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Polyglot mentality | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| Koos Newbie Sweden Joined 6186 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English | Message 1 of 6 25 December 2007 at 12:10am | IP Logged |
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I would like to know more about the mentality of polyglots. Many years ago I went to a seminar where results from polyglot studies were presented. Claims were made that the only difference between polyglots and other people is the attitude. While people generally were held back in their language learning processes by their own fear to make mistakes, the polyglots were supposed to dive in head on, driven by a desire to communicate at any cost. The reason behind this was supposedly the polyglots’ interest in foreign cultures and the individuals that they met. The last statement seems to correspond well to the ideas about embracing culture in the message Edited by Sprachjunge on May 17 2005.
What I want to do is to write a thesis on language learning, where the concept of “learning how to learn from those who have learned the best (the polyglots)” is an important part. My immediate problem is that I never got hold of any references a decade ago, so right now I am in desperate need of sources to back up these ideas with. Web sources would of course be most convenient. It is not so difficult to find texts on the net about polyglot studies that focuses on neurological differences, but this is not so interesting if you are in to learning and teaching, because there is not much to do about it. I find the psychological side of the matter interesting, because if some attitudes are more favourable than others, then a change of attitude on behalf of the learner would be most profitable in order to achieve positive language learning results. With kind regards, Koos 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mrinternational Triglot Newbie United States Joined 6577 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Mandarin, Italian | Message 2 of 6 25 December 2007 at 3:54pm | IP Logged |
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Hello,
I want to give you some insight about the polyglot mentality. I speak 5 languages. They are English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian. Now I'm only a native speaker of english. I'm not an expert but I'm just a language lover. I speak the other 4 languages with varying degrees of fluency. For me, my definition of fluency means being able to hold a flowing conversation with someone with minimal or no stumbling. As for my attitude about it, I love learning foreign languages. I think that multicultural awareness is a great thing.In all honesty, I have studied over 7 languages all together. I am still studying other languages in my spare time. Whenever I meet someone who is from another country, I always want to talk to them in their language or say just a little bit to them in their native language. I realized that I could pick up on languages very quickly. As a result of that, I just continue to learn another language. Some languages are harder than others but there are linguistic methods that I use to help me learn a language. Also, my incentive is to go to another country and be able to get around using the language that I have acquired. I hope this will help you. However, please feel free to ask me any specific questions in depth. I have been studying foreign languages for at least 8 years. I will be glad to help you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 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 3 of 6 26 December 2007 at 3:31pm | IP Logged |
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For me the polyglot mentality is something you develop when you learn more and more languages, - it's not something you have from the beginning and just have to put into practice. When you learn your fourth or fifth language you realize that this is a process that could in principle continue ad nauseam, - it's not because languages are inherently difficult that you don't learn them, but just a matter of lack of time, lack of ressources and some more or less rational choices. In principle any language could end up on your CV if you just decided to learn it (and were prepared to accept the consequences in terms of time and money). Personally I have decided to learn whole language families: the Germanic and the Romance languages plus Greek (so far only Dhimotiki), and I'm going to add the Slavic languages to my collection. Realistically seen I may not have time for more, but in the unlikely case that I got a splendid job offer in Bangkok the first thing I would do would be to learn Thai. If I somehow got a year in Taipeh I would learn Mandarin and probably also Taiwanese. That's in my opinion the essence of being a (minor league) polyglot.
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| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6707 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 4 of 6 29 December 2007 at 9:06am | IP Logged |
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I think one of the keys to becoming a polyglot is realizing that languages skills that can be trained rather than knowledge sets that can be learned.
