Chinese learning system of polyglots

[Guest]

Hi everyone,

I went through these forums back and forth..it is an enormous source of information for me and I'd like to thank everyone, who shares their ideas. It is seriously great and saves up a LOT of time searching elswhere.

I have a question:

I started learning chinese and I wanted to know, weather there is someone, who speaks 6 or more languages fluently ( don't ask me, why I chose this number:) and then started learning chinese. the thing is..these people seriously have a system and a system that deffinetly works, which I would love to discuss.

If there is someone like that, please PM me,

I was also trying to set up while back in Bologna an international polyglot society, but as I said, we were looking for people with 6 and more languages. so..if there is anyone out there, please contact me.

[in_lab]

My guess is that people who speak six or more languages well are sucessful not so much because they have more advanced study methods than others, I think attitude is more important. I think they are people who are able to get right into speaking a language, not worrying about mistakes, not afraid to ask questions, and who are never at a loss for something to talk about. The kind of people audacious enough to claim to speak six languages fluently.

I've only met one person who made that claim. He claimed to speak at least four Indian languages, English, and I can't remember what else.

[Ferno]

you need to be talented in languages, there's no "method", it is about how good your brain is.

[Desmond]

There are a couple comments I would like to make on this subject:

First, be warned when people count out how many languages they "speak". I knew a guy who could speak 6 languages. Heck, I could say I speak 6, as I've learned various levels of Spanish, French, Chinese, German, and Russian (plus English). How many do I speak? I say just one, even though I can get by on basic/intermediate levels on Spanish, French, and Chinese.

Point is, after learning bits of each here and there, I realized that this guy doesn't "know" 6. He knows 2 at best (English and French) and the rest he's at a basic/intermediate level. So it kind of depends on how you define "know". Does "attempt" work? Cause then I can help ya, I've attempted lots!

Second, how do you factor in knowledge of similar languages? I know some people who know a huge handful, but it's often something like "bengali, hindi, punjabi" etc, where the languages are similar. Those are often learned by just hearing them around and picking them up. Or are you looking for book-studied languages, from scratch?

In my experience, I've seen certain people learn languages at an incredible rate. I've seen others who seem to study and never really learn. And others who have all the opportunity in the world but never care to practice.

For the first type, I've noticed one thing they have in common, is that they talk and talk and talk. They talk to everyone. They talk about everything. They are the type that have no fears about making mistakes. They don't discriminate because the other person doesn't speak their native language (ie. they don't flock to people who do speak their native language). Even if they don't learn much in the tiny conversation they may have at a bus stop with a stranger, they still did learn, and practice, and it all adds up. You can tell yourself that you need to get out there and speak to natives, but that often falls into the "easier said than done" category. At least it has for me so far... but I swear, next time it won't!

[Guest]

I fully agree with what you are saying,

As I said.. when I was back at the Bologna university in Italy, me and a friend were trying to set up this kind of a 'hyper'polyglot association and of course one of the first questions was, how to asses the level of language knowlege..because exactly as you said, some people claim to be speaking 6 languages but know how to say 10 words in one or the other, maybe are able to have a very very limited conversation in them. Also..we wanted to keep it as professional as possible, because it was on academic ground and so on... so we decided, that in order to count a language (native or foreign) as a language, you need to be able to do the following: pass an oral exam (plus a written one if possible) at a university from philosophy, history...physics...in the foreign language. This means that: you must be able to speak fluently, be able to defend your position against a professor, talk about difficult topics (not what your hobbies are ect.), have a reasonable vocabulary, talk in good/perfect grammar (the professor wants to hear an answer to his question.. he doesn't have time to correct your grammar mistakes) be able to read high level material and understand it perfectlty.

to achieve this....it's really difficult. you might say that 6 languages at that level is too much. you see...some people are fortunate engough to've been born in a trilingual environment (south slovakia for instance Slovak-Hungarian-Czech) they then go to school and it is compulsory to learn english and later german or french. so under some circumstances a talented individual could speak fluently 5 languages with much less effort and interest, than you might think.. that's why we added that 6th language, for people who are really devoted to languages.

thus far I only met one person in my age...actually he's the only one, who I met, except for myself who has this kind of devotion or talent or whatever... he also didn't meet anyone else. It would be a great thing to set up such a society and this is one of the reasons I started this thread...if there is someone like us, please contact me.

another thing that you mentioned was how to distinguish if a language is "foreign" enough. now that's a problem...Some Italians understand better spanish than 'Napoletano' which is a south-italian dialect. Spanish is claimed to be a different language, napoletano is not..Generally - an official language of a country counts.

