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Planning your polyglottery | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| BobbyE Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5025 days ago 226 posts - 331 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 1 of 16 27 November 2011 at 8:37am | IP Logged | ||
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How do you plan your path to being a polyglot?
How proficient do you think you should be in a language before you can begin studying another language simultaneously? Do you take one language to proficiency, and then start another, or do you take one language to beginner level, then take another to beginner, then revisit the first one... and so on...? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5625 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 16 27 November 2011 at 12:00pm | IP Logged | ||
First: I didn't plan to become a polyglot. It just developed after learning more and more languages. But if you want to plan it, here is some advice! You can study 2 - 3 languages simultanously, but ideally they shouldn't be too similar (to avoid mixing them up) and this will be much more time consuming per week. I would give you the advice to study every language at least to B1 / B2 - level, because studying a language to the beginner level and then stopping with it will lead to loose the language knowledge again. A beginner level language is very difficult to keep active because you can't read books or magazines in it. So language studies up to the B1 / B2 - level are the minimum and that's also the level you for example need to be conversational on Skype. For me a person who has only a beginner level in 10 - 15 languages is not a polyglot. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 27 November 2011 at 12:01pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4800 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 16 27 November 2011 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Take a look in the section of the site called "lessons in polyglotery". There's some really interesting stuff in there. Prof A wrote a lot of stuff which will help answer your question.
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| Humdereel Octoglot Groupie United States Joined 4756 days ago 90 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Written), Turkish, Persian, Urdu Studies: Russian | Message 5 of 16 27 November 2011 at 6:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I honestly never planned how I would learn multiple languages. When I started with Arabic, I had no idea that I'd grow a deep interest in other languages such as Persian and Turkish.
Typically, however, I don't like acquiring "beginner" and then moving onto another language. I tend to focus on one language actively until I get to a comfortable level with it, and then I move onto another language. I think this comofortable level could be called "basic fluency", but since there's not set of definition for fluency, it's hard to say. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6481 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 6 of 16 28 November 2011 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||
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As Fasulye wrote, you don't plan to be a polyglot. There is actually a risk that you burn out or loose interest if you set up a too strict plan without already knowing what it really is to learn a language - especially if this entails a lot of homestudy. When you have learnt a number of languages you will also know whether you actually want to add to the collection rather than staying with those you already know (or doing something totally different, like cooking or playing with your kids).
Another point which we have discussed in several places here at HTLAL: you can study several language in parallel, but the consensus here - which I support - is that you shouldn't start a new language before you are beyond the initial steps in the preceding one. A good criterion is that you should be able to sit down and read an easy text or listen to a TV program and say or write something simple without looking all the words up. The point is that it is hard to do intensive study all the time, so if you can relax with at least one of your two latest languages you won't burn out prematurely. At the other end of the scale: do you demand utter perfection of yourself, or can you live with a level that is good enough for conversations and general reading, but maybe not enough for a career as spy? There are examples of people who have reached a high level in a language without staying abroad, but it will just be harder - in practice you need to spend a lot of time on each language, and the higher pretensions the more time it takes. In an immersion setting you get much of that contact for free, but at home you have to work for it. And finally: should you go for related languages or for a lot of unrelated languages? In the last case the consequence will normally be that you can't add as many languages and dialects as you could with a number of related languages. One factor here is whether you use linguistical references to known languages while memorizing words and rules in a new one. Another factor is of course the level you expect to reach - many unrelated languages takes less time if you accept that you won't become an expert in any of them. And final finally: when you read about people who have learnt 50 languages then don't be too tempted to follow in their footsteps. Formulate your goals as a couple of concrete languages within the next couple of years, not as 10 or 20 or 48 languages before you die. Edited by Iversen on 28 November 2011 at 1:01pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5625 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 16 28 November 2011 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | ||
That's exactly the risk of it, if you plan to achieve a very high goal (such as becoming a polyglot) and you have no solid language learning experience as a foundation. It would be the same, if you started to take swimming lessons as a beginner with the goal to take part in the Olympic Games. The danger to burn out then is quite near, so I would rather recommend to set yourself goals in small steps, as for example to plan in the next two languages you want to learn. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 28 November 2011 at 12:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5112 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 8 of 16 28 November 2011 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I never even thought of myself as a polyglot before I found this site - I just knew I loved languages. If anyone planned for me, it was my mother, who sent me to France and Spain as a kid, and who insisted that I learn German, even though that meant I had to do high school in one year in stead of three.
It wasn't until I turned 17 that I started actively learning other languages on my own, and started dabbling in a lot of languages. The only one I could say that I reached basic fluency in, is Italian - and now I am trying very hard to learn Russian. I totally agree with Fasulye and Iversen on this one. Start with one or two languages, and then see where you get. Maybe you will be satisfied with just one language. Or maybe you will become the next Mezzofanti. Only time will tell. :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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