Twenty-year-old Alex Rawlings speaks 11 languages | Hacker News Reader

Twenty-year-old Alex Rawlings speaks 11 languages

bbc.co.uk

23 pointsThibaut51 comments

Rather than the raw number, what amazed me was the variety of language families that he was proficient with. Just like you might be less impressed with someone who can program in Java, C and C++ than someone who can program in C, Lisp, and Haskell, I know many people who can speak French, Italian, and Spanish...but does that even really count?

Here's the breakdown by my count:

* Spanish, French, Catalan, Italian -- pretty "core" Romance languages

* Dutch, Afrikaans, German, English -- closely related Germanic (even I, knowing English and a bit of German can understand some Dutch)

* Greek -- unique (and very impressive; I've been told by many multilingual individuals that Greek is unlike any other language and therefore a pain to learn)

* Russian -- shares a few characters with Greek, but that's it

* Hebrew -- a Semitic language, related to Arabic but distinct from the others he knows

About all he is missing is an agglutinative language (the "Lisp"s of human languages) such as Turkish, Korean, Finnish, or Japanese, or something tonal like Mandarin. Still, a very impressive accomplishment!

The Foreign Service Institute has a nice ranking of difficulty per language, for an english speaker

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Language_Learning_Difficulty_fo...

  >> speak French, Italian, and Spanish...but does that even really count?

For an English speaker, French and Spanish probably should each count for about half of a language compared to learning a truly foreign language.

Adding Italian to Spanish should count for less than a half (maybe a quarter?). However, trying to maintain Italian and Spanish simultaneously is very confusing due to the strong similarity.

I was impressed at how many people I met in Luxembourg spoke French, Portugese, English, German, and Luxembourgish. Almost 100% of the native population speaks Luxembourgish (which they learn in dedicated kindergarten years, and then never again), French, German and English. Luxembourgish is like their secret language - spoken universally by the native population, but by almost nobody who didn't grow up in the country. It's useful for them in business meetings, when they want to discuss something among themselves, without being concerned that the visitor actually speaks german/french.

I wonder if there is another country where the vast majority of the native population speaks four languages?

In the Netherlands children in higher secondary education learn English, French and German, besides Dutch. Many schools also offer courses in either Spanish or Italian. When going to the 'highest' secondary education form (gymnasium) you can also learn ancient Greek or Latin.

Yes, but bear in mind that many Dutch people, while having had a few years of education in highschool, struggle when confronted with a conversation in French or German, and it's a long stretch to claim they are fluent.

It's not comparable with the way people from Luxembourg speak French and German.

(Disclaimer: my roots are in Luxembourg I live in The Netherlands).

In Canada it's mandatory to take french (or at least, it was when I went to school) from Grade 7 through 9. I"m prepared to wager that 90%+ of the high school graduates in British Columbia/Alberta (where there isn't much french spoken) couldn't manage a simple conversation in french.

The difference was in Luxembourg, where people effortlessly switched between french and german - and then fell back to english as the common european language if the speaker didn't understand either of those. (The service workers, at Subway and other restaurants tended to speak portugese - possibly speaking to where many of them had come from)

Put another way - you could get by fine, anywhere in Luxembourg, speaking only French. You could get almost nowhere in British Columbia speaking only French (even though, theoretically, it's one of the two national languages of Canada).

In the Netherlands - could a speaker in just French or German get by in only that language everywhere?

Switzerland officially recognizes four languages as national tongues (German, French, Italian, and Romansch), and my understanding is that it is relatively common for the Swiss to be tri- or quadrilingual.

Hardly anybody speaks Romansch, though. The languages are loosely mapped to geography, and it's typical for the french-speaking parts to learn German as a second language from early on (and then pick up English on their own, or get taught it in later years). Iirc it's the reverse in the german part. Not sure what the Italian-speakers do...

So, in short, most french/german native swiss should speak at least French, English and German fluently enough to have conversations in it.

Right. My experience is that usually it's two or three of the others + English that is spoken by most.

Much as this sounds amazing, languages are pretty uniform once you know the basics much as once you get the basics of programming, your knowledge is portable across other languages. The majority of a language is working out how the basic structures apply and learning local variations and nuances.

I'd be more impressed if he had some eastern languages which don't follow the usual structures. The languages he has learned are all similarly structured. Hebrew is possibly an exception.

The BBC are also notoriously impressed with anything that people can do if it's a slow news day.

