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Your personal polyglot ideal | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Raistlin Majere Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Spain uciprotour-cycling.c Joined 7154 days ago 455 posts - 424 votes  7 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Catalan*, FrenchA1, Italian, German Studies: Swedish | Message 17 of 125 16 February 2006 at 6:34am | IP Logged | ||
I didn't mean to use "accusate" in that harsh sense. I meant it in the way a teacher could tell his pupil that they haven't got a good pronounciation, not a direct accusation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| maxb Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 7185 days ago 536 posts - 589 votes 7 sounds Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 18 of 125 16 February 2006 at 8:08am | IP Logged | ||
Of course it didn't mean severe pronounciation mistakes like that. However if you pronounced the English "th" as t but otherwise had perfect American or British intonation I think many people wouldn't even notice that it was incorrect. However if your intonation is incorrect people have to concentrate more to understand you and they will more easily notice any incorrect sounds you have. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6945 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 19 of 125 16 February 2006 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||
I used to think like that, but have changed my mind. At the end of the day, a novel is a novel is a novel, and it's not clear that novels written at least in the Western European languages are so different these days as to warrant by themselves the enormous expenditure of time it takes to learn and maintain more than a couple of foreign languages. Any number of times, upon finishing a novel, I asked myself whether I would have found it equally compelling had it been written in English, and the answer was often that I would still enjoy reading it, but could just as well have read any number of novels in English instead. Of course, one gets that special high from immersing oneself in a foreign languge, but if that's the main reason for reading, it's good to be able to get some addtiional kicks from one's language-learning efforts, and traveling and talking to people in their language may be just the thing. And once this is a factor, there is every reason to try to improve one's accent, even if passing for a native is not one's top priority in learning a language. Also, with all the technological advances, access both to audio-rich learning materials and authentic speech, as well as to the information about them (think of this site), are so great these days that I find less and less justification (I am speaking about myself only, of course!) not to try to learn to speak reasonably well, even if what gets me into a language is that alluring novel on the shelf that I can't read (just) yet. The novel may end up being a disappointment, after all, but being able to converse with the natives never will. Edited by frenkeld on 16 February 2006 at 9:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7017 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 125 16 February 2006 at 10:15am | IP Logged | ||
I might also change my mind in the future (when I'm older and wiser, lol) but at the moment I'm quite content just reading and watching TV. I suppose that it would be useful to converse with natives but at the moment I have no need to do so. If I did, then the last thing I would worry about would be my accent as long as I was understood. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6896 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 125 16 February 2006 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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As for just "polyglot" my standards for this are fairly low. I consider anyone who can function to some degree of competence in most situations in more than two languages can be called by the name "polyglot".
Of course the merit is greater the more languages you have and the better you speak them, but I don't see the word "polyglot" as a medal awarded according to merit, it is just a label reflecting a fact. But if we talk _ideal_, that is different. As an absolute ideal we might even consider perfect knowledege of all languages and variants. Impossible ? Of course it is, but that's in the nature of ideals. More realistically though, if we think about "ideal but (just) possible for a human" I'd refer to the biography of Cardinal Mezzofanti that you can read right here at this site. I can't imagine a better example of a living "ideal polyglot" than what this man must have been. And it is not the number of languages he knew that necessarily impresses most, but the little anecdotes showing his unbelievable talent and skill at picking them up. One example: By just leafing through a few books in Swedish, knowing German from before, he was rapidly able to recognise cognate vocabulary, build an idea in his mind of the basic grammatical structures, and after checking a few points of pronunciation with a native, was able to communicate in Swedish after only a few days. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Eidolio Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 6863 days ago 159 posts - 164 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Dutch*, Flemish*, French, English, Latin, Ancient Greek, Italian, Greek | Message 22 of 125 16 February 2006 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | ||
Can you manage the rolling "r" in Italian and how did you learn that? (I suppose you have an uvular "r" because your mother tongue is French). My ideal of a polyglot is someone who masters 7 languages fluently with a native accent. It's quite hard to achieve this. (I think 7 is only manageable if you don't need a "genuine" native accent) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6867 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 23 of 125 20 February 2006 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, there are lots of British accents! Every major conurbation has its own accent (Liverpool, London etc). However, the main division seems to be how the words "bath" and "path" are pronounced. In Northern England, we say it the same way as in North American English, whereas in Southern England and in London they say those words as if there was a letter r in the middle (barth, parth etc). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7017 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 125 20 February 2006 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | ||
We also pronounce it like that in Gibraltar. In university, although no-one could place my accent, they used to guess that I was from the south of the UK (they were always surprised to find out I was from that far south!). Edited by patuco on 20 February 2006 at 4:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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