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Do Polyglots’ Returns Have to Diminish? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| cpnlsn88 Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5036 days ago 63 posts - 112 votes  Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, Latin | Message 25 of 55 18 October 2014 at 11:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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In reply to Serpent I use the term 'pulse' to mean something like spaced repetition.
At a certain point (for me anyway) I would not feel the need to do things every day so I would read the occasional book, watch the occasional film and read newspaper articles and occasional trips to the country and such like. I don't do it scientifically but find fluency is fairly stable this way. So at this point I am not doing anything extensive or indeed burdensome. As pointed out elsewhere, the level you have acquired affects how much you need to do to maintain. It seems to me a model of 'maintain and extend' can be helpful in many cases. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4948 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 26 of 55 18 October 2014 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I wholeheartedly concur. :) Allow me to humbly recapitulate after reading through this very important thread. I think to maximize time in maintenance, the following concepts have been proffered. And I'll add a couple: 1. Extend your active time (decrease your sleep by an hour, and learn through diet, exercise, and other techniques to compensate for it without deleterious effects to brain performance) 2. Decrease your number of languages in maintenance: this can be done in a number of ways: (a) Schedule rotation: day 1 language A-B-C, day 2 language D-E-F (b) drop languages G-H-I from the rotation, then bring them back by dropping A-B-C. (c) Use language families to your advantage: have a Romance-Germanic-Slavic in the rotation, and the same R-G-C pattern for languages off rotation. For a language isolate (e.g. Chinese), special attention would be required, i.e., keep it always in your rotation but decrease the number of minutes slightly (since you would work every day on it). (d) thinking about the topics and situations that you notice most often arising when using a certain language and then tailoring your maintenance to ensure you are whetting those narrower areas. That way you will maximize efficiency of review 3. Make friends in your workplace or in places you often frequent with speakers of your language. Even the cashier at your supermarket... go to his/her cash register and use the 2-5 minutes to your advantage! 4. If possible (and without endangering others), resile passive learning for when commuting in your car, or when walking to work or running errands (using your cell phone or tablet obviously). That way you maximize usage of Dead Time which gives a major boost. 5. Set your electronic items, your office desk, etc., to the target language of your choice. Heck even buy those paper calendars at Barnes and Noble with German/Italian/French/Spanish vocabulary a day. 6. When going on vacation, if possible plan a trip to an area where your target language is spoken. Thus you double up pleasure with maintenance. 7 and 8. For hardcore language lovers, it goes without saying that seeking an employment that demands the use of your target languages, or finding a romantic partner that is a native speaker of one (or better yet multiple L2s!) is the ultimate maintenance. But this is the most unlikely for anyone to be able to pull off, so it is the last suggestion. Finally, do some reading about learning techniques, experiment with them yourself, and make use of free or not-so-free technology if you think it is worth it. My major caveat here is this: While certainly having no proof, it appears to me based on the at times supernal and sedulous postings (which are great nontheless), that some of us may be focusing so much time, effort, and research on "maximizing" learning and/or maintenance, that we are neither learning nor maintaining much in the first place. This paradox is similar to the "HTLAL" one: the more time one spends here, the less one tends to learn. That is not a knock on this fabulous website, but just a general fact of time usage. So, while working smart is very important, be sure to not get caught up in it too much. Just go and learn, read, listen, and talk, even if the techniques are not the vanguard. Leave the hardcore research into the mysteries of learning to the scientists. :) Edited by outcast on 18 October 2014 at 6:41pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 27 of 55 19 October 2014 at 12:15am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Let it go on record that I did not bring up this hoary question of the 300-word high-performance vocabulary.
But since a certain poster unwittingly brought it up in a typical attempt at being funny, the issue might be of some relevance to the discussion here. When we look at acquiring and maintaining large numbers of languages both from a receptive and, even more so, from a productive perspective, the amount of effort required can become quite staggering. Just last week came out the 23rd edition of the dictionary Real Academia Española with 93,111 headwords including 19,000 Americanismos. The word-counting mavens here could probably prove that to have decent word-coverage of Spanish daily press and literature one would need let's say at least 25,000 words. Since many of those words have multiple meanings and idiomatic usages, let's say that we have to have around 50,000 word-meaning combinations swimming in our head. Then all the dozens or maybe hundreds of rules of grammar and usage constraints. That's just for receptive vocabulary. For productive vocabulary, the figure will undoubtedly be smaller but we have to throw in the challenge of good pronunciation. So, anything approaching native-like proficiency in Spanish is a huge accomplishment, especially if one does not live in a Spanish-speaking country. For other languages, the scale is probably comparable. Two languages plus one's native language all at equal levels of proficiency is, in my opinion, very rare. That said, what I have always argued is that rather than try to achieve true native-like proficiency what most polyglots and particularly the hyperpolyglots do is combine good pronunciation with a relatively small and manageable subset of each language components. This subset may be quite large for passive knowledge where the effort is really one of recognizing things and being able to associate some sort of meaning. But when it come to actually speaking the language well, I think the subset tends to be quite small but mastered well enough to deal with most common situations. This strategy , I believe, allows people to manage large numbers of language. Otherwise the task becomes herculean. Edited by s_allard on 19 October 2014 at 12:39pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6549 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 28 of 55 19 October 2014 at 7:01am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Wow, some really poor word choices s_.
