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Muhamed Mesic | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Gilgamesh Tetraglot Senior Member England Joined 6044 days ago 452 posts - 468 votes  14 sounds Speaks: Dutch, English, German, French Studies: Polish | Message 9 of 21 25 February 2008 at 8:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello Muhamed,
I (and I am sure many other members with me) would find it very interesting to learn about how you learned your languages, what techniques you used, when you started, what your future plans are, etc. If you find the time to do this, I'd be very grateful. Think of the motivation and inspiration it might bring for many, many people on here (including myself). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Faraday Senior Member United States Joined 5920 days ago 129 posts - 256 votes Speaks: German* | Message 10 of 21 23 March 2008 at 8:49am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm also interested in hearing about how you acquired your languages, especially the more obscure ones.
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| the_lizard Newbie Bosnia Hercegovina Joined 5926 days ago 8 posts - 11 votes | Message 11 of 21 10 April 2008 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||
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To be honest, I have no idea. I just started learning very early on, maybe due to the fact that we were a bilingual household, but I remember speaking English without ever having learned it, at age 4. Doctors think it's something in my brain, but what's kept me going on all these years is pure curiosity - I always tend to live languages: listen to an audiobook in Arabic at the gym, read Hebrew on the subway, listen to radio in Maltese (you see, I like Semitic languages in particular) thru the net while cleaning up. Now easier than ever! :)
Send me a message if you wanna know details ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JasonChoi Diglot Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6161 days ago 274 posts - 298 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Latin | Message 12 of 21 10 April 2008 at 9:48am | IP Logged | ||
It's fascinating that you mentioned 'curiosity' because this is what I noticed among many people who learn anything quite rapidly. I don't know if this is 100% true, but it seems that when there is curiosity, there is very little focus on mistakes, which is ironically something we are taught in schools. Also, it seems many polyglots have all sorts of learning methods, but curiosity is certainly one of the things that I see in common. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if curiosity is essential for learning languages (or anything else for that matter). Edited by JasonChoi on 10 April 2008 at 9:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gilgamesh Tetraglot Senior Member England Joined 6044 days ago 452 posts - 468 votes 14 sounds Speaks: Dutch, English, German, French Studies: Polish | Message 13 of 21 10 April 2008 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you for your reply. I was actually referring to some kind of linguistic biography, which no doubt would be very inspiring for the rest of the forum members. You mentioned you have a particular fondness for Semitic languages? What other languages fascinate you? Which ones do you plan to learn in the futur? And how do you go about learning the more obscure ones? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bojan Bilingual Pentaglot Newbie Germany Joined 6026 days ago 35 posts - 35 votes Speaks: Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian*, German*, English | Message 14 of 21 11 April 2008 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dobrodosli. Si ti iz Tuzle? Imas MSN?
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| the_lizard Newbie Bosnia Hercegovina Joined 5926 days ago 8 posts - 11 votes | Message 15 of 21 12 April 2008 at 2:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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"Linguistic" biography... well, I grew up in what was basically a bilingual household so that probably helped, although I can't actually remember ever learning my first foreign language, English; all I do remember is the fact that I read it by the time I was 5. I love books (I've been a bookworm for as long as I can remember; my gran's prophecy is that I'll die from asthma), so I guess "reading" books (I picked up the latin and cyrillic alphabets early on) at that age, even without knowing what was actually written, must have been useful. War came next - and I spent days lingering around little groups of Swedish/French/Italian relief workers/peacekeepers, again, listening to the patterns in their languages and interpreting whatever actions they relate to what they're saying, and while I guess half of my "talent" has to do with the way my brain works and whatever all sorts of (semi-)qualified people have had to say about it, the other must have been the fact that growing up in an isolated craphole under constant shelling makes you want to get out and meet the world as much as you can, and the only way to understand people is to actually talk to them, and the only way to talk to them is in a language, and given that the objective chance of someone speaking Bosnian (and its in-law languages) in all those exotic places I want to know everything about is pretty meager, I got them rolling, one by one. Nowadays I usually say I can communicate in a language once I've mastered whatever of it is in the appropriate textbook I've been using, as I do indeed use textbooks a lot (Colloquial/Buske/Assimil/Teach Yourself collections), but rather than complementing that with CDs, I listen to the radio (viva internet!) and tend to doodle things in the language while I'm learning it; if I'm going to the place where it's spoken, that's an added motivation bonus. I also see languages as inseparably related to whatever culture they "belong" to, so being interested in, say, Euskera, means reading Gara and watching ETB every now and then, counting your sit-ups in it, or writing a letter to the Lehendakari (and then getting a lovely Basque flag from him). But then, that's me, I guess memory also plays a role and I do tend to remember kazillions of useless things - such as car registration numbers & co. - but that only helps me immerse in a language, the rest is part of the fun.
And yes, as soon as they tell you you've got to watch out for mistakes, they're chasing the fun away from you and you're much less likely to succeed in learning, or rather, in freeing yourself to speak and understand the given language. Once a guy told me, "you have no idea about languages... you don't know how difficult it is for a true language learner to memorize all the rules", and then I realized that rather than looking for what he knows and what he can say, he was looking for what he doesn't know and can't say. Mistakes are what makes us learners; heck, most people whose native language is English make a mistake every once in a while, I make them in Bosnian and yet none of this impairs my ability - and great desire - to communicate whatever I want in either of those languages. Even more so in those languages of which I only happen to speak a bit, such as Lithuanian. If you become desperate knowing that, say, the accusative form of "debesis" which is masculine and ends in "is" isn't debesio, but debesies (correct me if I'm wrong), and give up on Lithuanian just because "cloud" is one of a handful of masculine words that don't declinate following the standard (1st) pattern, then you're not learning it because you really want to. I've never met a single Lithuanian - and I've met a few - who'd feel disappointed over a foreigner's lack of confidence in speaking his language. Semitic languages fascinate me in particular, because I think that because of the way stems work following such an amazing logic, they're extra fun to learn. Modern Arabic dialects also fascinate me; as does chasing stems back across to proto-Semitic. Other fascinating languages? Inuktitut, definitely, or Haida, and Welsh. One of my main projects for the future is going to be working on ways to get "moribund" languages of that scale and back into the community - and I believe that teaching life skills in those languages to the kids in communities where these are dying (the languages, not the children, G-d forbid!) is one of the ways of succeeding. I hope I've answered some of the questions :))) This is almost getting to feel like an interview... Bojane, jesam, iz Tuzle sam. MSN baš i ne koristim. Zašto? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bojan Bilingual Pentaglot Newbie Germany Joined 6026 days ago 35 posts - 35 votes Speaks: Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian*, German*, English | Message 16 of 21 13 April 2008 at 11:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Ich wollte einfach mal mit dir schreiben, Ex-Landsmann :D
Mich würden deine Fähigkeiten in der deutschen Sprache sehr interessieren. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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