|
 |
Edgardo Donovan | ||
Tags: Polyglot | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| eddiedonovan Newbie United States eddiedonovan.co Joined 7035 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes | Message 1 of 5 25 August 2005 at 12:09am | IP Logged |
|
[EDITED] Double posting is not allowed on this forum, even for such an advanced polyglot as Eddie. You can read the text of his message on his Member Profile Thread. Edited by administrator on 25 August 2005 at 9:16am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| fanatic Octoglot Senior Member Australia speedmathematics.com Joined 7149 days ago 1152 posts - 1818 votes  Speaks: English*, German, French, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch Studies: Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 2 of 5 25 August 2005 at 3:02am | IP Logged |
|
I enjoyed your mail and I have visited your web page and read a lot of the material with interest.
Can you please explain in more detail how you study a language? Do you use the same method for each language or does the method depend on what materials are available to study the language? Do you keep up your knowledge and how do you do so? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| eddiedonovan Newbie United States eddiedonovan.co Joined 7035 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes | Message 3 of 5 25 August 2005 at 7:20am | IP Logged |
|
I cannot explain in anymore detail than I already have above.
With every language I try to become interested in the culture and find opportunities to speak with natives regarding topics that interest me. I try to treat every language the same but the opportunities to intereact with natives depend a lot of where I am living at any given point in time. As far as keeping a language alive is concerned, finding ways to use it is essential. Once I am up and running with a language I may get rusty but I never lose it. To keep my ability in tune I do however need to engage in some sort of conversation which requires me to organize my thoughts in that language every so often. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| eddiedonovan Newbie United States eddiedonovan.co Joined 7035 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes | Message 4 of 5 26 August 2005 at 12:54am | IP Logged |
|
Response to Administrator:
Thank you for your discrete editing of my double post. I apologize for I did not read the forum rules prior to posting. I am in the process of reading the material regarding Mezzofanti and historical polyglots. Thank you for making it available. Fascinating stuff. The only other place on the web that deals with historical polyglots is the open source "notable polyglot" page on Wikipedia but that pales in comparison to what is available on this web site. To the best of your knowledge, was there any attempt to write a historical analytical account of polyglot achievements in the 20th century. If not, do you know if any publication of that kind is currently in the works? I have tried to search all publicly available encyclopedias to no avail. Thanks Kind regards, Eddie 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7379 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 5 26 August 2005 at 3:46am | IP Logged |
|
I don't think there is any such resource available anywhere. Wikipedia is nice but not really exhaustive and sources are not listed. There is a great book in Russian called 'Kak statj poliglotom' that discusses, polyglot to polyglot, the achievements of some contemporary polyglots.
I think one difficulty such studies must address is to have a precise and objective yardstick to measure the actual proficiency in each language (you address it quite well with the DLI scores) and that of what 'counts' as a language. It is clearly very tempting to count every single Italian dialect as a language but there is no objective way of testing one's proficiency in those languages (I think) and learning them is clearly quite different from learning languages from another language family. If you read Russell's book on Mezzofanti (full text on this website) you will see how Russell addressed the first problem. One way to address the second would be to make several groups, one for 'real' languages and one for easier to learn 'dialects'. It is quite difficult to do such grouping without offending people whose language we would call a 'dialect' though. Maybe a euphemisms would be handy. Let me know of your thoughts on this, you seem to have researched this topic quite far. 1 person has voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
