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Feelings about being a polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
 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 33 of 36 21 December 2006 at 9:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't really recognize the situation where people ask you to prove that you can speak a certain language. Maybe here in the Scandinavian countries it is just taken for granted that people speak at least two or three languages, and some speak a few more. My languages are not even spectacularly weird (except maybe Romanian and Catalan).
In fact I rarely discuss the question. At my work place it is vaguely known that I'm interested in languages (it was even so before I started relearning my old forgotten languages this summer). Normally knowledge of anything but Danish and English is not relevant for my work, but once I was asked to make a translation of a Dutch clone of Trivial Pursuit which was considered for production (I did deliver, using my dictionaries and common sense, but the project was dropped). Another time there was collaboration with a company in Spain that kept sending mysterious documentation brochures and letters in Spanish, which I duly translated as a diversion from my normal work. And then I have I Cypriot collegue who sometimes get e-mails or files in Greek that her computer won't show correctly. I have just for fun a couple of times made casual references to the content based on a few words that I could understand, or I have read aloud some of the text, - so now she is deeply suspicious and believes that I'm just hiding my knowledge of Greek (but the fact is that it is only now that I'm seriously trying to learn the language). Finally I remember that we once got a MS product with all the documentation in Italian. Of course I wrote a complaint in Italian to the vendor; to their credit the reply was also in Italian (1-1 draw), and they sent us the correct English CD. Edited by Iversen on 27 December 2006 at 2:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7018 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 34 of 36 21 December 2006 at 11:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Sorry for the vulgarities, but situations like japkorengchi described really annoy me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| japkorengchi Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6683 days ago 334 posts - 355 votes | Message 35 of 36 21 December 2006 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Actually people like him are very common in my city, because most people are only interested in learning Chinese and English here.
Yet I can still distinguish them and group them into two types. The first type are those who are really curious about saying something in a foreign language. They just want to learn a few phrases from you. Generally speaking, they don't want to be mean or negative. The second type are those who want to frustrate you and prove that you can't do the thing they can do. For example, the man I met also studied Korean, and he wanted to prove that he was better than me in the language. So he just asked me silly questions like 'how to say x in y?' instead of having a genuine conversation with me. What further annoyed me was that once he knew I had Korean friends, he even shamelessly wanted me to introduce them to him, so that he could exploit them as "language tools". I don't take my foreign friends as "language tools" and I am not going to let them being exploited by this selfish and self-centred guy... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| japkorengchi Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6683 days ago 334 posts - 355 votes | Message 36 of 36 22 December 2006 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree largely with you that answering this kind of silly questions is a lose-lose situation. Obviously, this man is of the second type of persons(see my post above), the better I do in Korean, the more annoyed he is. Sometimes I just learn languages as a hobby for fun, but I don't understand why other people have to intervene with my hobby and test my level in it. I don't show off my languages in my life. Yet when you talk about foreign movies and songs, it's so easy to move to the topic of languages. Basically,I find it really hard to conceal your languages if you are talking about foreign things. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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