Some questions people ask a polyglot
Some questions people ask a polyglot - Hallo World !!! News Today in World, In this article you read by title Some questions people ask a polyglot, We've prepared this article well so you can read and retrieve information on it. Hopefully the contents of the post
Article LIFT, What we write can you understand. Okay, happy reading.
Title : Some questions people ask a polyglot
link : Some questions people ask a polyglot
You are now reading the article Some questions people ask a polyglot With link address https://newstoday-ok.blogspot.com/2017/12/some-questions-people-ask-polyglot.html
Title : Some questions people ask a polyglot
link : Some questions people ask a polyglot
news-today.world | My regular readers will know that I speak several languages and learning new languages is what I enjoy doing in my spare time. I often blog about the experience of learning foreign languages and today I am going to focus on questions I get asked when people find out that I speak many languages. Some are good questions which merit a thoughtful reply whilst some are such dumb questions I can only respond by telling you why it is very wrong to ask a question like that.
Q: Do you ever get confused when speaking so many languages?
This is a rude question to ask. Imagine if you are meeting your friend and you noticed that she has turned up carrying a cycle helmet and wearing cycling gear, so it is obvious that she cycled to meet you. Imagine if you asked her questions like, "do you ever fall off your bike?"or "do you ever crash because you lose your balance?" Your friend would probably get quite upset because such questions are implying that she is not a competent cyclist, that she is somehow too clumsy or uncoordinated to ride a bicycle. Of course, accidents can still happen to the most competent cyclists on the roads because you can be riding perfectly safely but some idiot in a car can still hit you because they're such bad drivers - but in those cases, it is clearly not the fault of the cyclist. So a question about safety could be phrased in a way which doesn't in any way suggest that the cyclist is incompetent, for example, "the traffic in central London is so busy, do you feel safe cycling around town? What has been your experience in London been?" You see, that question is then more about the general situation for cyclists in London which does not in any way suggest that the cyclist is incapable of riding well.
So why do people ask this question? It is probably because they get confused themselves when trying to remember words from other languages - but as in the example of the cyclist, some people are brilliant at cycling whilst others simply don't have the necessary skills. Some people have brains that are somehow incredibly efficient in sorting out words from different languages whilst others can't even find the right words in their first language to express themselves. Even if you think you may get confused, never ever assume that the other person would get confused just like you. So a more neutral way to ask the question would be like, "how do you categorize the different words from different languages in your head, especially those dealing with basic concepts like rain? How do you retrieve the right word from the right language when forming a sentence in your head?" You see, every language learner will have a different answer to that question and it is then a question about the process of remembering and sorting out the information in your head, without suggesting that the polyglot would end up in a situation where s/he gets incredibly confused by all these different languages in their heads, that having so much vocabulary from many languages in your head is somehow a bad thing.
Q: Okay fine, I get it. Imagine if I asked the question without once questioning your ability, Mr Great Super Polyglot.
A: Actually I do get confused but only with the languages that are in my third and fourth tier. You see, I have my first tier languages which I am totally fluent in: English, French and Mandarin and there is absolutely no confusion at all in those languages. Then I have three languages in my second tier which are Welsh, Hokkien and Spanish - I speak these languages confidently to a very high standard but there would still be gaps in my vocabulary for those languages, but I would know that the gap is there as I formulate the sentence in my head and I would usually just use the English equivalent like this, "¿Sabes dónde puedo comprar un... 'phone charger'? Of course, the word for 'phone charger' is cargador de teléfono but the fact that I had to use the English word for it just means that I didn't know the Spanish equivalent for it, it doesn't mean that I somehow got confused between the two languages. Then we come to my third tier languages: German, Italian, Malay, Indonesian, Russian and Cantonese. These are languages that I have conversational proficiency in, but have big gaps in my vocabulary. So I was trying to speak to a friend in German the other day and I constructed a sentence in my head that was almost correct, except that I had reached for the wrong word from the wrong language. The word I was trying to translate was high - which in German in hoch. But I reached for the word alto which is high in Spanish and Italian, I realized something was wrong but instead of turning alto into hoch, I turned it into alt which actually means old in German - the moment I said that German sentence with the word alt, I immediately realized my mistake the moment the words came out of my mouth and corrected myself. That whole process took about one to two seconds in my head - it suffices to say that my vocabulary for my first and second tier languages are very well organized, but for the third and fourth tier languages, they are in a bit of a mess admittedly.
Q: What language(s) do you dream in?
A: Mostly English, as that is my first language and the language I process my thoughts, new information and work in. I can have dreams in other languages like French, Welsh, Mandarin, but in my first and second tier languages only
Q: Why do you put in so much effort into learning (insert name of language)? You know you will never speak like a native speaker, you will never be able to pass off as 'one of them' or be accepted as a local even if you're very fluent.
A: As awful as that sounds, I have already covered this in a recent post, so I am just going to direct you there.
Q: Wouldn't technology replace the need for people to learn all these languages?
A: No not really, I function in a very multi-lingual, multi-national business environment. We eliminate the need for languages because everyone just defaults to English as that is the one language that we all speak fluently. Sure sometimes we get documents sent to us in languages other than English but we cannot accept a legal document that has simply been fed through Google Translate even if it would give us a good understanding of what the document is saying, anything official has to be translated officially or at least written by the client in English. So it's not really the power of Google Translate, but rather the well educated people in the business world everywhere choosing to learn English.
Q: How do you select which language you learn next?
