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patrickwilken
Senior Member
Germany
radiant-flux.net
Joined 4320 days ago
1546 posts - 3200 votes 
Studies: German
| Message 33 of 159 08 January 2014 at 8:36pm | IP Logged |
tarvos wrote:
Quality over quantity matters, because... what?
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It matters to those who need reach a certain level of quality for practical communication reasons (e.g., work; study etc). I want to work in Germany professionally. It doesn't matter how many other languages I know. All that matters is that I speak German. At a high level.
In my case quality does matter. Quantity doesn't.
BTW: I wish we would stop using the word "native" level abilities in a language as some sort of benchmark for quality. 20% of the US population (for instance) are functionally illiterate and so would struggle to pass C1 accreditation in their native language.
My wife sometimes says she wants native level abilities in English (she is easily already C2) - what she actually means is she wants native-like abilities on par with her equivalent cultural/social group (e.g., philosophy professors at Harvard etc). Not native-level at all.
I think there are two meanings of native: (1) you can do anything in your L2 that you could do in your L1 in your same social/professional group; (2) you can perform as someone born in that country (perhaps at the average level, but that's never clearly defined - it could just as well be at the level of an illiterate hillbilly).
I think some people who say they want/are native-like, are interpreted as meaning 1, when actually they mean 2.
Edited by patrickwilken on 08 January 2014 at 8:53pm
6 persons have voted this message useful
| Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 6943 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 34 of 159 08 January 2014 at 8:54pm | IP Logged |
patrickwilken wrote:
tarvos wrote:
Quality over quantity matters, because... what?
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It matters to those who need reach a certain level of quality for practical communication reasons (e.g., work; study etc). I want to work in Germany professionally. It doesn't matter how many other languages I know. All that matters is that I speak German. At a high level.
In my case quality does matter. Quantity doesn't.
BTW: I wish we would stop using the word "native" level abilities in a language as some sort of benchmark for quality. 20% of the US population (for instance) are functionally illiterate and so would struggle to pass C1 accreditation in their native language.
My wife sometimes says she wants native level abilities in English (she is easily already C2) - what she actually means is she wants native-like abilities on par with her equivalent cultural/social group (e.g., philosophy professors at Harvard etc). Not native-level at all.
I think there are two meanings of native: (1) you can do anything in your L2 that you could do in your L1 in your same social group; (2) you can perform as someone born in that country (perhaps at the average level, but that's never clearly defined).
I think some people who say they want to be native-like, are interpreted as meaning 1, when actually they mean 2. |
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D'oh! I should have added "What is good enough?" to my list of older threads that predate this thread.
Carry on.
3 persons have voted this message useful
| patrickwilken
Senior Member
Germany
radiant-flux.net
Joined 4320 days ago
1546 posts - 3200 votes
Studies: German
| Message 35 of 159 08 January 2014 at 9:02pm | IP Logged |
Chung wrote:
D'oh! I should have added "What is good enough?" to my list of older threads that predate this thread.
Carry on. |
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Chung: could you point me to the relevant part of the thread that talks about the use of "native-like" ability and what it means?
Please do carry on...
Edited by patrickwilken on 08 January 2014 at 9:04pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 6943 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 36 of 159 08 January 2014 at 9:05pm | IP Logged |
Chung wrote:
culebrilla wrote:
The real issue, speaking very bluntly but truthfully, is that the general public doesn't distinguish quality from quantity.
Try this: spend 1,000 hours each on 10 languages. They can even be somewhat related languages. Let's say English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and a few more indoeuropean languages. That is 10,000 hours total. And make sure that they are quality hours. No multi-tasking. You are spending those hours concentrating on learning, studying, or practicing the languages. You will be ok in 10 languages and be able to express yourself relatively well. But let's not delude ourselves and say that we will be as good as somebody that has lived, say, 10 years 100% immersed in a single language.
