't know what the person who wrote that about Gabelentz or Bowring meant, it's hard to know if "Mr Z could speak XXX languages" has some sense since every one has his own definition of "speaking of a language". If only we were talking about persons we could meet or at least have a look on their achievements in polyglotery on youtube or something... Anyway, I'm not sure that looking for who has/had the greatest "look how many languages I can speak/read/understand/manage/whatever" gift has some significative meaning: for example, when one can manage an important number of languages of the same family, shouldn't we consider that person like somebody able to speak various dialects of the same language? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| FrancescoP Octoglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5776 days ago 169 posts - 258 votes Speaks: Italian*, French, English, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Norwegian Studies: Georgian, Japanese, Croatian, Greek | Message 12 of 32 24 December 2008 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This is for Vai.
The issues you raised would deserve a thread of their own, but let’s begin here. Your discomfort with tourist material is certainly justified: who would bother to memorize sentences he cannot fully understand? Chances are he will expose himself to awkward situations if he tries to use them on natives… Besides, only parrots might want to learn that way. On the other hand, at the opposite corner, a totally reductionistic approach may also have its limits. No language can be worked down to the mere sum of its components, or reconstructed “in vitro” from a set of rules and raw vocabulary data. That’s why it can be useful, in some cases, to learn stuff beyond your level, especially in early stages. When I began studying Russian the first thing I did was learning greetings by rote. At a later stage I was very grateful I did. When you store a banal expression like “do svidanja” (“goodbye”, literally: until we see each other again) into your brain you also learn, without knowing it: 1) the genitive singular of certain neuter nouns; 2) the fact that the preposition “do” requires the genitive; 3) the fact that do + genitive suggests “until a certain condition is attained”; 4) the indoeuropean root “vid” for “seeing”, featured in countless verbs; the desinence “-anie” for abstract action nouns in Russian. This sets up patterns you can fall back on in a lot of cases. It’s up to the smart intermediate learner to reawaken the dead chunks of language he passively acquired in the very first stages and make the most out of them, instead of letting them float in a pool of “mmmh”s and “eeer”s like ready made expressions. That’s why tourist and conversation manuals can turn into a hoard if you find a way to squeeze the right information out of them. The gist of it all is: books, resources and manuals can be good or bad, but it’s the learner’s attitute that makes a difference. A skilled learner will be able to distill precious information from pretty much everything: commercials, brochures, packets of crisps… The real trick in language learning is getting to this point, and that’s where a thorough linguistic training comes in. The learner must be the one in command, not a puppet of uncontrollable forces. In other words, I totally sympathize with your hardcore approach, being very old school myself: grammar and more grammar! On the other hands, I personally experienced the limits of this method when I was trying to learn Georgian. Scientific linguistic resources for this language are many and very good, but there are no good learner’s manuals, no conversation guides. The trouble I had, man…! As of today, I can recite the workings of Georgian verbs forwards and backwards and hold a lecture on them, but I don’t really get to everyday conversation from there. There’s something in between, and that something is still partly unknown. That’s why I’m incredibly clumsy when exposed to natives. The real substance of the language as a living language I had to glean from the skimpy sources I had and from friends, and it was hardly enough. I wish there were good tourist manuals for Georgian, I really do! The only one I have, made for Russians, is obviously more preoccupied with food vocabulary than real usage (who’s really learning Georgian to be a tourist, after all?). See it this way: I was in exactly the same situation you designed for yourself with Portoguese (I had no alternative), and it worked so and so. My advice is: as long as material is available, use as much as you can according to your needs, of the most diverse nature and origin. Even crappy hotel flyers might have something good in store for you. Uneducated immersion doesn’t work, pure grammar approaches don’t work either: the best, as far as my experience goes, is a recursive combination of the two. But then again, I’m still experimenting… Throwing in some Assimil or TY can do no harm, at any rate. Back to the general topic, I think the only way out is stopping to be obsessed with mere numbers. To me it just sounds like a continuation of teenage disputes on penile length with other means (courtesy of Mr. Clausewitz). What does it matter if a dead diplomat from 150 years ago claimed to “know” 100 or 200 languages? In the end it comes down to what you do with those skills, how you contribuite to either your personal life or the cultural level of your nation. The rest is American Gladiatiors-linguistics 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6720 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 32 24 December 2008 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
On the whole I agree with you that mastering the different tenses would be one of the requirements, but I wouldn't consider knowledge of the subjunctive future in Spanish, or lack thereof, to be very relevant at all.
I know this was in answer to another post by Vai, but it seems funny why imperatives should be mentioned separately at all. It is certainly one of the basic tenses and if someone can even manage to avoid learning the imperative and get to any kind of level in a language, it would definitely have to be considered a big gap in their knowledge. Too obvious to be worth pointing out I would have thought, like saying that knowing a language must include knowledge of words beginning with the letter R. Edited by Hencke on 24 December 2008 at 12:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| FrancescoP Octoglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5776 days ago 169 posts - 258 votes Speaks: Italian*, French, English, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Norwegian Studies: Georgian, Japanese, Croatian, Greek | Message 14 of 32 24 December 2008 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hencke, I think you misunderstood me, the only point I was trying to make with my reply about imperatives was: there are languages in which a given grammatical category is trivial from all points of view (English, Norwegian) and languages in which the same category can be pretty damn complicated (Japanese). Moral: you can't define requirements for fluency in purely grammatical terms, because they won't work for all languages. The only way to define such requirements (the problem at stake) is in pragmatical and situational terms. That was my thesis, a fairly common concept of fluency, not anything in particular about imperatives or anything else.
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| Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6720 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 32 25 December 2008 at 10:45am | IP Logged | |||||
No, I basically agree with your points. I wasn't disagreeing with or commenting on what you said, it was just a general reflection about the fact that the imperative came up at all. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jar-ptitsa Triglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5724 days ago 980 posts - 1006 votes Speaks: French*, Dutch, German | Message 16 of 32 26 December 2008 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree and with Hencke also. Vai, Why the imperative and hypothetical situaiotns in particular? I find it truly a ridiculous thing to say that a person knows a language when he/she know the imperative or hypothetical conditional. Those are in the Germanic and Romance languages not difficult, but much easier as many of other things I think. Why not the present, past and future, how about aspects, mood, vocabulary, idioms, understanding native speakers natural speaking and the ability reply, reading a book, understaing the TV, standard phrases for example for the letters, phone etc? In my opinion you learn the imperative when you're beginner and hypothetical constructions when you're intermediate: this is absolutely not sufficient for fluency, "know" or "speak" a language but it's only the first part of learn a language. Which lnguages can you speak? At which level? Happy christmas 
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