A: Now that's a good question. There are two key ingredients: the first is a certain level of interest in the culture you can access with that language - if you have little interest in that country's culture, then learning that language is not going to be very useful for you in. But then there's my experience with Korean - I totally love K-pop and K-culture and I would love to be able to speak Korean, but my valiant attempts to learn Korean failed because I lacked two more things: anyone to actually practice Korean with and a decent course to follow. The online course I used was just rubbish with two presenters who lacked charisma - it was just fucking painful listening to them trying to be funny and failing miserably. I'd rather they just struck a far more serious tone and got on with the business of teaching. The book I have on the other hand just sped through the chapters and I tend to learn better from hearing and speaking, rather than just reading passively. So apart from being motivated by an interest in the culture, having a good method of instruction is a huge factor as well if you are to get anywhere in the language. Sadly, I never got past the basics in Korean which is a shame.
Q: Go on, you're going to tell us which Korean course has the two awful teachers.
A: Nah, I think that'll be unkind. These are two Korean teachers who can speak English well, trying to get people around the world interested in speaking their language in an engaging way. They have good intentions of course, but I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that in some cultures, they may come across as funny but I found them utterly unbearable. Whilst they were truly fucking awful, I don't want to discourage others from trying the same thing, from trying to teach languages over the internet as that's really the way ahead, that's how a lot of people are going to learn new languages in the future. I don't want to 'name and shame' these two Koreans because they don't deserve that and I don't want people to think, "I'd better not try to put that on Youtube just in case I get named and shamed for making a bad video." I think people should be encouraged to do this and if you're just guilty of being boring, that's not such a big deal but don't try too hard to be funny as that's a recipe for disaster. But anyone who has ever tried learning Korean online would have probably stumbled upon these two Koreans and you'll have a good idea who they are. Let's leave it at that.
Q: Do you want to learn every language in the world?
A: Believe you me, I was asked that question and that's a stupid one because there are currently about 7000 languages in the world and that number is far bigger when you include dialects which are not mutually intelligible. But just 6% of those languages have over one million speakers and that collectively accounts for 94% of the world's population. So perhaps a more realistic number would be to focus on this 6% which is still well over 400 languages. It is hard to verify the claims of the top polyglots in the world, with some claiming to speak as many as 100 or even 200 languages - but how true are these claims? For example, I can make simple conversation in Turkish, like I know the greetings, I can count to ten, I can ask for directions and other bits I remember from the time I have spent in Turkey but I wouldn't dare to claim to speak Turkish as I don't know any more than the very basics. For these people who claim to speak 100 languages, well, such claims are treated with a lot of skepticism because amongst these 100 languages, there will be a lot where they only know the basics - on part with the standard of my Turkish. It then becomes a question of breadth vs depth. Do I want to be the polyglot who knows a little of many languages, or become fluent in a much smaller number?
I believe that the realistic number is around between 20 to 30 such as in the case of Tim Doner who clearly speaks all his 20 languages to a reasonably high standard. Yeah that's fair enough. Most of the polyglots I have a similar pattern to myself. they have a first tier of languages which they speak at mother tongue/first language level, then they have a second tier of languages which they are rather competent in (say the equivalent of O levels/GSCEs), a third tier of languages which they have mastered to the standard to say the standard of a 12 year old who has been studying the language for a few years. And then there's a fourth tier of languages whereby they know just the basics and in my case, Turkish would fall into that category. If you were to add the first and second tiers of languages, the number would usually be between 5 and 8 but once you add the third tier, then it is usually between 10 to 20. I think it would be meaningless to add the fourth tier languages into that any claim because that is clearly done by people for the sake of boasting. There is then the choice between trying to bump a second tier language up to the first tier by investing far more time and effort to improve that language (which I could do with my Spanish for example) or trying to bring a fourth tier language up into my third tier (which I am trying to do currently with my Hindi). So even if I am not studying a new language, I am still always trying to improve the ones I already speak. It's a personal choice and thus for me, it is about achieving a good balance.
Q: Do polyglots learn these languages on your own or do you take a course say at a language school?
A: Practically all polyglots are self-taught but it doesn't mean that we just figure stuff out on our own. We usually use books and online courses to learn the language, without the help of a teacher, without being in a classroom environment. That is because of a very practical reason: we usually have a lot going on in our lives. We have to work long hours, we have friends to see, we have families, we may do sports often: all these factors would limit our availability to do a regular course. And at school, you can't just study languages and nothing else: we usually have other subjects like maths, physics, chemistry, geography etc to study. And even at university, most degree courses would limit you to two languages because if you try to do more than two languages, you risk not having enough time to become totally fluent in those languages and that reflects the ability of most normal people to pick up languages. Polyglots are just not normal, so the only way we can learn all these languages is outside the normal framework of education and study on our own. But once we pick up the basics, we we go out there and practice it on anyone and everyone who can help us improve, we don't wait for a teacher to help us - anyone who speaks that language we are studying can become our 'teacher'.
But modesty aside, here's another practical problem with taking a course: I remember studying French in Singapore and naturally, I have a great affinity for French and soaked it up instantly with little effort. I remember being extremely bored in class seeing how slow everyone else was and thankfully, the system at l'Alliance Française was flexible enough to accommodate me - I was allowed to skip levels and was promoted several times to the right class that fitted my standard and I had teachers who went out of their way to push me a lot harder than the other slower students. If you already know ten languages, you're likely to learn a new language so much faster than someone who is monolingual, so it makes no sense to put you in a class with someone who's going to learn at a much slower pace - that's why most polyglots prefer to learn on their own or if they can afford it, pay for one-on-one tuition with language teachers who can teach an a hyper-accelerated pace to suit the learner, rather than be held back by the slowest student in the class. Look, I am sorry if that made me sound arrogant, but is a real problem I faced with learning French and after that experience, I have actively avoided 'classroom' type situations when learning a language because that method of learning just doesn't work for me.
