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You are not a real polyglot if...

  Tags: Polyglot
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
299 messages over 38 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 21 ... 37 38 Next >>
Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5421 days ago
4143 posts - 8864 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 161 of 299
25 October 2013 at 8:13am | IP Logged 
Ari wrote:
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
In sports however, we are never as happy as when we can beat the
Swedes. In fact we do not really care if we lose against everyone else, as long as we beat the Swedes.

Haha, and it's the same way here, though depending on the sport. In skiing, we need to beat the Norwegians
and in ice hockey we need to beat the Finns.


I should perhaps also be more specific. In cross country skiing we need to beat everyone, in most other
sports we are happy just to beat the Swedes. The good side is that in sports where we do not do well, like in
football, we are happy to chear for the Swedes :-)



2 persons have voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6790 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 162 of 299
25 October 2013 at 9:31am | IP Logged 
tastyonions wrote:
beano wrote:
Has anyone ever seen a polyglot who speaks 7 or 8 languages really well? Most of the guys on youtube seem to excel in 2 or 3 and speak the rest in broken fashion.

I think about this as well. Certainly it's possible to develop a "fluent" command of the basics in a number of languages, as we can see from YouTube, but I wonder how many languages those people would consider themselves to have a "deep" proficiency in (..)


It is all dependant on the opportunities we have for using our languages. I can always find something to read and mostly also something sensible to listen to in all my languages, and I know from my vocabulary counts that I have a decent passive vocabulary even in some of the languages which I only have listed as 'studies'. For instance I have recently returned from South Africa, where I used field guides in Afrikaans and read local newspapers and magazines without any problems. I can also understand most of the content in the podcasts from Radio sonder Grense (my reading skills always will be better than my listening skills in any language, and I haven't listened enough yet). But I can't speak Afrikaans fluently, and I still need a dictionary when I write in this language. It is fairly certain that a week or so where I really got the chance to speak Afrikaans would kick it up into at least B1, maybe B2 actively, but with an English/German-speaking tourgroup I simply didn't get the chance, except in a couple of cases in shops.

With languages like Italian and Spanish I have done travels on my own and I have a much longer history of listening and reading in these languages, so even though I do make errors and sometimes lack words I can say - based on facts - that I can live a fairly normal life as a tourist in the relevant countries, speaking as much and about the same themes I would speak about in English in an Anglophone country. So my proficiency may be lower than in English, but my fluency isn't.

So above a certain level of proficiency fluency is all about exposure, expoosure and once again exposure.

Edited by Iversen on 25 October 2013 at 12:42pm
2 persons have voted this message useful



Henkkles
Triglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 4340 days ago
544 posts - 1141 votes 
Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 163 of 299
25 October 2013 at 10:34am | IP Logged 
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
Could anyone post a reference to any place where the Scandinavian languages are considered one language by linguists? I have never seen that. The only times I hear that used, is when Finns say they do not understand Norwegian, but that they understand "Scandinavian". What they mean to say is that they understand Swedish.

I don't have any references for you but at one of the lectures at Helsinki university the professor in linguistics said roughly that they're the perfect examples of languages with an army and a navy and how they differ from one another less than many "languages" that are considered as dialects of the same language. This was in the topic of "how arbitrary it is to fight over what is a language and what is a dialect" but I think he meant that the general idea is that scientifically speaking it makes much more sense to think of them as dialects. The idea is that most distinct languages are formed when the dialect continuum breaks and the different parts drift into separate directions, but the Scandinavian dialect continuum is very unfragmented; and isn't it silly that almost everyone admits that there are dialects of Swedish that are somehow closer to Norwegian?

All in all it's not black and white but in some cases when science is considered it makes more sense to do something differently than in the "actual world".
2 persons have voted this message useful





Iversen

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