I learned Hebrew when I was much younger, I'm no longer even remotely functional in it but I can tell you that it has a lot of patterns that can be carried over from other western languages. The primary novelty in it would be the K-T-B [1] vocab patterns and the occasional quaint idiom.

[1] K-T-B referring to how nouns/verbs with the consonants K, T, and B in them tend to refer to libraries, books, or reading. This is true in both Hebrew and Arabic. IIRC, Aramaic shares the same families of concepts but isn't as directly portable like Arabic and Hebrew.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-T-B

Thanks for this - very interesting!

If you think that's cool, imagine how easy vocabulary is in Hebrew or Arabic once you know the patterns.

The verb/noun/adverb patterns tend to be pretty consistent, so if you know the noun for "book", you can just apply the verb pattern to get "read". This can be carried over to most such concept-families that follow this pattern.

Note: not as applicable to newer words or words taken from the West. Hebrew has a lot of obvious English ports.

I find middle-eastern languages pretty fascinating in general. It's my dream to spend time with ancient Levantine-Arabic speaking tribes and learn the tongue from them. The idioms in traditionally Arabic-speaking cultures are fascinating.

There's a reason the intellectuals of yore, such as Thomas Jefferson, considered Arabic to be one the most artful and elegant languages in terms of expression and structure.

A lot of people like to talk about musical talent ports over very well for programming ability.

I'd like to think my obsession with languages has done similar things for my coding.

I disagree, but from a gut feeling. Frankly, I've never been good at languages.

English is the one single language I learned and feel comfortable with, everything else failed (most notably I tried several times to learn Italian, now I'm in Israel and start to doubt if I'll ever have a conversation in Hebrew).

Maybe you are right about emerging patterns, and in fact that is exactly what the guy claims in the BBC video at the end: It becomes easier the more languages you learn. But still, I'm honestly impressed by speaking a large amount of languages fluently (i.e. no stuttering, freely, without a hard accent - and without starting to mix languages due to context switches).

"All similarly structured": I guess I have to take your word for it. Coming from Germany I haven't found a language that feels like a good match so far (disclaimer applies again of course: I suck at languages). To me, Russian and Dutch/Afrikaans kind of don't mix.

And the final, most impressive feat for me is: Handling the conflicts, not the similarities. A chair - does it have a gender in the language at hand? Which one? What are the consequences? Are you talking to a male or female person? Does this change your sentence? What are the languages ~basic~ irregularities (think numbering, for example).

Some of these examples are things that I'd imagine being hard learning German. Some are issues that I have with learning Hebrew. I'm impressed.

It is impressive; he won the prize for for most prolific young polyglot in the country. There are very few in the world at this age who can speak 10+ languages.

Are you speaking from authority as a polyglot yourself? Because I haven't heard this opinion before. The uniformity does ease the burden slightly of learning a language but it's a small role in achieving fluency.

I think you could go from zero to having full command of the Spanish grammar in a couple of weeks. I did it self taught in a month or two with a Michel Thomas CDs in a single grammar thin book. If you have the mind for it, learning language structure of a Romance or Germanic language is not too much of a challenge.

What then takes _years_ is vocabulary acquisition, comprehension, pronunciation, idiomatic usage, and the fast application of the grammar you've learned. For me, what took a long time was training my brain to think fast enough that I could decode the target language fast enough to hold fluent conversation and, later, get my brain fast enough thinking in the target language. This is hardly "learning local variations and nuances", it is what takes up 90%+ of reaching a "fluency" and it's something every language learner must go through, whether they already speak 1 or 8 languages.

I am starting learning German, and i'm going through the same process as with Spanish. It's really not hard to laern the principals of the language, the sentence structure and verbal agreement, gender etc. But _using it at a natural speed_ so you can conversion in German - that's a mammoth job and takes months or years.

Perhaps your programming anology holds, but reaching a "fluency" means you can go hours or days of coding without ever reaching for a reference document. Sure took me a long time to get there.

It does take years. The brain is very pliable and easy to teach the younger you are so it depends on when you start.

I'm not much of a polyglot myself: English, French, Swiss-German, Afrikaans (mainly the insults!) but my sister can speak 8 languages fluently (she's a professional translator) and the basis of my comment is on her observations of language.

I was hoping he'd offer some advice for those who struggle with language learning.

Can anyone share an opinion about the best way to learn a new language (or several)?

In my experience the best way to learn a language is to use a book and read/write enough to have a basic hang of the language. Once you have the basics down, force yourself to start thinking in that language. Make it a game: each time you get an entire sentence of your thought process correct in that language reward yourself. If you make a mistake punish yourself.