[in_lab]

Those tests for fluency might be a little too specialized. If you asked a professor of physics to explain something in Taiwanese, which is his fist language, I think he might have a difficult time, because the common language of acedemics is mandarin. And if you asked a history professor to use the Taiwanese pronunciation of Chinese place names and names of people, he would be stumped on more than a few names, even though he is quite fluent.

Here's my test for fluency: Your hear a piece of news on TV in the target language. One minute later, you relate the story to a native speaker as completely as possible. Then you ask the native speaker if he got all the key points of the news report. I guess that's a single-language interpreting task. If you test a person's skills by conversing with another person, the other person, consciously or not, will modify his language to make it easier for you to understand.

[Celso Pin]

I also agree with desmond.

I speak can speak spanish fluent (my mother language is portuguese). I can even speak spanish with 4 different regional accents... However, i have never taken formal classes of spanish and all of my life I had limited exposition to this language.

About english, I have formal classes for years (and.. as you can see... without great results...). I was able to speak german faster (10 times faster) than english (and i consider german pretty more difficult...

so...

my first conclusion before to learn german was: I am good for latin languages because my mother language is portuguese... but after german, i cannot say i am bad with german languages... then, why my english remains so bad?

My theory, is once you are able to communicate (ok, if you are lazy...) and have no other interests that use the refered language (for instance, read phylosof or psicanalisis in german) the development stops...

I am able to watch tv in french or italian... read the newspaper in swedish... but i never had any wish to study these languages...

just to finish, i start to study chinese 3 months ago... and I am surprised with the speed I am learning... extremelly faster then I supposed before. Whats the secret? i am very interested to have an academic level of chinese. I will get a HSK 6 in 3 years... i hope and i pray!

[carlo]

I think what you have in mind is someone who is *literate* in 6 languages. This is more or less what you would need to be in order to able to pass an oral exam in the langauge (never mind that the exam is spoken: I don't think you are even going to get the references your lecturer gives you if you can't read or write, let alone discuss with him -- after all there aren't many illiterate people with college degrees, no pun intended).

That is one possible definition of multilingual fluency. It's not the strictest one (so-called 'high acceptability' would mean that you can pass as a native in 6 languages) and is also not one of the easier ones (that you can 'function' to some extent a given language, eg you can understand Egyptian TV but can't say 'I love you' in Arabic, because you don't watch soap operas there). Translating a piece of news on the fly is a nice idea, but the whole notion of 'translation' implies metalinguistic awareness, which is not a necessary condition for fluency: a number of bilinguals can't translate well or at all, yet they are fluent in two langauges.

Literacy implies a high degree of cultural awareness. So it's definitely easier for someone who's literate in Spanish to achieve the same level of literacy in French than in Chinese or Hindi. It's taken me one month to learn to read novels in Spanish (starting from a reading knowledge of English, German and Italian), and at least four-five years to do the same in Chinese.

And then there is another problem. Most Chinese are fluent in at least two languages, Mandarin and their home dialect, but only a few are 'literate' in the latter (can you be literate in a dialect?). The European situation of having fully developed, strictly monolingual societies that speak closely related official languages is the exception, not the rule in this world. Half of Luxembourg's population could easily join your associatino only by virtue of the fact that German, French, Letzebuergesch and English happen to be official languages *somewhere*.

[in_lab]

Carlo, I'm not sure if what you wrote about translating news on the fly was in reference to my post or not, but if it was, let me clarify: I meant that the test would be listening and speaking in the same language, not translation.

[carlo]

in lab, of course you are right, I read and wrote the above too quickly, and misunderstood what you wrote. It seems I'm not that fluent after all. (sh)

[Lu]

A friend of mine is the kind of polyglot you talk about. She is fluent in Dutch, English, Slovakian (and also Chzech which is mostly the same), and Spanish, has an intermediate level of Chinese getting better and better, can get by in Japanese, and is now picking up Nepali in Nepal. I think she also knows German but I'm not sure.

I've learned several languages, most of them to the level that I could have an intelligent conversation with a native speaker about any subject I was interested in. I don't think there is a method, a large part is talent and a large part is putting a lot of time in just studying words and grammer, and practice. Nothing revolutionary.

[malinuo]

There is hardly any one single good method to learn many languages but a few hundred million different ways. My experience from Africa is that about every single person speaks at least two languages and often many more than that. The odd exception is usually the European ex-patriates, who often speak only their own language and some English. My understanding is that the situation is similar in India and many other places in the world.

However, many of those multilingual speakers would fail on any written test, as they are illiterates.

If you want to quickly learn a foreign language so that some natives take you for native, my advice would be to take grammatical rules that don't carry any meaning very lightly. In European languages you can for example skip learning gender and when to use definite articles. It is much more important that you have a good pronunciation, perfect prosody and that you quickly find the words you actually know without hesitating. Many schools ignore those three factors to a surprising extent.

