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A polyglot state of mind | ||
Tags: Foreign Languages | Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6074 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 1 of 5 20 November 2007 at 4:04am | IP Logged |
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Succeeding, or failing in language learning are for me partly psychological matters. When you have learned one foreign language, you can learn another, and then another, because as the catch phrase has it, "You know you can do it."
I find it hard now to imagine being a monoglot Anglophone, but most Anglophones are. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6670 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 2 of 5 20 November 2007 at 1:54pm | IP Logged |
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You know, I always figured I'd feel different after I learned another language. I felt like I'd be more...fulfilled, for want of perhaps a better word. And when I studied languages (Esperanto being my first language I really tackled on my own) and never obtained this satisfactory feeling, I figured I just didn't know it well enough, and certainly was not fluent, because I didn't feel comfortable in the language.
This then carried onto Spanish. After even a year of living in Mexico, I didn't feel comfortable in the language yet. However, it wasn't until I got home was spoke English full-time again, not to mention could speak Spanish among people I didn't feel intimidated by, that I realized how well I actually had learned the language. It seemed the skills had to incubate in me, though. I never have found that feeling of being completed by a language, but by now have that there is such a language that will do that for you. :-) Doesn't mean I am going to stop learning them, though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6074 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 3 of 5 20 November 2007 at 2:15pm | IP Logged |
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There is a certain beautiful frustration with language. There is always something new to learn. And there are new languages too, new heavens to storm. I don't think you can be fulfilled. You will stay a little bit hungry even if you're Mezzofanti, I believe.
It's the small things I like - watching a French film without subtitles and understanding it, watching The Third Man and understanding the Austrians' unsubtitled complaints in German, arguing with a Jehovah's Witness in his native language, not mine. Even with the ones I don't know so well, like Italian, I can listen to them talking and realise I'm understanding the greater part of it. Edited by William Camden on 20 November 2007 at 2:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Koos Newbie Sweden Joined 5983 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English | Message 4 of 5 05 January 2008 at 11:30am | IP Logged |
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I would like to know more about the mentality of polyglots. Many years ago I went to a seminar where results from polyglot studies were presented. Claims were made that the only difference between polyglots and other people is the attitude. While people generally were held back in their language learning processes by their own fear to make mistakes, the polyglots were supposed to dive in head on, driven by a desire to communicate at any cost. The reason behind this was supposedly the polyglots’ interest in foreign cultures and the individuals that they met. What I want to do is to write a thesis on language learning, where the concept of “learning how to learn from those who have learned the best (the polyglots)” is an important part. My immediate problem is that I never got hold of any references a decade ago, so right now I am in desperate need of sources to back up these ideas with. Web sources would of course be most convenient. It is not so difficult to find texts on the net about polyglot studies that focuses on neurological differences, but this is not so interesting if you are in to learning and teaching, because there is not much to do about it. I find the psychological side of the matter interesting, because if some attitudes are more favourable than others, then a change of attitude on behalf of the learner would be most profitable in order to achieve positive language learning results.
With kind regards, Koos 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6074 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 5 of 5 15 May 2008 at 9:38am | IP Logged |
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I think attitude is a large part of it. As part of my Russian course, I went to a summer school at an English university for a three-week crash course. (Ah, those were the days!) I remember a particularly fluent Russian speaker among the students. He was a bloke from Trinidad who could only be described as an extrovert. No fear of making mistakes on this guy's part, though no doubt he made them.
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