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The Polyglot Project Book | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| htdavidht Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4435 days ago 68 posts - 121 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French | Message 1 of 3 10 March 2013 at 9:38am | IP Logged |
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Recently I decided it worth the effort to research learning techniques trying to find the most efficient ones for learning languages, eventually saving me time by learning faster.
On this research I decided to get information from actual polyglots explaining how they get to learn so many languages. Then I found out this book, this is basically someone with the same exact idea I just have, but over 2 years ago. Witch is great for me because it saves me the time to research and all I have to do then is just read. This book collect the narration of over 40 language lovers, that is how the book describe them, recollecting how they get to learn languages, and how the study of languages have influence their lives. I finish the book some hours ago and decided to come with some thought on it: -- -The background Many people get expose, one way or another, to multiple languages during their childhood. This doesn't really make a difference on the future. If the person didn't actually learned the language then eventually any possible exposure to a language becomes irrelevant. Formal education is pretty much useless, taking a language in school for 5 years doesn't even bring the student to basic level. There is not such thing as a "gift" for languages. There is motivated people who study the right way for a dedicated amount of time. - How to learn a language. Listen before you speak, read before you write. All the personal histories say this same thing, except Benny the Irish, who says speak before anything else. Now the time from listen to speak change from different people, shadowing would be the faster on transition, I guess. Don't bother to memorize grammar. This is the main reason why formal education fails. grammar should be deducted by pattern recognitions or as many say "feeling". The most recommended tool for learning a language? A MP3 player. Immersion is not really that important, integration is the key. This means, being in a place where you are surrounded by the target language is not as important as making the target language a part of your life. -Bloopers Travel to the other side of the world to practice your target language and find all the locals wanting to use you to practice their English. Except that one time when you really need to get to a place and the taxi driver is the only person in Germany who doesn't speak English. -- And that is what I get from this book. There is some few things I though where important and are not really address on the book, for example the learning how to think on the target language instead of translating into it. Anyway, the 2 most useful skills on learning a language, according to what I understand from the book, are: memory and patter recognition. Here a link to the book presentation, link to download the book on the description of the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Z6Esovj4o 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6251 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 3 10 March 2013 at 10:33am | IP Logged |
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You'll find plenty of other polyglots who don't advocate listening/reading before speaking/writing. Professor Argüelles, for instance, has mentioned having better accents in languages where he spoke early in the learning process, if memory serves.
You might also like Kato Lomb's "This is how I learn languages". She was quite competent in a number of languages. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| htdavidht Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4435 days ago 68 posts - 121 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French | Message 3 of 3 10 March 2013 at 7:47pm | IP Logged |
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TY for the book, it was an interesting reading, the whole learning system is summarize on chapter 20, for whoever who doesn't want to read the 19 chapters version of it.
Kato works on the theory that the best learning tool is books, and she manage to learn languages trough reading, piking up pronunciation trough listening. But the system is mostly read and read. This explain her claim that she can speak some 5 languages but read in some 11 languages. The book does handled the question of "thinking in the target language", chapter 19, unfortunately Kato think it is not possible for a human to switch at will from one language to another, therefore she only thinks in 1 language and translate to the others. She then gives advise on how to produce more accurate translations. I think it is possible to think on a target language. For example while I am writing down this I am thinking in English, not in Spanish and translating. Building up vocabulary relating words to words on another language is a harmful practice, fluency can't be archive this way, no matter how fast the translations happen. Of course Kato have a different point of view on this, but this is because her job was to translate not to communicate. This is what Wiki says: "Native in Hungarian, she was able to interpret fluently in nine or ten languages (in four of them even without preparation), and she translated technical literature and read belles-lettres in six languages. She was able to understand journalism in further eleven languages." And this is how she explain it on her book: "I only have one mother tongue: Hungarian. Russian, English, French, and German live inside me simultaneously with Hungarian. I can switch between any of these languages with great ease, from one word to another. Translating texts in Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese,and Polish generally requires me to spend about half a day brushing up on my language skills and perusing the material to be translated. The other six languages [Bulgarian, Danish, Latin,Romanian, Czech, Ukrainian] I know only through translating literature and technical material." In other words she was good at one way translation, from other languages to Hungarian, no so easy the other way around from Hungarian to other languages. No that I am saying there is something wrong with this, my actual target on French is to be able to read it, I am going an extra mile to learn to speak it because I might need to in some occasion. Certainly her method is a good school of translators. Edited by htdavidht on 10 March 2013 at 7:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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