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| Bruegel; tower of babel |
Questions are aggressive. They intrude. They provoke. They lead us into temptation. They lead us to enlightenment. They follow us to our graves. And beyond.
Quora.com is a site composed of questions. Below is a conversation between two experts in the filed of learning languages. I reproduce the conversation as I am at least partly responsible for the war of words that may or may not happen here the over he next few days.
As an outsider and a language language learner who has never learned enough I thought the topic worth following. I had just recently finished a book on the topic which had far different views on the issues than Judith Meyer. I brought this up as a kind of a question and got a very strongly worded response. But I am merely the messenger. And word spread. Now the author of the book has provided his own response.
The question I now ask you to consider after you have read the words of the experts is: who is right? Whose side are you on? Do you have to pick sides here?
I will have much more to say in a subsequent post but for now I leave you to the texts and let you vote or comment or take sides or add to the fray. It is how I learn. Your answers will teach me.
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| Music as Babel? |
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What are they? How were they picked up? When? How long did each take to reach fluency or their current level?
Just curious, really!
Edit
I
usually say 8+ because people have varying definitions of what it means
to speak a language. Here are all languages I have ever studied for
more than a few hours, in chronological order. I have marked the ones
that I'm intermediate or higher in with an asterisk.
* German (language)
- 0 years old - my native language. Obviously fluent in it now, I have
created 500+ language lessons for it as the host of GermanPod101 and I
sometimes teach students over Skype.
* English (language)
- 10 years old - learned it as my first foreign language at school in
grades 5-13. For the first few years I was really bad at it, but then I
got English-speaking penpals, I hung out on political discussion forums
online and I started voice-chatting, so that it started to feel like
another native language around age 17 or so.
* Latin (language)
- 12 years old - my second foreign language at school, grades 7-11.
Started studying Latin because it was a mandatory choice between either
Latin or French and I thought Latin would help me with other languages
in the future. After three years, my teachers recommended me as a tutor
for weaker students and eventually I started teaching Latin online on
Myngle and Edufire. Udemy course to appear soon.
* French (language)
- 14 years old - my third foreign language at school, grades 9-10. I
really struggled with this language and quit after grade 10, but I had
online friends who wouldn't let me forget it completely. I visited
Montréal for a month immediately after graduating from high school and
stayed with a French-speaking family, from where I picked up my passion
for the Québécois variant. When I needed a linguistic-oriented
university major to go with my study of computational linguistics, and I
was too late to inscribe for English Studies, it was easy to decide on
French Studies instead and my trusty online friends helped me
re-activate my French in time for the initial evaluation exam. I speak
French fluently now and I enjoy reading some classic French literature.
* Esperanto (language)
- 14 years old - the first language I studied outside school. I had
read a popular science book about linguistics, which dedicated a few
pages to Esperanto and mentioned that it was the most successful of all
constructed languages, and designed to be super-simple. I thought to
myself "If it's so simple, I should be able to pick it up without
effort, as another notch in the belt. If it gets too hard or annoying,
I'll just drop it, no regrets". So I signed up for the German Esperanto
Youth's free e-mail-based course and got a mentor who was a student at
Berlin Technical University. Learning Esperanto was exhilarating, the
only language before or after that was intrinsically motivating to
study. I finished the course in 5 months, then attended a weekend course
for intermediate students in Berlin that my tutor invited me to, and by
the end I was comfortable in Esperanto. Read also: http://www.quora.com/esperanto-b...
* Italian (language)
- 16 years old - my fourth foreign language at school, grades 11-13.
Started studying this because of the vacuum left by quitting French
class. By the end of grade 13, when I chose Italian for my oral
baccalaureate exam, I was able to talk fluently about technical matters I
had studied before, for example the causes of Venice's frequent
flooding problem. Then I didn't use Italian at all for the next 5 years
or so, and only sporadically since, and it's rusty. I frequently read
books for fun in Italian and I can still understand everything in a
conversation, but when I want to reply I often halt and have to recall
words.
* Modern Greek (Language) -
maybe 17 years old - not sure exactly when I started studying it,
because a Greek friend kept teaching me a few things here and there and
eventually I decided to pursue it more seriously. I learned the basics
in self-study and from my friend, then to reach intermediate level I
used the Assimil method Greek course and an online tutor. Right now I'm
conversational but not fluent; I have read two novels in Greek without
the help of a dictionary but it was work, can't read Greek for pure
entertainment yet.
* Mandarin Chinese (language)
- 18 years old - I've always been fascinated by Chinese characters, so
when I heard about a federal competition for high schoolers starting to
learn Chinese, and I was in my last year of high school, that was all
the motivation to start it then. I studied it by myself for half a year,
then won the competition (prize: scholarship for 6 weeks language
school in Beijing), sat in 1 1/2 semesters of Chinese at my university,
then those 6 weeks in China (2004), then some more self-study, which
tapered off... in 2009 I decided to get serious about it, studied 2500
characters in that one year, then have been steadily improving since.
Last week I had a 2 1/2 hour conversation all in Mandarin about all
kinds of topics, but I still search for words and it still feels like a
foreign language. I have also read several books in Chinese and my
reading speed is abysmal.
Czech (language)
- 22 years old - I got the opportunity to attend a seminar in the Czech
Republic, so I studied some Czech, maybe 500 words, even though the
seminar itself would be in Esperanto. I haven't done anything about
Czech since this trip, so I forgot it all.
