How to learn 30 languages
bbc.com
bbc.com
My personal opinion is that claims of polyglotism are quite often (if not usually) exaggerated, whether intentionally or not. There are many different metrics for language proficiency, but they are all just samples of a person's linguistic competence rather than a complete picture. For that reason, they're prone to the same issues as general intelligence tests. A high score on a language test is no guarantee of fluency just as a high IQ is no guarantee of intelligence-- and this is all assuming the person claiming to be fluent has even taken such a test, which is rare. I think more often people have individual standards for "fluency", which vary wildly. Again, I'm not saying that people intentionally mislead others about their own language ability, or that there aren't any true hyperpolyglots-- just that such claims should be taken with a grain of salt.
Both the description of the critical hypothesis in the article and the person who described it as "a bunch of crap" are wrong. The hypothesis actually states that there is an ideal window for language learning that occurs at a young age, whereas the article presents it as "a narrow window during childhood in which we can pick up the nuances of a new language". No serious academic linguist that I have ever met subscribes to a definition that rigid. Adults absolutely can pick up on the nuances of a new language, but for the overwhelming majority it takes considerably more time and effort compared to a child in the critical period.
I do believe that language learning for adults can be made more efficient than it usually is (e.g. the classic cookie-cutter layout of every foreign language textbook I've ever read), and perhaps some of the strategies laid out in the article are effective, but that does not discredit the critical period hypothesis and it's still going to take a lot of effort for a typical adult to become fluent in a new language.
I would disagree that learning one language helps you with another unless they are from some kind of language continuum - languages are so vastly different (especially depending on geographic distance) when you try to really master them, often full of idiomatic expressions and expressions you can't understand unless you grow in the historical context the language developed, and accurate translations are basically impossible. Some even use completely different causal logic (like Aymara), or miss elements considered basic in other languages (directions absent in Hawaiian) etc.
Learning languages is driven by curiosity, was handy a bit while traveling around the world and it helps to be near some language school, attend parties with people from all around the world and just have fun trying to chat together natively ;-)
For instance, if you can't wrap your head around why a language may be missing 'basic' elements, you would never really master that language.
IMO, basic proficiency is simply the ability to communicate unaided with effort on both parties. Which really only takes the language skills of ~5-7 year old native child.
This is very true and this is what bothers me when reading about these supposed polyglots/hyperglots. As a Portuguese speaker, I get Spanish "for free" as in I'm able to read Spanish, follow a Mexican soap opera on TV, and stumble through an order at a Mexican restaurant. Does that mean I can add Spanish to the list of languages that I speak?
> IMO, basic proficiency is simply the ability to communicate unaided with effort on both parties. Which really only takes the language skills of ~5-7 year old native child.
A 5-7 year old child with normal language development will be fluent, as in mastery of the grammar. There's no comparison between an adult who can get by in a language and a native speaker. For example, a child who is a native speaker of a language with grammatical gender will never mess up gender agreement whereas an adult learner might struggle mightily with that.
As a side note I was reading in a book[1] the rather extreme view that the "corrupt" Japanese or Korean readings of characters maybe seen as a dialect of Chinese.
[1] Élémens de la grammaire chinoise. Abel Rémusat (1822) https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&out...
I acknowledged, in the post you're replying to, the large body of borrowed vocabulary, but that's not how languages are classified/made into families. Chinese and Japanese do not have a common ancestor and have very, very different grammar and phonetics.
It's not the language that helps, but having the experience of learning it.
These popular narratives about "hyperpolyglots" tend to have really naive views about what "fluency" in a language means. It's probably feasible to have rudimentary knowledge of many languages, but there are large practical limits as to how sophisticated your competence can be unless you're using that language regularly to communicate in a variety of domains.
The 1st: my mother tongue.
The 2nd: I'm native-level, studied all my life, use it everyday.
The 3rd: I'm somewhere between advanced-survival and fluent-colloquial depending on my BAC; spoken in the country I live in so I don't put that much effort.
The 4th: just basic knowledge but really closely related to the 1st, so communication is fluent even if I'm making up words and abusing the rules of grammar.
The 5th: I study it every day since over a year, I speak retarded and understand correctly pronounced simple phrases 60% of the time. Can survive in the countries where it's spoken and it's a nice perk with people; they become surprisingly friendly because very few people speak the language other than natives.
If people could give them a try and provide ideas and feedback, I'll do my best to incorporate it into a future release. I'm adding Spanish Verb Conjugation drills to the next release.
And that softer requirement is also not cheating. If you speak many other languages you even need to reactivate your native language.
It's reasonable to ask what a person means when they "speak X languages", though. It's in itself more vague than one might think. If you ask a monolingual person he might consider a C2 (European Framework) level to not be "speak my language", while a language learner might consider a barely passed B2 and then never used again as "speaking that language".
I speak one foreign language at a solid C2 level, but I also scored in the 99th percentile on the GRE verbal (USA's English Language grad school entrance exam for native English speakers). I never feel fully fluent in that foreign language, even when I can pass language exams most locals can't. There's simply to way for me to match my fluency and comfort with English.
So I agree; the standard for fluency is always relative. And -- contrary to superficial appearance -- even native speakers have a wide variety of levels of competence and you can always benefit from studying more.
That said, it's certainly amazing what he can do. He taught himself Italian over the course of about a month, simply to read a single dissertation written in Italian. He spoke French already, and he asked me a few questions because I'm fluent in Spanish, because when he didn't find a word in his Italian/English dictionary he wanted to make a guess based on other romance languages. I think ultimately he wouldn't even consider himself at all competent in Italian, even though he was able to read doctorate-level writing for a few weeks.
"If..., then..." and "I've spoken English for decades."
I wonder what's the similarity between learning human languages, and computer languages. I think one can pick up a computer language fairly quickly if it's in the same paradigm (imperative, functional, logic, etc.)... but actually mastering it is much harder, because there are so many different ways to do ("say") the same thing.
That's one factor that makes it plausible that a programmer would learn a new programming language in a weekend, but somewhat implausible that someone would learn a spoken language in a weekend (although you can get surprisingly far). On the other hand, Daniel Tammet apparently learned Icelandic in one week:
People very specialised into translation problems (just a narrow class of problems) probably will score poorly with complex technical problems of a different nature. If your problem needs to be solved just one time and as soon as possible (as in the 99% of the cases) you probably should not really care to much about if is solved in chinese or Tamil. Is not really relevant if you think about it.
You just can hire a translator one or two weeks each year to act as megaphone at the end of the process and that's all. Translation uses just a small percentage of the project time, generally at the beginning and at the very end.
To hire the translator full time, 365 days/year is just easier for human resources, but not a guarantee that you are really targeting the solver that you need.
In any case reading the link provided seems that the journalist translates directly 'how to do something' as 'its great' and 'you can do it!'... Much hype, few substance, as usual.
Glad to read this...
I speak ~4, english being the 3rd (far from native but good enough to do biz) and the forth being basic/intermediate level. I've met people fluent in 5 languages... but they start to struggle with the 6th onwards.
That being said, I think 30+ is a lot. I've never known anyone who speaks fluently more than 6, but hey, if they can... great!
This people must have lived in a lot of countries since their early years, or their parents were polyglots themselves. I think the key is early exposure to different languages. You can easily teach kids 5 languages before they're 12...
More interestingly, if your friend can do that, perhaps the universal translator is not such a magical concept after all. For terrestrial languages, at least.
Being able to speak something like English in some part of the non-English word might make you able to communicate with people there. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be able to have meaningful connections compared to speaking the native tongue.
[1] Like the native language in some country or region.