The disadvantage to this method is you need a lot of discipline to keep constantly forcing yourself to think in a new language, and you will spend a lot more time when thinking.

How-to-learn-any-language forums is to polyglots what Hacker News is to hackers.

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html

Make an amazing number of mistakes, make a constant fool of yourself, and above all - KEEP GOING!

Disclaimer: Pure opinion. I only speak 3 languages reasonably fluently, and have a basic to moderate understanding of a few others. It's not like there's any scientific backing for this method, though.

Step 1: bootstrap. Before you can really learn the language, you need to set up some basic structures in your mind for that language. You need a basic understanding of grammar, a few useful sentence patterns, etc. You need those to be wired in so that they can be called upon in conversation, so just reading is no good - you have to both listen and speak. I've found the Pimsleur courses to be excellent for this bootstrapping, especially those that have 3 sets of lessons (3x30 half-hour lessons = pretty solid bootstrapping), but even with just one you get some solid basics like simple sentences, numbers, basic grammar, etc.

Step 2: grow basic vocabulary. Even after bootstrapping, you'll still have a vocabulary that's way too limited to engage in meaningful conversation (though at least you can have uber-simple conversations like asking for prices, directions, and being polite). At this point you need vocabulary - a lot of it. The best way I've found to build this is to read, with a good dictionary and (if the language needs it) verb conjugation book handy so that you can actually understand things. Basically, take beginner-level reading materials, and, with a pencil in hand, read, paragraph by paragraph. While you read the paragraph, underline words you're not 100% sure about (but don't stop reading until you get to the end of the paragraph). Once you're finished with a paragraph, look things up and write the definitions in the margins. By the time you've read 2-3 beginner books like this, you can probably handle a simple conversation about a topic other than the price of a train ticket.

Step 3: total immersion. This is the key step, and you can even skip the previous two if you're in a rush, and go straight for that, but then it'll be very hard and you'll waste a lot of "prime time" (i.e. time spent surrounded exclusively by native speakers) learning the basics you could have learned at home. In this step, you need to speak only that language for at least a few weeks, ideally three months or so. Stay away from people who speak your native language (i.e. don't hang around with exchange students or whatever, however "safe" that may seem, since it will destroy the main benefit of this). Speak only the target language, and within a few weeks something magical will happen: you'll switch from thinking in english and translating, to thinking directly in the target language. This is the holy grail. At this point, you can speak. You may still have a LOT to learn (depending on the language... e.g. with Chinese, well done, you can speak - now you can learn to read ideograms, which is twice as hard), but you've got enough of the building blocks that you don't need a deliberate system other than speaking to people in that language and reading stuff in that language. The more you speak/read, the better you'll get.

Have fun!

Advice please.

I have "party French". In social circumstances where someone is willing to be gracious to me, and talk slowly, and explain what certain words mean, I can carry on a conversation.

So I believe I have reached and done Step 3.

I now want to develop "adversarial French", i.e. a command of the language that I can use in circumstances where people don't actually care if I understand them.

However, I feel like I hit a plateau. Perhaps it was because I didn't do complete immersion, and switched back to English? Would that be the solution to me advancing further, or is there another technique to use?

I've been told that you cannot consider to have mastered a language until you dream in that language. Total immersion is likely the only thing that will get you over that plateau.

I dreamt in Spanish (and spoke Spanish in my sleep) way before I had mastered it. Hell, I haven't "mastered" it now after four years and doubt I ever will. It's not a particularly useful barometer for language domination; I dreamt in it just because I was immersed in the language and went to sleep reading or thinking about it.

Some interesting research/Myths on learning a second language: http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/myths.html

The one that caught my attention was, "Myth 3: The more time students spend in a second language context, the quicker they learn the language" - I would have never guessed that. Just goes to show -it's always important to do the research.

I remember being sent by my parents to Germany, when I was a kid, where I stayed with a German family for 2 weeks. My command of German was pretty pathetic, but that didn't stop me from engaging in a (in hindsight, hilariously insensitive from both sides) debate about whether the Swiss were more evil than the Germans (my hosts unwisely decided to claim that Switzerland was evil because of the Swiss banks... I couldn't resist such a gaping wide opening for counter-argument, and the ensuring argument included me retorting that I felt that given the history of Germany, they were hardly in a position to call other countries evil, considering they had slaughtered millions of people around Europe not all that long ago). I was 12 or so, I think.