Q: Do you ever forget languages you've learnt?
Q: Do you ever get confused when speaking so many languages?
This is a rude question to ask. Imagine if you are meeting your friend and you noticed that she has turned up carrying a cycle helmet and wearing cycling gear, so it is obvious that she cycled to meet you. Imagine if you asked her questions like, "do you ever fall off your bike?"or "do you ever crash because you lose your balance?" Your friend would probably get quite upset because such questions are implying that she is not a competent cyclist, that she is somehow too clumsy or uncoordinated to ride a bicycle. Of course, accidents can still happen to the most competent cyclists on the roads because you can be riding perfectly safely but some idiot in a car can still hit you because they're such bad drivers - but in those cases, it is clearly not the fault of the cyclist. So a question about safety could be phrased in a way which doesn't in any way suggest that the cyclist is incompetent, for example, "the traffic in central London is so busy, do you feel safe cycling around town? What has been your experience in London been?" You see, that question is then more about the general situation for cyclists in London which does not in any way suggest that the cyclist is incapable of riding well.
So why do people ask this question? It is probably because they get confused themselves when trying to remember words from other languages - but as in the example of the cyclist, some people are brilliant at cycling whilst others simply don't have the necessary skills. Some people have brains that are somehow incredibly efficient in sorting out words from different languages whilst others can't even find the right words in their first language to express themselves. Even if you think you may get confused, never ever assume that the other person would get confused just like you. So a more neutral way to ask the question would be like, "how do you categorize the different words from different languages in your head, especially those dealing with basic concepts like rain? How do you retrieve the right word from the right language when forming a sentence in your head?" You see, every language learner will have a different answer to that question and it is then a question about the process of remembering and sorting out the information in your head, without suggesting that the polyglot would end up in a situation where s/he gets incredibly confused by all these different languages in their heads, that having so much vocabulary from many languages in your head is somehow a bad thing.
Q: Okay fine, I get it. Imagine if I asked the question without once questioning your ability, Mr Great Super Polyglot.
A: Actually I do get confused but only with the languages that are in my third and fourth tier. You see, I have my first tier languages which I am totally fluent in: English, French and Mandarin and there is absolutely no confusion at all in those languages. Then I have three languages in my second tier which are Welsh, Hokkien and Spanish - I speak these languages confidently to a very high standard but there would still be gaps in my vocabulary for those languages, but I would know that the gap is there as I formulate the sentence in my head and I would usually just use the English equivalent like this, "¿Sabes dónde puedo comprar un... 'phone charger'? Of course, the word for 'phone charger' is cargador de teléfono but the fact that I had to use the English word for it just means that I didn't know the Spanish equivalent for it, it doesn't mean that I somehow got confused between the two languages. Then we come to my third tier languages: German, Italian, Malay, Indonesian, Russian and Cantonese. These are languages that I have conversational proficiency in, but have big gaps in my vocabulary. So I was trying to speak to a friend in German the other day and I constructed a sentence in my head that was almost correct, except that I had reached for the wrong word from the wrong language. The word I was trying to translate was high - which in German in hoch. But I reached for the word alto which is high in Spanish and Italian, I realized something was wrong but instead of turning alto into hoch, I turned it into alt which actually means old in German - the moment I said that German sentence with the word alt, I immediately realized my mistake the moment the words came out of my mouth and corrected myself. That whole process took about one to two seconds in my head - it suffices to say that my vocabulary for my first and second tier languages are very well organized, but for the third and fourth tier languages, they are in a bit of a mess admittedly.
Q: What language(s) do you dream in?
A: Mostly English, as that is my first language and the language I process my thoughts, new information and work in. I can have dreams in other languages like French, Welsh, Mandarin, but in my first and second tier languages only
Q: Why do you put in so much effort into learning (insert name of language)? You know you will never speak like a native speaker, you will never be able to pass off as 'one of them' or be accepted as a local even if you're very fluent.
A: As awful as that sounds, I have already covered this in a recent post, so I am just going to direct you there.
Q: Wouldn't technology replace the need for people to learn all these languages?
A: No not really, I function in a very multi-lingual, multi-national business environment. We eliminate the need for languages because everyone just defaults to English as that is the one language that we all speak fluently. Sure sometimes we get documents sent to us in languages other than English but we cannot accept a legal document that has simply been fed through Google Translate even if it would give us a good understanding of what the document is saying, anything official has to be translated officially or at least written by the client in English. So it's not really the power of Google Translate, but rather the well educated people in the business world everywhere choosing to learn English.
Q: How do you select which language you learn next?
A: Now that's a good question. There are two key ingredients: the first is a certain level of interest in the culture you can access with that language - if you have little interest in that country's culture, then learning that language is not going to be very useful for you in. But then there's my experience with Korean - I totally love K-pop and K-culture and I would love to be able to speak Korean, but my valiant attempts to learn Korean failed because I lacked two more things: anyone to actually practice Korean with and a decent course to follow. The online course I used was just rubbish with two presenters who lacked charisma - it was just fucking painful listening to them trying to be funny and failing miserably. I'd rather they just struck a far more serious tone and got on with the business of teaching. The book I have on the other hand just sped through the chapters and I tend to learn better from hearing and speaking, rather than just reading passively. So apart from being motivated by an interest in the culture, having a good method of instruction is a huge factor as well if you are to get anywhere in the language. Sadly, I never got past the basics in Korean which is a shame.
