People from Canada who are fluent in Thai (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

People from Canada who are fluent in Thai
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages	( Topic Closed)

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leosmith
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6551 days ago
2365 posts - 3804 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Tagalog

Message 25 of 64

02 October 2010 at 2:52am | IP Logged

I live 40 miles from the border, but not in Canada. Would you like to chat in Thai?
1 person has voted this message useful

Cesare M.
Senior Member
Canada
youtube.com/user/CheRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5171 days ago
99 posts - 135 votes

Speaks: English*

Message 26 of 64

02 October 2010 at 4:15am | IP Logged

leosmith wrote:

I live 40 miles from the border, but not in
Canada. Would you like to chat in Thai?

Yes please. Chai, karuna. Khun mi Skype mai?
1 person has voted this message useful

Cesare M.
Senior Member
Canada
youtube.com/user/CheRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5171 days ago
99 posts - 135 votes

Speaks: English*

Message 27 of 64

02 October 2010 at 4:27am | IP Logged

ellasevia wrote:

Again, I have no intentions of being at all
offensive, but here is my critique of your new language video
for the languages that I have some knowledge of.

ITALIAN: Sounds pretty good, but there were a few
grammatical mistakes that I heard.

FRENCH: It’s okay. I can understand most of what you were
saying, but you made up a couple words and some of the
grammar was wrong.

SPANISH: I could barely understand your Spanish. I think I got
the gist of it, but you still seem to be at a fairly beginning stage
of your studies.

PORTUGUESE: About the same level as your Spanish, but I
think I understood it better. You mixed in several Spanish and
Italian words instead of Portuguese though, and there were
some grammatical mistakes. I’m not sure that learning the
language from Google Translate was the best idea.

ROMANIAN: I could understand the one sentence you spoke
in Romanian, but I don’t think it was correct. I’m at a beginner-
intermediate stage in this language myself, so I might be
wrong here, but I would hesitate to call you fluent.

RUSSIAN: I was surprised to find that I could mostly
understand your Russian (and some bit of the other Slavic
languages), but I can’t really comment on the correctness. All I
know is that I could mostly understand you.

GREEK: Your Greek is total gibberish. I couldn’t understand
any of your spoken Greek at all, and what you said (in terms of
sounds) certainly doesn’t match up with the text you gave as a
transcription. The transcription, by the way, also has many
errors.

GERMAN: I think I may have understood what you were
trying to say for German, but almost every word was
pronounced incorrectly as far as I can tell and it was definitely
not easy to comprehend.

I don't have enough knowledge of Indonesian, Bulgarian,
Persian, Albanian, Catalan, Serbo-Croatian, Urdu, Ukrainian,
Dari, Azerbaijani, Arabic, Macedonian, Thai, Estonian, Danish,
Kyrgyz, Georgian, Pashto, Chuvash, Hindi, Gujarati, Turkish,
Kazakh, or Latin to accurately judge your level on those, so
you'll need to wait for someone who does speak those
proficiently, but I did make some observations about a few of
them:

ESTONIAN: I know how Estonian is pronounced and you
pronounced some stuff wrong according to what I see as the
transcript.

DANISH: I usually can’t understand more than one or two
words now and then in authentic spoken Danish (from my
Swedish), but since in your video I understood most of what
you were saying, I’m guessing it wasn’t pronounced correctly…

GEORGIAN: That was a rather short sentence, but it didn’t
sound like the Georgian I’ve heard. I actually understood a
couple of words from prior flirtations with the language, but I
don’t think they were pronounced correctly. However, I might
be mistaken.

For a couple of them I think you could get away with claiming
basic fluency, Italian for example. Your Slavic languages and
Indonesian sounded pretty fluent actually, but again, I have no
idea whether or not they were at all correct. However, for many
of them I think it's a stretch to even claim basic fluency, for
example Greek, Georgian, and Latin. For Greek at least, you're
still at a very beginning level.

A small suggestion for any future videos is to speak for longer
for each language because some of those were simply too
short. Another idea is to use the same text for each language
about a random topic (such as talking about your favorite book
or something) so that we can compare each language to each
other.

