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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| johnm87 Newbie United States Joined 5886 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 6 03 April 2008 at 10:43am | IP Logged |
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Hi Dr. Arguelles, I'd first like to thank you for the time you've spent helping the members on this forum. I've only very recently discovered it, but I've gone back and looked through many of your old posts, which have been extremely useful for me. But there are several questions I still have that I was hoping you could help me answer.
First a little about myself: I'm about to turn 21, my native languages are English and Persian (the latter of which I have almost no reading or writing comprehension, but I speak/understand properly), with perfunctory understanding of Spainsh from my high school days that has almost completely disappeared at this point. Learning to read/write Farsi and learning Spanish are my first priorities. I am interested in pursuing a very demanding field unrelated to languages and have many other outside fields that I am interested in studying during my free time, so I don't have quite the time I would like in order to study languages. For the next several years, likely an hour a day, more after that (my plan is to spend the next few years on romance languages). I'm mostly interested in languages for literature, though I would of course like to learn to speak them as well. Now, onto my questions: 1. A little confusion about your shadowing technique. So this is done before one begins any formal study of the language? And I saw in many of your posts you mention that you now find writing by hand to be even more helpful. Would you perhaps recommend I begin learning completely foreign languages by listening to audio books of written works while at the same time reciting them verbally and transcribing them? Or would it be better to do just shadowing where I walk upright? 2. I noticed you have mentioned several times that about 15 minutes a day is needed to "maintain" languages. However, due to my limited time, the amount of languages I want to learn (far more than I know I will ever have time for, there are about 20 I want to learn) and my purposes, I was wondering whether it would be a great error not to spend time "maintaining" the languages? If I, for instance, learn Arabic fluently (as you said to the point where I can read a classic work of literature without a dictionary at a pace similair to English), how quickly do you expect my grasp of the language to slip without regular practice? If I don't spend any time with it for, let's say, 5 years (more than will likely be the case), will I lose so much of the language that I will not be able to readily re-learn with a short period of intense study? I ask this because I know I will not have time to maintain many languages in this way, and I do not mind having my fluency slip a bit if I will be able to re-learn it. But if it will do serious damage, I would of course like to maintain. 3. A question on a few specific languages: a. How readily can all the various forms of Latin be learned? In other words, if I learn Classical Latin, will it take a great deal of time to learn Mediaeval? When mapping out my own language schedule, I would like to know if learning the different historical forms will take as much time as learning a seperate language. b. The same question for Sanskrit/Avestan c. The same question for Modern Persian/Middle Persian d. The same question for Greek and Ancient Greek (these I know are said to be extremely different, so even more specifically Attic Greek vs. Homeric vs. Biblical) e. The same question for Classical Chinese vs. Mandarin 4. In your opinion, which Indian languages have the richest literary traditions? I would like to learn Sanskrit/Hindustani, but I would also like to learn 1 or MAYBE 2 others. Any suggestions? I know Tamil and Bengali and Kannada are supposed to be good. I think that just about covers it. Thanks so much for the help. I know I've listed a large number of languages I would like to learn, and I realize I will almost definitely not be able to learn them all (some I would be satisfied with only a partial understanding), but this is a lifetime goal and I will have more time to dedicate after the next few years. Edited by johnm87 on 03 April 2008 at 11:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Makrasiroutioun Quadrilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Canada infowars.com Joined 5906 days ago 210 posts - 236 votes  Speaks: French*, English*, Armenian*, Romanian*, Latin, German, Italian Studies: Dutch, Swedish, Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 2 of 6 03 April 2008 at 2:50pm | IP Logged |
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I cannot adequately answer questions 1 and 2, though I too am looking forward to the professor's advice, but I will give you my personal input on questions 3 and 4.