In the other corner let's have somebody spend 10,000 hours on ONE language. The person will not know everything about the language and most likely won't be as good as a 30 year old native speaker that has spent their entire life speaking the language. But they will be pretty darned good at the one foreign language they have worked on.
And the variables have to be the same. In both examples the two people have equal aptitude for languages, start learning at the same age, same learning strategies (Although time is really the most important one. A lot of people here hate classes but good classes DO exist. Also, taking 4 hours of classes a week is nothing. You don't put in work out of class you won't be good at the language)
If the 10 language polyglot goes to the press and shows off their solid but certainly not near-native abilities, the press will go bananas. They will shower the person with praise and adoration and exaggerate their language level by saying that they are as good as a native speaker.
On the other hand, the one language specialist will be met with silence. "Big deal, brah. You know one language. The other guy knows 10, like, really well!"
Ignorant people (i.e, people that don't speak the languages or have never learned one to a high-level) will not be able to tell what is good or bad. If somebody goes up to another person and says, "I played a round of golf after 10 hours of practice and shot a 200. Then, I swam 10 laps and did each 25m lap in 60 seconds. Finally, I ran 800m in 4 minutes!"
Conversely, if somebody spent the same amount of time on just one sport and did 800m in, say, 3 minutes, people that don't know the sports won't really understand what it means.
Quality matters, people.
Note: people that spent a LOT of time on many things get darn good at many things. World-class decathletes are good enough that they can beat a very good High School varsity athlete in EVERY SINGLE EVENT. In the 100m, they are good enough to get a Division 1 college athletic scholarship. They suck at distance, though. Overall, that is pretty good. Completing a race or playing a sport at a very low level? Not so impressive.
Finally, there are exceptions to every rule. Is there some person that is 5X as fast in terms of hours in learning languages? Probably. What is the percentage of language learners that are so far to the right of the bell curve that you have to crane your neck to its extremes? Pretty darn low. None of the famous polyglots that have posted videos I've seen are prodigies. They just either have spent a lot of time with the languages (Luca, Mr. Simcott) or have a level appropriate for the time they have spent with their languages.
And please don't say that polyglots have some "revolutionary" way of learning. It indirectly says that specialists are bumbling, inefficient dolts that just study conjugation tables all day and learn esoteric language that is not used in the street. People that dedicate themselves to just one or two things in life can be very efficient in learning too.
Edit: everything was in bold. |
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This is starting to blur into a rehash or variation of these chestnuts:
Ziad Fazah - does he exist?
How many languages to be a polyglot?
You are not a real polyglot if...
Do you consider yourself a polyglot?
Clugston challenges polyglots to debate
Are we being too hard on the polyglots?
Polygot under 18
Video of man who studied 120 languages
Different Kinds of Polyglots
Only gifted polyglots can learn 10+langs?
Language classes do NOT work
A class that "works"?
We, who manage to focus on ONE language
It's not that I don't see any value in culebrilla's post (or even nathdep's opening sentiment), as much as it ultimately smells like same-old, same-old. I might not be as crusty as tarvos in his response, but you know... my old age... |
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Here it is.
1 person has voted this message useful
| patrickwilken
Senior Member
Germany
radiant-flux.net
Joined 4320 days ago
1546 posts - 3200 votes
Studies: German
| Message 37 of 159 08 January 2014 at 9:08pm | IP Logged |
OK. I will just shut up then. Thanks for the subtle hint.
Edited by patrickwilken on 08 January 2014 at 9:14pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| Jeffers
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4696 days ago
2151 posts - 3960 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German
| Message 38 of 159 08 January 2014 at 9:30pm | IP Logged |
I disagree with pointing new people to old threads. These are discussion threads, not a wiki. If I have a discussion with someone, I don't need someone telling me, "We talked about that last year without you. You can read the minutes." By all means let new people know there are threads, and allow them to read them if they want. But new people don't want to read an old discussion, they want to discuss. You don't have to read it yourself. There are many topics now that I usually don't even open up, because I myself feel I've exhausted them.
