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Polyglots around us - do you know one? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6084 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 113 of 121 13 September 2008 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
My salad days, when I was green in judgement. I enjoyed the beer, and German is still my most fluent spoken L2, though I have studied many others. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Razekial Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5832 days ago 13 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 114 of 121 25 September 2008 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I live in a region more or less dominated by monolingual Americans, with the exception of immigrants who have learned English/are learning English on top of their native language (usually Spanish). I honestly only know one person who I have regular contact with that speaks 3 languages, much less someone who speaks more.
Edited by Razekial on 26 September 2008 at 9:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6305 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 115 of 121 11 November 2008 at 2:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I live far from foreign countries, and the nearby minorities' languages aren't worth learning and remain exotic. Chinese, which is not far, is too hard to dare except for humanitarian students. In our scientific city, we continue to learn languages because everybody does this. :) I can't remember anyone to speak more than 3 foreign lanugages.
Those who know 3 at a quite fluent level (= without strong accent/grammatical errors), are humanitarian sciences students or graduates. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Almond Diglot Newbie Yugoslavia Joined 5628 days ago 11 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishB2 Studies: Spanish, French | Message 116 of 121 22 December 2008 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I know the guy who can speak 7 languages. He is amazing.
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| formiko Nonaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6023 days ago 848 posts - 855 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Esperanto, Indonesian, Yoruba, Cherokee, Russian, German, French Studies: Mandarin, Ancient Greek | Message 117 of 121 23 December 2008 at 2:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I have always been a good mimic and I can SOUND fluent while being far from fluent. I usually will take the accent of the instructor on CDs or tapes. One time, when I was learning German, I met some tourists who were speaking German. I said a few sentences from my "10 lesson knowledge" of Germsn, and one of the guys started speaking back to me rapid fire German! I was lost after word number 3, He said I spoke with a Tirol accent! (Western Austria) I've met people who know English as well as I do, but have a thick accent. So accents are a bad judge of language knowledge.
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| qklilx Moderator United States Joined 5998 days ago 459 posts - 477 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean Personal Language Map | Message 118 of 121 23 December 2008 at 3:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I have similar experience with accent. Or at least I did a year ago with Japanese. Before I was able to understand everything that came out of my customers' mouths I simply knew how to say certain things REALLY WELL, which caused the Japanese customers to think I was fluent, or at least pretty proficient. They were often let down when they realized how much I actually understood, and thus slowed down and simplified their sentences some.
As for polyglots, I kind of know one, but you have to lower your standards of knowing a language for him to fit the bill. He has basic conversational ability in: Mandarin Cantonese Korean Japanese Thai Tagalog And he of course speaks English fluently. Korean is his best foreign language, followed by Cantonese then Mandarin. In none of these languages is his particularly "skilled" but it's impressive to see him use them. And to be honest, he might speak more; I never asked him for a list of what he knew. It's strange because the people at the dormitory took a good month or so to find out that he spoke those. I should add that he has only actively studied some of these. Most of his learning took place by writing notes during or after conversation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| joaopferrao Pentaglot Newbie Portugal Joined 5616 days ago 25 posts - 27 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Icelandic | Message 119 of 121 04 January 2009 at 6:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Here in Portugal there are a lot of polyglots. I mean, lots of people speak English, Spanish, a bit of Italian and a bit of french. The last four languages are very similar, so it's not very hard for a portuguese to master them, at least in a medium level.
But if you come to terms with languages like German, swedish, russian, greek, mandarin and others that are very different from romance languages, the number of polyglots is incredibly low. To summary, I believe I know only one polyglot: a linguistics student, that can speak portuguese, English, German, french, Italian, Spanish, romanian, czech (?), russian and a bit of finnish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| maya_star17 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5727 days ago 269 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 120 of 121 05 January 2009 at 1:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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My grade 6 French teacher (who is essentially the reason I discovered my love for languages), spoke Italian (mother tongue), French (flawlessly), English (very well but with a slight accent), Slovakian (not sure how well, and I think German... I know she spoke 5 languages fluently and that they were all European languages, but I don't remember what the last one was. I think it was German.
Currently, I have a friend who speaks Chieu Chow (mother tongue - not sure of the spelling), English (mother tongue), Cantonese (with a very good accent), can understand Vietnamese, and is actively studying French. English is currently her strongest language, however. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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