qklilx Moderator United States Joined 6187 days ago 459 posts - 477 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 5 01 June 2008 at 4:59pm | IP Logged |
Professor, if I may add on to this question, would you say it is more difficult to become a conversational polyglot or a reading polyglot? Let's simply assume that one is going to study a set of pre-decided languages from an early age. Given the same person and the same study habits (of course different methods depending on the goal), do you believe it would take longer for this person to become highly conversational in all of his languages, or to become able to read a modern adult novel in them?
Thank you for your input.
- Evan McKinney
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IbanezFire Senior Member United States Joined 6695 days ago 119 posts - 124 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Russian
| Message 3 of 5 04 June 2008 at 6:09pm | IP Logged |
Here this will be of some use...
http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/about.html
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 5 of 5 05 June 2008 at 8:34am | IP Logged |
I agree, the new homepage of ProfArguelles is clear and well structured and brimming with interesting content which will probably be new to most people outside this forum.
My answer to the original question: it is relatively easy to learn enough of a language to survive as a not too inquisitive tourist. But to be really conversational you have to feel the need to speak the language in question, and you have to hear a lot of it - in practice that means that you have to live in a suitable setting, preferably in a country where the language is spoken, but having just one reference person around you might do the trick. If these conditions are not met it is easier first to get a good passive knowledge of the language, with the emphasis on written sources, and then use that as a basis for getting as much out of your rare opportunities to write and speak the language as possible.
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