
How to learn 30 languages - d_a_robson
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150528-how-to-learn-30-languages
======
emodendroket
I am somewhat skeptical of these people's claims. Some of these people are
pretty prominent on the Internet and watching videos of them speaking
languages I'm more familiar with found their command of them to be more
beginner to intermediate. That's still a kind of accomplishment but really
becoming fluent in a language is a huge investment of time because you have to
learn lots of vocabulary, idioms, and collocations, and I just don't see how
you can do that without spending thousands of hours using it.

~~~
dbbolton
My degree was in linguistics (although it is not my current profession), and I
wholeheartedly agree with your comment.

My personal opinion is that claims of polyglotism are quite often (if not
usually) exaggerated, whether intentionally or not. There are many different
metrics for language proficiency, but they are all just samples of a person's
linguistic competence rather than a complete picture. For that reason, they're
prone to the same issues as general intelligence tests. A high score on a
language test is no guarantee of fluency just as a high IQ is no guarantee of
intelligence-- and this is all assuming the person claiming to be fluent has
even taken such a test, which is rare. I think more often people have
individual standards for "fluency", which vary wildly. Again, I'm not saying
that people intentionally mislead others about their own language ability, or
that there aren't any true hyperpolyglots-- just that such claims should be
taken with a grain of salt.

Both the description of the critical hypothesis in the article and the person
who described it as "a bunch of crap" are wrong. The hypothesis actually
states that there is an _ideal_ window for language learning that occurs at a
young age, whereas the article presents it as "a narrow window during
childhood in which we can pick up the nuances of a new language". No serious
academic linguist that I have ever met subscribes to a definition that rigid.
Adults absolutely _can_ pick up on the nuances of a new language, but for the
overwhelming majority it takes considerably more time and effort compared to a
child in the critical period.

I do believe that language learning for adults can be made more efficient than
it usually is (e.g. the classic cookie-cutter layout of every foreign language
textbook I've ever read), and perhaps some of the strategies laid out in the
article are effective, but that does not discredit the critical period
hypothesis and it's still going to take a lot of effort for a typical adult to
become fluent in a new language.

~~~
emodendroket
Well, also, empirically, adults who learn a foreign language can become quite
good at it but even after decades of using the language often have accents or
fossilized incorrect grammatical uses or uses of vocabulary. That doesn't
really happen to children either.

~~~
dbbolton
Yes-- I thought it was reasonably well established that children have superior
"plastic" or "fluid" intelligence in general, but apparently a few people feel
that this doesn't apply to language (for some reason).

------
bitL
I speak 8 languages, 4 super fluently, 2 sufficient for daily communication
and 2 so-so for special occasions only, and learning continuously. They are
all from different groups without many commonalities (Germanic, Romance,
Slavic, Sino-Japanese). For Sino-Japanese there is the odd disparity between
the ability to read and ability to write that doesn't exist in the other
groups, as well as a single character having different sound depending on
context. Slavic languages are crazy because they can form sentences in any
order and the order changes meaning substantially, something that doesn't
exist in orderly Germanic languages. Romance languages often add terms related
to feelings that do not have any corresponding term in another languages.

I would disagree that learning one language helps you with another unless they
are from some kind of language continuum - languages are so vastly different
(especially depending on geographic distance) when you try to really master
them, often full of idiomatic expressions and expressions you can't understand
unless you grow in the historical context the language developed, and accurate
translations are basically impossible. Some even use completely different
causal logic (like Aymara), or miss elements considered basic in other
languages (directions absent in Hawaiian) etc.

Learning languages is driven by curiosity, was handy a bit while traveling
around the world and it helps to be near some language school, attend parties
with people from all around the world and just have fun trying to chat
together natively ;-)

~~~
emodendroket
Why group Sinitic and Japonic languages together? It's true that Japanese (and
the other minor Japonic languages) borrows a lot of Chinese vocabulary but
grammatically and phonetically they have practically nothing in common.

~~~
titanix2
Because a large part of Japanese language (and Korean and Vietnamese for that
matter) is made of loanwords of Chinese origin (漢語) it made some sense to
bring them together (albeit I suspect it is often done because Japanese use
Chinese characters too). So while the grammar vastly differ, learning one is
really useful to learn another because a lot of words are roughly the same.

As a side note I was reading in a book[1] the rather extreme view that the
"corrupt" Japanese or Korean readings of characters maybe seen as a dialect of
Chinese.

[1] Élémens de la grammaire chinoise. Abel Rémusat (1822)
[https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&out...](https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&output=reader&id=rJAUAAAAYAAJ&pg=GBS.PP5)

