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Methods of accomplished polyglots | ||
Tags: Polyglot | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6866 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 1 of 5 15 May 2012 at 12:18am | IP Logged | ||
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We are fortunate to have a number of accomplished polyglots among the forum members. Many of them have given us a glimpse into their learning methods through the remarks made in various discussions. Few, however, have given us a reasonably complete picture of how they would go about learning a new language. I think it would be helpful to many forum members if they described their methods in greater detail, and I would like to offer this thread as a place to do it.
Somewhat randomly, and just for the purpose of this thread, let us define an "accomplished polyglot" to mean a person who has learned at least three languages from at least two different language families to the C1 or higher level, and did that on his or her own. If you are such a person, please describe here how you would go about learning Azilian, a fictitious language Kato Lomb used to illustrate her approach. In fact, the format she used to describe her method is a pretty good one. It is captured in this article and especially in Chapter 20 of her book that is freely available here. Obviously, you can choose whatever format you think is best - this was just an example. Please, try to cover your learning process end to end, from the very beginning to the highest level you would be aiming for. Thanks. Edited by frenkeld on 15 May 2012 at 7:37am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5770 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 5 15 May 2012 at 6:37am | IP Logged | ||
According to your definition I would not be an "accomplished polyglot" because both my C1/C2 - languages are from the Germanic language family and I have never been a self-study learner before 2009. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 15 May 2012 at 6:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6866 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 3 of 5 15 May 2012 at 6:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Fasulye, obviously the term "accomplished polyglot" is very informal. I simply named the thread first and then tried to think about what kind of polyglot might have had the sort of language-learning experience that would make his or her learning techniques of particularly wide interest. I thought the criteria I ended up with were not so onerous as to limit the contributors to the thread to "hyperpolyglots", yet were stringent enough for the person's methods to be sufficiently mature and well-tested and thus of special interest to the forum members. The point was certainly not to suggest that anyone not fitting the criteria is not "accomplished" - I myself consider learning even one foreign language to the C1 level to be an accomplishment. I will edit the original post slightly to emphasize this fact.
In any case, if you (or anyone else) feel that the proposed criteria are unrealistically stringent, feel free to ignore them and post here anyway. It's more important for your learning methods to be mature and tested than for the somewhat arbitrary criteria that I came up with to be satisfied to a tee. Edited by frenkeld on 18 May 2012 at 10:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6626 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 4 of 5 15 May 2012 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I could just refer to my five-part Guide, where I have tried to cover my ideas about language learning in a systematic way through the things I have written in other threads.
But Azilian? I don't know whether Azilian is written using the Latin alphabet. If so proceed to step 2, but otherwise I would first of all learn the alphabet by transcribing as much text as needed to some variant of the Latin alphabet (preferably the offical one, if there is one). If the writing system used ideogrammes I would use a 'pinyin' kind of system alongside the original one, otherwise I wouldn't be able to remember the sounds of each sign. Besides I would listen to some words with certain letters to hear the possible pronunciations. At this stage it wouldn't be necessary to be able to pronounce everything correctly, but I need to be able to 'hear' a text when I read it. After that I would get at least one grammar - not necessarily a big fat one, but the one in a language guide wouldn't be enough because it normally doesn't cover the syntax. And I would think it through rather than memorize it. The next step would be to get a number of bilingual texts, where the translation was as literal as possible - even a faulty machine translation is better than a treacherous 'free' translation. And then I would start copying and translating sentences for the next couple of months until I had been exposed to most of the things which Azilian could possibly throw at me. New words would go into my wordlists for memorization. At a later stage I would begin to memorize words bulkwise directly from dictionaries using wordlists. I would introduce extensive reading gradually, first texts which I already had studied intensively, but later other comprehensible stuff about interesting subjects. At any moment I would make a clear distinction between studying intensively and reading extensively. Those two activities have mutually exclusive goals. I would definitely not want to communicate before I could both speak and understand most possible answers so I would first listen closely to speech to learn to split it into words and sentences (without caring about the meaning). When that functioned well - and not before - I would proceed to listen for the meaning, preferably with a transcript in my hand, but otherwise podcasts and videos which I could repeat again and again, until I could understand what was being said. Before speaking I would want to be able to think in the language, but to weed out my systematic misconceptions about the pronunciation I would transcribe some short snippets of text. And then I would try to find a cheap flight ticket to a suitable destination. During my first immersion stay I might not be ready to say much, but I would walk around translating everything into monkey Azilian in my head until I could do it on the fly - not correctly, but fluently. And I would buy a lot of magazines so that I had something to study intensively AND and read extensively after my return home. Next time I should be able to do a monolingual trip. At that stage I would hopefully be able to read most texts fairly fluently and understand ordinary speech, which would make my immersion much more efficient. And I would not promise to do anything in three months, unless I spent those three months abroad WITH my computer and WITH my library and WITH some local contacts. Edited by Iversen on 15 May 2012 at 2:35pm 11 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6866 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 5 of 5 15 May 2012 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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There's a book by D. Spivak "How to Become a Polyglot". It dates back to the 1980's or 1990's and may only be available in Russian. Several years ago I translated a short section in that book describing his approach in considerable detail. The translation appeared in this thread. As the translation was spread over 8 posts, I am reluctant to reproduce it here, so please see that thread if you are interested.
Edited by frenkeld on 18 May 2012 at 10:32pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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