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Learning many languages | ||
Tags: Polyglottery | Number of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5326 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 25 of 30 09 August 2010 at 6:29am | IP Logged | |||||
language and what you know, a lot of it could be figured out from derivatives and common roots), it would help to know that many words if reading a novel. I was really tired, and for some reason I only thought about speaking a language, not writing/hearing/reading. My mistake. 1 person has 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 26 of 30 09 August 2010 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree very much with Iversen but with a slight nuance that, I'm sure, he is probably aware of. When one speaks of a word, as in 3000 words for a basic vocabulary, one must be aware that many words have multiple meanings, especially the most common words. I prefer to speak of lexical units associated with a given word. If you look up the English verb "to make" in a big dictionary, you will see a very long list of meanings and all sorts of idiomatic expressions with that word. Then look up the same word in any bilingual dictionary and you'll see how complicated it is to translate "to make". In a similar manner, if you look up the translation of the Spanish "ya" into English, you will probably be surprised how many different usages of "ya" exist.
The point of all of this is that a basic vocabulary of 3000 words is actually more like 10000 lexical units and 20000 words correspond to many many more units. The other nuance is that this idea of a core vocabulary of 3000 words for 90% of our speaking needs does not take into account the fact that any given specific subject requires some specialized vocabulary. For example, you can speak Spanish very fluently with those 3000 words but you can quickly feel stumped if you are asked to explain in Spanish how to make a cheese omelette or how to buy a bicycle. 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 27 of 30 09 August 2010 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I certainly agree with s_allard, - in fact the most common words in a language are generally also those that have the most idiomatic uses - and the most varied ones too. But my word counts are based on the notion 'headword', which roughly are the words printed in bold typeface in a dictionary in the target language. It is the only practical way to do those counts.
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| deej Tetraglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5337 days ago 31 posts - 38 votes Speaks: Hindi, English*, Italian, French | Message 28 of 30 09 August 2010 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, that sounds great! Even though I would really love to be able to speak them all well, I think just having some knowledge of as many languages as possible, or a fair few languages, even if that knowledge was very limited, would be good enough for me. But I've decided to just see how it goes instead of setting myself definite targets- targets may lead to just frustration/putting too much pressure on myself and taking the fun away. I'm not so sure of what you said about not being in a bilingual/trilingual environment being a massive drawback though, I could and have spent days being mostly surrounded by French through using the Internet, French magazines and newspapers, vocab sheets and French books and films, and I live in London! So it is still possible to gain access to your target language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| egbert Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5210 days ago 20 posts - 19 votes Studies: Japanese, English* | Message 30 of 30 19 August 2010 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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it will probarly be possible but only if you spend your whole life learning. I know it doesnt say it but I speak 4 languages fluently and intend to learn more
GOOD LUCK! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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