Most people when they learn languages think they can learn a set of rules and a bunch of vocabulary, and they will know the language. They get frustrated when they find out it doesn't work that way. They also tend to think that people who have successfully learned a new language have some kind of gift or magic that lets them leap from having the rules and words to being able to speak fluently. Anyone who really learns a language discovers that it's about training yourself to respond in the foreign language the way an athlete trains himself to respond in a game. It's about repetition of key elements (grammar) in a way that lets you be flexible, and use them with a variety of vocabulary. Sometimes they do this by accident, because they live in the environment and are forced to use their language. Polyglots realize it's not an accident and know that what they achieved in the first, they can achieve in the eight, tenth or twenty-first. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7261 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 5 of 6 30 December 2007 at 4:55pm | IP Logged |
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Ms. Koos [please forgive me if you are really Mr. Koos X, but as you have failed to properly identify yourself, I have chosen to err on the side of politeness],
Please tell me more about the nature of your thesis—may I assume that it is a dissertation for an Ed.D in applied linguistics? You are heading in the wrong direction if you are following the conclusions of the conference you mentioned, for it is patently ludicrous to claim that the only difference between polyglots and non-polyglots is “attitude.” You will have to define that term first and foremost, as in general I think one’s “attitude” is a relatively superficial mental state that can be changed quite easily, indeed instantaneously, either by force of will or by some shock to one’s perspective, and non-polyglots certainly need to change more than that in order to become polyglots. Fear of making mistakes does inhibit some learners, but that is not the reason why there are not more polyglots in this world. Likewise, the notion that polyglots are driven by a desire to communicate at any cost does not explain polyglottery at all to me, for I can honestly say that a desire to communicate has played absolutely no role at all at any stage of my own language learning life. Mr. Iversen, you are most emphatically NOT a minor league polyglot! Considering that you are, in the original and best sense of the word, an “amateur,” while I am a “professional,” your achievements do not lag behind my own in any sense. Indeed, because you lead a more “normal” life, as is opposed to my unusually language-centered one, should we ever disagree on any important point of language learning (and I do not believe we have thus far), most younger language-learners would be better advised to follow your advice than mine. I value your insight and critique most highly, and I wish your kind of maturity would prevail even more often in this room. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 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 6 of 6 13 January 2008 at 6:11am | IP Logged |
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To Professor Arguelles:
Thank you very much for the laudatory words about me. To be true it may not be precise to say that I'm in the minor league - in fact even minor league players are professionals. I'm indisputedly in the amateur league, but I'm happy there and doing my best to progress. The big problem is that polyglottery seems to be on the wane within the academic world because everybody seems to think that their native language and English is enough. So being a professional in the minor league may actually be worse than being totally outside the system. The advent of the internet has been wonderful for those of us who deliberately choose to learn more languages because it is much easier to find written sources with an interesting content now (especially non fiction), and for the spoken language it is a pure bliss to be able to find radio and TV stations from all over the world. But the same medium that offers these possibilities is also luring all of us into an Anglophone world where any other language is something that you find pushed into some dark corner where the worms can eat away at it. The possibilities for becoming a polyglot have improved immensely, but the temptation not to become one has also grown. This is particularly evident if you consider the non fiction literature. If we are speaking fiction everybody is probably vaguely aware that translations almost always are less valuable from any point of view than the originals, even though people choose to read the translations because they can't read the originals. Therefore all good libraries in Denmark have at least some works of fiction in major foreign languages like French and German (plus the languages of our immigrants). But it is difficult to find non fiction in for instance Italian og Spanish. So that's where the internet can really help out. In the Danish television foreign films are luckily not dubbed, but subtitled, so if you can stand hystery and tears you can learn Portuguese from Brazilian soap operas. But most non fiction programmes comes from the Anglophone realm, and even most fiction is Anglophone, and you have to be lucky to hear non fiction in other languages. The basic problem may be that the people who buy the programs don't know what is happening outside the languages they know themselves, and therefore it always ends up with one more program in English. The only solution for the budding polyglot is to get your non-English programmes directly from abroad, and again the internet comes as sent from heaven. But the internet also puts you in a situation where you can find enough interesting English material to gobble up every spare second of your time, so it is indeed a two-edged sword. In several of your earlier threads (for instance the one referenced by Rob in another thread) you stress the importance of reading the major works of literature. Both for the cultural importance and for learning the very best of a certain language that is undoubtedly a good advice. In fact I do sometimes read fiction and I have both Os Lusiadas and Il Nome della Rosa lined up for me in the upcoming week. And for studying a certain language fiction may generally be better than non fiction because literary authors are generally more focused on language itself than those who write non fiction. But occasionally I do find books that combine a good command of the language with interesting non fictional content, - that's my preferred genre, and when I find such a book I'm just happy. Edited by Iversen on 13 January 2008 at 6:44am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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