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Your personal polyglot ideal | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6182 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 81 of 125 08 September 2008 at 3:26am | IP Logged |
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My personal rough **ideal** polyglot would speak a language with good fluency. A
'vocabulary' of at least 20,000 words but 30,000 would be preferable. I know vocabulary is hard to quantify and differs language to language but that's just a rough estimation. They should speak it at least 96% correctly in grammar, idiom, form, and register. Anything above 96% is excellent and preferable. They should have a refined accent at the very least. All their utterances should be comprehensible to any native speaker without them having to strain to understand. Speech should not be jumpy it should be natural. It should never annoy a sane non naturally angry native speaker. There should not be any 'translation' in their heads because that's not really knowing a language. They should know at least a thousand of the most common idioms. The ability to read and write well is also important. Illiteracy in Chinese is acceptable to me but not preferable. The polyglot should feel somewhat at ease in the language. Edited by zerothinking on 08 September 2008 at 3:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Gray Newbie United States Joined 5846 days ago 32 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 84 of 125 21 October 2008 at 8:02pm | IP Logged |
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For me, my personal polyglot ideal would be to speak three languages (other than your native tongue) at a fully professional level of proficiency. As in, speaking well enough that you could move to a country that spoke that language and (barring immigration issues) set yourself up in fairly short order in your professional field of choice. I'm thinking ACTFL Superior or ILR 3+/4. Professional level skill in the four main skill sets - speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Basically able to function as well or almost as well as a native speaker of that language. Aside from that, speaking several other languages at an ACTFL Intermediate (ILR 1+) or better. :) Or at least, this is my eventual goal. I'm only a lot ambitious I think.
Aside from that, for me, I distinguish between polyglots and people who are bi- or multilingual in that "lingual" for me, implies naturally acquired proficiency (native languages, in other words). Whereas polyglot implies a level of sustained effort and education. I think that there is an important distinction to make between people who are heritage speakers of multiple languages and people who are educated non-native speakers of multiple languages. For instance, many children of immigrants grow up speaking multiple languages. Generally, depending on various factors and circumstances, one language will dominate over the others (usually the culture language and their language of education). They'll be educated in that primary language and be able to operate in a professional environment using all four skills. By contrast, their secondary and/or tertiary languages will often be highly colloquial and under-educated, really only useful for conversing with friends and family. They are "fluent" by the grace of being able to converse naturally and easily, but they would not necessarily be able to move to their family's country of origin and function on a professional level without significant additional education. Now, of course, if they acquire that additional education, then they're polyglots (assuming at least 3 languages). Also, people who acquire additional languages through effort, even if they're not literate would be polyglots in my book. That's also one of the ways I would distinguish between what counts as an additional language vs. a dialect. For instance, Hindi and Urdu are generally thought to be mutually intelligible when it comes to the basics of day to day conversation. However, the writing systems are different and professional and specialized language can wildly diverge between the two. In my mind, you can claim two languages only if you've educated yourself and can operate professionally in both languages. In short - any languages you got for free you're "lingual" in, whether it's prefaced by mono-, bi-, tri- or multi-. But if you've worked for additional proficiency in several of those languages, and/or have learned additional languages then you're a polyglot so long as your total count adds up to at least 3. Edited by Gray on 21 October 2008 at 8:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| maike.12345 Newbie United States Joined 5561 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Catalan, Italian | Message 85 of 125 03 March 2009 at 7:19pm | IP Logged |
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For me, the ideal polyglot would be someone that speaks at least three to five language with fluency. A diverse selection of languages is impressive. Ex: Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, a few obscure dialects of a language, and definetely knowledge of one extinct language.
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| paparaciii Diglot Senior Member Latvia Joined 6146 days ago 204 posts - 223 votes Speaks: Latvian*, Russian Studies: English | Message 87 of 125 30 April 2009 at 1:51pm | IP Logged |
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I rather choose to know 3 or 4 languages at a near-native level than add one language after another to my language list and always having poor ability of self-expression in all of them.
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| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6475 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 88 of 125 01 May 2009 at 12:01am | IP Logged |
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This is a futile discussion. If it's all about numbers, then I'd say 5 languages fluently, but I'm equally impressed by someone speaking only one foreign language perfectly as by someone speaking 10 languages badly.
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