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REAL multi-languages fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 17 of 102 12 September 2014 at 1:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, it is realistic to have three languages at that level, but you have to start early on. If a child is raised in a multilingual environment, their levels would be somewhat like this. (ex: parent 1 speaks French, parent 2 speaks Arabic, child grows up in Serbia). Edited by tarvos on 12 September 2014 at 1:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 102 12 September 2014 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, as various folks have been pointing out, it depends a lot on how you define "really fluent." If you mean "capable of having a pleasant social conversation," I recall a story about Alexander Arguelles. (Check out this table of how well he reads in various languages; it's absolutely remarkable.) He was speaking Danish, I think, for the first time in a while, and he was having a conversation with some locals. The locals asked him, "How many languages do you speak?" He asked, "Would you say I spoke Danish?" and the responded that he did. He replied, "About 20, then." This seems reasonable: Looking at his chart, he has 99% coverage of Danish when reading, which I estimate would be B2 passive skills, or perhaps enough to pass a C1 reading exam. But Alexander Arguelles has studied languages tirelessly for decades, often putting in 5 hours a day, but sometimes many more. But let's look at things from the other direction: How many languages can people learn natively from childhood? Again, it depends a lot on how you define "natively": - We had a neighbor who grew up speaking German at home. She was a apparently a very successful heritage learner, and she sounded native when speaking German. She applied to a university in Germany, was accepted, and later reported that her first year was very difficult: She felt like she had the vocabulary of a native 5-year-old. - There's a noticeable minority of people in Montreal who speak both English and French sufficiently well that I can't tell which is their stronger language. Typically, they sound like fully native English speakers, and they speak an extremely fast and fluent French with a local accent. But if I listen to them long enough, I notice strange little vocabulary holes: "booster seat", "escalator", and so on. - Various anthropologists have claimed that there are communities where everybody grows up speaking five languages. But it's also apparent that they don't use all five the same way a well-read monolingual uses their only language: The languages often drift together into a tight Sprachbund as the various grammars are regularized. - I've spoken to North Africans who speak Arabic at home and in their community, but who have received almost all of their formal education in French. A common complaint: They can't discuss intellectual topics like a native Arabic speaker, but they can't socialize like a native French speaker. - We occasionally get a post here on HTLAL from somebody who moved around a lot during childhood, and who went to school in multiple languages. Some of these folks complain about having "no native language", which seems to mean that there's no one language in which they can function like a typical, well-read adult. In other words, there's no free lunch: Even most truly impressive bilinguals, living in a bilingual city and switching languages every five minutes at work, often sacrifice something somewhere, even though it may be just some obscure vocabulary or high-level academic stuff. But if you relax your constraints a bit, and accept various imperfections, there are people who could handle a basic job interview or read the "Great Books" in a truly impressive number of languages. Basically, getting from "very good" to "native-like" is more work than getting from "nothing" to "very good." And for most folks, it doesn't actually make sense to invest the massive effort needed for the last few steps when they could become "very good" in several new languages for the same effort. Edited by emk on 12 September 2014 at 1:54pm 16 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 19 of 102 12 September 2014 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
This leads to some wacky results depending on the person. I have known several people who have moved a bit during their upbringing and come from either an intercultural marriage or growing up abroad - the linguistic skills vary immensely depending on the person and their interests. Some people forget some of their heritage language and can't really speak it that well - one of my best friends is half Greek, but hasn't spoken Greek in ages and can't really read it either - he can understand a fair amount though. However he speaks fluent English and Dutch, based on the fact that his mother is Flemish and he grew up in the States and in the Netherlands. But English and Dutch were used in the home, Greek not so much. But he switches between English and Dutch all the time and we don't know which one is his native language. It's confusing as hell. Similarly, I used to date someone who had moved around, attended different schools, and had parents who were natives of another country than the two she'd lived in. She ended up speaking four languages very well, being able to use another two or so to some more limited extents, and being of academic level in at least two. And here the parents used their own mother tongue to talk to their children, but the children between them spoke the language of the country the girl was born in, and at school in another country they spoke the main language of that country, plus English, plus learning another two languages (one because of Jewish ethnicity, one because that was another official language of the country). 