~~~
emodendroket
Big surprise, a book from the early 19th Century has a silly linguistic view.
By this logic English is a romance language because it has a lot of French
borrowings, despite not descending from Latin. As for Chinese characters,
well, do we consider Vietnamese and English part of the same language family
because both are written with the Latin alphabet?

I acknowledged, in the post you're replying to, the large body of borrowed
vocabulary, but that's not how languages are classified/made into families.
Chinese and Japanese do not have a common ancestor and have very, very
different grammar and phonetics.

------
tcbawo
I'm curious how much effort goes into maintenance. Even if you could learn 10+
languages, how much time per day/per language is necessary to retain fluency?
That must be why these people seem to constantly seek each other out.

~~~
panglott
I remember once reading an interview with a supposed hyperpolyglot, in which
he revealed that he spent nearly all of his time (8+ hours/day) reviewing
flashcards. I guess it's possible, if you really like doing flash cards.

These popular narratives about "hyperpolyglots" tend to have really naive
views about what "fluency" in a language means. It's probably feasible to have
rudimentary knowledge of many languages, but there are large practical limits
as to how sophisticated your competence can be unless you're using that
language regularly to communicate in a variety of domains.

~~~
Uberphallus
When I met one of those I felt like I just received a license to say I speak 5
languages.

The 1st: my mother tongue.

The 2nd: I'm native-level, studied all my life, use it everyday.

The 3rd: I'm somewhere between advanced-survival and fluent-colloquial
depending on my BAC; spoken in the country I live in so I don't put that much
effort.

The 4th: just basic knowledge but really closely related to the 1st, so
communication is fluent even if I'm making up words and abusing the rules of
grammar.

The 5th: I study it every day since over a year, I speak retarded and
understand correctly pronounced simple phrases 60% of the time. Can survive in
the countries where it's spoken and it's a nice perk with people; they become
surprisingly friendly because very few people speak the language other than
natives.

------
ranman
I've honestly never trusted these guys who claim to speak 30 distinct
languages. Can it all be tested at once?

~~~
ch4s3
Hard to say. From what I've read and heard anecdotally from friends that speak
5+ languages, the get easier as you learn new ones. You begin to think about
them structurally and pick them up in groups of closely related languages. At
some point its just a matter of learning the idioms and building you word
catalog, as you've learned the grammar in a similar/related language.

~~~
chegra
I think it is the same with programming. Once you understand the basic
programming paradigms the rest becomes easy. I think in terms of language is
Object, Verb, Subject order.

~~~
schoen
I'm concerned that there are often going to be weird little issues about
particles and stuff. For example, a lot of people have a tidy notion about
Romance language grammar -- subject-verb-object, conjugate the verb to show
person, number, tense, and mood. But the different Romance languages have
rather different tricks about what happens when the object of a verb is a
pronoun. In some languages it then gets squashed onto the end of the verb
(possibly changing the form of the verb), even into the _middle_ of the verb
before the endings (Portuguese mesoclisis), or placed before the verb. And the
different languages have different preferences and possibilities about this.

------
discardorama
.. and here I'm having difficulty plodding through Scala... :-(

I wonder what's the similarity between learning human languages, and computer
languages. I think one can pick up a computer language fairly quickly if it's
in the same paradigm (imperative, functional, logic, etc.)... but actually
mastering it is much harder, because there are so many different ways to do
("say") the same thing.

~~~
schoen
One significant difference is that programming languages have a very small
vocabulary, while spoken languages usually have an enormous vocabulary. A
programming language might have 10-20 reserved words (plus specific meanings
of tokens like "++", "\", ":=" that you need to learn). On the other hand,
yesterday I realized that I didn't know the word for "brick" in _any_ foreign
language, including languages I've studied and regularly used for a long time.

