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Role Models | ||
Tags: Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Gorgoll2 Senior Member Brazil veritassword.blogspo Joined 5148 days ago 159 posts - 192 votes  Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 9 of 17 10 March 2011 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I try learn whatever I want. In the past, I did adopt role models like Bowring,
Ikonomou, Iversen, among others. I won´t do it more. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| portunhol Triglot Senior Member United States thelinguistblogger.w Joined 6254 days ago 198 posts - 299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (classical) | Message 10 of 17 10 March 2011 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm sorry guys. I am more than just a little surprised and incredulous. If you ask the two living of The Three Tenors both will say that one of the most influential people that made them want to sing opera professionally was Mario Lanza for his portrayal of Enrique Caruso in The Great Caruso. Caruso was Lanza's role modle and even Caruso himself had a role model.
No one inspired any of you to become polyglots? You all just independently, as if in a vacuum, decided that language learning was really cool and worth hours of effort? No polyglot has come before you and made you say something like, Hey, that's really cool! I wonder if I could do that too.? Sorry, but I just don't buy it. I realize that we are all individuals and that we all have our own style and goals but I just don't believe that no one, real or fictional, ever inspired any of you to try an learn languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 11 of 17 11 March 2011 at 12:25am | IP Logged | ||
This is definitely my case. No one around me was a polyglot and Internet didn't exist yet -- at least not the way it does today. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mayfair Diglot Senior Member Australia theasiaanalyst.wordp Joined 5421 days ago 48 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Mandarin | Message 12 of 17 11 March 2011 at 1:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Kató Lomb.
I've only read one of her books, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, since I believe it's the only one translated, but it's filled with such infectious enthusiasm that whenever my motivation is flagging, one chapter is enough to make me dive right back into study. That's assuming I can stop reading the book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6652 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 13 of 17 11 March 2011 at 1:41am | IP Logged | ||
No one person inspired me to want to learn other languages in the same way no one person inspired me to learn my native language of English. It just came about as a desire to understand other people who speak those languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aldous Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5244 days ago 73 posts - 174 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 14 of 17 11 March 2011 at 7:37am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with Portunhol. Most of the answers on this thread have struck me as pretty weird. Maybe some folks come up with the idea of studying languages completely on their own and are entirely self-motivated. But I would think most people would have been inspired by others.
Some of my role models have been 1) My father, who was always tinkering with one language or another, usually obscure ones. 2) Indiana Jones, and other fictional characters who knew lots of languages. I thought it was pretty cool the way Indy could just glance at some old inscription and sight-read it. Even now, five minutes of Raiders or Last Crusade gets me fired up to study a language. 3) Barry Farber, author of How to Learn Any Language. That's when I first started learning the practical techniques for learning languages effectively. 4) More recently, the YouTube polyglots Stu Jay Raj, Glossika, lingosteve, and Huliganov. I've learned a lot from them, and it encourages me to see how much progress they've attained. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Torbyrne Super Polyglot Senior Member Macedonia SpeakingFluently.com Joined 6097 days ago 126 posts - 721 votes Speaks: French, English*, German, Spanish, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Czech, Catalan, Welsh, Serbo-Croatian Studies: Sign Language, Toki Pona, Albanian, Polish, Bulgarian, TurkishA1, Esperanto, Romanian, Danish, Mandarin, Icelandic, Modern Hebrew, Greek, Latvian, Estonian | Message 15 of 17 11 March 2011 at 10:38am | IP Logged | ||
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I never thought about the term polyglot much. It was simply a label attached to me as a by-product of my language study. I cannot therefore say there was a polyglot who acted a role model for me per se.
Many people, including other language learners, thought I was quite mad for wanting to learn more and more languages. The thought of doing a degree in more than 3 languages was not common in the first instance. A few people told me that I learning many more languages was impossible in quite strong terms. Whilst I was studying at university, e-mail and the Internet were new and exciting. I very quickly discovered IRC to talk to people around the world to practice my languages. It was brilliant. One of the people I spoke to on IRC was another language learner, who said he had studied 24 languages. I was very impressed but also unsure if any decent level of fluency could be achieved in so many languages. He asked me to go into several different language rooms, where he interacted with a number of other Internet users in a variety of languages. This was all before Google Translate, so no cheating! ;) I then asked him to call me on the phone, so I could speak to him in person. We spoke in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan and Swedish (the languages we had in common at that time). He was able to speak in all of the languages, and some of them were at a much higher level than me. I was suitably impressed by the display. I don't remember his name and I don't know where he is now or which languages he speaks. What I took from our conversations was that he confirmed my belief that believing in other people's ideas linguistic limitations is not the way to go. This was a light in the fog for me. Thankfully today we have much better contact to other like-minded people on forums such as this one and YouTube and other sites, where people can see, hear and contact polyglots. This was my main motivation to create my YouTube account and make the initial multilingual video. Whilst I do not think of myself as a role model, I do hope that my presence on YouTube serves to show other people out there that they are not alone in wishing to pursue studies in multiple languages. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5336 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 16 of 17 11 March 2011 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | ||
The thing is, becoming an opera singer is something you decide to do. And it is something which earns you fame, respect and good money. Becoming a polyglot may be more something that just happens, as you are interested in more and more languages. Being a polyglot sadly does not bring you fame and fortune, in fact most people think you are a litte mad to know more than 2-3 foreign languages. I never had a role model, in fact I didn't even think of myself as a polyglot until I found this forum. I just knew that I was passionate about languages, and discovering this site with so many others who are interested in languages made me feel like an adopted child who finally found her biological family. The one factor that gave me the basis for becoming a polyglot was my mother. She started teaching me English before all the other kids started learning English, she gave me lots of books in English, she sent me to live in a Spanish family when I was 11 and a French family when I was 14, and even offered to send me a year to England and a year to Germany when I was 16 (sadly I declined, but at least I got the opportunity). She taught me by example that even with 100 words of Spanish and French you can get by in those countries, if you add sufficient amounts of legs and arms. :-) Was she a polyglot? No. Not in our sense. She was fluent in German, since she grew up during the war, she could speak enough English to carry a conversation, and she knew enough Spanish, Dutch and French to get us fed on vacation. My father, who technically might qualify as a polyglot, since he taught English, French and German was no inspiration at all. He had studied languages like you study economics. It gave him a job, but was not a passion in any sense. I think what motivated me most was all the positive feed back I got after having learned Spanish and French. As a kid I was not particularly good at anything, and then suddenly I discovered that I was really good at speaking foreign languages. As for the polyglots that are known now, I have a lot af admiration and respect for both Torbyrne and Luca. I am impressed both by the number of languages they speak, and their level. I discovered them too late for them to be instrumental into making me a polyglot in the first place, but they are a great inspiration for me now. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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