|
 |
’Jack of All Trades’ or Master of a Few? | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| 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 17 of 40 13 June 2011 at 6:46am | IP Logged |
|
I wish I had your learning abilities.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| hjordis Senior Member United States snapshotsoftheworld. Joined 5172 days ago 209 posts - 264 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 18 of 40 13 June 2011 at 11:48pm | IP Logged |
|
I'm also a mix. I have a list of languages I want to eventually study, all separated into categories depending on how fluent I hope to become. The list of languages I just want to dabble in is by far the longest, as it should be.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6689 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 19 of 40 13 June 2011 at 11:58pm | IP Logged |
|
For me the alternatives are not being total master of a few languages or a complete idiot in sixty.
I want to carry those languages I take seriously to at least basic fluency - i.e. to a level where I can discuss those things that interest me in each and every language on a level where native speakers don't have to talk slower or use simpler words. In those languages I also expect to be able to watch TV and podcasts, and I want to be able to read every kind of text except maybe hermetic poetry and law texts. However I have realized that I only have such unlimited and problemfree access to speech and texts in maybe half a dozen languages that I can push those towards advanced fluency. On the other hand it should be possible to learn twenty languages or so to a useful level - and that's enough for me. 'Wanderlust' is totally a different matter: here you take up one language after the other, but never learn enough to use any of them before you let yourself be lured into the study of new languages. And that's in my opinion a waste of time. Of course you may spend some time on fringe languages or you may test yourself in a language which you eventually decide not to study, but from the moment you decide to take a language seriously you should do it with the clear goal of reaching the level I described about, where you can use it and keep it alive by extensive reading and listening. After that it is mostly a matter of taste whether you want to push yourself towards advanced fluency, but if you choose this it will inevitably cost you something in the number of languages you can find time for. With an adaption of a wellknown rule of thumb: 20% of the effort may give you 80% of the usefulness of a language. The remaining 20% will cost you the remaining 80% of the effort - and it is up to you whether you find that this deal is OK. Edited by Iversen on 14 June 2011 at 12:20am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5814 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 20 of 40 14 June 2011 at 1:29am | IP Logged |
|
I personally plan to take as many as I can to a high level of fluency, but also learn an enormous number to a lower
level, around A2 I guess, where I can use them and enjoy them to a limited extent. I don't mind letting a language suffer from neglect for a little while and refreshing it later, either, but only once I've reached a level I'm satisfied with, and I would prefer to maintain them all. I'm only just beginning so I don't know how many it will be in the end, but I hope it will be around 15 or more total! I consider myself a Jack of All Trades in every part of my life. I have a huge number of hobbies and I am a quick learner and a perfectionist so I always become good at them, though many of them are only "good for a hobbyist" and not at a professional level. That's fine though- I can make my own clothing, food, furniture, do repairs and so forth, and it saves a lot of money, I just have to know when something's beyond my skills. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Rhoda Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5586 days ago 166 posts - 196 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, Swahili, Ancient Greek, German | Message 21 of 40 14 June 2011 at 5:16am | IP Logged |
|
Like a lot of other people on here, I'm somewhere in between. There are ~3-5 languages in which I want complete, total, super-advanced, native-like fluency, and another 3-5 or so in which I'd like to attain a high degree of skill. Add in another 10 that I'll be content to learn just to an intermediate level/basic fluency. Pragmatically speaking, I don't want to aim too much higher, since I don't have all day to work on maintaining them! And I certainly don't want to learn a ton to a basic level and then lose them all. Any language I seriously decide to learn has to get at least to the point where I can lay it aside for a few months or even a year and come back to find it more or less intact at an intermediate level or higher.