Swedish (language) - 24 years old - exact same as for Czech
Lithuanian (language)
- 24 years old - exact same as for Czech. I'm happy I learned it,
because otherwise I would have missed my flight back. After the seminar,
the bus stop to get to the airport had changed and none of the
passer-bys were able to speak English or another of my languages.
* Kiswahili (Swahili)
- 26 years old - I want to study some languages that are truly
different from the ones I studied so far, and Swahili sounds really
cool. I learned it from the Assimil course. I haven't had a chance to
speak it much, but I can read and write it well enough to keep a diary
in it for example.
* Dutch (language)
- 27 years old - As Dutch is so similar to German, low-hanging fruit so
to speak, it would be stupid not to pick it. Some language geek friends
and I made a challenge to learn Dutch in 6 weeks of self-study. For
proper motivation, I signed up to give a 45-minute presentation of the
German language, in Dutch, at a language festival in Leeuwen
exactly 7 weeks after we started. I managed, though only the Dutch
attendees could tell how many mistakes I made.
* Spanish (language)
- 27 years old - Spanish is similar to Italian. I wanted to study it
but found the course too boring, so I jumped straight into reading "A
Space Odyssey" in Spanish. Spanish and Italian keep conflicting in my
mind though, whenever I want to speak one, I keep thinking of words in
the other language.
Arabic (language)
- 28 years old - I studied it non-seriously before but always got
discouraged quickly. In 2011, I finally managed to bring Arabic up to A2
level, but then I lost interest because the people I was planning to
talk Arabic to moved and there's not much to read in Arabic even if my
level was better.
Finnish (Language)
- 28 years old - This language never really interested me, but some
language geeks made it a challenge to spend 35 hours on Finnish in one
month and see how far we'd get. I used Assimil, Teach Yourself and a
word frequency list supplemented by sound files from Forvo. At the end,
my level was evaluated as A2, but I didn't continue to study Finnish.
The challenge thread: http://how-to-learn-any-language...
Japanese (language) -
29 years old - my most recent addition. I just spent 50 hours on it for
the August/September 6 Week Challenge (those challenges occur 4x a year
now). My main goal is to understand the anime series "Hikaru no Go" and
Japanese Go (board game)
lectures and I don't care about much else for now, so I tried a new
method that involved flashcards made from Hikaru no Go episodes (try
Subs2Srs, it's awesome). I'm now able to understand two thirds of a new
Hikaru no Go episode without subtitles, and my Japanese is useless for
anything else.
I have a blog about language-learning, which includes personal updates as well as advice on methods etc., at http://www.learnlangs.com/blog .
If you're looking for language geeks like the crazy ones who started the challenges with me, http://how-to-learn-any-language... is your best bet. And if you want to experience intense language self-study, why not sign up for a 6 Week Challenge? http://6wc.learnlangs.com/howto
I
am the author of Babel No More, and Judith Meyer's description of the
survey I conducted and its conclusions is wholly incorrect -- so wildly
off-base, in fact, that I wonder if she actually read the book or read
only excerpts that were available for free online, reviews of the book,
and/or interviews with me.
People who know the book know that:
1.
In the book, I do not claim that every hyperpolyglot is left-handed,
homosexual male. The survey results do not support this. In the entire
sample, there is a predominance of males, but as I say in the book, this
is probably an artifact of the sampling method. Based on the
statistical analysis, there is a larger number of self-identified
homosexuals than the statistics predict, but it does not show a
predominance of left-handers, twins, or those with immune disorders.
This holds for the whole group of people who claim to learn languages
more easily than others and who report knowing six or more languages.
There is more on the survey in my Google talk, which you can view here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KmzgB7PomUA#!
2.
The narrowing down to the 17 hyperpolyglots is based on the number of
languages they report knowing. People who have read the book also know
this. There is a significant drop-off in the number of languages that
takers of the survey reported at around 10 or 11 languages, which
suggests there is something happening at that limit; the 17 I talk about
in the book are those who report having 11 languages or more. When
numbers provide a basis for making a distinction, the result can hardly
be called "unscientific."
3. Time. If Judith Meyer had, indeed,
read the book, she would have seen the account of Arguelles' time on
task, so I think I adequately talked about time spent studying. The
question becomes, why do some people like to spend huge amounts of time
on highly repetitive, systems-based activities? I spend quite a lot of
time in the book unpacking that question, as well.
The broader
conclusions about hyperpolyglots come not only from the survey but from
my interviews and my historical research. What Meyer seems not to
appreciate about Babel No More is that in anyone else's hands, the
hyperpolyglot would have been dismissed as a fiction or a hoax --
instead, the book says that it's a real phenomenon, and sets about to
investigate what the hyperpolyglot (and especially the hyperpolyglot
brain) may have to do with the rest of us. I couldn't -- and can't -- go
further than what neuroscience has achieved, and neuroscientists
haven't been that interested in hyperpolyglot achievement. My book, as
the Economist said in its review, is the first serious account of this
phenomenon. Will there be others? I hope so.
The
most interesting book I have read on learning languages is Babel No
More. The website has some great things on how the world's greatest
language learners did (or do) what they did.
It is heartbreaking
(not quite the right word, alas) in certain ways to know there are
humans who can board a plane from the US to Europe and when they step
off be conversationally fluent in yet another language. Life is not fair
for sure. Not the best book I have read recently but worth a skim.
http://www.babelnomore.com/Edit
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