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Polyglots around us - do you know one? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| AML Senior Member United States Joined 6637 days ago 323 posts - 426 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, German, Spanish | Message 17 of 121 04 June 2006 at 4:20pm | IP Logged |
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The best I know personally is a good friend of mine. She speaks Romanian
(native) as well as perfect French and English. Each with hardly any accent and perfect grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6742 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 18 of 121 04 June 2006 at 4:59pm | IP Logged |
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My grandfather speaks English, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Chiu Chow (I don't know the spelling) and Thai. I can only verify English and Vietnamese (native speaker), but I've heard people telling me that he speaks Cambodian, Cantonese and Chiu Chow without an accent. As for Mandarin, he was married to a Mandarin speaker for over 25 years.
I know that most of these languages belong to the same language family, so it's not that extraordinary. Nevertheless, he's the only polyglot that I know. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| brumblebee Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6587 days ago 206 posts - 212 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese | Message 19 of 121 04 June 2006 at 6:17pm | IP Logged |
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I can think of a few. My friend from Germany who lived here for two years was fluent in English, German, and Portuguese (her mother was from Brazil), and she might have been fluent in French. My Icelandic friend's mom speaks Icelandic, English, Danish, German, Norwegian, Swedish, French, and Swiss German (If you want to count that as seperate).
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bartolomeu Dias Groupie United States Joined 6759 days ago 43 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Latin | Message 20 of 121 22 October 2006 at 11:11am | IP Logged |
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My mother is a university professor in the US, and one of her colleagues (a
Latin teacher) is fluent in six languages. Growing up, he spoke only English, but he later made an effort to learn German as a teenager because it was his mother's first language and she felt more comfortable speaking it. He later taught himself Spanish, French, Latin, and ancient Greek as well. He's very nice and has encouraged me to study languages on my own; and I must say his abilities are very inspiring! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lengua Senior Member United States polyglottery.wordpre Joined 6496 days ago 549 posts - 595 votes Studies: French, Italian, Spanish, German | Message 21 of 121 22 October 2006 at 12:41pm | IP Logged |
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I once had a Spanish teacher who said she knew English, Portuguese, French, and Italian. Unfortunately, I never got to ask her about how she learned any of them.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6514 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 22 of 121 22 October 2006 at 10:21pm | IP Logged |
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Wow, let's see. Since I've come to Taiwan, the number of polyglots I know has skyrocketed, because I'm surrounded by people who have come here to study a language, and most of them have already learned their native language plus English.
There's my girlfriend, whom I've mentioned before, who speaks Indonesian, Sundanese (a dialect of Indo), Mandarin, Teochow (Chaozhou), Hakka and English. The only one she studied after high school was Mandarin. My friend Baatr is from Russia. He can speak Russian, and his English is accent-free. He can also speak German and some Kalmyk (a Mongolian language, his heritage). He said that he studied Latin and one of the dead Germanic languages, though I forget which. Now he is studying Spanish. Marco is German, and also speaks English, Russian and Chinese. He went to Pakistan for a year to learn Urdu, but I don't know how much he actually picked up. Last I heard he was working on Japanese. I had a Polish classmate who also spoke French, English, Chinese and Hindi. Other than that, I know a slew of Taiwanese who speak three languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese and English). I know a handful that have studied other languages, especially Japanese. One of my coworkers, Selina, knows those four, plus spent six months in Switzerland learning French. I also had a Chinese professor in college, and I know he spoke English, Mandarin, Russian and Shanghaiese. I'm pretty sure he had studied one or two other languages (I seem to remember him mentioning Spanish), but I'm not sure what they were. I've heard that my grandmother was a ployglot, but I've log forgotten which languages she could speak. She was either Swedish or Norwegian, and could speak both of those, and spoke English without an accent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Quackers Triglot Newbie United States Joined 6524 days ago 18 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English*, French, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Bengali, Armenian, Italian, Russian | Message 23 of 121 08 November 2006 at 9:42pm | IP Logged |
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I once took a Russian class from William Schmalstieg, who knows a lot
of languages. He's originally German, he had a minor in French as an undergraduate, and he has written textbooks on Old Church Slavonic, Hittite, Lithuanian, and Old Prussian. That's eight languages, and I would guess that he knows several other languages as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Augustine Bilingual Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 6480 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tamil*, French | Message 24 of 121 19 November 2006 at 10:00pm | IP Logged |
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I've got a friend who moved quite a lot when he was a kid and also has different backgrounds coming from a mixed family. From all of this he learned Arabic, English, French, Armenian, Russian and Polish. Just to make sure he wasn't lying, we tested him with people who could speak the lanaguges fluently.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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