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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3861 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 19, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I've seen enough Youtube polyglots to be convinced that you can probably learn, if not an arbitrary number of languages, then certainly a large number without it 'crowding out' anything else. I suspect the same is true for physical skills, like playing instruments (loads of musicians can play multiple) and sports (or sport-like skills such as juggling).

I guess it depends how much time and energy you've got to spare.

How multi-lingual are these guys really? My impression was that they achieve very basic conversational aptitude in the languages they study i.e. enough to play the role of white guy who "stuns" native speaker of X by order noodles in X, rather than reaching genuine fluency.

Yup. If anyone cares to look it up, most youtuber polyglots are fakes and if they rotate around to a language you know you can tell.

and sports (or sport-like skills such as juggling).

heavy athletics and marathon running are very antagonistic

Do keep in mind that our brains have specialised circuitry for language learning that it doesn’t have for say aerospace engineering or history trivia facts. Ideal language study methods are also very different compared to any other field of knowledge. So it’s not the best field to focus on when discussing this topic

I have a baseline high level of suspicion towards Youtube polyglot videos. These people are like magicians in that they give an illusion of an ability when their real talent is for something somewhat orthogonal (that is, less about being actually proficient, but rather about looking proficient in select settings that they tune). A few tricks include:

  1. Controlling the conversation: The main skill many of these "polyglots" have is in pushing conversations towards topics about which they have the appropriate stock phrases well rehearsed. Sentences about how much they "love the culture", "I always thought [insert country] was so beautiful", "the [insert cuisine] is delicious" etc. If someone says something the "polyglot" doesn't understand they'll smile, nod, say "that's great" or "hmm, I'm not sure" and quickly try to change the subject. The better ones can do this more subtly, but even the clumsier ones can get away with it since most viewers aren't watching critically.

  2. Selective editing: The format lets them use staged videos or simply to selectively include footage of their best performances. Given the incentives on Youtube I don't really trust most to not do these things. For every free-flowing Mandarin conversation there may have been 10 where the polyglot just totally misunderstood the native speaker.

  3. Optimizing study: Words and phrases are Pareto distributed, so you can get to a basic conversational level in most languages with about 3000. If you're good at point 1 above you can probably get away with much fewer. For comparison, a native speaker is estimated to have a vocabulary of 20k to 35k. If you're loose with the definition of "fluent" you could just study these most optimal 3k for several languages instead of becoming highly proficient in one.

  4. Piling up on highly similar languages: The distinction between a "language" and a "dialect of a language" is more political than anything objective to the forms of speech themselves. An English-only speaker could likely become fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, and French with less effort and time than it would take to get equivalently fluent in just Japanese (or Mandarin or Arabic or Korean). By largely focusing on clusters of highly similar languages, they more easily inflate their "language count".

Most genuine "polyglots" (high proficiency in 3 or more) I've spoken with say that they can only have thorough, complex conversations in 2-3 highly distinct languages at any given moment. Even a few months of disuse is enough for them to feel significantly sluggish retrieving words and forming sentences in their native languages, albeit still highly proficient. If they know they'll need a particular one soon (like they'll be traveling to [insert country] next month), then they can review for a week or two and revive the quick access (like putting it in RAM), but trying to keep all of them active simultaneously makes organizing thoughts a bit chaotic.

Even a few months of disuse is enough for them to feel significantly sluggish retrieving words and forming sentences in their native languages, albeit still highly proficient. If they know they'll need a particular one soon (like they'll be traveling to [insert country] next month), then they can review for a week or two and revive the quick access (like putting it in RAM), but trying to keep all of them active simultaneously makes organizing thoughts a bit chaotic.

This is also my experience, but if the question is "how many languages can you have stored in your brain in some form?" rather than "how many languages could you have a political debate in right this second?" I don't think anyone has demonstrated a limit, and seeing as even polyglots have to spend time doing things other than practicing languages it may as well be infinite. Of course, people may have different opinions on what counts as "knowing" something. If, given two days to prepare, I could pass a linear algebra exam by recalling what I learned in college, but I would fail miserably if presented with one right now, in what sense do I "know" the material?