On the other hand, if it is a question such as, "Who has used X product and is it any good?" then it is probably worth pointing to an older thread where the product has been discussed. It is usually more useful in these cases when a new user asks new questions on an old thread.
8 persons have voted this message useful
| Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 6943 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 39 of 159 08 January 2014 at 9:44pm | IP Logged |
*sigh*
The trouble is that these kinds of discussion add little that is new. If anything, the animosity in this thread is probably a little higher than usual which isn't all that constructive.
Really the only thing that is new here is the set of participants. Sooner or later these seemingly new threads touch on or approach themes or conclusions reached previously. The bonus of pointing out the old threads is that veterans probably jumped in then because the content of those threads weren't discussed much before, if at all.
Jiwon expresses it thusly in a restricted discussion about what happened to forum activity in 2010-11:
On 6 June 2013 at 4:50am, Jiwon wrote:
The reason why I don't visit this website as often as I did is because it just does not stimulate me anymore. I was first attracted to all the information about languages themselves and the fact that there were other people who were so serious about languages and literature.
But now.... There are way too many new discussions whose content and conclusion have been addressed a few years ago. The large part of the forum is almost like a collection of private blogs where new language learners show off how much they have learnt last week, with very little substantial discussion about language learning methods or languages in general. I would rather spend more time actually studying languages rather than skim read through all the active topics to find the pearl of useful information. |
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(Ed. bolding is mine)
In the same discussion, emk touches on the sentiment in more detail:
On 6 June 2013 at 4:53pm, emk wrote:
Another real possibility is that after 36,000 threads and 448,000 posts, HTLAL has talked about everything at least two or three times. We've had a multiple threads about every well-known learning technique. We've talked about most of the popular internet polyglots. We've talked about researchers and studies and history and clueless newspaper articles.
On top of that, the currently prevailing moderation philosophy at HTLAL dislikes long, nasty flamewars. It would be very easy to fill HTLAL up with acrimonious 30-page threads arguing about whether Russian should be an official language of Lithuania, or whether Internet polyglot X is a shameless fraud trying to cheat people out of their money, or whether everybody in country Y is hopelessly "racist" towards people who speak Z. But these threads tend to get locked, and this discourages certain eager flame warriors from hanging around at HTLAL. (It has also cost us one or two marvelous but combative polyglots. But on the other hand, it helped us keep a few other great polyglots who can't stand conflict. It's certainly not a simple tradeoff.)
On top of that, the language learning world seems to be getting less acrimonious and dogmatic in general. When Benny Lewis and Steve Kauffman can appear in the same video, and Khatzumoto writes things like:
Quote:
| PS: Personally, if I’m ever trying to get functional in a language fast, I’m going straight to Benny’s house for advice. |
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…it takes a lot of the fun out the method wars.
So when you've talked about everything obvious, and even the true believers admit that there's more than one way to learn a language, what's left? A lot of things: Companionship with fellow learners. Helping out newbies. Occasionally kicking around an old issue to see if we've learned anything new. Trying experiments and reporting what we learned.
I think this is one of the reasons the logs have really boomed over the last few years. The logs are about companionship, experiments, and personal observations, without needing to find one final answer. |
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Draw your own conclusions, folks.
8 persons have voted this message useful
| Hungringo
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 3775 days ago
168 posts - 329 votes
Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish
Studies: French
| Message 40 of 159 08 January 2014 at 10:27pm | IP Logged |
As to quality vs quantity I think each person should consider his or her specific situation. If you are a taxi driver in Zurich or a waiter in Monaco it's probably more beneficial to you if you have B1-B2 level abilities in 5 languages than having C1-C2 in only one. On the other hand if you want to work as a mechanical engineer in Germany you should concentrate exclusively on your German. Also if you are a border patrol agent in Texas being proficient in Spanish has more advantages for you than being able to chat about the weather in German, French, Polish and Japanese.
Edited by Hungringo on 08 January 2014 at 10:28pm
6 persons have voted this message useful
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