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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3977 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 21, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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You read accounts of famous 'geniuses' of old and many of them are noted for being fluent in like 3+ languages, often starting at an early age.

I often wonder how many of these accounts are hyperbolized, since in my experience just flat out learning languages from scratch is a miserable task with only marginal success.

It feels like in principle it should be possible to learn some 'universal' rules that let you see the congruence common to all languages and thus make it easier to learn new ones and translate between one's you already know, but in practice the intricacies end up making each one so different as to feel almost incomparable.

Depending on how big the "+" part is... I am reasonably fluent in 3 languages (meaning, can maintain a conversation, read a newspaper, would likely understand about any book not specifically written to be incomprehensible, etc.) and can easily understand another one though not speak fluently, for the lack of practice. Not a genius by any measure. So I'd imagine if somebody had real skills and worked on it... I don't see why achieving something like 8-10 would be impossible. I mean, once you got once Romance language, a reasonable effort would probably give you about 5 of them. Add German and English, you're already at 7. Then you can add Dutch and Norwegian and Swedish, since you already familiar with Germanics, and you've got 10. And we didn't even have to leave Europe!

You read accounts of famous 'geniuses' of old and many of them are noted for being fluent in like 3+ languages, often starting at an early age.

Surely being fluent in 3+ languages starting at an early age is less impressive than being fluent in 3+ languages starting at a late age!

I’ve always been confused about why people emphasize how many languages some 18th century child prodigy speaks. Surely this is the easiest time to pick up a language? And it’s not like it was uncommon to speak multiple languages in antiquity if there was use for it - educated folk in the Byzantine empire would’ve spoken at least Greek and Latin, right? Was “fluency” a much more stringent assessment before the 20th century?

There are a lot of confounding factors. If the languages are closely related e.g. Spanish, Italian, French, Latin, then it isn't too hard, particularly if you are a native speaker of one of them. If you truly, absolutely need to master a language for work as an adult e.g. English for immigrants to the US, then you aren't going to hear many complaints like "oh, I'm bad at languages" that you get from monolingual Americans or Brits. It's just that most English-speakers are never put in a situation where knowing a foreign language is essential, so the opportunity cost for them is too great.

I grew up in a State Department household (my parents speak 9 languages between them) that hopped from country to country so of course I'm biased, but I don't find learning a language at least to the basic "can barter for groceries and ask for directions" level to be that miserable of an experience. Sure, you might sound like a fool who can't conjugate verbs, but it can still be a lifesaver if you happen to be stranded in a third world country without any other means of communication with the locals. The hardest grammatical rules tend to come relatively far along the path of diminishing returns when it comes to language learning. Pronunciation can be trickier, but I would only expect that to be an absolute communication barrier at first in something like Chinese or Arabic.

I'm not sure what sorts of universal rules you are thinking of, but I find that learning the linguistic terminology for things like verb tenses, noun declensions, particles, etc. does help a lot when starting a new language, so I'm glad I went through the traditional schooling approach with a grammar textbook for at least one language. Of course you will encounter more new things the farther you stray from your mother tongue, but that's to be expected.

I'm just saying that I've worked on learning the basics of Japanese, Russian, and German and dear lord do the rules you learn in one mostly NOT help you learning the others.

There is a lot of snake oil peddled in the language learning field. (Any class or video or program that promises "Fluency in X weeks!" is bullshit.)

Nobody - literally nobody - can become "fully fluent" in a new language in a matter of weeks. Even with the most intense immersion program, you could only get up to a barely functional level.

That said, it has long been known that children learn languages incredibly easily compared to adults. Up until about age 12, a child immersed in a new language can probably acquire native fluency within a couple of years.

If you look on YouTube, there are a lot of so-called "polyglots" who claim to speak up to 20 languages. At most, some of them speak 3 or 4 at anything like native fluency, and all those other languages are ones where they've memorized enough canned phrases and dialogs to make an impressive-sounding YouTube video.

Around 20 years ago I met a Greek guy who’d studied Finnish for six months from language cassettes and then spent two months here speaking the language. At that point he was fluent to the extent that I first thought he’d been living here for a decade. I’ve never seen anyone else come even remotely close to that and the guy turned out to be a language genius (he spoke around a dozen languages more or less proficiently).

Yeah, that's about my conclusion.

Either you learn multiple languages as a child when your brain is specifically attuned to learning them, or you're bottlenecked forever thereafter.

That said, I've been using Duolingo for Spanish for around 10 years now, and I think I'm actually capable of reading it and grasping the meaning pretty fluently, and I can notice and follow snippets of conversations around me. Even though AI translation is now strictly superior to humans, I will probably keep at it for the pure sake of 'brain exercise.'

I suspect people claiming fluency in many languages are using it kind of like membership in Mensa, just a signal they can send of their intelligence, even if, practically speaking it isn't that useful to them and they're far less impressive than it implies.

Indeed, most people who are truly fluent in multiple languages would just get jobs as translators, which isn't a field known for it's megageniuses or paying massive amounts. It's pretty much just a rote skill like any other and is only situationally useful to develop.

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