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Claims of 50+ languages | ||
Tags: Hyperglot | Number of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5598 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes  | Message 25 of 57 16 June 2011 at 8:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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If I consider my own case, I must say that I am interested in an incredible amount of languages with the intention to learn them, not as a polyglot, but as a philologist. That means I am going to be able to understand texts in foreign languages equipped with grammar books and dictionaries, taking your time, after having learned grammar, syntax, phonology and a lot of vocabulary.
I think as a passionate philologist it is doable to learn more than 20 languages. You won't be able to speak it, but you can reach a high reading proficiency (and a limited ability to write the language). So maybe 50 is possible, but only for philologists, who treat living and death languages alike and don't mind that they cannot even order a cup of tea in their languages, but can read its literature. Edited by Cabaire on 16 June 2011 at 8:05pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 26 of 57 17 June 2011 at 12:47am | IP Logged | ||
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Learning to read fifty languages should certainly be possible - although it will take many years of hard study to get there.
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| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5728 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 27 of 57 17 June 2011 at 3:17am | IP Logged | ||
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One thing is that they may not know what is required to learn a language. When I was 12 I thought I knew French after taking 9 weeks of it in junior high. Obviously I knew nothing about learning languages back then.
In other threads people have mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect in which incompetent people think they're skilled but don't realize that they're incompetent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect As far as defining what "speaking" means, there are different rating systems for the level of fluency a person may have, two of the more common being the CEFR and the ILR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Re ference_for_Languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interagency_Language_Roundtable _scale These scales often have estimated amounts of time needed to reach a certain level in a language. It seems to me that when people make claims of fluency they're not just making claims about their proficiency but also about the amount of time they've spent with the language. Of course, not everyone keeps careful track of the amount of time they've studied, so that idea may not work. They should try to use these different scales when qualifying their fluency, so other language learners can have a frame of reference when trying to understand their level. Of course, people who claim to speak an excessive amount of languages probably are only looking for attention and want to be as vague as possible as to what "speaking" a language means to them. Another thing that one of my favorite bloggers, a professional translator, mentioned is that learning the basics of a language doesn't take much time, but studying to become fluent does. Some people may have an incredibly large amount of time to spend on studying languages so they may be able to learn the basics of a language in 3 months or so, but of course they aren't fluent, neither is making a 3 minute monologue on YouTube very difficult for them. I think I've written enough, but I think the phenomenon of people claiming on YouTube to speak an excessive number of languages is a little more complicated than people just wanting attention and praise. YouTube can be a very hostile public forum since it's unmoderated and as the saying goes, you can't fool all the people all the time, and someone will call BS on a fake on YouTube eventually. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 28 of 57 17 June 2011 at 10:25am | IP Logged | ||
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I have spent some time reading about the Dunning-Kruger effect, and although I did know about it I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting it.
For instance I was almost on the brink of laughing while reading about the bank robber Wheeler who thought that rubbing lemon juice over his face would protect him against surveillance cameras. Or in the words of the psychologist: "As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity." But afterwards it is of course scary that we may be surrounded by megalomanic fools who simply don't see their own defects - or even worse, that we might be part of that society without knowing it (which is part of the definition). However there is one factor that should lessen, but not eliminate the impact of this effect, namely that most of us know that there are languages which we are good at and others we only know superficially. So the suspicious sign of the effect in a person would be that they don't make this distinction, but claim that they are equally fluent in ALL their languages, whatever the number. One more interesting passage in Michael K's message above is this one "...neither is making a 3 minute monologue on YouTube very difficult for them". I have actually made videos in languages in which I couldn't have a normal conversation (and yes, I have made this clear in the comments to those videos). And no, it is not done by producing a text with Google translate and reading it aloud in front of a camera. The point is that if you ruminate over what you want to say over several days, look up things, try out different possibilities (maybe even using Google translate), write down useful phrases and so on, then you may be equipped to talk about just those things for five minutes. But in a normal conversation you can't foresee what is going to happen and besides the presence of another person (who may be impatient or slightly hostile) could be enough to throw you off your rails. So yes, it is possible to make videos in languages in which you aren't fluent. And then: why do it? To get praise? Actually the risk of being flamed is just as big as that of being praised, and polyglotism is not the obvious way to go for those who want to become rich and famous. I do my videos mostly to mark a stage in my language learning, and making a public video is a more a message to myself than to the audience out there. Besides the amount of preparation it takes to make a video in a language which you don't speak fluently makes the process as effective as taking a crash course in that language. Edited by Iversen on 17 June 2011 at 10:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6918 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 29 of 57 17 June 2011 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dunning-Kruger effect - love it!