Don't be discouraged by any of the comments here though.
Although I don't think you are fluent in most of them, you do
know a little of many languages which is a good starting place
for becoming more fluent. Keep trying and maybe you will get
to the point of fluency in all 39 languages in the
future!

Hey thanks for the critique. I deleted my new 39 language
video and what I am going to do is to make seperate videos
about me speaking different languages for each video about
how I learned those languages and then I will eventually make
more videos about a random topic in those languages.
1 person has voted this message useful

s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5431 days ago
2704 posts - 5425 votes

Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish

Message 28 of 64

02 October 2010 at 2:59pm | IP Logged

This thread has to be one of the funniest moments here at HTLAL where we usually get our noses out of joint over weighty topics. I really can't take it seriously. I had the opportunity to look at the 39-language video before it was deleted. Actually I have to congratulate the author for having the guts to do something like that. I certainly wouldn't have had the nerve. As for the contents, I really can't assess the languages I don't know. Even so, I think the level of proficiency in each of the languages is kind of irrelevant. The author is actually "speaking" the languages. How well is another matter. It just goes to show that so much of our debates about the kinds of fluency are totally meaningless. If Cesare M. believes he is a superpolyglot according to his definition, who am I to say otherwise?
2 persons have voted this message useful

Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6440 days ago
4474 posts - 6726 votes

Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

Message 29 of 64

02 October 2010 at 5:12pm | IP Logged

s_allard wrote:

Cesare's interest in a number of languages is commendable. I wouldn't quite say he spoke 39 in the video, though. Quite a few seemed to be edging towards Interlingua/Slovio/Tutonish in a way. He sort of hinted at this in his real vs fake criticism video as well; listen to what he says about his Ukrainian.

On a side note, it's clear that his French/Italian/Spanish are more comfortable to him than his Catalan or Latin, for example.

s_allard wrote:

It just goes to show that so much of our debates about the kinds of fluency are totally meaningless. If Cesare M. believes he is a superpolyglot according to his definition, who am I to say otherwise?

The debates may or may not be meaningless, but I don't really think this demonstrates it.

2 persons have voted this message useful

Cesare M.
Senior Member
Canada
youtube.com/user/CheRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5171 days ago
99 posts - 135 votes

Speaks: English*

Message 30 of 64

02 October 2010 at 8:48pm | IP Logged

s_allard wrote:

This thread has to be one of the funniest
moments here at HTLAL where we usually get our noses out
of joint over weighty topics. I really can't take it seriously. I had
the opportunity to look at the 39-language video before it was
deleted. Actually I have to congratulate the author for having
the guts to do something like that. I certainly wouldn't have had
the nerve. As for the contents, I really can't assess the
languages I don't know. Even so, I think the level of proficiency
in each of the languages is kind of irrelevant. The author is
actually "speaking" the languages. How well is another matter.
It just goes to show that so much of our debates about the
kinds of fluency are totally meaningless. If Cesare M. believes
he is a superpolyglot according to his definition, who am I to
say otherwise?

Thank you for defending me and yes I do admit it is very funny.
1 person has voted this message useful

skeeterses
Senior Member
United States
angelfire.com/games5Registered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6619 days ago
302 posts - 356 votes

1 sounds
Speaks: English*
Studies: Korean, Spanish

Message 31 of 64

03 October 2010 at 3:25am | IP Logged

Reading this thread has definitely reminded me of good reasons to focus on my Korean skills and stay out of this
"polyglotry" business.

At the risk of hurting some people's feelings, I'll go ahead and state the obvious. The polyglot in question is a 9
year old boy in the body of a grown man. The reason I'm even making a response is because a lot of the childish
excuses and thinking have been spouted so many times by other "polyglots" who ought to know better.

The first notion obviously that needs to be dispelled is the idea that a person can get fluent with a phrasebook
or foreign language 101 book alone. In some of the videos, I've seen the OP wave around the 101 books for
different languages and brag about learning half the words of some languages from his books. The mere fact
that he's on this bulletin board asking about other "fluent Thai speakers" from Canada shows that he believes
one can get fluent without regular contact with a native speaker.

The second mistake that he makes is judging his own language abilities by comparing himself with people of
lesser language skills. An example that he makes for his Russian skills is the fact that he's done volunteer work
with helping Russian immigrants on their English. Again, these people are fresh off the boat as far as their
English skills are concerned and are happy to have a volunteer help them learn English 101. If he had actually
applied for a professional Russian translation job, somebody in the Real World would hold the OP's feet to the
fire on his claims of Russian fluency.

