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Beware of becoming polyglot | ||
Tags: Wanderlust | Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| htdavidht Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4624 days ago 68 posts - 121 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French | Message 1 of 17 10 March 2013 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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When i first come to this forum my whole intention wast to make it easier for me to learn French. Then I have found myself in a set of topics and questions.
One of them is: "why would someone want to become polyglot?". When I made this question I imagine someone saying something like: "I want to speak at least 5 languages". And I am asking "why?' Now that I am deep into this language stuff. I start to see how easy can someone get into learning a lot of languages. For example, the other day I saw a map of languages around the world and notice that America is totally cover by English, Spanish, French and Portuguese... So I though, well I ready into 3 of them if I get 1 more I would have cover the whole America... except for some parts on the jungles. After all if I know Spanish that gives me some 50% of Portuguese... Then I look at Africa and notice that if I add Arabic then i would have it cover, and then I see this big part of the map cover in Russian... lol Recently I am "playing" in a learn Japanese website, I take it as a memory game, but if I don't control myself I might just en up learning the language. This is a constant danger I face, the possibility of learning a language just for fun. Today I decide to research what are the official languages of the UN And ones again found 3 out of 6, I am into... so the question comes one more time: "what if...?" This is a constant temptation. For example, I was thinking the other day: "Esperanto is a very easy language, it can be a nice addition without too much sweet" Yes, I caught my self considering learning a language just to pick up the number of languages I know. I still have not got to the point of considering a language because it is "an interesting addition to the ones I ready have" or "It makes my set look uncommon"... but I can end up like that if I don't control myself. Yet I am getting to the point of denying languages, for example I have say nothing about how much I understand Italian (I have translate a book from Italian to Spanish), and I don't mention this on my profile, under the excuse that "I am not really proficient on it, so I don't claim it". But, I am getting to believe the true is I don't really want to accept the idea of becoming polyglot... I am not the only one making excuses for the same reason, many people use this same excuse, some people for example say they have not being using a language for some time so it got rusty and they take it off their list... other common excuse is to pull up the bar, people says: "I am not a polyglot, I know only 20 languages, polyglots are more than 50"... is a sad thing to witness, and how often it happens, we are full of excuses. So I want to warn people about the dangers of starting to learn languages, one day you may wake up and discover you are a polyglot. And there is not a support group to help polyglots. Ones this happens, you will be a polyglot for the rest of your life. 15 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 17 11 March 2013 at 4:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Be careful: first, you go polyglottal, then hyperglottal... And eventually you reach a point where it's impossible
to make the glottal stop. 42 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 3 of 17 11 March 2013 at 7:46am | IP Logged | ||
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Maps are a dangerous thing, especially these two:
language families writing systems One antidote to the polyglot madness is to spend a little time thinking of reasons NOT to learn certain languages. For example I'll tell myself Russian has more speakers than all the other Balto-Slavic languages put together, and it covers a far greater area. Therefore, why should I bother with all the other Balto-Slavic languages? I'm aware there are legitimate reasons to learn those other languages, but as we all know, there are too many languages and too little time. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5023 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 17 11 March 2013 at 3:44pm | IP Logged | ||
Except for xhosa, zulu, afikaans, Swahli,woolof, etc. etc. Edit: I don't mean to be that guy, I'm just ribbing. I have found myself thinking like that at times, but then I remind myself that it would take a 24/7 commitment to tackle that many languages, and even then it probably wouldn't really be achievable. I once started a topic asking about how much time people spent thinking about which languages they would like to learn, and a bunch of regular members denied thinking about the topic much at all. I still don't believe them. Edited by dbag on 11 March 2013 at 3:54pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| MultipackCan Newbie Ireland Joined 4285 days ago 20 posts - 28 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Esperanto | Message 5 of 17 11 March 2013 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Many people relapse when they choose one final language and swear they're quitting after
that one, but it would be such a shame not to be able to use the Assimil resources so you might as well learn French before you begin that one too... 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| htdavidht Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4624 days ago 68 posts - 121 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French | Message 6 of 17 11 March 2013 at 9:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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As there is questions about the references I made to the a map, I giving the link to it:
http://www.allcountries.org/maps/world_language_maps.html On the map I can see Africa cover on the north by Arabic, on the middle by French, English and Portuguese and the south is not specify, but whoever created this map was probably thinking about Dutch or some like that. I ready figure, this is an over-simplistic view of the language map, to learn 8 languages and cover some 70% of the land. But still I was fantasizing about languages, not caring that much for accuracy. I guess We can go trough those countries and see if they have more than 1 official language and stuff. But I am not particular interested on that at this moment. Back to the topic, how many people get married to someone just to learn another language? I mean... seriously? You ready speak 10 languages and the love of your life doesn't speak any of them??? how tragic is that! so you have not choice but learn it. Some people will just do anything to learn another language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MerryCrassmas Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States languagewanderlust.c Joined 5064 days ago 62 posts - 68 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English* Studies: German, Russian, Czech, Polish | Message 7 of 17 11 March 2013 at 10:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ahh language wanderlust. I am sill infected by this (horrible?) wonderful disease! I think I need therapy for this. It
has made me quite indecisive and as a result....I know how to speak a little bit in like 100 languages but only enough to get by in most situation in very few. If it were not for language wanderlust and my inability to rid myself of this monstrosity, I think I would have been truly fluent in at least 4-5 languages by now. Darn. :) Someday, I will find the ability to resist learning a hundred languages in a period of 12 months. Perhaps a kind individual would point me in the right direction, where I can find useful information. Thanks :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Icaria909 Senior Member United States Joined 5592 days ago 201 posts - 346 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 8 of 17 11 March 2013 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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After two years of being on this site, I definitely was infected by the wanderlust bug.
I remember sitting in class drawing world maps and shading in areas to represent peoples that spoke languages that I wanted to learn and struggling to decide what dozen languages I should learn over my lifetime. But that feeling slowly faded. As more time went by, I realized how difficult it is to learn a language to any meaningful level, even when I was legitimately fascinated by the culture of the language. That led me to ask, "What will I really gain from this?" To acquire any kind of meaningful proficiency in a language takes hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work. Is it really worth it to learn another language, just to say that I can "check it off my list." There are so many great reasons to learn a language, whether it is because it will serve a purpose in my life, because maybe in that period in my life I was fascinated with the culture, I need it for work, etc. But I have lost the will to plan out which languages I want to learn in the future. All I know is that I want to enjoy learning my L2 in this moment. Who knows if in the future I may find a reason to learn another language. It is no longer of any concern to me. 10 persons have voted this message useful |
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