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Do Polyglots’ Returns Have to Diminish? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4668 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 49 of 55 24 October 2014 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | ||
So what you want to do is maintain a number of languages (so that they do not deteriorate much), while perhaps actively working on some other languages? In that case you need to measure (somehow) the amount of time that you need to spend maintaining a single language per unit of time. So if you found, for example, that you needed to spend one hour per week to keep a language topped up, then if you have 10 hours per week of "language time" then you can maintain at most 10 languages. Perhaps you can measure the required maintenance time by picking a suitable activity for a specific language(reading, speaking, watching the news) and measuring your ability now. Then restrict yourself to say one hour working on that language per week (or per month) and reassess yourself after two or three months. Repeat with longer intervals or less maintenance until you notice a measurable drop in performance. Now reverse the process and build up that language again with maintenance and measure how long it takes to get back to where you were. Now you have an idea of how much you can neglect a language for a given amount of deterioration. Living in the UK, I've never had a day when I've not used English. I have had plenty of time when I've only used Italian sporadically (a few times a week maybe) but I've never turned on RAI and not known what was going on. Since starting on Japanese (over 2-1/2 years now) I've done no active work with French, but I still see posts in French on FB and twitter and I'm not having much trouble with them. My French was probably only B1 (reading) anyway, but, it doesn't feel that it'll have gone away significantly before I get a chance to refresh it in a year or two. Of course, I may be eating my words when I actually next pick up a French novel! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 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 50 of 55 24 October 2014 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Honestly, I think people here read too much into the exact numbers. I think what we
qualify as necessary levels and what we need is so variant and dependent on each person's personal situation and preferences that it's hard to draw an exact line. I try not to be obsessed with the number of languages that I speak (and I hate answering that question anyway - when someone asks me it I answer evasively). For me, the idea of being a hyperpolyglot is simply to speak many languages to whatever level that happens to be required at a certain time. This means that many of my languages are in a constant state of flux. Because hyperpolyglottery made it onto my agenda not too long ago, some languages have really fluxed in their usage. Whether I speak 6 or 10 or 20 languages isn't really an issue here; you could say that I speak 7, or 8 if you include Afrikaans (which I understand but I'd usually just respond in Dutch), and in that case we're going by the basic fluency criterion, but there's plenty I can do in other languages that I don't fulfill the criteria for. Does that mean I speak Hebrew/Portuguese/Greek/Chinese/Breton? Maybe. Maybe not. But the exact number and the maintenance is so dependent on circumstance that I can't really plan for every eventuality. I don't see diminishing returns as that big of a threat. I cannot read all the books in the world anyway, and I'll happily skimp a bit on some languages in order just to read for fun. It's nice to have skills that run the full gamut of possibilities, but it's very rare even for bilinguals to have that ability, and in my case the only reason it exists is because English has played such a big role in my formative years. Basically I choose what to maintain based on my life at the time and especially my social contacts and career plans. Right now, this implies Chinese and later Greek. There are certain languages I can't do without: Dutch, English, Russian and maybe French have played too big a role in my life to forget them. I still speak Swedish regularly with a few people and read novels in it for fun, but it's not my best language (especially pronunciation-wise). Why don't I maintain German so much? Because I don't use it that often in my life except the one or two times a year I visit Germany. I can read German novels without too much trouble, I know that, but it's how it is. Some languages suffer and it's also because your ties to them are not as big. For example, I've recently started writing a series of articles on my trip to Romania (and am doing it in Romanian) and one of the reasons is to maintain that language, because I don't practice it very often here, even though my level is above basic fluency and I certainly speak fairly good Romanian. How do I maintain this? I don't do much, but at a certain point this language may crop up as important again and then I will have to reactivate it (not hard with a language you speak well in the first place). To be honest, certain languages that I have studied I never could see myself study in the first place. I didn't know much about Romanian at all until I started dating a Romanian girl and learned some things. In those days I might have picked Chinese or Greek or Russian or whatever, but never Romanian. I stumbled upon it by chance and lo! and behold I have come into a situation where it's one of my preferred languages and I can use it well. And some languages that I would love to speak well such as Icelandic I've never gotten round to doing properly, because I've just never put in the time or effort (even though I have been to Iceland and spoken to Icelanders). So what do you maintain? I maintain based on my life. I don't pick places to go so I can study the language. I live my life and the languages that crop up as necessary are the ones I learn. This is why Greek is so nice to have for me - it's a language I can always find a use for because my best friend is half Greek. Learning Greek is always useful if you can tap into a social circle if you feel the need to. But do I put a particular focus on a level? No. For me, the enjoyment of literature as Juan alluded to is but one of many pursuits. I prefer rock and metal music to classical and many of the bands that play in that genre are Scandinavians, so it's much more interesting for me to speak Swedish than Swahili. Does it mean that I will keep those languages around forever? No, maybe not. We change as people, our priorities change. Maybe one day I will get bored of polyglottery and go do something else entirely, who knows. But even in that case, I will probably remain multilingual because it's become part of my identity and part of who I am. I don't let my languages decide what I do, I decide what to do with my life and currently languages play a big role in that, but more due to pure circumstance than due to intent. 