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’Jack of All Trades’ or Master of a Few? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6425 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 9 of 40 12 June 2011 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
Aside from languages you really need, why not just see which languages naturally go in that direction? When I started seriously studying Esperanto, I never dreamed that it'd become my second-strongest language, after English. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6020 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 10 of 40 12 June 2011 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm trying to be the 'Master of Few' kind of guy, at least for languages; My other interests are all over the place.
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| ChiaBrain Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5794 days ago 402 posts - 512 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish* Studies: Portuguese, Italian, French Studies: German | Message 11 of 40 12 June 2011 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think when you don't need any it's natural to have wanderlust and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I'd say it's a good thing. It's probably wiser to learn about a lot of different languages and cultures before prioritizing any. Edited by ChiaBrain on 12 June 2011 at 9:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5997 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 12 of 40 12 June 2011 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the best thing is to start out as a jack-of-all-trades, and then specialise later.
I always saw myself as working on as wide a range of languages as possible, but now I'm finding that my Spanish has suffered from underuse... despite still being used pretty frequently. Now I'm thinking it might be time to "settle down" with a language or two. However, I wouldn't change the past, even if I could. I credit my success in each language in part to each other language. My pronunciation in Gaelic is better because of the work I put into learning the phonemes of Hindi. My Gaelic pronunciation helped my Spanish pronunciation. And it's not just pronunciation. Learning Catalan taught me phrases and bits of grammar that occur in French, Italian or Spanish that I hadn't learned in them the first time round. And it's not just closely related languages either. As my general awareness of the possibilities of grammar increase, I find it easier to accept new variables. The hardest part of learning languages is opening your mind to the many different ways of expression, and learning several languages to a reasonable level (B1-C1) does a lot to open the mind. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6425 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 40 12 June 2011 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes.
While it takes a bit of work, I don't find that to be anywhere near one of the hardest parts. And, frankly, I found reading a few books on linguistic typology which were full of example sentences with very detailed glosses to be more helpful than learning a few languages to C1 in that regard. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5752 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 14 of 40 12 June 2011 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Do I have to choose? (Crying.)
Volte, I think there is a difference between knowing a certain grammatical concept exists, maybe even being able to give examples, and being able to use it without having to think about it. Maybe your experience is different, but I myself tend to pick up structures that I can relate to something I can already use in another language without having to think about it; when I am confronted with a completely new strucutre I need a lot of repetition until I get anywhere near that. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5212 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 15 of 40 13 June 2011 at 1:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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Master of All Trades, really. I don't really see the point of putting a non-negligible amount of effort into something I'm not really interested in, so to me "Master of a Few" really equals "Master of All that's to be mastered".
Obviously, if you try too many things you won't get as far as you'll do if you try a lesser number. Having said that, many (most?) people turn such an universal truth into a bad excuse for not getting too far in anything -- it's always because "they're doing too many things", while in many cases I know of it is just a matter of not working hard enough, that they end up in a broad mediocrity. The good news is, most fields of knowledge aren't really that compartimentalized, or island-like, much less languages. If you work enough to master just the things you're genuinely interested in, becoming more or less a polymath, you'll get a superficial knowledge of many others for the same price, as a part of the process. On the other hand, if you don't concentrate in any field, well, you'll be a Jack of All Trades, just with the recent negative implication "and Master of None" attached :(see above) And now you know what's best for you, children... ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6425 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 16 of 40 13 June 2011 at 5:32am | IP Logged | |||||
I find I internalize being able to understand structures quite quickly. A while ago, I surprised a friend of mine who is solidly intermediate in Mandarin by puzzling out the meaning of some Mandarin she found difficult, after she gave me a word-by-word translation. I've never studied Chinese*, and the structures weren't similar to anything used in any of my languages. Admittedly, I find more synthetic structures more difficult; throw me into a thicket of cases and I'll struggle. Gaining active use of a structure takes somewhat more work, and here I do agree that repetition is important. * If you don't count working through a few puzzles on this forum, and a couple of hours of scattered looking at material or having people teach me the occasional phrase. I doubt this sums to 5 hours. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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