I once shared a railway compartment with an Iranian, who spoke to me in fluent Italian. Fluent - but far from correct. But it was only after half an hour that I realised that he never used verbs at all, and yet everything he had said had made perfect sense. OK, he would never have fooled a native speaker or indeed me, but he definitely showed that he could communicate very well in the language.

In another case I was called in to do some interpretation in Swedish and Portuguese between two friends, who seemed to have no common language. After a few minutes I realised that the Swede actually spoke grammatically almost perfect Portuguese, but she hesitated a lot before each word, and she had a strong accent. Consequently the Portuguese speaker had refused to believe that the Swede understood anything at all.

If the ambition is to speak six languages perfectly and master them all in writing with stylistic brilliance, I doubt anyone has ever achieved that. I know of very few people who master even their own language to that extent.

(To anticipate some replies to my anti-grammarian rant above: Yes, it is better to have a good grammar than a bad one. It is not wrong to learn German genders. There are situations where gender actually carries a meaning and makes a sentence clearer. I hate it myself when I cannot remember the gender of a word. However, for many speakers it is far from certain that it pays to invest as much time as it takes to learn that kind of information. There may be other more important things that are neglected, because too much time is spent on gender.)

[Guest]

some interesting points you've made.

I wanted to write you an e mail, but then I saw the 'you can write one to me, but I rarely read them and almost never reply' warnig, so I chose to post a reply instead.

I fully agree.. there are millions of methods of learning foreign languages and the one you've mentioned is one of them. But I like to judge people by their results so...

now tell me.. even if you saved up some time and energy by not learning genders, saving up on grammar and speaking in with verbs in their infinitive form and people would actually understand you..why in the world would you do that? first of all, if you've learned languages before, than you and me both know, that if you've learned something easy the wrong way at the beginning, it's allways an extra effort to forget about it later and start using the correct form.

secondly...what good is such language knowlege to you? you cannot teach it, you cannot do bussiness with it, it's not even for your own pleasure, because you must be aware, that you don't speak it correctly...I mean.. it's real strange.

I would agree with you, if you said, that people shouldn't let's say...worry that much about how to use periodo ipotetico correctly or at all in italian in their first two weeks of studies, but not using gender articles in German? Looks like you studied German, so you must know, that you move around in cases by changing the gender articles, so naturally you must learn them..how else would people get what you're really talking about? I mean.. eventually they would, but I think one of the purpouses of language learning is for others to understand you clearly and not guess what you were trying to say.

I don't know man... it's an interesting method to learn the language to some very limited extent and then go and let's say.. talk to locals about directions to the next restaurant, but deffinetly not to do bussiness or any official work... not to mention studying something in that language.

if you meant, that you should start learning by not worrying about grammar at the beginning and then shift to it later... it's a loss of time. a human brain is perfectly capable of doing that from the beginnig.

This is only my opinion

[malinuo]

Vlad,

Making interesting points was my main intention - so I played a little with accuracy.

You bring up quite a few good points as well.

To start with, gender was just an example. In some languages it is more important than in others. In German I would recommend any learner to study the articles that determine case, so you know that "des" and "der" are genitive for example.You need to at least recognise them in order to understand what other people say. No matter if you say der, das or die Autobahn in nominative, people will understand what you are talking about. However, if you say der or das Bahn, which is a shorter word, there may be confusion. Learning gender for short words is fairly important. Learning gender for longer words is... well, less important.

I would never recommend anyone to speak Italian without conjunction of verbs (even though some foreigners somehow manage without it). The parlo, parli, parla, parliamo, parlate, parlano forms are too important and carry too much meaning to ignore. That doesn't mean you have to actively learn all the different ways to express past tense.

When it comes to Chinese I have not found truly useless things in the grammar. The main shortcut in the language seems to be to avoid learning to handwrite the hanzi, as you can produce them with pinyin on a computer.

Your point about not being able to use a simplified language, I disagree with. A lot of serious business in this world is conducted in grammatically bad language. I've seen a letter written by the then president of the European Commission to a prime minister of a European country which contained loads of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes - and yet the meaning was perfectly clear.

A translator from e.g. Polish to Spanish doesn't have to be able to speak any Polish, as long as he can understand a written text and get the Spanish bit right.

You can even make reviews of legal contracts in languages you know only so so. It's of course good to also discuss them with someone with better understanding of the language, but that is often not needed for the first drafts.

There are clearly situations when a simplified language doesn't work at all. If I were to design a product booklet in English, for example, I would require not a native speaker but a speaker with a perfect sense of style. However, for many (probably most) situations, a simplified language works pretty well.