I experienced the same thing with my first foreign language. After a year of high school Spanish, I thought I was reasonably fluent. I chatted with everyone I could find in Spanish. (Now I realize that they lowered their speech levels to accommodate me). Then I went to college and studied Spanish and realized I was not fluent. After a few years, I again thought, now I am a fluent Spanish speaker. After all, I have a degree in Spanish, have taught Spanish and studied Spanish medieval literature. Then I starting working as a translator and received my first business, legal and financial documents to translate (rather than controlled texts from a textbook) and realized that I still had more work to do. After working as translator for a few years, now I am fluent, I told myself. Then I traveled to South America... That is why I have said in the past that you can learn as many languages as you want, but you should aim at advanced proficiency in at least one language so that you will have some kind of perspective as to the whole picture of what is means to learn a language. We are led to believe that because we finished Spanish textbook I, II and III and there is no book IV that we are finished or that we have accomplished some great feat. In reality, there could be a book IV, V, VI, VII - XIII and we have barely begun, but hardly anyone ever gets that far. We finish a Teach Yourself course and tell ourselves that we have mastered most of the language just because there is no TY book II, III, IV - XIII (there could be, but again, hardly anyone is willing to invest that much time). That is why people who have invested years in language study get frustrated when they hear people make claims like "learn to speak German in two months". I'll bet if these people studied a language for a decade, they would have a completely different opinion of language learning. They think they have learned 70-80% of a language in three months, but the reality is that they have probably only learned 10-20%; they just don't know it because they cannot yet see the whole picture. Edited by translator2 on 17 June 2011 at 2:33pm 12 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6674 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 30 of 57 18 June 2011 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree with you. I think the process of making these videos is a language learning technique itself (input, output) and it's a mark we can use to know our level at this moment. Making it public is a way of commitment. On the other hand, if we don't want to show our face, people can always use my "tutorial" style. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5297 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 31 of 57 19 June 2011 at 12:06am | IP Logged | ||
A lot of truth in your words, I guess. I think there is a connection with the fixation on "speaking" a language. While many claim that this is the highest possible goal, there is no doubt that there are many people who can speak, say hello and all this incredibly interesting conversational stuff, this grail of language learning, but in their polyglot youtube videos they have no problem with stating that they can't read a book, watch and comprehend tv, well almost anything. They don't feel any bad, cause they "speak". Cool. And someone who can read literature in 50 languages will get bad critics about his not native accent. You get what you deserve ... Speaking at this low level has almost no positive effect regarding your native language, you don't stretch your abilities, no linguistic expansion, no broadened horizon. If I remember correctly it was Moses who told us in one of his newer videos, that he has finally completed his first TY, from cover to cover. Congratulations. I hope that many people buy his 400 dollar packages and profit from his deep and profound knowledge. And may they never find out that phrase books were invented some years ago, already ... (btw. Moses is a great guy, no kidding; but better buy a lonely planet booklet, more content. Cheaper.) Banality in 50 languages has one advantage only: More people have a chance to notice that you have nothing to say. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 32 of 57 19 June 2011 at 2:27am | IP Logged | ||
Well, the whole business of language teaching has been throroughly permeated with the idea that communicating is the only justification for teaching people a language. But I have not noticed that the polyglots out there should be so fanatical about this that they are content with learning to have simple conversations and only that, - actually I do think (and hope) that they also learn to read books and understand TV shows etc. Personally I haven't had a language class since 1981, but from what I read/hear all classes start with short dialogs of the type "My name is blabla, what is your name?" "My name is bloblob, what is your name?" "My name is still blabla, what is your name" and so forth. I do see the point in teaching travellers some useful expressions before they leave home, but but it is not obvious that the ability to have simple conversations should be more important than the ability to read a novel or understand a news broadcast on TV. My own current learning methods are primarily based on written sources (preferably with translations), and my preferred fare is scientific magazines and articles from the internet. And when I start to think in a foreign language I think about factual things rather than possible discussions with native speakers. It is important to make your languages active (including dead languages like Latin), but you can make a language active by writing or speaking about factual matters in nice well-ordered sentences. The 'chunks' you need to keep a conversation flowing should of course be learnt, but it is not a law that they should be learned before anything else. Btw. I doubt that the preferred starting point of languages learners (communication 'chunks' or well-gromed literary texts) can be used to predict the number of languages they end up with. Edited by Iversen on 19 June 2011 at 2:42am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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