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Advice for Adolescent Polyglot Aspirants | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| jerseyboy Newbie United States Joined 5732 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 7 10 August 2008 at 12:23am | IP Logged |
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Dear Prof. Arguelles
It is with my utmost respect that i ask you for advice on becoming a polyglot. I am fourteen years old and from the United States of America. I have from a very young age been interested in linguistics and polyglottery. My interest in languages is probably a product of my personality, that of an extreme extrovert. I hope that you can help my language learning aspirations become a reality. I would like to learn Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian. This is probably a very high goal to set for myself right now but I am truly dedicated as I find great pleasure in studying new languages. The first language I would like to learn is Spanish. I have studied it for quite a while and can have basic conversations with Spanish speakers. What order do you suggest i attempt to learn these languages? Is it wise to study multiple languages at once? My access to learning materials is currently limited to internet resources and I do not have a very large budget for my linguistic pursuits. What software would you suggest for visual learners? Thanks, Chris Meyer 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Olympia Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5762 days ago 195 posts - 244 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Old English, French | Message 2 of 7 12 August 2008 at 8:41pm | IP Logged |
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I know I'm not Professor Arguelles (nor do I believe I know better than he), but I am also a teenager (nearly 19),
and in much the same situation as you are. English is my first language, and I speak Spanish at an advanced level. I would suggest continuing with your Spanish as in the US it is not so difficult to find library books and other print resources in Spanish, and you can converse with native speakers by simply going to an ethnic restaurant or some Latino community organization (the internet is useful in finding these). I think the fastest way to fluency is to try to immerse yourself in the language as much as possible--online magazines and newspapers and also YouTube videos are great (and no-cost) ways to do this. I've been following this path for nearly two years and my skills in Spanish have increased dramatically. As for what language to try next, I'm also in that situation because I would love to learn Portuguese because I've always been fascinated with Brazil. I haven't had much luck because of the huge similarities between Spanish and Portuguese. I've had to stop two different times because I would mix the languages so badly when speaking Spanish. So my advice there would be to choose a language that is more different from Spanish. I have friends who have studied Spanish in school and then began German classes at the same time, and say they have no difficulty with keeping the languages apart. However, it will only be worthwhile if you can keep up with your Spanish--it won't work to learn one language while sacrificing another. Well, there's my two cents (well, maybe a bit more). I'm eager to see what Professor Arguelles has to say. Good luck to you! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5923 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 3 of 7 16 August 2008 at 12:22am | IP Logged |
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Hello! I am not Professor Arguelles either, but I thought I could comment on your situation as well as we are both in a similar situation. I am also fourteen-years-old and native English speaker living in the United States who has always been very interested in linguistics and such.
Anyways, I have advanced fluency in Spanish--I began learning it at a bilingual school (which I attended for four years...until it closed...) in kindergarten, therefore beginning at quite a young age, and am continuing to study it even now. However, I have always wanted to learn many more languages than just Spanish (and as the years go on, the list grows longer too!) and up until the past year, I was just studying Spanish and Greek (my whole family is from Greece). So, about a year ago, I decided that I should start learning a new language. I decided that I wanted to learn another Romance language from my list--preferably one close enough to Spanish that I could study it relatively easily on my own. And so I chose Portuguese (I study the Brazilian dialect), which due to its similarity to Spanish, caused some difficulties—especially in pronunciation—in the beginning stages of my learning. However, I soon got passed those early obstacles and now I don’t mix the two up so much (if I don’t know a word, I tend to just say the Spanish word with a Portuguese accent, hoping that it is correct). I would definitely call this ‘adventure’ with the Portuguese language (which, by the way, is incredibly beautiful) a success (well, at least so far). Well, some materials I have found very useful for Portuguese are the following. I got a free six-month subscription for Rosetta Stone from my school (but as you said you have a small budget and Rosetta Stone is normally ridiculously expensive, it will not be likely that you’ll be using this expensive but amazing and very effective software) which was amazing. I also invested two books, one is called Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese (by Sue Tyson-Ward) and also Ultimate Portuguese (by Lourdes Filoco). I was able to buy both of these books without the audio CDs that sometimes come with them and this dropped the prices from around $70 to about $15 (I bought them at Barnes and Noble). I like both of these books (I have used the latter more than the former), although sometimes I find that the way they present the vocabulary lists are a little inconvenient and I choose to ‘edit’ them a bit. In the beginning stages of my learning (before I had Rosetta Stone or either of the books), I also used other random web pages to teach simpler grammatical structures and such. Another good option after Spanish would of course be French! A month or so after beginning with Portuguese, I switched to French and dropped Portuguese for a while (for several months). I did this because I wanted to learn enough French to skip level