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Comparing language portfolios | ||
Tags: CEFR Language Levels | Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| litovec Tetraglot Groupie Switzerland lingvometer.com Joined 5133 days ago 42 posts - 60 votes  Speaks: German, Russian, French, English | Message 1 of 18 17 April 2015 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Dear all,
I thought for a long time on how to score someone's language portfolio given that some languages are related to each other and have different proficiency levels. For example, 1-st person speaks 2 languages - French and Chinese, 2-nd person speaks 3 languages French, Italian, Spanish. Two is less than three, however, one could argue that two languages of the first person weigh more than three languages of the 2-nd person since for a French it's much easier to learn Italian or Spanish than Chinese. I tried to make such a calculator - lingvometer.com - there are some principles (the closer are the languages, the less is the score) and math behind it. A solution for the example above would be French + Chinese = 2 languages languages (one and one is two only for languages from different families), French + Italian + Spanish = 1.6 languages. In this way, we could better compare the achievements of others and judge our own. I'll be glad to hear your opinion about it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5238 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 2 of 18 17 April 2015 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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I have thought about this mainly because of trying to benchmark my own language abilities. The problem that you have is although there is an intellectual argument that one language is harder to learn than another, it doesn't take into account peoples predisposition toward the language (love it, hate it, etc), the opportunity to use it, and materials available.
If for example your 1st person is French, 18 years old, and marries a Chinese person and moves to Shanghai to live, attends a full-time Chinese language class for two years. They have 24/7 passive input of the language. The second person is also 18 years old, lives in Quebec and has almost no native speakers of Italian and Spanish around them, very little opportunity to use the languages and is forced to rely on MP3's, Movies, and books for what little input they can get. Who then has the more difficult task ahead? Who will require more motivation and have to work more diligently? I would argue the second person has the more difficult job, because they have more obstacles to over come. Personally I find spoken Mandarin more "logical" and easier to learn than French. They don't have crazy verb changes, and the word order in a sentence makes more sense to an English speaker. PinYin is a pronunciation guide and they don't have silent letters like French. The main drawback for Mandarin which I've encountered and the reason it might take longer to learn is the lack of cognates means you have to learn every word. But on the plus side of the cognate argument, there are no "false friends" to unlearn. And the writing system of course is different, but you can speak well enough only learning pinyin. I would argue Japanese is more difficult for a speaker of an Indo-European language because of the word order differences, (you have to talk like yoda). So your calculator would need to take into account motivation, materials, as well as opportunity for practice. EDIT: After looking at your site again, it occurs to me that you aren't taking the persons native language into account. An English speaker learning English would be easier than A French speaker learning English. Sure Mandarin is difficult to learn, but probably not so much if you speak Tibetan, as opposed to German. Edited by rdearman on 17 April 2015 at 1:44pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5191 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 3 of 18 17 April 2015 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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There's a small bug: if you delete ALL your languages and click submit, it goes to a "page not found" page.
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| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5264 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 4 of 18 17 April 2015 at 1:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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There must be some kind of inherent human need to quantify. On the surface, it seems easy to do, but there are so many variables involved, some of which rdearman has pointed out.
I'm just happy to be able to speak a couple of languages well, one (Haitian Creole) not as well and one (Ladino) gives me joy just because it is special and unlocks a culture very different from my own. Since I am not trying to be the next great polyglot, for me, I don't feel the need to quantify them with a numerical figure. I'm sure there are people with goals different than mine who do look at language-learning that way (keeping score). Something like this could be useful for them. So, good luck with your project, but I believe you will have to add more languages to your list. Edited by iguanamon on 17 April 2015 at 1:18pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| litovec Tetraglot Groupie Switzerland lingvometer.com Joined 5133 days ago 42 posts - 60 votes Speaks: German, Russian, French, English | Message 5 of 18 17 April 2015 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Imagine that he/she does the following instead: first marries an Italian moves to Rome attends classes etc, then something went wrong and right after having learned Italian he/she divorces and marries a Spaniard, moves to Madrid etc. I think that Rome+Madrid "mission" could be accomplished sooner than the Shanghai "mission" ) However, it's not only about the time to learn, but also having acquired new structures that are missing in related languages.
If you measure IQ, would you consider that someone was married to Harvard professor/was motivated to get smarter/had a ton of books?
Yes, your're right, native fluency is assumed to be C2 level, this is an assumption that could be disputed.
This is also a good point. It's assumed that the languages could be described by a language family tree that is a certain idealization of the real world. French having influenced English besides their Indo-European ancestry would break the tree structure. Thus, the whole model (as every model) is a certain approximation that I hope is close enough to the real world.
Maybe I didn't get this point, but Tibetan+Chinese=1.6 and German+Chinese=2
Thanks!
Hm, I still wonder each time that even having put there 4000+ languages, there are still languages that are missing (Haitian Creole) :)! Ladino is there. Edited by litovec on 17 April 2015 at 2:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4911 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 6 of 18 17 April 2015 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I certainly would rate it as important. IQ isn't a fixed thing. If the same person didn't have that spouse/motivation they would certainly score lower on the test. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4101 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 7 of 18 17 April 2015 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
You know this, no doubt, but remember that not all Indo-European languages are built the same way and word-order varies. Breton, for example, favours a V2 and VSO word order which doesn't necessarily come much more naturally to, say, a native anglophone than does Japanese word order (but the handful of cognates between Breton and English through Old French and more familiar sounds will come in handy, no doubt). 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5377 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 8 of 18 17 April 2015 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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What kind of math are you using? I scored a 1.32, but 1.32 what? What are the units? I don't see how there can be a meaningful numerical comparison of things that cannot be measured and quantified in numbers.
Certainly, you could compare things that can be compared and get meaningful information... for example, I can meaningfully compare myself with one of my friends: I speak English natively, Spanish at B2 and French at almost A1. My friend also speaks English natively, Spanish at my same B2 level, but he speaks French at C1. Mathematically we can clearly say he has a more "valuable" language portfolio than I do (everything is identical except his French is better than mine). However, when you try to inject some sort of units of "value" to something that cannot be measured in numerical terms you get a meaningless result (other than whatever arbitrary number gets assigned to him is greater than my arbitrary number). My friend and I can only be meaningfully compared because there is only one variable that distinguishes us. You can compare the language levels of two people only to the extent that you have one variable and are using a comparative scale (better or worse). It is meaningless to say my friend speaks French four times better than me or three times better than me. Math does not work that way. What do we get out of his 1.57 score compared to my 1.32 score other than it is higher? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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