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Guinnes record for polyglottery? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| qklilx Moderator United States Joined 5998 days ago 459 posts - 477 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Korean Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 32 27 December 2008 at 2:26am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
The professor has listed the languages he is most proficient in on his website here: http://foreignlanguageexpertise.com/about.html 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Jar-ptitsa Triglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5710 days ago 980 posts - 1006 votes Speaks: French*, Dutch, German | Message 19 of 32 27 December 2008 at 6:33am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I agree that the imperative in the Germanic and Romance languages is basic (I don't speak a language of other groups at all, thefore I don't know , but on this thread a person told about the very complex imperative in Japanese). I agree as well that the hypothetical is complexer, but it depend of your own language and which you learn, for example the Dutch and English conditionals are 90% identical, but the Spanish is completley different structure. therefore for the Dutch-speakers, the English hypothetical is very simple, for them, it's more difficult to learn the progressive because they haven't it. Spanihs has the progressive, therefore this is simple for the Spanish-speakers in English. I think that it's very subjective to define: "know" a language, for you it's the knowledge of certain structures, for me it's the knowledge of many things.
For me, "knowing" = basic fluency *minimum*, probably the advanced fluency.
I've no idea, btu he's made a chart. I made a screenshot: 
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| Jar-ptitsa Triglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5710 days ago 980 posts - 1006 votes Speaks: French*, Dutch, German | Message 20 of 32 27 December 2008 at 7:15am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
*in American textbooks* this is important: therefore for the English-speakers. For other people, the future in English can be very diffciult, much more as the imperative, for example. the aspects of the future are many and complicated (depend of your native language) but the imperative is simple if you learn English but evidently not if you learn Japanese. Probably you think the "present" is easy, but for many learners of English, the simple versus the progressive is difficult (I fidn this very difficult because in the languages which I "know" it's not a progressive). Like I wrote in the preceding post, for Spanish-speakers this is easy. You're typcial anglophone: see it all from the English-speakers' perspective and always about learn Spanish because it's not a tradition of learn foreign languages in the US and because English is the dominant global language and Spanish is the foreign language. This is very oftne in this forum I've noticed. Sometimes it's annoying. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Jar-ptitsa Triglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5710 days ago 980 posts - 1006 votes Speaks: French*, Dutch, German | Message 23 of 32 27 December 2008 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
You described the Spanish hypothetical conditional. The English one is differnt: “if” followed by the past perfect and “would”
No, it’s not all grammar and the knowledge of those certain structures at all. For accuracy you have to know the grammar, but for communicate you have to know the vocabulary. If you don’t know sufficient vocabulary you can’t know the language (understand or use it).
Yes, you can tell them they don’t know it if they don’t know it. If you studied for years but you didn’t leanr nothing then you don’t know the language.
You’re absolutely wrong. Language background is extremely important. You don’t care what’s the native language of a person, then you’re stupid because it’s very relevant. It’s relevant for the grammar and for the vocabulary and for the culture. Individual ability’s very important also, with this I agree.
Yes, I’m unfamiliar with scholarship in the field of linguistics but I know very well Dutch and quite well German which are foreign languages for me. I like to see all the connections and search for those in the 5 languages I know or learn. My attidtued’s not annoying, but you’re *very* arrogant and annoying.
Wow!!! It’s interesting :-) please write somethings in this conversation in Hawaiian Pidgin; I never seen this language. I like very much dialects and creoles. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| qklilx Moderator United States Joined 5998 days ago 459 posts - 477 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 32 27 December 2008 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Howzit brah? Where you stay now cuz? Nice to see a fellow local on the board. :D It's impossible for the Professor to achieve full proficiency in all of his languages for the simple fact that several of them are dead languages and thus lack native speakers and audio media. Also, his goals as a polyglot are not to speak but to read. His reasons for that are simple: he will probably never meet a native speaker of a lot of the languages he has studied extensively. As for idioms, I've never studied a dead languages so somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but is it possible to understand idioms in a language nobody uses? Save for instances of extensive context, of course.
Actually I fully agree with Vai on this. One's language background has nothing to do with one's ability to learn a foreign language. It's pure individual ability and determination. Language background DOES come into play if a given individual is assigned a certain language. Say for example, a Korean assigned to learn Japanese. But what's stopping a Korean from learning any other language in the world? Edited by qklilx on 27 December 2008 at 7:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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