Q: Go on, you're going to tell us which Korean course has the two awful teachers.
A: Nah, I think that'll be unkind. These are two Korean teachers who can speak English well, trying to get people around the world interested in speaking their language in an engaging way. They have good intentions of course, but I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that in some cultures, they may come across as funny but I found them utterly unbearable. Whilst they were truly fucking awful, I don't want to discourage others from trying the same thing, from trying to teach languages over the internet as that's really the way ahead, that's how a lot of people are going to learn new languages in the future. I don't want to 'name and shame' these two Koreans because they don't deserve that and I don't want people to think, "I'd better not try to put that on Youtube just in case I get named and shamed for making a bad video." I think people should be encouraged to do this and if you're just guilty of being boring, that's not such a big deal but don't try too hard to be funny as that's a recipe for disaster. But anyone who has ever tried learning Korean online would have probably stumbled upon these two Koreans and you'll have a good idea who they are. Let's leave it at that.
Q: Do you want to learn every language in the world?
A: Believe you me, I was asked that question and that's a stupid one because there are currently about 7000 languages in the world and that number is far bigger when you include dialects which are not mutually intelligible. But just 6% of those languages have over one million speakers and that collectively accounts for 94% of the world's population. So perhaps a more realistic number would be to focus on this 6% which is still well over 400 languages. It is hard to verify the claims of the top polyglots in the world, with some claiming to speak as many as 100 or even 200 languages - but how true are these claims? For example, I can make simple conversation in Turkish, like I know the greetings, I can count to ten, I can ask for directions and other bits I remember from the time I have spent in Turkey but I wouldn't dare to claim to speak Turkish as I don't know any more than the very basics. For these people who claim to speak 100 languages, well, such claims are treated with a lot of skepticism because amongst these 100 languages, there will be a lot where they only know the basics - on part with the standard of my Turkish. It then becomes a question of breadth vs depth. Do I want to be the polyglot who knows a little of many languages, or become fluent in a much smaller number?
I believe that the realistic number is around between 20 to 30 such as in the case of Tim Doner who clearly speaks all his 20 languages to a reasonably high standard. Yeah that's fair enough. Most of the polyglots I have a similar pattern to myself. they have a first tier of languages which they speak at mother tongue/first language level, then they have a second tier of languages which they are rather competent in (say the equivalent of O levels/GSCEs), a third tier of languages which they have mastered to the standard to say the standard of a 12 year old who has been studying the language for a few years. And then there's a fourth tier of languages whereby they know just the basics and in my case, Turkish would fall into that category. If you were to add the first and second tiers of languages, the number would usually be between 5 and 8 but once you add the third tier, then it is usually between 10 to 20. I think it would be meaningless to add the fourth tier languages into that any claim because that is clearly done by people for the sake of boasting. There is then the choice between trying to bump a second tier language up to the first tier by investing far more time and effort to improve that language (which I could do with my Spanish for example) or trying to bring a fourth tier language up into my third tier (which I am trying to do currently with my Hindi). So even if I am not studying a new language, I am still always trying to improve the ones I already speak. It's a personal choice and thus for me, it is about achieving a good balance.
Q: Do polyglots learn these languages on your own or do you take a course say at a language school?
A: Practically all polyglots are self-taught but it doesn't mean that we just figure stuff out on our own. We usually use books and online courses to learn the language, without the help of a teacher, without being in a classroom environment. That is because of a very practical reason: we usually have a lot going on in our lives. We have to work long hours, we have friends to see, we have families, we may do sports often: all these factors would limit our availability to do a regular course. And at school, you can't just study languages and nothing else: we usually have other subjects like maths, physics, chemistry, geography etc to study. And even at university, most degree courses would limit you to two languages because if you try to do more than two languages, you risk not having enough time to become totally fluent in those languages and that reflects the ability of most normal people to pick up languages. Polyglots are just not normal, so the only way we can learn all these languages is outside the normal framework of education and study on our own. But once we pick up the basics, we we go out there and practice it on anyone and everyone who can help us improve, we don't wait for a teacher to help us - anyone who speaks that language we are studying can become our 'teacher'.
But modesty aside, here's another practical problem with taking a course: I remember studying French in Singapore and naturally, I have a great affinity for French and soaked it up instantly with little effort. I remember being extremely bored in class seeing how slow everyone else was and thankfully, the system at l'Alliance Française was flexible enough to accommodate me - I was allowed to skip levels and was promoted several times to the right class that fitted my standard and I had teachers who went out of their way to push me a lot harder than the other slower students. If you already know ten languages, you're likely to learn a new language so much faster than someone who is monolingual, so it makes no sense to put you in a class with someone who's going to learn at a much slower pace - that's why most polyglots prefer to learn on their own or if they can afford it, pay for one-on-one tuition with language teachers who can teach an a hyper-accelerated pace to suit the learner, rather than be held back by the slowest student in the class. Look, I am sorry if that made me sound arrogant, but is a real problem I faced with learning French and after that experience, I have actively avoided 'classroom' type situations when learning a language because that method of learning just doesn't work for me.
Q: Do you ever forget languages you've learnt?