Senior clerics in the Catholic Church are routinely fluent in 5+ languages simultaneously. It’s definitely a thing even if YouTube polyglots are often illusionists.

I suppose, but in the context of the original post, polyglot feats were given as a supporting example for there not being much of a "crowding out" effect on other skills/knowledge.

I imagine these senior clerics tend to specialize in specific subregions of the world with similar languages (though do correct me if I'm wrong), which is why I emphasized "highly distinct languages". Furthermore, their conversations in those secondary languages are likely to be limited to a well-trodden Catholicism-focused subset of all possible topics. Sure, speaking about Catholicism in English plus 5 Romance languages is impressive, but it doesn't compare to the cognitive load of having depth and breadth of proficiency in English + Mandarin + Arabic, where I'm positing that you will start to see crowding out effects at least on the level of "quickly, effortlessly accessible" if not on the level of having the actual knowledge somewhere buried in the brain.

I have personally met a bishop who spoke, fluently, in English, French, German, Lithuanian, Russian, Kazakh, and Italian at a minimum, based solely off his life story and conversational abilities that I personally saw, and could also read and write very well in Latin. John Paul II was notoriously able to speak 14 languages, and even if we limit it to fluency in distinct languages I'd be able to count 5 off this link(https://www.quora.com/How-many-languages-did-Pope-John-Paul-II-speak-fluently).

Now it's quite likely that they learn these things instead of, say, math, and Catholic bishops have a very high average IQ so can probably have a higher cognitive load than average. But it does probably demonstrate that knowing many, many languages to a high degree of fluency is entirely possible.

How could you really actually know though? Unless you are better than they are or are assessing with translated recordings in a testing environment? I'm with bonsaii here, I think it is BS.

I heard him speak English and French fluently; fluency in Italian would be a prerequisite of his level of influence within the church; his life would be extremely implausible if he didn’t speak Lithuanian, German, Russian, and Kazakh all extremely well and over a broad range of topics. I suppose it’s possible that his literacy in Latin used a dictionary or other translation assistance, but I heard attestations that he didn’t need it.

As far as JPII goes, I have no direct knowledge, but the consensus seems to be that he really was fluent in eight languages, although granted that’s partly by counting Spanish and Portuguese separately.

Bully for him. But I just don't think people can actually keep that many disparate grammar models rattling around in the old braincase at the same time +vocab. Maybe he WAS ok at some of those languages 30 years ago when he spoke them every day or something, but there is no way for someone to be "fluent" in that many at the same time.

I just spent a bit of time googling about and there seems to be a general consensus that most youtube polyglots are faking it for the most part. Other more honest polyglots know a core of 2, or rarely 3 "unique" languages and are at a conversational in a few more, they still need a few weeks to refresh their skills before traveling to another country. There is no doubt about it, trying to maintain many languages runs into maintenance problems well before you hit fluency in 8 languages as disparate as those listed. It just isn't possible in the way some people claim it is.

I suppose it depends to some extent what fluency is, exactly. I'd be very impressed by anyone not a native speaker knowing English as well as I do (and, to be honest, a bit impressed even by native speakers when they know sufficiently obscure words).

I would imagine generating the right word on the spot would be significantly harder than grammar—native speakers can fail to do so, on occasion.

That people would know at most 2 or 3 languages well seems unlikely to me. My guess would be that there would be hundreds of millions of people who are natively bilingual, so surely higher numbers have occurred a bunch of times.

Eh, I know a number of Lutheran clergy who speak multiple languages fluently and additionally have a reading and sometimes writing knowledge of several more. It’s not at all uncommon to come across pastors who speak fluent English, German, and one or more of Spanish, Italian, one of the Scandinavian languages, Afrikaans, Russian, Japanese, etc. These same guys can generally also read Koine Greek without much difficulty, maybe ancient Hebrew (if they retained it after graduating from the seminary), and frequently also Latin.

The ministry is one of the few professions that still heavily emphasizes the learning of foreign languages, so it’s not altogether surprising that it attracts people with a propensity in that direction.

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