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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 17 of 21 27 March 2015 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't speak many of my B-range languages fluently (Greek, Mandarin, Hebrew, most of the
Romance languages except for Romanian and French), but even a B-level language is pretty useful. I know that all my very good languages are all Indo-European (from the Germanic, Romance and Slavic families) but that doesn't mean I can't use any of the others - even with poor Italian I managed to converse for an hour, I can hold my own in Mandarin (though it's not good and needs improvement) and I can already deduce a lot of complex Greek. Will I ever speak all of these languages at the C2 level? I doubt it. I'm a traveller, and all I need to know is what is enough for my purposes, and if I know more it is because I have developed a particular interest in that culture or spent an extortionate amount of time amongst those people. Which is why I probably will speak Mandarin for the rest of my life, even though that's not a C level language for me and won't be for a good while. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 18 of 21 30 March 2015 at 11:14am | IP Logged | |||||
I can very much relate to this! At times, language learning feels like it's zero-sum and improving one language is at the expense of others, even related ones. Or even improving one aspect of a language is at the expense of other aspects of it. I don't know what the solution is, especially since you're juggling a couple more than I am; I'm just showing some solidarity :). I think that going from speaking a language quite well to speaking it very well is the hardest part of learning: it not only takes a ton of effort, but that effort has to be sustained in order to keep progressing and not move backwards. Doing that in more than one language is a very big ask unless you have a ton of free time. These days I just try to see the positive side in order to not lose motivation. Being able to speak a few languages "quite well" is still a great thing and incredibly useful, even if I would prefer "very well", and slow progress is better than none so I try to keep moving or at least maintain and not lose too much. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 19 of 21 30 March 2015 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The last step is indeed the most time-consuming, but the good thing is that at this stage
you can't 100% lose your knowledge. And it has to be said that I have not yet found a satisfactory approach to improving efficiently at higher levels - but of course I am not juggling 2 or 3 languages, but in the vicinity of a dozen. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4049 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 20 of 21 08 April 2015 at 1:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi guys, thank you for all your messages.
I came back from my vacation in Spain, where I had a lot of fun speaking Spanish, even if mostly with waiters and owners of hotels and camping. But I did my preparation completely in informal situations and did all this administrative things without any specific training, so. And it is because of this that I remembered that I don't need to be Shakespeare to enjoy of the languages. I have all life to improve my languages. So now it's the time to add two more. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5061 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 21 of 21 09 April 2015 at 8:23am | IP Logged | |||||
I couldn't disagree more with this statement. The reason that few people know seven or more languages is, quite simply, that most people don't need or want to and don't find the required effort worthwhile. It is quite difficult to hold many languages at a level where you can speak well at a moment's notice, but the limiting factor is not "3" but rather the frequency with which you get to use them (although the amount of maintenance required varies among polyglots). It's not unreasonable that you could have five or more languages that you get a chance to speak every week--an hour or two of each one should be enough to maintain speaking fluency. And it's not at all unheard of for talented language users to be able to speak at a high level in languages that they haven't been regularly speaking in the last few weeks. And as for the number you could have at a "limited proficiency" being 2 (for a total of 5), it's hard for me to imagine anyone believing to be an authority on the matter and making such a preposterous statement. Why do people like to say that learning lots of languages is impossible? I don't get it. Sure, if you have a full-time job that doesn't involve learning languages and a spouse who isn't a polyglot and kids, you're unlikely to find time to do it. That makes sense, because there is no prize for learning a 10th language. But we wouldn't use this reasoning to say that there is some "maximum" for how good you can get at piano or chess or whatever because you don't have enough time to practice. To find out what your maximum is, you have to go all in . It doesn't seem reasonable to talk about the "maximum" for the number of languages you could potentially learn unless you've spent at least 3 hours per day working at it for at least 30 years, and that as a bare minimum! It is irrelevant to talk about the number of people who actually know more than seven languages, because almost no one really tries (or has the luxury to), even the polyglots on HTLAL.
I don't try to maintain speaking fluency in all my languages. There are two languages that I regularly speak, and so maintain fluency without any special effort. I find that for my stronger languages, I'm able to speak them even when I'm out of practice. Not perfectly, but well enough to get by. Anyway, if I need to reactivate them (e.g. when traveling) it's not that difficult. After abandoning the goal of maintaining constant speaking fluency in all my languages, I find that passive maintenance is not too bad, maybe 1-2 hours a day including passive listening while washing dishes, sitting in the bus, etc. The trick is to replace native language media with other languages. It's a lifestyle choice, but it's not like I have to study for three hours every night. Mostly, I just watch fewer movies and read fewer books in English, and use the gained time to maintain my languages. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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