A: That's a good question! The short answer is yes, of course. But I tend to lose my fourth tier languages most quickly. Take for example Hungarian: I put a real effort to learn Hungarian when I went there last year and impressed the local crew just how much Hungarian I could speak. Well that was last summer and I barely had a handful of opportunities to use my Hungarian since, so I have forgotten most of it and would hesitate to even include it as a fourth tier language today - well, not without a massive amount of revision to refresh my memory. Languages can also slip one tier down that scale from lack of use - a good example of that would be Hokkien. I would put it as a third tier language for me as I used to be quite confident in expressing myself in Hokkien up till the age of 21, but I simply have nobody in London to speak Hokkien with.The only times I ever get to speak Hokkien is when I Skype my family and they tend to reply in English or Mandarin. However, when I was back in Singapore, I sat next to two older aunties who were having a feisty conversation in Hokkien - I eavesdropped (well these aunties were talking rather loudly) and found that I could quite easily follow the conversation, I understood practically everything they said. However, if you were to ask me how to say certain words in Hokkien, I would probably hesitate and may not remember the word for it, especially if they are different from Mandarin or Malay. However, once you've achieved a very high standard in a language, it is unlikely to become so rusty that you'll forget words - but that really only applies to your first tier languages and second tier languages which you often use.
Q: Can anyone become a polyglot through sheer determination and hard work?
A: I am not sure I am qualified to answer that question but the evidence points me towards the answer no. I've seen incredibly intelligent people suck at learning new languages, not because they are stupid but simply because their brains just aren't wired that way. Likewise in gymnastics, I have been asked, how long does it take to learn a back flip? My answer is simple: it depends on how talented you are. If you're really talented, maybe 20 minutes. If you're not, then you can attend gymnastics classes for years but still never achieve it. We're all unique individuals with different brains, wired up differently and it is not politically incorrect to admit that some of us are gifted in some areas whilst others are not. What I have seen is that most people can learn a foreign or second language, but how far they go, how fluent they become, how easy they find it varies widely from person to person and natural talent is a huge factor in that. This is typically the case in a country like Germany where English is the default second language that is spoken by most of the population there, though to varying levels of proficiency. Some Germans are totally fluent in English whilst others struggle to even communicate even the most basic information despite having learnt English though the same education system.
I have also heard people say shit like, "oh yeah I'm sure I can pick up (insert name of language), I just haven't found the time to do so yet." Bullshit. This reminds me of a ridiculous situation I have come across some years back and this is so incredulous I must state that I am not making this up. I knew this guy through work and he's not just fat - oh no, he was the size of the small house. This guy was morbidly obese and I heard him saying something like, "oh I know I can lose all this weight, I was thin before and my weight goes up and down. I remember when my wife made me exercise and go on a diet and the fat just disappeared in weeks, I know my body. I just have to find the time to get organized about losing weight, you know." I looked at him in disbelief and tried hard to contain my reaction, because I simply didn't believe he was in control at all. Never mind losing enough weight to become fit, he wasn't even maintaining the same weight - oh no, over the years I knew this guy, he consistently got fatter and fatter, heavier and heavier. Is he ever going to get thinner? No, that is not going to happen. So unless you've already started working on the language you want to learn, don't make tall claims about "oh yeah I'm going to learn this language blah blah blah". Get cracking with it, start learning!
Q: Why the fuck haven't you learnt my language? Learn my language bitch!
A: I truly hate trolls like that, because this is the kind of statement designed to provoke a reaction - they're saying, "well you know all these languages but you have not learnt mine, so that means there's one thing that I can do better than you! It doesn't matter if you're richer than me or more successful than me, I've found that one thing I can do better than you!" People who come up with such idiotic statements are just fucking assholes. A polyglot like Tim Doner is just amazing, he's a teenager who speaks over 20 languages and even someone like him gets haters who bitch about him not being able to speak their language. I wanna slap those people with my Hindi and German books and tell them, "listen up you dumbfuck retard, Tim Doner is a million times more awesome than you and if he wanted to learn your language, he could probably become fluent in a few weeks - but you have a shitty, pathetic culture that he doesn't give a fuck about and that's why he hasn't bothered to learn your shitty little language you motherfucker. So shut the fuck up, fuck off to whatever shitty little country you come from and back the fuck off." But reacting to trolls like that on the internet never leads to a good outcome because you can never ever win an argument with a troll like that, so let's not even go there.
Q: Do you have an accent in some of your languages?
A: Of course. It is inevitable when I have so many third and fourth tier languages - sometimes these accents become mistakes as well. It really shouldn't be a problem with third and fourth tier languages because people can tell clearly that you're someone who is trying hard to communicate in a language you don't know well. Accents really become an issue in your first and second tier languages in situations such as job interviews - you'll probably never ever do a job interview in a language that you're not fluent in. No one is going to judge you for having an accent in their language, they're probably just grateful that you are able to help them in their language. I remember getting lost in Sofia in the first night I arrived in Bulgaria - it was late, it was very cold and we had gotten off at the wrong station due to a miscommunication with my AirBNB host. I approached this young couple for help and I did try to valiantly speak in a mix of Bulgarian and Russian, they replied, "do you want to speak English?" Sure they had a heavy accent and spoke in grammatically incorrect English, but at that point I was just so relieved and grateful to have found someone who could help me that I was never going to judge them for their accent. But if you have a heavy accent in your first language that makes you hard to understand outside your local community, then clearly, that is a problem if you want to work with international clients.
Q: Reading, writing, speaking, listening: which is the hardest for you?
With my third and fourth tier languages, it is listening - I am currently learning Hindi and making decent progress. I have a train journey into work (50 to 60 minutes each way) which I dedicate to studying Hindi, so it is a decent amount of time I am dedicating to learning Hindi and I do need Hindi for work given that we're dealing with so many Indian clients. Sometimes I say something in Hindi and they take it as their cue to switch to Hindi - they then say something which is too fast for me to catch all the words. You see, as a beginner, I need them to say it very slowly and clearly before I would even have a chance to catch what they are saying and understand. That's a problem I face with all my third and fourth tier languages but as long as the other party slows right down and speaks very clearly, then communication can happen. Likewise, the writing system in Hindi is pretty complex as well - good grief, I am not sure if I will ever be able to read and write in Hindi. But the most difficult language to read and write in must be Chinese, given the complete absence of an alphabet system - likewise, Japanese is also notoriously difficult given that they use so many different writing systems. Even with an ability to read some of the Kanji (which is a huge advantage when learning Japanese), I am still so baffled.
