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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6138 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 41 of 41 17 October 2010 at 3:29pm | IP Logged |
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I been wanting to post in this thread for some time (the language family part) as it
really did make me re-evaluate "numbers of languages" and the "speak vs study" debates. I work with a hundred or so other linguists, all highly skilled and dedicated, but I only know one other person has more than two language families. I think this is down to two reasons: firstly you need to have a really in-depth knowledge of the languages you use professionally and so it tends to deaden you enthusiasm for adding languages to a lower level because you know you're never going to use them (as Homer Simpson once said -No matter how hard you try there are always at least a million other people who are better than you. So the morale is, don't try). Secondly, most of the languages we (the UK establishment as a whole) are interested in are I-E (even seemingly exotic languages like Farsi, Kurdish, Pashto, Punjabi, Bengali etc); jobs working with the Non-I-E languages are more often than not staffed by bilingual speakers (i.e. - learnt during childhood). The other person with more than 2 families is actually bilingual in Korean-English; but he also speaks very good Mandarin - but otherwise people tend to focus on adding related languages. Personally, I have 24 Anki decks at the moment and 1 set of physical flashcards covering the following families: Indo-European - (Adv - French, Spanish, Russian Int - Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Slovak, Farsi Beg - Bulgarian, Pali, Nepali, Armenian) Tai-Kadai - Adv Thai Indo-Pacific - Int Indonesian Afro-Asiatic - Beg/Int MS Arabic, Beg Hebrew Austro Asiatic - Beg/Int Cambodian Beg Vietnamese Sino-Tibetan - Int Mandarin, Beg Burmese (the physical deck - typing Burmese is a nightmare!) Esperanto - Int Japanese (just learning the Kanji at the moment - proficiency in Japanese is a very long-term goal - 5+ years) Niger Congo - Beg Swahili Kartvelian - Beg Georgian (Beginning is Teach Yourself or Colloquial standard; Advanced is entering any words I don't recognise while I'm using the language; Intermediate is the bit in between - adding vocab from readers, vocab books etc.) It seems at lots but many are at the very early stages (300-500 words for Georgian, Swahili, Armenian), some are just on the back burner to keep things fresh (Indonesian) while I have quite low or passive only targets for others (Farsi, Italian, Japanese). And I'm certainly not claiming spoken fluency in all the languages in the advanced category. I should also point out that the reason I'm using Anki as an indicator is because I've studied many different languages over the past 10 or so years to the level where I am familiar with the grammatical concepts but my vocab as been pretty much zero. But since I've discovered Anki I've become addicted and found the perfect way to finish many of the half-finished textbooks on my shelves. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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