That's one factor that makes it plausible that a programmer would learn a new
programming language in a weekend, but somewhat implausible that someone would
learn a spoken language in a weekend (although you can get surprisingly far).
On the other hand, Daniel Tammet apparently learned Icelandic in one week:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet#Savantism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet#Savantism)

------
pvaldes
I think that is better to speak one or a few _well_ and take profit of the
extra brain space.

People very specialised into translation problems (just a narrow class of
problems) probably will score poorly with complex technical problems of a
different nature. If your problem needs to be solved just one time and as soon
as possible (as in the 99% of the cases) you probably should not really care
to much about if is solved in chinese or Tamil. Is not really relevant if you
think about it.

You just can hire a translator one or two weeks each year to act as megaphone
at the end of the process and that's all. Translation uses just a small
percentage of the project time, generally at the beginning and at the very
end.

To hire the translator full time, 365 days/year is just easier for human
resources, but not a guarantee that you are really targeting the solver that
you need.

~~~
emodendroket
The brain isn't really like that. People who speak multiple languages are not
necessarily better or worse at any unrelated skills.

~~~
pvaldes
If you claim to master 30 languages you can of course hammer a nail, but not
to be a professional piano player. Is very unlikely. Days are just too short.

In any case reading the link provided seems that the journalist translates
directly 'how to do something' as 'its great' and 'you can do it!'... Much
hype, few substance, as usual.

------
joeyspn
> Those who knew three languages, however, were diagnosed 6.4 years later than
> monolinguals, while for those fluent in four or more languages, enjoyed an
> extra nine years of healthy cognition...

Glad to read this...

I speak ~4, english being the 3rd (far from native but good enough to do biz)
and the forth being basic/intermediate level. I've met people fluent in 5
languages... but they start to struggle with the 6th onwards.

That being said, I think 30+ is _a lot_. I've never known anyone who speaks
_fluently_ more than 6, but hey, if they can... great!

This people must have lived in a lot of countries since their early years, or
their parents were polyglots themselves. I think the key is early exposure to
different languages. You can easily teach kids 5 languages before they're
12...

~~~
pascalmemories
I have a friend who seems to pick up languages by osmosis. We went for a meal
and were served by someone from Croatia. My friend started chatting to him (in
English) and asked him for a few words in Croatian (no more than about a
dozen) then was able to start speaking to him in Croatian. Afterwards he
explained the few words let him know some basic structure he could relate to
other languages he knew and he could extrapolate from them and the new words
enough to be able to have a conversation. It was both spooky and amazing at
the same time. He has a library in dozens of languages and gets books 'just to
see what the language is like' \- it's like some sort of super-power.

~~~
outworlder
So, basically, he's an organic version of Star Trek's universal translator?

More interestingly, if your friend can do that, perhaps the universal
translator is not such a magical concept after all. For terrestrial languages,
at least.

------
MaximillianII
Speaking foreign languages opens truly opens many opportunity that most
monolinguals (especially English-speaking ones) do not even suspect. Yes, my
German colleagues and friends all speak English and we could get along fine
using it. However we wouldn't be able to share our personalities and cultural
differences as well as we do on a daily basis if we didn't share a native
language (for them) spoken at a high level (for me).

~~~
Dewie3
People in general seem to underestimate how important it can be to speak the
same language as a group[1], even when you happen to share another language.
If I were to move to another country for many years, I would definitely start
learning the most relevant language there. Even if ~98% spoke English.

Being able to speak something like English in some part of the non-English
word might make you able to communicate with people there. But that doesn't
necessarily mean that you'll be able to have meaningful _connections_ compared
to speaking the native tongue.

[1] Like the native language in some country or region.

~~~
thfuran
If you can't form meaningful connections when you're speaking your native
tongue and they aren't, why could you when they are and you aren't?

~~~
Dewie3
Maybe I'm just bad at it.

------
th0br0
I was at the meeting here in Berlin and can only say that it was awesome. Such
interesting talks and people! For those interested, the talks should be posted
online soon at
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_8BR59zKgBzeWPxFtmHSwA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_8BR59zKgBzeWPxFtmHSwA)

------
agumonkey
“The more it changes, the more it's the same thing.”

