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How do polyglots do it? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 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 49 of 159 09 January 2014 at 10:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Two issues:
The first is the question of old versus new threads. And here it is obvious that new members can't be aware of all the old threads, and with limited search tools at their disposal they may not even be able to find them through searches. So it is inevitable that we more or less run in circles with whole chains of threads on topics which old members think they already have covered years ago. But that's life, and even though I as a moderator in a few cases have closed no. 2 NEW simultaneous thread on a specific problem I generally don't think that we always should go back to old threads and make them even longer. We should just see it as a service when some of the ol' folks here provide links back to earlier threads about similar topics - it does not necessarily mean that the new thread should be killed in the cradle. The other issue is the direction of most of this thread. Yes, it has returned to the classical problem about quantity versus quality, whereas the OP actually gave it the title "How do polyglots do it?". Why? Simply because it is simpler to discuss quality versus quantity once again than it is to analyse whether polyglots use different methods than people who study fewer languages. Why? Because polyglots are a bunch of very different people who study under very different circumstances and have very different goals. When Erard wrote his book about hyperpolyglots (people with more than 11 languages on their scoreboard) he tried to find some traits that could define them as a community, and to that end he focused mainly on brain function and sociological/psychological traits - he didn't try to analyse their methods, i.e. the "how". His main predecessor Spivak did discuss methods, but ended up as another Dr. Phil whose job it was to give advice. So we are left with testimonials from those polyglots who have chosen to describe their methods in detail (as I have tried to do in my "Guide to Learning Languages" here at HTLAL and others do on Youtube or in their blogs). And frankly, my current hypothesis is that those people who give such presentations are utterly unrepresentative because some of the most eminent language learners really couldn't give damn about language pedagogics - with the late German (un)diplomat Krebs as an extreme, but not untypical example. The one thing you could do is to focus on L2 learners who start out with new languages PAST their school years (where the teacher took the decisions), and my hunch is that the persons who start from scratch learning their first new language after school are less savvy about specific methods so they probably try to carry on doing the same exercises as in school, maybe through evening schools or expensive systems of dubious value like R...Stone. But if they survive this and decide that they are ready for the next post-school language then they already more or less know what they like and what functions. And if they change their methods fundamentally it can just as well happen at this stage as past their seventh language. Nobody knows, and I haven't seen any indication that anybody in the pedagogical academical world is willing or able to start a large-scale research project to answer this question. So unless you can repeat the project of M.Erard with a larger sample and more emphasis on methods I doubt that we ever will find out whether (hyper)polyglots actually study differently from those who study fewer languages. The only thing which is certain is that they have been through the "learning from scratch" phase more times than those who just continue studying the languages they learned at home or in school. So any differences you find are likely to be confined to this stage. Edited by Iversen on 09 January 2014 at 10:26am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4485 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 50 of 159 09 January 2014 at 10:26am | IP Logged | ||
Yes, and I have seen an example of this. Romanian-Jewish family, moved away from Romania under Ceausescu. Moved first to Germany, then to Belgium. Children spoke Romanian at home with their parents and also learned Hebrew. The children learnt German in Germany, and then French in Belgium. Furthermore they went to good schools where they also learned English and some Dutch (and also Hebrew for a while I think). The children had native-level ability in four languages, and understood or spoke two more. One of the children had also lived abroad in Spain/Latin America - he also spoke Spanish. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3766 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 51 of 159 09 January 2014 at 10:42am | IP Logged | ||
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I think the most important factor in becoming a polyglot is interest and passion. If you love languages in general or at least the languages you study then you can become a polyglot. When you spend hours with your hobbies you don't count the hours, it's not a chore, but absolute bliss.