3.a. Quite readily, especially with a solid knowledge of advanced English vocabulary and some basic Spanish or Italian or Portuguese. From a diachronic perspective, the differences between Archaic or Old, Classical and Vulgar Latin are large, especially in terms of grammar but also some fairly basic terms (equus vs. caballus from Celtic). However, most Mediaeval Latin texts, since it was no one's native tongue by then, are written in wildly varying degrees of "classicalness" so to speak. It will also show spelling and pronunciation differences depending on the writer's native Romance or even non-Romance language (German, Dutch, Scandinavian, and Gaelic come to mind.) Then there is New or Neo Latin, which is a modern version of Classical Latin with nearly identical grammar but with 19th, 20th, and 21st century vocabulary. Learning all historical forms of Latin would be fairly economical, in my opinion, and a great intellectual adventure. b. Sanskrit and Avestan are very closely related, especially in terms of grammar. There are some perfectly corresponding sound changes and some vocabulary differences, but the basic Proto-Indo-European word stock and structure are there. c. Persian has remarkably changed little since the 10th century or so, but before that it had a tumultuous and very quickly changing linguistic history. Middle Persian is a challenge, but I would recommend to look into Old Persian if you are serious about learning Avestan and Sanskrit, as these three form a primitive PIE continuum in that part of the world. In fact, if you compare Old Persian, Avestan, and Sanskrit declension and conjugation tables, you probably won't be able to tell much of a difference at first. All three maintain the dual, the eight original PIE cases, and a lot of the phonology is intact. d. It would be an even greater pleasure and linguistic quest to study Mycenaean Greek, Homeric Greek, Attic Greek, Doric Greek, New Testament Greek, Byzantine Greek, Katharevousa, and Dimotiki than it would to cover all forms of Latin! Though the differences are much more significant. If you are studying Katharevousa and Dimotiki at an advanced level, it would take little effort to learn some Ancient Greek grammar and start reading the classics in their original, with the help of a dictionary. Homeric and Mycenaean (along with Armenian and Phrygian) are a must for those interested in early Indo-European languages. e. I can't answer this one well, since it is outside of my areas of study. My guess would be that the written form would be more or less understandable for a modern Mandarin or Cantonese speaker, but that the pronunciation would be utterly different. 4. Bengali would be very easy with Hindi/Urdu at hand, but you ought to look into Prakrit for a very rich literary tradition. Tamil is from another very different language family, Dravidian, which is agglutinative instead of inflexional. It has very different morphology and word derivation. Tamil has indeed a rich 2200 year literary tradition. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 5948 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 3 of 6 04 April 2008 at 8:14am | IP Logged |
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e.
The grammars of Classical Chinese and Modern variants are actually quite different, and several characters (actually the words behind the characters) have shifted in semantics in Mandarin. However, the general gist of a text can be understood with knowledge of modern Chinese, maybe even Japanese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7056 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 4 of 6 06 April 2008 at 9:38pm | IP Logged |
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As others have already begun to give very competent answers to your questions about specific languages in points 3 and 4, let me just address your procedural questions in points 1 and 2.
I do not think it is accurate to say that one begins shadowing “before” undertaking formal study of a language. Rather, shadowing itself is a most effective technique for undertaking the formal study of a language. Depending on the difficulty of the language in question, you may well want to spend a period of time blind shadowing or focusing purely on phonetic acquisition, but this is part and parcel of the whole learning process and not merely a prelude. Likewise, writing texts out by hand is not an alternate method, but rather the natural and normal complement to shadowing. As for using audiobooks, you should have the patience to save that for the intermediate stage and do your actual initial learning with didactic materials specifically designed for the task. As to the rate and the degree to which you will lose languages that you do not actively maintain—I think that this is something that can vary greatly from individual to individual. I have known a fair number of middle aged+ men who have told me that they used to have a high professional functionality (e.g., military surveillance, language teaching, etc.) in a foreign language that they have subsequently forgotten completely. I have also seen my own students lose the ability to converse in a foreign language, though they can still understand it, within just a few short years. On the other hand, I have also found my own experience echoed in others in that unused languages can languish for years, but yet not actually rust away. Losing a language you are not actually using might not even bother some people; however, to me it seems like a terrible loss on your investment of time and energy, so yes, to use your words, in my opinion it would indeed be a great error not to spend time maintaining your languages as the risk of losing them is not one I think it is reasonable to take, even though the general experience seems to be that relearning is never as difficult as initial learning. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6503 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 5 of 6 07 April 2008 at 3:44am | IP Logged |
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Due to my 24½ year long pause from serious language study (from January 1982 to May 2006) I have some experience with language loss. During the periode I mentioned I regularly used my English and to some extent my German. I also watched television in Swedish, Norwegian and sometimes French. Besides I travelled a lot, not least in Latinamerica, which of course benefited my Spanish. But the net result of this lack of activity was that I lost Romanian, Catalan and Latin completely, Italian to the extent that I could only read it, while my French, Spanish and German were still functional, but not more.
However when I decided to roll back these developments I found that it was easier than expected, - and that held true even for the first target, Romanian, which I needed for an upcoming travel. The central activity during this period was - as 'politically incorrect' as it may be - to make word lists with vaguely known words (I got the idea while counting my Romanian words). Recuperating my old vocabulary was the key to being able to read and listen to those languages with some degree of pleasure, and I found that I could add language after language to my CV. The success even spilled over to some new languages, most notably Portuguese, because they have so many words in common with languages I already knew. Only when I changed my focus to new and more distant languages such as Greek and Russian I had to revise my methods. In spite of this I would not advice anybody to let their languages slip away. Even a quarter of an hour here and there can be enough to keep a language alive, provided that you spend this time with your full attention on the language itself and not just on the meaning of some text specimen. And a quarter of an hour here and there should be possible to find even for a busy person. Edited by Iversen on 07 April 2008 at 8:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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