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Learning many languages | ||
Tags: Polyglottery | Number of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| balou67 Triglot Newbie France Joined 5231 days ago 15 posts - 31 votes Speaks: French*, Esperanto, English Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese | Message 9 of 30 31 July 2010 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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About "keep[ing] revising them constantly which would take some of the fun away", it
only depends on how you revise them. Is your goal revising grammar charts over and over again, or *using* it to talk with people, whatch movies, read fun books and surf the web? While chatting online, you can quite easily browse an online dictionary for the words you might not know yet. (I'm talking about those languages you already spoke a bit, but some would recomend it even earier in the learning.) Using a language don't have to be serious and boring. You learnt yours fooling around in the schoolyard, didn't you? Have fun! :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5446 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 10 of 30 31 July 2010 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it's worth remembering that the geniuses of old who spoke 20 languages weren't taking the JLPT or posting YouTube videos to prove their linguistic prowess. Rather, they were living busy lives filled with varied people, places and interests. They didn't speak 20 languages merely because they wanted to. They spoke 20 languages because they had to in order to give full expression to the lives they had chosen for themselves. How well did they speak their 20 languages? Well enough for their purposes, which tells us nothing on the one hand and everything we really need to know on the other!
There are lots of reasons to learn languages: travel, literature, cinema, love and friendship, family ties, business, music and, of course, the love of languages. I think it works best to combine the love of language with something else. You need something outside the language itself not just to motivate you, but so that you can realistically assess whether your learning is actually adding something to your life. By the exacting standards some on this forum set themselves, I'd never claim to speak Spanish, never mind post YouTube videos to prove it. And yet if a client doesn't speak English, I will switch to Spanish. If a Spanish speaker in a shop or on the street appears unable to communicate in English, I'll step in to interpret if I have a few minutes. If I get an e-mail in Spanish, I read it and write back in Spanish (prefacing my answer with an apology for any errors). If I were learning Spanish just to learn Spanish and you asked me if I spoke it, my mind would fill with questions like: "Am I B1 or B2?" and "What if I'm just B1, is that good enough to claim I speak it?" But for Spanish, my life does not allow me such silliness. When someone asks me, "Do you speak Spanish?" they are really asking, "Can you help me?" or "Do you want my business?" It's much harder to answer "no" to these questions. When you think about learning languages, don't think about levels of fluency. Think about what you want to be able to do to enrich your life, increase your options or broaden your horizons. For me, for Spanish, fluency doesn't matter. Being able to talk to clients and colleagues for work and read Borges after hours does. The real allure of the polyglots of old, I think, was not just that they spoke 20 or 30 or 50 or 50 languages. The real allure was that in an era when many people never left their home villages, these men could seemingly go anywhere, however exotic, and read anything, however esoteric. The world was theirs. You indicate you'd like to be a polyglot, to do more with your "9" languages, but that you're concerned that it will distract from your other interests. It may be that you're learning the wrong languages. Imagine the places where your life would be better if you spoke more languages. Which languages would you need to read your favorite philosophers in the original? To follow the commentary for football matches not covered on English language television? To communicate better with customers and colleagues, or the people in your neighborhood? If you really want to do this, don't look for a way to fit in learning and maintaining languages. Look for a way to broaden your horizons so the languages become naturally a part of your life. 17 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Po-ru Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5479 days ago 173 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, Mandarin, French | Message 11 of 30 01 August 2010 at 2:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, it depends what you mean by fluent. If you mean speak perfectly, read everything
you see, and pretty much understand it like your native language, then I think 20 languages is impossible. If you mean that you want to speak very very well, have a really good understanding of everything you read, and understand a large amount of what you hear, then I believe that 20 languages is certainly possible. I think Steve Kaufmann and Professor Arguelles are very "fluent" in at least 10 languages and are probably very good in many more. Moses McCormick, may not be as fluent as those two in many languages, but he's certainly conversational in at least 30 or 40. So it really depends how good you want to be. Unless you devote your whole life to learning and living with a language(or a few), your not going to get to be as good as your native one. Personally, I'd rather be a sort of high level in 40 languages, than perfect in 5. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5584 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 12 of 30 01 August 2010 at 2:53am | IP Logged | ||
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This is my favorite thing about language learning. The sky is the limit. Who says you CAN'T or WON'T do something? You do. I'm not going to come on here and say you won't be able to learn 20 languages. Will it be difficult? Of course. Can you do it? Absolutely.