Some people have this passion and interest for languages and they will become polyglots, other people are passionate about other things. I had a mate at university who was a football (soccer) fan and he virtually knew every important match result in the last 50 years by heart. For me it would have been like memorising the phone book, but for him it was enjoyable fun. Edited by Hungringo on 09 January 2014 at 10:46am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4166 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German | Message 52 of 159 09 January 2014 at 11:37am | IP Logged | ||
10 000 hours to reach C2 ? It should be way less , for sure it depends a lot on the language , but for european languages it should be less . As you said 10 000 hours would very very close to a native alter ego and I think most of us agree that from C2 to your native alter ego can be still a very very long road , probably a never ending one . Edited by albysky on 09 January 2014 at 11:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4031 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 53 of 159 09 January 2014 at 11:54am | IP Logged | ||
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It depends on the definition; if C2 is not the ultimate plateau, then reaching C2 will take a lot less time. But if we define C2 (mind you these are NOT to be taken at face value) to be the point where one is at after ten thousand hours, then it is a tautology by definition. However, as you can see from the curve, one is approximately halfway between C1 and C2 and from this point forward, the learner should be virtually indistinguishable from a C2 and the "shortcomings" are only visible in vocabulary and constructions comparable to the English "unbeknownst to", "notwithstanding" and mastering the English subjunctive and knowing that artistic freedom or not, the songtitle should not be "What if God was one of us?" (winkey-face)
As a reminder; these are not official CEFR levels that I'm talking about here which I think mr. Albysky confused them with. They are there to provide a foundation so that one can make relative assumptions on the levels that are being discussed. Of course the CEFR scale is arbitrary, but it has become a sort of a de-facto standard of proficiency here so I figured I could attach the mental imagery into that framework. I think people place the native level to sort of mythical realms which someone could never ever hope to reach. I would argue that this is not the case. Natives are not perfect in their language. Far from it. Edited by Henkkles on 09 January 2014 at 12:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4311 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 54 of 159 09 January 2014 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | ||
Just as an aside re: 10000 hour rule: This is one these slightly annoying "psycho facts" that gets passed around in the popular media, that has little to do with the original study it supposedly came from. The original paper on skill acquisition showed that for a particular elite music academy in Berlin, the defining difference between the top third of students vs the middle and bottom thirds was hours of practice. Innate ability seemed to make no significant difference; which was surprising given the cult of genius that was/is associated with top musicians and was why the study got so much press. These studies have since been replicated multiple times now across various fields for skill acquisition (e.g., chess, sport) and generally support the notion that the critically determining factor in skill acquisition is hours spent learning NOT some other innate factors. These results are now so well established in sports that it is the ground for all professional sports training (obviously things like height also play a role in some sports like basketball). The authors of the original paper observed that the top third of students when entering the school had already done about 10000 hours of practice (music students were picked precisely because a reasonably accurate estimate of hours of practice could be made). The authors certainly didn't think that the students were now expert musicians and no further practice would be required for them to become soloists. They explicitly state that the more competitive the enterprise the more time will be required to master the skill. So (from memory) they suggest that you may need 30 years to become a world expert in some fields like chess. They certainly did not say that all skills are equivalent in terms of hours of practice needed. Really the main point of these studies is to undermine the idea of innate ability as a critical factor in skill acquisition and then look at the sorts of factors that seem important to becoming experts (e.g., specialized coaching identifying specific problems that can be resolved via short-term intensive practice etc.). Since I don't know of any of these studies looked at language acquisition it's really up to the reader to draw their own conclusions. Edited by patrickwilken on 09 January 2014 at 1:07pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4031 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 55 of 159 09 January 2014 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | ||
I think you might have missed this part:
I forgot a mention at that not being meant to be taken at face value, just to give the process a matrix in which we could compare the supposed "levels" of skill, instead of just fractions of x. Just for the record, I am a firm believer that a very high level can be attained at say, around 2,000 hours, give or take multiplied by the factor by which a person's capability to learn a language is designated, the languages they already speak and so on. To rephrase what I said under "hypothesis" (notice that it still reads "10,000 hours below HYPOTHESIS) Should we set the arbitrary number of 10,000 hours to be the studytime necessary to reach the ultimate plateau... I think someone has put a curse on me; whenever I post anything, people get stuck on the only things I did not mean to be taken at face value. Sigh... I understand your need to battle pseudoscience but still makes me kind of sad... did you even read the disclaimer on my graph? Edited by Henkkles on 09 January 2014 at 1:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4311 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 56 of 159 09 January 2014 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | ||
I did understand your graph and liked it. What these studies (if they are applicable to language learning at all) show is that innate capacity to learn a language is probably not that important (given obviously people have the capacity to study at all). I think this is quite counterintuitive, but it may make more sense if you think what you are really doing is very slowly over many years growing new neural connections, and so everybody starts more or less at the same level, and all brains are basically the same at this basic physiological level in terms of growth etc. Also, I realize you might have used "ultimate plateau" metaphorically, but the one thing about language that psycholinguistics has shown (and is consistent with the acquisition of other skills) is that there is no plateau. One continues to get better at a language the more you use it. Perhaps the relative differences won't be noticeable to people further down (I can't really tell one top musical performance from another) but I bet gatherings of top writers are acutely aware of the growth (or not) of their and other writers abilities. But even if there was an ultimate plateau to learning a language, why should language learning be so much easier than say learning chess or sports or music all of which require many more than 10000 hours for people to become real world-class experts (note: in the original study 10000 hours was only sufficient to get you admitted at the top 1/3 of students to first year classes of the music school). One thing that occurred to me: FSI (say) says it takes x4 longer to learn Japanese than German at least to C1ish. Do people think that this continues to hold as you go from C1 to C2? I could imagine that once you are at C1-level the relative difficulty between languages narrows considerably. Does anyone know from practical experience whether this is true? Edited by patrickwilken on 09 January 2014 at 1:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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