3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5804 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 22 of 40 14 June 2011 at 7:20am | IP Logged |
|
I've asked myself this question a dozen times especially when I feel the pull of
linguistic wanderlust. I think that when I noticed how bad my Spanish had gotten, I decided to recover it and complete it in a way I never had before (my later experiences with languages/language teaching made this easier than the first time) so that was my 1st real decision to take a language to a 'mastery' level. Spanish - until a v. high level of fluency (speak accurately, read native level novels with few problems). Korean - it will take me years but I have all the time in the world. Simply put, the more I learn, the more it will help me in my life so that's a constant motivator. But I'm in no rush. German - High-Intermediate to Advanced. Understand most of what I perceive in the language. Maybe not as high as my Spanish/one day Korean but quite strong. French - High-Intermediate to Advanced. Understand most of what I perceive in the language. Maybe not as high as my Spanish/one day Korean but quite strong. Spanish should give me an advantage over German in this one. Latin - Intermediate. I think this will be more of a hobby on the side though the idea of reading Caesar in it's original might push me further and higher. Ancient Greek - Low-Intermediate. I prefer Latin to Ancient Greek because of sources. Russian - Low-Intermediate. Arabic MSA. Dialect not sure, possibly Egyptian and/or Classical Koranic. Low- intermediate but possibly higher. To be honest, my top 4 languages in the list I'm aiming for mastery-advanced which should take another 5 years (Korean will be longer) if lucky. The others I'll see how I like them. The little I've learnt of Arabic was very interesting and had some great sounds to it. The above is a plan for a minimum of the next ten years of my linguistic life. Planning when you will study the languages you want to learn and how you will learn them (put ideas on a text file about cool resources you find/ideas) does seem to prevent wanderlust which is obviously useful. Other languages such as Dutch, Swedish, Ancient Egyptian, Polish etc. will probably just be to a low-intermediate level when I'm content with the others. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| RMM Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5213 days ago 91 posts - 215 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Swedish, Japanese | Message 23 of 40 14 June 2011 at 7:45am | IP Logged |
|
I definitely have a "jack of all trades" mentality. Indeed, in many instances, grasping the basics of a language is all that I really want to do (at least for the moment), and I firmly believe that this is not a waste of time. I'm interested in languages. I like to see how they work and how they sound. For some languages, I am content to understand the basics of how the languages are put together and to compare this to other languages I already know. In this manner, you get to see the remarkable variety of ways there are to construct languages and through languages to construct thoughts. Beyond this, just knowing the basics in a language has helped me in my travels in the past, and personally I find it a nice skill to know how to pronounce many different languages correctly--even if just to be able to pronounce place names and people's names properly.
However, like others on the board, there are some languages that I would like to achieve a certain level of high fluency in (although it need not be truly "native" fluency). In particular, I'd like to do this in what I consider to be my core languages (German, Italian, Spanish, and French--although I've got a long way to go still with the French). For other languages that I've dabbled in in the past or present (Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese, Welsh, Russian, Icelandic, Portuguese) I would probably be content if I eventually make it to intermediate level (and that doesn't need to be any time soon). In some cases, there are languages for which I'd be happy just to get the basics down (Finnish, Scottish Gaelic, Hungarian, Chinese, Danish, etc.). (I studied Ancient Greek at the university too, but I'm not really sure what to do with that one now--I suppose I just would like to get to the point where I can read ancient texts more easily without having to look up so many words.) At any rate, one's plans can always change in the future. I'm sure a lot of us will eventually get really interested in a language that we once only considered more of a side item to our main language studies. Overall, it seems to me that a lot of the people on this board want to become both "Jacks of all trades and masters of some," which makes a lot of sense to me. 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 24 of 40 14 June 2011 at 1:53pm | IP Logged |
|
In fact, I think this topic ties into an idea that's been buzzing around in my head for a while.
Modern society tends to favour specialists, people who know one thing and know it really well. But our society seems to lack generalists, people who can understand multiple fields well enough to co-ordinate and share knowledge between them. It leaves a gap that we've tried to bridge with a new type of specialist: the management professional -- the idea being you don't need to know anything about the field you're operating in, you just need to know how to manage. I always wanted to be a generalist, but there's no place for a generalist in most corporate structures. I thought when I started switching to languages that I was just picking a new specialism, but thinking about it, my breadth of languages (plus all the facts I've learnt here about languages I don't speak) makes me something of a generalist -- I use my knowledge of multiple languages to bridge the gap between two languages. So I suppose what I'm after is "jack of many trades, master of one or two". 2 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