Anyway, the point of this: I think adversarial conversation is more a matter of mindset than of mastery of the language. If anything, not understanding half of what is being said helps to encourage adversarial conversation on both sides :-)

With respect to your problem, yes, total immersion is a good solution (imho, disclaimer, etc). Travel to that country and stay away from English speakers, and speak only that language for a month. If I'm right, you'll build the mental wiring necessary to speak that language in any circumstances (whether you're understood is then just a matter of practice).

Interesting his idea to learn similar languages to observe the derivation process.

I don't speak more than 2 languages, but spend a lot of times on etymology websites, the more words history you see, the easier it gets to decode languages.

  - phonetic transformation
  - semantic 'slip'
  - multidimensional denotation/connotation projection

At the end you kinda build a core set of ideas used in all languages, either for lexicon or speech structure. Then the learning feels a lot more gradual.

btw : his french accent is almost there, he feels comfortable using common idioms, which is a good point.

His Afrikaans sounds a lot better than his Dutch. With a little bit of work he'll be able to speak Flemish too, as that is about as similar to Dutch as Afrikaans.

I wonder how fluent (in terms of vocab) he can become in each? And if he'll remember them.

Richard Francis Burton, supposedly learned almost thirty languages - and from what I've read - he would study a new language - while throwing out another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton

I try "learning" spanish while commuting using this Android app: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.pervychine.spanish...

I love this way of learning

This is an interesting link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17101370

Wow, and I thought I'm cool for being fluent in 4 languages.

Nice hobby, but to me learning many languages sounds a bit like a waste of time. Unless you want to become a translator, but where is the appeal? It seems to be a very passive, uncreative job.

Also I wonder how hard it really is to learn a language, with the proper memorization techniques.

Edit: To the downvoters: I was expressing my personal opinion, that for me it seems like a waste of time. If you enjoy learning languages, more power to you. But be tolerant of other people's opinions, if you can.

Knowing languages other than your native language can be really useful if you work for a multi-national company.

I'm a software developer. My previous gig was at European aerospace company, and my current gig is at international financial institution. At both of these companies there's a wide range of languages spoken, and being able to converse in other colleagues' native language can indeed be useful. Both of these employers see languages as a desirable, but not essential, skill.

Of course languages can be useful, as I said, I just question the effectiveness of it. At a multinational corp. English would be expected. English is not my first language, so I already know more than one language anyway.

I'm not sure about at other businesses but the Software Development company I work for has native speakers of what must be nearly every major language (the only one I haven't come across is Portuguese, and I'm sure that is just because I haven't meet that person yet). For example, the bank of desks I'm sitting at this moment has Greek, Bulgarian, Punjabi, Sri Lankan, Hindi and Russian. It would be quite difficult for me to pick up any of the languages to a standard that could compete with that!

Since when is a nice hobby a waste of time? What a rude thing to say.

Sorry, but why do I have to like other people's hobbies? If I think they are boring, then I won't pretend it ain't so. However, if he enjoys learning languages, it doesn't bother me in the least. So where is the problem?

Also I admit it frustrates me if people study that kind of thing instead of productive things. Where I live people even go to university studying languages for years. Sorry, but things like engineering simply seem more productive to me, just my opinion. If all those people can find jobs as translators and are happy with it, whatever.

I recently heard of a friend of a friend who is translator for the Spanish envoy and get's to dine with Angela Merkel (German chancellor) occasionally. Might be interesting, but I personally wouldn't dedicate my life to achieving it. That's just me.

Well I only happen to think that only handful of my friends and colleagues do anything of any worth with their working lives. I wouldn't dare say that of course! I'd have no defense if they offered the same retort - and then I'd weep for a few hours thinking my life was of no consequence.

For many employers the subject someone studies is moot, it's the skill sets built around the study that are important. Showing that you can apply yourself to something.

Not that I want to poo poo your idealism.

I do gripe about that aspect of modern live, that I feel most jobs are really worthless and bullshit. It includes my own work life and it depresses me greatly. But I try to work against it and actually do something meaningful. Is it really so bad to encourage my friends to do something meaningful in their lives, too? It's not as if the majority of people is ever so happy about their jobs. They are all depressed, but they think it is normal and so they put up with it. I don't feel guilty for pointing that out occasionally.

Incidentally, isn't that part of what Hacker News is all about?

Hanging out here making comments is of course not at all a waste of time.