Q: Which languages are easiest/hardest for you?
A: The two languages that my brain clicked with most quickly are French and Welsh. I became totally fluent in French after having lived in Paris and gone to university there, if I had the chance to live and work/study in Wales, I'm sure my Welsh would easily become a first tier language given my natural affinity for Welsh. But given that I am fluent in French, Italian and Spanish came very easily because of the shared Latin roots. I even found Malay easy - I never ever studied Malay formally in Singapore, I was merely surrounded by it all the time and somehow managed to pick it up without too much effort. Now French, Welsh and Malay are all from very different language groups: Romance, Celtic and Malayo-Polynesian. It seems totally random which language my brain clicked with, I suppose it is almost like how you may like the taste of certain fruits more than others. Actually, I do speak Mandarin and Hokkien pretty confidently, I struggled with the reading/writing process because I was extremely badly taught as a child and having a bad relationship with my father who was a Chinese teacher just made me rebel against the language altogether: but that's more a reflection of his terrible parenting, rather than the language per se. A very bad language teacher can totally put you off anything really.
Q: So you're good at languages, are you also gifted at music or maths?
A: No! Neither in fact. Well, I did do piano when I was a kid, but I hated every moment of it as I had an awful teacher. Like all students, I had to do maths as well but I don't think I was that good at it and I hated every moment of it as well, mostly because of bad teachers. Mind you, the one sure way to make a student hate something is to give them a bad teacher and there are a lot of fucked up, awful teachers out there. Who knows, if I had a good piano teacher, I may have liked it enough to want to pursue it but my piano teacher was seriously fucked up in so many ways: her husband cheated on her, she underwent a bitter divorce. She then became such a bad mother that her son took her own life and she found his dead body. Awfully tragic, I know but she took all that out on her students - she screamed at them, beat them and vented her anger because she couldn't scream at her ex-husband or her dead son. Yeah, talked about fucked up - she was in no state of mind to be a teacher when there was that much shit going on in her life, but she had bills to pay you know. Like I was seriously scared of her as she was mentally unstable, I'm sure she was a decent teacher once upon a life before her life fell apart but holy shit, that woman needed to be in a padded cell. It was very hard to be sympathetic to this woman.
Q: Is there a language that you don't speak but you'll love to learn?
A: I would definitely like to learn how to speak Arabic given how it is the fifth most spoken language in the world with about 422 million speakers - but am daunted by the complexity of the language having tried to learn it before. I got past the conversational basics but the writing system just floored me. Looking at the list of the world's most spoken languages as well, I have all of the top ten covered with the exception of Bengali - but you see, I have no intention of learning Bengali given a lack of interest in that culture. I also want to just focus on one Indian language for now. The same applies to a number of other languages that have cropped up in the top 20: I just don't have enough interest in their cultures to want to bother learning their language. If we go by my cultural interests, then the languages I should focus on are mostly European ones already in my third and fourth tier, along with Japanese and Korean. But for now, I'll just focus on Hindi.
Q: So can you list me what your first, second, third and fourth tier languages are?
A: Sure thing.
First tier: English, French, Mandarin.
Second tier: Welsh, Spanish, Hokkien
Third tier: German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Malay, Indonesian, Cantonese, Romanian, Dutch
Fourth tier: Swedish, Catalan, Norwegian, Danish, Polish, Ukrainian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Japanese
So if you were to ask me how many languages I speak, it depends on which tiers are included in that list, where do you draw line the? So if we're only talking about first and second tier, then it is a modest six languages. But if we were to include the third tier, then it is 15 and with fourth tier, it gets rather silly as it becomes 35. The problem with trying to compare how many languages you speak with others is that there isn't a fixed benchmark - heck, some people may only count the first tier languages and then that would make me just trilingual. But you can see the pattern here: so for example, being totally fluent in French has allowed me access to all other Romance languages which do crop up in my other tiers and even though my Russian is only on the third tier, it has allowed me access to so many of the other Slavic languages which are on my fourth tier. And notably amongst the 35 languages on that list, 9 are Asian and 26 are European. This is simply a reflection of the fact that my mother tongue and first language is English, so I am always going to find European languages much easier than Asian languages given how my brain is culturally mostly 'white'.
Q: Polyglots: nature or nurture?
A: I hate to answer questions like that as I don't want to be guilty of just talking about my own experience or the experiences with my friends so please just take this as a personal opinion. It is a mix of both. If it is a question of nature, then let's look at the parents of the polyglots and see if they too were polyglots who brought up their children in a multilingual environment. I have yet to find a single case of that - instead, I have only found cases of some success as a result of mixed marriages. So for example, I know a French man who married a Russian woman and they had a child - this family lives in London, so the child is trilingual in French, Russian and English. But that's practically expected, if the child didn't speak one of those three languages, then I'd think something was desperately wrong. But if it is nurture, then does that mean anyone can become a polyglot with enough hard work? The answer is no, it takes a certain amount of talent to do that. Thus I am not sure if it is a good answer but I think it is totally random who gets the gift of being a polyglot - a bit like a genetic lottery. The only correlation I have observed is that some very intelligent people are naturally good at learning very complex concepts quickly, so they can figure something like German grammar out rather quickly.
