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George Campbell | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| qklilx Moderator United States Joined 5988 days ago 459 posts - 477 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Korean Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 10 04 April 2008 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | ||
True, but possibility has to do with capability, in that you need the possibility to take advantage of your capability. But I digress. Willingness is a big factor, but you also need to convince a lot of potential learners that it's a possible task since so many people believe that language learning is limited. I'm a monolingual triglot and I have people---even bilinguals---telling me how smart and dedicated I must be. Then you have to convince the potential learners that it's a worthwhile effort, since it does use a rather large chunk of your life, and with today's generation (how ironic I am 19) time is supposedly better spent not studying. Anyway, I agree with JasonChoi in regards to competition, but I was thinking more along the lines of how subjective of a competition it would be. I'm sure most of us here have spent time discussing with a peer at some point the various stages of learning a language. Not to mention the difficulty of language A versus language B, from the perspective of native speakers of language 1 versus language 2. Edited by qklilx on 04 April 2008 at 5:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6505 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 10 of 10 06 April 2008 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is not enough to spend all one's waking hours on languages, - many language teachers do precisely that without becoming hyperpolyglots. In fact the need of professional teachers and translators to become expert in one or a few languages may keep them from adding scores of new languages to their repertoire. Somewhere along the road you have to decide that polyglotism is your thing, and not becoming expert in a few languages.
My personal feeling is that it the acquisition of vocabulary (including idiomatic phrases) that take most of the time, - both grammar and pronunciation are important, and you can spend forever refining them, but they don't take nearly as much time as learning words. With neighbouring languages you get a lot of words for free, which explains why they can be learnt fast, but to learn scores of languages you have to include several language groups, and then the number of common words is not that that big. So it would help to know why a few people are so much better at retaining what they have learnt. I don't think that it is a matter of simply having an eidetic memory (though that would certainly help), - being able to relate new unknown words and constructions to stuff already learnt is at least as relevant. Some people try to do this by training their ability to produce striking associations, but I know from my personal experience that at some point while I'm learning a language the purely intralinguistical associations take over, and suddenly the words seem to stay much more willingly in my memory than before which makes learning much less cumbersome. Maybe the grandmasters of language learning just get there earlier than most of us. Well, I just speculate. The problem is that there are far too few detailed analyses available of the way the real masters study. Take now Mr. Campbell. Many people must have known him, but on the internet it is the same obituary that is repeated again and again, interspersed with a few references to a book he wrote. Maybe these people are too modest, or they just take their own abilities for granted. Edited by Iversen on 06 April 2008 at 4:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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