I've picked 5 foreign languages that I would love to reach advanced fluency in. I guess my goals are humble in comparison to others; however there are many people on this forum that have 20 times the intelligence than I do. You can definitely learn as many languages as you want, the only thing against you is time. If you put in the effort; you'll have a fantastic product, and that's what I love about language learning. You get out what you put in. Members on this forum have achieved things that I could only dream of. "Foreigners" speak my native language better than I do. People speak 6,7,8, or 20 languages as if it's nothing. I'll be happy to know one or two. I'm recognizing and understanding words in another language and I don't even know what they mean in my native tongue. Don't come on here and ask if your goals are possible. Of course they are. Stay true to your goals; and let no one slow you down. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5326 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 13 of 30 01 August 2010 at 5:52am | IP Logged | ||
Seriously, it doesn't matter who says you can only learn X number of languages. Learn 500 languages, prove people wrong. Show people it's possible. If someone tells you you can't do something, that's one more reason to do it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| deej Tetraglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5337 days ago 31 posts - 38 votes Speaks: Hindi, English*, Italian, French | Message 14 of 30 01 August 2010 at 9:36am | IP Logged | ||
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BartoG: Nice post. I have no problem with going for 20+ languages unless it takes
absolutely all of time, because as I said, I have other passions as well. I am learning languages mainly simply out of a love for languages, but I suppose there is the attraction of simply being able to consider myself very good at something, being able to impress others, and definitely travelling as I love meeting new people and discovering new cultures. But I don't think that there are certain languages which would enrich my life much more than others-my passion is such that I would like to learn all the languages in the world if I had time and if somebody offered to teach me some obscure language I had never heard of right now I would not say no. Thanks everyone else for the advice as well, it has been positive enough to encourage me to go for it. This may turn out to be a big decision in my life and I certainly hope I enjoy languages in the future as much as I do now. Thanks. One thing which surprised me though was that people think it's much harder to reach native fluency than it is to be simply fairly fluent/conversational. This doesn't really bother me much as native fluency is not my aim but I would have thought it would have consisted of just learning all the colloquial expressions, practicing very regularly, and memorising a lot more vocab. Any advice on learning 20+ languages is always welcome, cheers. 1 person has 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 15 of 30 01 August 2010 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree with Zamie, - if you spend one year in 20 countries (or rather language communities) AND do some focused language study in each of these, then you will end up with twenty languages which you can speak. But few of us can live this kind of life, and those that do live like international nomads will in all likelyhood stick to a few languages because they are more interested in doing business than in learning languages. At the other end of the scale you find those that remain stuck in monoglot societies, and it must be a chore for them to get enough input in other languages. Though the internet opens up some possibilities that the parent generation of those people didn't have. In between there are people like me, who live in a country where most people know at least two languages (though their English may not be top notch), and where there is an ample supply of TV from different countries and local TV with subtitles. But if you want to learn twenty languages even that is not enough. Personally I travel a lot, and I use the internet, but this is not the same thing as living permanently in twenty countries one after the other. So the solution can only be to aim lower, i.e. to aim for basic fluency instead of near-native fluency, at least at the outset, and to do a lot of formal studies of vocabulary and grammar as a means to squeeze out more information from the input you do manage to get. If I can read everything in a language (including dialect texts), understand ordinary TV programs and do weeklong monolingual voyages where I can discuss history and science and travelling with the local population without getting replies in English, then that's all I want. Setting yourself too high goals from the beginning just leads to frustrations. Edited by Iversen on 01 August 2010 at 9:33pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 16 of 30 04 August 2010 at 5:08am | IP Logged | ||
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I think most people underestimate what is involved in learning a language to native-like proficiency at an adult age. Tens of thousands of words, hundreds of grammatical rules, retraining of mouth muscles for the phonetics plus the cultural content and all sorts of rules of social-linguistic etiquette. It's quite staggering when you think about it.
So, the fundamental question, as others have pointed out here, is really how you define your goals. One foreign language can take a lifetime to master or one can learn enough of various languages to get by. Both are very valid goals. My specialty is French, and I can say that I have met very few native English-speakers who can speak French at anything close to native level as a result of formal study. You have to live in a language to able to speak it. Let me just add that many people think they speak a language well because they understand it and people understand them. It's true that being understood is an achievement, but what happens so often is that one can be understood and still make terrible mistakes. Just today I was in a bank here in Montreal, Canada, and the French-speaking teller was speaking Spanish to a Mexican client. Her Spanish was quite good, but she repeatedly used "carta" as in "carta de crédito" instead of "tarjeta" for "card" or "carte" in French. This is very common and understandable mistake because the word "carta" does exist in Spanish and resembles the English or French word. The Spanish-speaking client obviously understood because he was able to make the connection and the correction. This is just a small example of the many pitfalls that we face when we speak a language relatively well. Because of our native language or other languages, we tend to unknowingly mix things up even though we can make ourselves understood. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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