Another thing that he does that is kind of annoying, and a lot of other "polyglots" do, is play around with the
definition of fluency. The OP mentioned that he knew some friends who spoke a foreign language as young
children and only know a few words, but still consider themselves "native speakers." Unfortunately all too often,
when young children immigrate to a monolingual country and learn the language of the land, they get fluent in
English/Spanish and end up either forgetting their mother tongues or knowing just enough of their mother
tongue to communicate to their grandparents in the kitchen. If that happens, a person cannot really be a "native
speaker" at that point because he/she would have to re-learn the language in order to speak it well again. In the
text response to one of his videos, the OP said that to learn his 39 languages, he simply went through the
phrasebooks, learned a bunch of vocabulary words, conjugations, and prepositions, and then put things
together. In some languages that have difficult grammars, the native speakers don't take kindly to a foreigner
just tossing words together and making many grammatical mistakes in his/her speech.

There's another thing that some "polyglots" do when playing around with the definition of fluency, and that is
believe or have other people believe that a person can get fluent in a foreign language without having to do any
serious reading in things like books or newspapers. The OP himself has not talked about his reading level for his
39 languages, but I believe that this is something very important to mention. There is plenty of psychological
research showing how crucial literacy is for the development of language. And yet so many people will claim
fluency in a foreign language while openly admitting they can't even read a short sports article in their target
language. While a person can get quite comfortable doing basic communication in a foreign language such as
ordering food or talking about the weather and be "fluent" in talking about those things, unless a person is well
versed in the literature of his/her target language and can comfortably watch TV in that language, "fluency" ends
the moment the person steps out of the restaurant and has to have a real conversation. Sure, the small talk is
important. But if a person really wants to be fluent in a foreign language, the difficult stuff like newspapers and
TV programs can't merely be thought of as Icing on the Cake.

Edited by skeeterses on 03 October 2010 at 3:34am
16 persons have voted this message useful

s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5431 days ago
2704 posts - 5425 votes

Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish

Message 32 of 64

04 October 2010 at 11:37pm | IP Logged

skeeterses wrote:

...

There's another thing that some "polyglots" do when playing around with the definition of fluency, and that is
believe or have other people believe that a person can get fluent in a foreign language without having to do any
serious reading in things like books or newspapers. The OP himself has not talked about his reading level for his
39 languages, but I believe that this is something very important to mention. There is plenty of psychological
research showing how crucial literacy is for the development of language. And yet so many people will claim
fluency in a foreign language while openly admitting they can't even read a short sports article in their target
language. While a person can get quite comfortable doing basic communication in a foreign language such as
ordering food or talking about the weather and be "fluent" in talking about those things, unless a person is well
versed in the literature of his/her target language and can comfortably watch TV in that language, "fluency" ends
the moment the person steps out of the restaurant and has to have a real conversation. Sure, the small talk is
important. But if a person really wants to be fluent in a foreign language, the difficult stuff like newspapers and
TV programs can't merely be thought of as Icing on the Cake.

I agree with most of what this poster has said. Those who have followed my crusade against the use of the word fluency when we really mean proficiency will not be surprised. My only quibble here is with the idea that fluency (fluidity of speech) or proficiency (overall mastery of the language) implies literacy. Let's first remember that many of the world's languages are oral languages with either weak or non-existent writing tradition. I'm thinking of indigenous languages today. The other thing to keep in mind is that one can speak a language very well and not be literate. Writing skills are very different from speaking skills. Literacy has nothing to do with fluency.

What is very true is that to be an educated or sophisticated speaker of a language with a strong writing tradition (i.e. with an abundant literature), one has to be literate.

To come back to the fundamental issue here, I would like to state once again that fluency as used here is such a vague concept that there is nothing to prevent someone from claiming that they speak X number of languages if they can utter some meaningful sequence of sounds. For that reason I have no objection with the OP's claim of speaking 39 languages.

On the other hand, if someone says to me that they are at a CEFR B1 level in 10 or 15 or 30 languages, then I will take full notice and give all due respect.

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