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 20 of 102 12 September 2014 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Depends on what level you're talking about. Even bilinguals normally don't speak one of their languages quite as well as the other, or have some topics that they're more comfortable discussing in one language. As for Italian... I do know a few people who speak really good Italian (idk if their level is good enough for you), and others who love various European countries the way I love Finland (ie a lot). Sure, they speak the respective languages better than I do, but not better than I speak Finnish. They also tend to say they're "forgetting" English, and while most of them are interested in learning "one more language", it somehow doesn't seem to happen. Basically, there are lots of requirements, like loving the language and culture, wanting to be a part of it, travel opportunities, access to media, even simply Internet access and free time, maybe also perfectionism. Many people don't have the right combination in any language, let alone several. (I assume you're speaking of a level that's a bit higher than what this forum calls advanced fluency) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 21 of 102 12 September 2014 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
I only started learning English when I was ten and I grew up in Germany. My level of written English you can assess - I make mistakes, I know. My spoken English is much worse. There is no doubt that German is my native language. Yet, while the number of transfer mistakes is much higher in English, I also make transfer mistakes in German. I also sometimes make transfer mistakes from Spanish and even Japanese in both languages. When I learn about a new topic using English it is hard to talk about it in German for the first time. I can eventually explain what I want to say, but I use the exact same strategies that I use when trying to talk about a topic in English that I only talked about in German before. I struggle for words, I paraphrase and hope my conversation partner supplies me with the correct terms. Sometimes I remember them, and sometimes I have to simply explain the concept and say the word I know for it. It's a struggle for me and a burden for my conversation partner. I know that this doesn't happen when I learn content of the same complexity in German and then talk about it in German, and that makes me feel like my German is not good enough. Even though it is my native language. I imagine that people who moved around a lot as children or who moved to a new country as teenagers and had too little contact to their old culture to learn how to function as an adult in that language experience something similar, but at a higher level of proficiency and without the kind of knowledge I have about German indisputably being my native language. So I think that there is a level of proficiency at which you can learn to deal with any new situation in the language as well as a monolingual native speaker with a similar skill profile, but if you already know how to deal with the same kind of situation in another language, you and other people might think you have a language deficit instead of thinking of it as a situation you haven't dealt with before. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6908 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 102 12 September 2014 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
Here's that particular section from the interview (it was Dutch, by the way): (32 minutes into the clip) Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 12 September 2014 at 10:58pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 23 of 102 12 September 2014 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Fair enough. I was defending polyglots against the accusation "they don't REALLY speak all those languages, do they?" which shares a lot of terminology with the OP. I can see that wasn't really the sentiment of the post, but I'm afraid some people could've still taken it that way. A third or even fourth (or more, but that's speculative) language at that level is definitely possible as long as we're not saying "same as a native speaker," but rather "functionally similar to a native speaker." Essentially, able to speak, write, read and listen with functional skills within the normal range of native speakers, but allowing for a noticeable accent and rare slip-ups. For example, my dad (who isn't a hyperpolyglot) started learning English as a teenager, but it's been his primary language ever since. He's got a slight accent and says a few things a little funny, but I'm sure his active and passive vocabulary and ability to write "correctly" are better than the median American. Not me though, I've only got two languages that are that good.
This pretty much sums it up. People who put in that massive amount of effort to go from "very good" to "native- like" in every single language they learn don't tend to become hyperpolyglots. To really get your number of languages high you generally have to settle for "very good." 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4771 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 24 of 102 12 September 2014 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
As for the OP's question, it's probably wrong to call my English "near-native", but I'm satisfied with it as it is, and as of now there are no areas where I would be willing to actively push for improvement. Besides, I have been mistaken for an Englishman or a Scotsman by Americans based on my accent, I guess that counts for something ;) None of my other target languages are at that level yet, and as of now Japanese is the only one where I can actually imagine myself putting in all the necessary effort to get there. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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