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 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 51 of 55 25 October 2014 at 12:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Pretty much the same for me. I tend to think of the "long-term me" when choosing my languages though, and I don't see myself dropping any. I don't tend to focus on a single language for a specific period of time so for me it's just a matter of making each language a part of my lifestyle and having regular contact with them all.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 52 of 55 27 October 2014 at 7:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm just the opposite. I rarely spontaneously find opportunities to use any languages
besides Swedish, English and Cantonese (because my girlfriend is Cantonese). I actively work to use my languages, forgoing things I'd otherwise like to do. I try to find books to read in other languages (which is always much more difficult than finding books in English), TV series to watch (even though American TV series are usually better), etc. I choose one language at a time (so far) and focus on it, temporarily letting my other languages sit, until I reach a certain level. Finding ways to use my languages is the most difficult part of language learning for me, but it's definitely worth it, since I love learning them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 53 of 55 28 October 2014 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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While thinking about this question of optimal language maintenance strategies, I decided to look at the issue in
terms of pure vocabulary numbers. Although I'm not a fan of counting words in general, I recognize that many people here are, and vocabulary size can serve as a rough proxy of proficiency. Let's say for sake of argument that most languages require a base receptive vocabulary of 5,000 word families for something like C1 proficiency. I'll skip the various controversies of what is a word, idioms and how to distinguish the lexicon from vocabulary. By the way, this figure of 5,000 is probably on the very low side. I've seen figures for French or English closer to 10,000 or even 20,000. To maintain a receptive knowledge of 5,000 words in my preferred language, Spanish, I have to read or hear them at some regular interval. Let's say that I want to cycle through all my Spanish in the course of a year or I will start to forget some. So far things seem pretty simple. All I have to do is maybe read a newspaper article or listen to a podcast everyday. But it's more complicated than that. First of all, we know that around 500 words represent about 70% of all written language and probably more in spoken speech. Which means that the remaining 4500 words of my vocabulary will have to be found in the 30% of my input. I therefore need a wide enough variety of materials to cover all this vocabulary. Here's the problem. Do I maintain the vocabulary by using the same materials I used to acquire the vocabulary in the first place and benefit from the repetition? Or do I use new materials, such as newspaper articles, with lots of interesting and current content but with the risk of not seeing all my current words and having to learn new words all the time? If we're really talking about true maintenance, i.e. retain what we already know, the first strategy would seem to be the way to go. I already have all the materials, so all I have to do is start at one end and work my way through material that should be familiar, then start over again. Is this what we are really talking about? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 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 54 of 55 28 October 2014 at 5:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is certainly a relevant angle. The 'unique glossary density' of my log files was a a level where you probably should read about 50.000 words to see 5000 different headwords. Some authors (and some rap artists!) have a higher density, many have a lower one - and conversations would almost certainly lie lower so that you would need more than 50.000 words to hit upon 5.000 unique headwords. It would take quite some time to listen to so many words! And 50.000 words in print would fill a whole book. But at least it is feasible to get through that amount of printed text - whereas by listening, well...
There is however another factor which must be taken into account, namely the number of repetitions of each word. Frequency tables are irrelevant here because truly rare vocabulary is distributed very unevenly. An author who has used the word "rambunctious" in a book once is likely to use it later in the same book, and there are without doubt other novels which don't ever mention it. And I know with 100% certainty that the word "Ediacara" is more common in my log than in the collected works of Shakespeare. So to get repetition it is worth reading at least some big fat books where you get enough repetition of at least some of the rare and precious words. But even in a discussion about the outer limits of a person's vocabulary it is also worth pointing out that you cannot just count words - your practical skills depend more on knowing the uses of the small and very common words than on knowing a few hundred bird names more. Edited by Iversen on 28 October 2014 at 5:14pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 55 of 55 29 October 2014 at 7:46am | IP Logged | ||
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I've realized that one reason why I find less time to new languages is that I'm not
content with maintaining my current languages. I constantly want to study more. My best foreign language (at least passively) is French, and I still find myself seeking out new words, or wanting to work on a difficult passage. I'm currently itching to start working intensively on some of the dialog of "Maison Close" because I find it hard to follow. I find it hard to just consider a language "finished" and not study it anymore, just trying to maintain it, unless it's at C2. With more languages, this will of course decrese the amount of time availible for acquiring new ones. I find it very difficult to come across an unknown word and not look it up and add it to Anki. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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