So that's it from me on this topic. There are so many more questions about learning and studying foreign languages that I can cover but I'll stop here. Let me know what you think please and leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.
Q: Can anyone become a polyglot through sheer determination and hard work?
A: I am not sure I am qualified to answer that question but the evidence points me towards the answer no. I've seen incredibly intelligent people suck at learning new languages, not because they are stupid but simply because their brains just aren't wired that way. Likewise in gymnastics, I have been asked, how long does it take to learn a back flip? My answer is simple: it depends on how talented you are. If you're really talented, maybe 20 minutes. If you're not, then you can attend gymnastics classes for years but still never achieve it. We're all unique individuals with different brains, wired up differently and it is not politically incorrect to admit that some of us are gifted in some areas whilst others are not. What I have seen is that most people can learn a foreign or second language, but how far they go, how fluent they become, how easy they find it varies widely from person to person and natural talent is a huge factor in that. This is typically the case in a country like Germany where English is the default second language that is spoken by most of the population there, though to varying levels of proficiency. Some Germans are totally fluent in English whilst others struggle to even communicate even the most basic information despite having learnt English though the same education system.
I have also heard people say shit like, "oh yeah I'm sure I can pick up (insert name of language), I just haven't found the time to do so yet." Bullshit. This reminds me of a ridiculous situation I have come across some years back and this is so incredulous I must state that I am not making this up. I knew this guy through work and he's not just fat - oh no, he was the size of the small house. This guy was morbidly obese and I heard him saying something like, "oh I know I can lose all this weight, I was thin before and my weight goes up and down. I remember when my wife made me exercise and go on a diet and the fat just disappeared in weeks, I know my body. I just have to find the time to get organized about losing weight, you know." I looked at him in disbelief and tried hard to contain my reaction, because I simply didn't believe he was in control at all. Never mind losing enough weight to become fit, he wasn't even maintaining the same weight - oh no, over the years I knew this guy, he consistently got fatter and fatter, heavier and heavier. Is he ever going to get thinner? No, that is not going to happen. So unless you've already started working on the language you want to learn, don't make tall claims about "oh yeah I'm going to learn this language blah blah blah". Get cracking with it, start learning!
Q: Why the fuck haven't you learnt my language? Learn my language bitch!
A: I truly hate trolls like that, because this is the kind of statement designed to provoke a reaction - they're saying, "well you know all these languages but you have not learnt mine, so that means there's one thing that I can do better than you! It doesn't matter if you're richer than me or more successful than me, I've found that one thing I can do better than you!" People who come up with such idiotic statements are just fucking assholes. A polyglot like Tim Doner is just amazing, he's a teenager who speaks over 20 languages and even someone like him gets haters who bitch about him not being able to speak their language. I wanna slap those people with my Hindi and German books and tell them, "listen up you dumbfuck retard, Tim Doner is a million times more awesome than you and if he wanted to learn your language, he could probably become fluent in a few weeks - but you have a shitty, pathetic culture that he doesn't give a fuck about and that's why he hasn't bothered to learn your shitty little language you motherfucker. So shut the fuck up, fuck off to whatever shitty little country you come from and back the fuck off." But reacting to trolls like that on the internet never leads to a good outcome because you can never ever win an argument with a troll like that, so let's not even go there.
Q: Do you have an accent in some of your languages?
A: Of course. It is inevitable when I have so many third and fourth tier languages - sometimes these accents become mistakes as well. It really shouldn't be a problem with third and fourth tier languages because people can tell clearly that you're someone who is trying hard to communicate in a language you don't know well. Accents really become an issue in your first and second tier languages in situations such as job interviews - you'll probably never ever do a job interview in a language that you're not fluent in. No one is going to judge you for having an accent in their language, they're probably just grateful that you are able to help them in their language. I remember getting lost in Sofia in the first night I arrived in Bulgaria - it was late, it was very cold and we had gotten off at the wrong station due to a miscommunication with my AirBNB host. I approached this young couple for help and I did try to valiantly speak in a mix of Bulgarian and Russian, they replied, "do you want to speak English?" Sure they had a heavy accent and spoke in grammatically incorrect English, but at that point I was just so relieved and grateful to have found someone who could help me that I was never going to judge them for their accent. But if you have a heavy accent in your first language that makes you hard to understand outside your local community, then clearly, that is a problem if you want to work with international clients.
Q: Reading, writing, speaking, listening: which is the hardest for you?
With my third and fourth tier languages, it is listening - I am currently learning Hindi and making decent progress. I have a train journey into work (50 to 60 minutes each way) which I dedicate to studying Hindi, so it is a decent amount of time I am dedicating to learning Hindi and I do need Hindi for work given that we're dealing with so many Indian clients. Sometimes I say something in Hindi and they take it as their cue to switch to Hindi - they then say something which is too fast for me to catch all the words. You see, as a beginner, I need them to say it very slowly and clearly before I would even have a chance to catch what they are saying and understand. That's a problem I face with all my third and fourth tier languages but as long as the other party slows right down and speaks very clearly, then communication can happen. Likewise, the writing system in Hindi is pretty complex as well - good grief, I am not sure if I will ever be able to read and write in Hindi. But the most difficult language to read and write in must be Chinese, given the complete absence of an alphabet system - likewise, Japanese is also notoriously difficult given that they use so many different writing systems. Even with an ability to read some of the Kanji (which is a huge advantage when learning Japanese), I am still so baffled.
Q: Which languages are easiest/hardest for you?