[Desmond]

I guess this also depends on how you define "most situations".

When are these situations that you're using these languages? Let's take the example of knowing 6 languages but to a mediocre degree. That would probably be my situation (let's make that 1 fluent language - English, and 3 mediocre, and 2 barely existing anymore). I could write out exactly what I'm saying right now in my 3 mediocre languages, but I wouldn't enjoy it. My message would be less clear. It would take me more time and effort.

What are the benefits of my 3 mediocre languages? When I got to a country that speaks (French, Spanish, Chinese) I can get by more easily. People are more impressed, and friendly. Life is just a little bit easier.

Interest: I had interest in so many languages, I didn't want to leave any out. How could I choose? So I didn't. That would be another benefit, and in other ways, a downside.

Downsides? There's a big reason why I stopped learning Spanish and French. I'm more of a perfectionist. I would feel that knowing a language well would be more of an accomplishment than knowing 3 at a poorer level. I also feel more embarrased speaking poorly. This isn't the same for everyone (many can just talk and not care). My anxiety is going away, but it never will disappear to that extreme.

I also realized that this mediocre level just isn't as fun as it used to be. I enjoyed being able to listen to French and say "I can kind of understand that!" But the novelty wore off. I want a "sister-language". I want to be able to do much more in it, to understand media, converse much more easily, and this would only be possible if I focused more (and chose only one language). So even though Chinese was much worse than my French and Spanish, I chose it as I knew it may become my "most situations". As it is my biggest interest, then I will likely want to use it. If I can work it into international business of some sort, then again it will become "most situations".

But what about polyglots who really feel that learning 6 is for them? Maybe the business they do is on a different level? Or maybe it's a pastime? Or maybe they travel on vacations (eg. they travel western europe all the time, and so desire a working-knowledge of western-european languages).

So I'm really curious to all of you on this thread that have learned (and are still learning) multiple. Why? Is it travel? Is it interest? Is it the feel of prestige? Is it just a change in mind every few years? What is it to you?

[Celso Pin]

"So I'm really curious to all of you on this thread that have learned (and are still learning) multipl e. Why? Is it travel? Is it interest? Is it the feel of prestige? Is it just a change in mind every few years? What is it to you?"

Portuguese - Mother language.

English - Mandatory at school until High School.

German - Spoken in south Brazil, Economic (business) reason ((São Paulo metropolitan area is the Biggest Manufacturing city of Germany (and sweden, but i will never learn swedish...)... It is true... is the city where there are more German investment concentrated in the world... even considering germany...)

Spanish - Natural choice for portuguese speakers... a litterate portuguese speaker could achieve the "native" level in 1 1/2 year... including the accent(s)...

Chinese - Since I speak at least one "BRIC" language (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and considering India english level... i am going to another BRIC language : Chinese (againg, nothing against russian, I have learnt cyrilic...)

[Desmond]

BRIC languages? What is "BRIC"?

[stephanhodges]

Would the ability to think in the language (let's say for argument's sake about 95% of the time) to define a native level (assuming you're life requries some thinking, of course)

That's always been a goal of mine in any language. I know someone who knows about 17 languages, several of them fluently (including Hindi, English, Sanskrit and Pali), and he says that he switches languages in thought, depending upon the type of issue he wants to think about, the type of poetry he wants to write, etc.

I can only judge his English (at the poetry level), and it's very good, both in nuance and presentation.

[Guest]

To Maulino

Agian.. I must agree. you've made some very interesting points. Yes.. mediocre language knowlege is also good and byfar better than no knowlege at all. but it was mentioned before and I'll say it again..some people are just perfectionists and I'm one of them. It's not enough for me to only get by in the language, I wan't to master it. plus...there are way too many situations in which a mediocre language just won't do.

plus..to see the look in ones eyes, when you start talking to him in his language sounding like a native, or close to native is a great feeling. the person realises what effort and time you must have spent on his culture and believe me.. if some brazilian would come up to me and he'd start discussing the world politics with me in fluent slovak with east-slovakian accent... I'd buy him a beer! hell.. I'd be so honoured. now... what if you run into a person whose decisions could change your future and you'd impres him this way? think about it. one can never know. I doubt mediocre language knowlege would get you anywhere.

to stevehodges

could you contact that person, who speaks 17 languages?

to desmond

to your question why people learn and wan't to get fluent in more languages...

for me.. it's passion and practical reasons aswell. passion, because I like to study different cultures and languages have fascinated me since I can remember. plus I think everyone should do what he can do best. I think this is what I can do and I'm loving it.

the practical reasons are, that I'd like to do international bussiness.

[Celso Pin]

a group of four emergent countries:

B razil

R ussia

I ndia

C hina