one in school and begin taking level two immediately (for the school year that is now upon us—2008-09) but was then moved up into level 3 because I was too advanced. Anyways, I found French to be very unproblematic except for the difficult pronunciation and spelling in the beginning, but a very nice choice. I am now taking a level two course in French at school and was able to excel to this level so quickly by mainly using random websites in the beginning, and then about six months into my studying, I bought Ultimate French by Annie Hemingway. I found this book to be cleanly and beautifully laid out and just picture-perfect in every way (I bought Ultimate French before buying the Portuguese version). I think that I should mention that there are two versions of the Ultimate series—Beginner-Intermediate and Advanced—I bought the beginner-intermediate editions of both. Well, I’m sorry that I am taking so very long to get to my main point, so here it is… I think that learning more than one language at a time can be a good or bad idea depending on several factors: one, the person (is he/she actually capable of doing this?), two, the languages (for some people, French and Japanese at the same time would be difficult because of the lack of similarity, but others would think that French and Spanish at the same time are difficult because of the similarities), three, how many languages (again, this depends on the person’s capabilities—I am studying four languages at the same time, not including Esperanto, and not having trouble, whereas someone else may find that they can only handle two at a time). Okay, point number one is done. Here is my last point. I would recommend that you learn your ‘desired languages’ in the following order if you want to slowly ease into harder and more different languages: Spanish Portuguese Italian French German Russian And if you want to just do it in an order that just seems to work well (it did, and I hope it will continue to work well), at least for me, here it is: Spanish French Portuguese Italian German Russian Or, if you want to try to learn the hardest of these languages first (while you're younger and your language-learning skills are still in top shape), you may want to do it in this order (this is assuming that you are always learning Spanish first): Spanish Russian German French Italian Portuguese Or, just kind-of ask yourself what YOU want to do next...what feels right. (Oh, and by the way—this may make you feel more reasonable about your “high goal”—but, my list of languages that I want to learn, which you can find on my profile page, consists of something like thirteen languages, so don’t feel like you are aiming too high…because it probably will only grow into a bigger goal as time passes.) Okay, I’m done. I hope this helps (I hope it wasn't a waste of your time and if it was, I give my greatest sympathies). Sorry I took so long. Bye!!! Edited by ellasevia on 13 January 2009 at 9:16pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5923 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 4 of 7 17 August 2008 at 3:21pm | IP Logged |
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Sorry again, but I just remembered a very useful site that I used that I forgot to mention in my last post. (I used it to learn some French.) It is about.com's free e-course that sends you one lesson per week. Here is the link:
http://french.about.com/c/ec/44.htm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rekenavri Pentaglot Newbie Belarus Joined 5694 days ago 14 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English, Belarusian, Russian*, Polish, Spanish Studies: French, German | Message 5 of 7 08 January 2009 at 9:00am | IP Logged |
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The only advice I can give you is to use books and courses more then Internet sites. All I met for Russian in Internet were so bad. Edited by rekenavri on 08 January 2009 at 9:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5923 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 6 of 7 08 January 2009 at 5:13pm | IP Logged |
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I have another wonderful source:
www.LiveMocha.com It has free lessons graded by native speakers in all of your desired languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7037 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 7 of 7 13 January 2009 at 7:02am | IP Logged |
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Mr. Meyer et al.,
I am truly sorry that I somehow missed seeing this initial posting a full 6 months ago because the first bit of advice I would give to someone in Chris Meyer's situation is indeed contingent upon age. I believe that anyone who discovers an inclination for language learning in his or her early teens ought to take a different track from the rest of us. The closer you (still) are to puberty, the greater the window of opportunity you may still have to develop good if not perfectly authentic accents in a range of languages. This is far from being the most important aspect of language learning, but since this is a limited time offering, as it were, you ought to take advantage of it while you still can by focusing on phonetics first and foremost and putting other aspects of learning on hold while you do. Use shadowing or any other technique for listening to and repeating the sounds of all the languages that might possibly interest you and for which you can find audio resources. As you learn to mime and mimic the intonations of a variety of tongues, you will not only be laying the foundations for good pronunciation, you will also go about discovering where you affinities lie by this experimentation, and thus you can determine for yourself which languages you ought to pursue in earnest. When you sicken of being a parrot, then it will be time to learn to study in a focus and disciplined fashion, but as long as you can enjoy doing this, do so. As for resources, I completely concur with what one of the other responders wrote: do not rely entirely upon the internet. If you have just a bit of money, you can purchase all sorts of language learning materials for ridiculously cheap prices on places like eBay. Even if you have no money at all, there are always public libraries, many of which now have services like Link+ that let you access materials from a wide range of sources. Alexander Arguelles 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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