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| cpnlsn88 Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5036 days ago 63 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, Latin | Message 29 of 55 19 October 2014 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't totally agree on leaving investigations to the scientists.... I think
polyglots and self learners if we come together as a community can (potentially) influence future research questions for people to garner a good evidence base. It is true there is a lot of rubbish out there about language learning that is just not factually valid and contributes to an already existing problem of language learning of early dropping out due to the length of time that you need to put in over a prolonged period. So I see this site as a means of pooling our hunches and experiences so that what is clearly rubbish gets seen as such and that we pool our ignorance (!) so that new ideas on effective language learning can take root - in due time studies might be done to validate or not these ideas. At this point I have particular interest in the phenomenon of maintenance phases as a part of effective learning as well as how to learn at the more advanced level. I think this is really important to structuring the language learning process and I want to pay special tribute to the ideas put forward by leosmith on the bow wave to language learning, which at an intuitive level makes a whole lot of sense - I've reread those posts a load of times and am totally sure that there's a lot there for future development and not just in maintenance phases. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 30 of 55 19 October 2014 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
On language maintenance... In the conclusion to Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching, the FSI stated:
In a way, the FSI is a bit like the HTLAL community. We are interested in research, but are really more practioners of language learning. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 31 of 55 20 October 2014 at 12:11am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I have come late to this thread, but like Jeffers I was puzzled by the idea that ordinary people just can learn a language in one year. Those that do are almost certainly people who have moved to a new country and who take the language learning task extremely seriously. And yes, some succeed, but many fail for a number of reasons. But unless the ace people continue to move around they aren't likely to continue to add languages to their score board - and given the utilitarian angle of their learning they may not even be interested in doing so.
On the other hand hyperpolyglots must have some kind of collector's streak in their mental makeup. There aren't many people who can integrate twelwe or twenty languages in their daily life (except maybe residing members of the community of the interpreters and translators in Brussels) so it takes some hard work to find opportunities to train so many languages. Actually I think it is quite feasible to reach and keep a decent passive level in a dozen languages, but it is a struggle to keep them active from the bottom of your comfy armchair. My own solution to that is to push my active languages to a level where I can travel around in a country and say more or less the same things in the local language as I would have said in for instance English - but I don't really care about getting a nativelike accent or eliminating all errors because I don't find it realistic to reach those goals in all my languages. The important point is however that I must be able at least to think in a language, otherwise it will become purely passive. And it is necessary to reach the stage where you can read a language comfortably - otherwise you can't just look through a couple of pages on the internet to keep it alive and kicking at the passive level. Weak skills disappear because you can't use them at short notice. Ok, so in between my travels some of my languages get rusty. But what does that mean? I don't feel my reading ability leaves me even in weak language despite weeks of neglect, but it becomes more difficult to think quickly, and some key words may actually have become temporarily unavailable. A short time listening of reading followed by some concentrated thinking or speaking to myself is usually enough to get the machine running again - but at that point the occasion to use it may have passed. A weak language is also more prone to interference from stronger languages, but here I have noticed something funny: I can normally listen to for instance TV in English or German or Danish while working with a weak language like Serbian or Icelandic - but listening to real living humans, as it happens during the polyglot gatherings and conferences, is far more likely to create havoc. And why? Probably because I know that listening to the TV is a strictly one-way communication, whereas I in principle might get involved into a discussion in Spanish or Portuguese if somebody is speaking it behind my back. And therefore I'm more likely to be distracted. So just saying that you can have three or four or seven really active languages and that the rest necessarily must be in partial hibernation for most of the time is a monstrous oversimplification. At best it refers only to the active skills, and even there it may be more a result of problems getting sufficient and readily avaible exposure in all your languages than the sign of some kind of biological limit. Edited by Iversen on 23 October 2014 at 10:43am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4948 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 32 of 55 20 October 2014 at 1:08am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This is the exact phenonemon that I experienced in my 4 month interlude from reading, speaking, or listening to my target languages (though I do admit that in that time I had a couple of meetings and occasionally I would read an article, but for the most part I really did not use the languages in any meaningful way). Reading did not seem impaired much. When I returned to listening, the first 2-5 minutes listening to French, German, and Portuguese, my brain "felt funny". As if the languages were being spoken at double the speed I remembered! Then like magic, after 10-15 minutes they just seemed to slow down dramatically... a very odd effect. It took me an hour or two to really feel comfortable again. Output suffered from the exact condition you mentioned: I could speak but I had a frustrating time remembering even key, common words like "bekommen", or "s'habiller"... And I could not think nearly as fast, everything was a bit labored. I needed about 3-5 days to feel that this vocabulary started to return with ease.
So based on experiences from many here, from experts like FSI, and others, and my own intuition, then it seems to be the case that language learning has an "orbital speed", as I call it. In other words, no matter how much effort you put into it, if you don't reach escape velocity (even if you are only a few kilometers per hour under it), you will crash back to Earth. If you do reach orbit, you will not last very long in a very low, degradable orbit, but given enough boost, you can reach a comfortable orbit and never again worry about falling back down. Language acquisition seems to be uncannily similar! We must reach that orbital speed where we will stay up, and not come back down. 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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