If only it was as simple a decision as that: either hang out on HN or learn another language. Frankly, I would probably still choose HN. Even though I hate the noise, I have also learned a lot of things relevant to my job through HN.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong, and you're wrong. First, learning a language is far more involved than proper memorization techniques. Second, there is real evidence that being monolingual causes parts of your brain to atrophy. Seriously! Here's a Science Friday report that talks about the study: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/25/134059279/being-bilingual-not-...

I'll save you some time, though. Essentially, researchers showed babies tapes of a bilingual individual speaking English, then switching to speaking French. After a certain age, monolingual babies were unable to pick up on the switch, whereas bilingual babies were able to detect when the speaker switched languages. Oh, did I mention? The bilingual babies were Spanish/Catalan bilingual. In other words, they were able to pick up on someone switching from English to French, while neither was their native tongue, indicating that being bilingual preserves elements of the language recognition portion of your brain.

As a counterpoint, I was raised monolingual and I can detect when people switch languages. I am not a baby anymore, though.

I've heard good things about raising kids bilingual, however since my wife has the same mother tongue as I we decided against it. I envy the people who have the option.

Certainly you can learn to distinguish languages even if you are raised monolingual, but that is a learned ability. You've still lost the innate ability that you were born with.

Also, there's no reason you can't start your child young with a second language. The French, in particular, are more than happy to train your child in French from a very young age pretty much no matter where you are in the world (search for Alliance Francaise). My wife and I have different native tongues, and we intend to have our child go to a school where the language of instruction is a third different language. We have friends who have raised their son speaking French, Spanish, English, and Turkish. He is now learning Mandarin and is the most articulate 8 year old you've ever met. It really is worth the effort.

Not being fluent in any languages other than my native tongue, I always feel that I can't really get to grips with a culture without knowing the language.

I find some language - and phrasing quite revealing and beautiful. I love listening to other languages - even if I don't understand them.

I don't mind other languages. Maybe my problem is that there isn't really any other culture I would like to immerse in. Most cultures seem to be all about oppression. I am happy to live in a moderately free world, which also happens to have a high fraction of English speakers.

For example, I might consider learning Mandarin. China sure is fascinating, but I sure as hell wouldn't like to live there. So what would I gain, really? The ability to read some fascinating ancient texts. OK - but as I said, I can imagine better uses of my time.

What would be a an interesting country to immerse in? Most Spanish speaking countries are poor and dangerous. The muslim world suppresses women and is also dangerous, and I could get killed for twittering. Russia? Also too poor, cold and depressing. Japan perhaps, but it is a rather small island and I am probably too tall to ever live there comfortably.

I already live in Europe and there are other European countries I like, but not enough to learn the languages. If I were to move to some obscure EU country, I would of course try to learn their language. But it seems unlikely atm, so why bother?

I think you have to be slightly careful with your sweeping generalisations!

I think culture transcends the state. The citizens of a country don't necessarily represent the state do they?

Of course there are nice people everywhere. But there are nice people at home, too.

What would be a nice country to visit? That is my question?

Take China - it is fascinating, but they don't have free speech and lots of death sentences. That makes it very unattractive to me. Even if I could meet interesting people there, chances are the interesting stuff would be illegal to say. So if I talk about it, I put myself at risk.

At other countries, you don't even meet women on the street. Sure, they might be really nice, but why do all the work to get beyond "culture"? In a lot of countries, if I talk to a woman her brothers might set out to kill me. Additionally, I am not keen on any kind of religion to begin with.

I wrote my rant in the hopes that somebody would come up with a good reason to learn a language or visit "challenged" countries.

I am aware that the Euro zone is a small bubble of moderate happiness on a sea of misery. I am lucky - but why should I leave the bubble and put myself at risk? Or even if I don't put myself at risk, chances are I am just taking advantage of some poor people (because I would travel to some holiday resort because it is so cheap).

Unfortunately historically culture tends to be all about suppressing women, among other things, I am just not into it. It is a set of rules, why should I force myself into it? I want to be free from culture, and I want to meet people who are free minds.

Can you name one worthwhile culture to get to know, and why is it worthwhile? Apart from scientific studies, which are fascinating, but not my line of work.

Clothes are the same all over the world now. Food you can also get a huge variety in most major cities.

Nothing against traveling to the odd country, but then again it is questionable if traveling to some country once for two weeks warrants investing years to learn their language.

> chances are I am just taking advantage of some poor people (because I would travel to some holiday resort because it is so cheap)

Those of us in the 'west' are doing this anyway through food and goods. Sounds like you'd prefer some kind of ethical tourism.

As a note of optimism, history is there to be learnt from. Not very long ago did we see women and blacks oppressed in the so called civilised world.

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