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Are we being too hard on the polyglots? | ||
Tags: Polyglot bashing | Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4926 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes  Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 25 of 72 13 December 2010 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I occasionally dream in either Spanish or Italian, but - I've said this in another thread - I live with both those languages throughout the day in both professional and personal settings.
I swear for the most part in English, though. Sometimes I'll swear in Spanish too, but I guess I like my F-bombs too much to stray very far from English when it comes to cursing. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5130 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 26 of 72 14 December 2010 at 12:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ok. I know I will get yelled at for making two posts, but I am not technically capable of quoting twice in the same post. Please forgive me. When I started this thread, I stated that my intention was not to shower praise on the undeserving, so in that respect I agree with you. It may however be difficult sometimes to say which is which. In some cases you observe people who can speak a number of languages you know, and who also sound very convincing in the ones you don't know, in which case I tend to believe them. When the video shows that they do in fact not speak the languages you know, and they claim to know several dozens more that are hard to judge, then yes, you get sceptical. Even then, I think we can try to be kind though - but without giving unfounded compliments. On YouTube I saw an example that was more difficult to evaluate. Someone who taught Mandarin claimed to speak 200 languages and dialects - most of them Chinese. I have no doubt his Mandarin is very good. But 200 dialects and languages. Hmm. I speak 5 languages. It has taken me a long time to learns those, and it takes a lot of effort to maintain them. Now 200 is a large amount. I do not want to distrust anyone, but you would really need to be a genius to pull that one off. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 17 December 2010 at 7:37pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5938 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 27 of 72 14 December 2010 at 12:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
English is my native language yet a good portion of my reactions like this occur in Greek. (Mostly things I've picked up from my older Greek-speaking relatives, like "παναγία μου," "αχ," "Χριστέ μου," or other random mutterings.) Edited by ellasevia on 14 December 2010 at 12:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4926 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 28 of 72 14 December 2010 at 1:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
That must have been one hell of a long video. Seriously... let's think about that number. 200 languages. *200* I would have a really hard time believing anyone could *read* 200 languages, let alone speak them. In fact, I'm just going to flat out say it without even seeing the video: I just don't believe that's possible, genius or not. R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7017 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 29 of 72 16 December 2010 at 9:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I can top that one. On the interpals website, one person listed the 70+ languages available on the site on his profile. All the languages that could be listed he put it down, but made the statement, that he is the head professor of the language department and speaks every language in the world. I think he was suppose to be only 24 years old. Curiously I looked and saw replies from other members complimenting him. One compliment resembled "That is amazing you speak all these languages." or "Wow." Others wanted to practice or something. IMO utterly ridiculous. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5720 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 30 of 72 17 December 2010 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think much of the criticism directed at Cesare M was actually justified. Unfortunately his initial responses to it were usually to declare anyone who did not praise him to the heavens to be a hater who didn't know the languages; even when the critiques were often valid. I stayed on the sidelines during all that, and thus refrained from interacting with him at all because it seemed pointless to do so when he was absolutely determined to demand that everyone must be in awe of his skills in every language he claimed to speak or write fluently and ignore his heavy reliance on English words in his early videos and his very basic grammatical mistakes when writing. I would only have been able to comment on his written Spanish in that thread, but it was obvious that a semester in a language class or just spending more time learning these languages on his own could have helped him resolve at least some of these issues. Yes, encouragement is important, but not all criticism (even if it is sometimes harsh)is unwarranted. In language learning, like any other field of study, there is always more that could be learned. Edited by mick33 on 18 December 2010 at 8:32am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6266 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 31 of 72 17 December 2010 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Do you believe in switching one's 'native' language then? Because there are many cases of adult immigrants moving to the US, learning to speak English perfectly and in return losing most of their abilities in their native language (over the course of a dozen years or more). I saw some interviews and they really sounded like foreign students of German rather than native speakers, accent included, and they were visibly more comfortable and more familiar with English. On a less extreme level, it is possible to acquire a native-like level in a foreign language without losing that level in one's native language. Another case are people who move abroad in the middle of high school or so, and whose vocabulary in the foreign language is much greater than in their native one.
For me it's usually English and occasionally Joual, yet there is no doubt that German is my native language. I hadn't been exposed to any English at all before starting to learn it at school at the age of 10. Another test I heard of was to have people perform mathematics out loud, which is supposed to be much slower in any foreign language. I still calculate much more slowly in English. However, I strongly suspect that this is just a test of which language you spoke at primary school; not entirely the same. Edited by Sprachprofi on 18 December 2010 at 12:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5492 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 32 of 72 18 December 2010 at 12:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It has been mentioned that it's hard to differentiate from short videos to differentiate
the "undeserving" from a genuine learner, and that we are being to hard on polyglots for not substantiating their claims. I believe that extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence. If I tell you I can run a 5k in 20 minutes, then you would have no reason to doubt me. But if I tell you I can do it in 10 minutes (substantially faster than the world record) then you would be remiss not to demand more evidence before bestowing upon me your credence. In terms of belief, there shouldn't be any innocent until proven guilty business going on i.e. always giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Belief should be purely commensurate with the amount of evidence weighed against the likelihood of the claim. In terms of politeness, we should always be encouraging and kind, but this is completely orthogonal to belief. It's entirely possible to dismiss someone's claims or ask for more evidence without being a jerk about it. In the same vein, not being jerks should not require that we check our skepticism at the door. Edited by egill on 18 December 2010 at 12:34am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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