A: The two languages that my brain clicked with most quickly are French and Welsh. I became totally fluent in French after having lived in Paris and gone to university there, if I had the chance to live and work/study in Wales, I'm sure my Welsh would easily become a first tier language given my natural affinity for Welsh. But given that I am fluent in French, Italian and Spanish came very easily because of the shared Latin roots. I even found Malay easy - I never ever studied Malay formally in Singapore, I was merely surrounded by it all the time and somehow managed to pick it up without too much effort. Now French, Welsh and Malay are all from very different language groups: Romance, Celtic and Malayo-Polynesian. It seems totally random which language my brain clicked with, I suppose it is almost like how you may like the taste of certain fruits more than others. Actually, I do speak Mandarin and Hokkien pretty confidently, I struggled with the reading/writing process because I was extremely badly taught as a child and having a bad relationship with my father who was a Chinese teacher just made me rebel against the language altogether: but that's more a reflection of his terrible parenting, rather than the language per se. A very bad language teacher can totally put you off anything really.
Q: So you're good at languages, are you also gifted at music or maths?
A: No! Neither in fact. Well, I did do piano when I was a kid, but I hated every moment of it as I had an awful teacher. Like all students, I had to do maths as well but I don't think I was that good at it and I hated every moment of it as well, mostly because of bad teachers. Mind you, the one sure way to make a student hate something is to give them a bad teacher and there are a lot of fucked up, awful teachers out there. Who knows, if I had a good piano teacher, I may have liked it enough to want to pursue it but my piano teacher was seriously fucked up in so many ways: her husband cheated on her, she underwent a bitter divorce. She then became such a bad mother that her son took her own life and she found his dead body. Awfully tragic, I know but she took all that out on her students - she screamed at them, beat them and vented her anger because she couldn't scream at her ex-husband or her dead son. Yeah, talked about fucked up - she was in no state of mind to be a teacher when there was that much shit going on in her life, but she had bills to pay you know. Like I was seriously scared of her as she was mentally unstable, I'm sure she was a decent teacher once upon a life before her life fell apart but holy shit, that woman needed to be in a padded cell. It was very hard to be sympathetic to this woman.
Q: Is there a language that you don't speak but you'll love to learn?
A: I would definitely like to learn how to speak Arabic given how it is the fifth most spoken language in the world with about 422 million speakers - but am daunted by the complexity of the language having tried to learn it before. I got past the conversational basics but the writing system just floored me. Looking at the list of the world's most spoken languages as well, I have all of the top ten covered with the exception of Bengali - but you see, I have no intention of learning Bengali given a lack of interest in that culture. I also want to just focus on one Indian language for now. The same applies to a number of other languages that have cropped up in the top 20: I just don't have enough interest in their cultures to want to bother learning their language. If we go by my cultural interests, then the languages I should focus on are mostly European ones already in my third and fourth tier, along with Japanese and Korean. But for now, I'll just focus on Hindi.
Q: So can you list me what your first, second, third and fourth tier languages are?
A: Sure thing.
First tier: English, French, Mandarin.
Second tier: Welsh, Spanish, Hokkien
Third tier: German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Malay, Indonesian, Cantonese, Romanian, Dutch
Fourth tier: Swedish, Catalan, Norwegian, Danish, Polish, Ukrainian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Japanese
So if you were to ask me how many languages I speak, it depends on which tiers are included in that list, where do you draw line the? So if we're only talking about first and second tier, then it is a modest six languages. But if we were to include the third tier, then it is 15 and with fourth tier, it gets rather silly as it becomes 35. The problem with trying to compare how many languages you speak with others is that there isn't a fixed benchmark - heck, some people may only count the first tier languages and then that would make me just trilingual. But you can see the pattern here: so for example, being totally fluent in French has allowed me access to all other Romance languages which do crop up in my other tiers and even though my Russian is only on the third tier, it has allowed me access to so many of the other Slavic languages which are on my fourth tier. And notably amongst the 35 languages on that list, 9 are Asian and 26 are European. This is simply a reflection of the fact that my mother tongue and first language is English, so I am always going to find European languages much easier than Asian languages given how my brain is culturally mostly 'white'.
Q: Polyglots: nature or nurture?
A: I hate to answer questions like that as I don't want to be guilty of just talking about my own experience or the experiences with my friends so please just take this as a personal opinion. It is a mix of both. If it is a question of nature, then let's look at the parents of the polyglots and see if they too were polyglots who brought up their children in a multilingual environment. I have yet to find a single case of that - instead, I have only found cases of some success as a result of mixed marriages. So for example, I know a French man who married a Russian woman and they had a child - this family lives in London, so the child is trilingual in French, Russian and English. But that's practically expected, if the child didn't speak one of those three languages, then I'd think something was desperately wrong. But if it is nurture, then does that mean anyone can become a polyglot with enough hard work? The answer is no, it takes a certain amount of talent to do that. Thus I am not sure if it is a good answer but I think it is totally random who gets the gift of being a polyglot - a bit like a genetic lottery. The only correlation I have observed is that some very intelligent people are naturally good at learning very complex concepts quickly, so they can figure something like German grammar out rather quickly.
So that's it from me on this topic. There are so many more questions about learning and studying foreign languages that I can cover but I'll stop here. Let me know what you think please and leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.
That's an article Some questions people ask a polyglot
Fine for article Some questions people ask a polyglot This time, hopefully can benefit for you all. Well, see you in other article postings.
You are now reading the article Some questions people ask a polyglot With link address https://newstoday-ok.blogspot.com/2017/12/some-questions-people-ask-polyglot.html
