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Advice To An Aspiring Teenage Polyglot? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| catullus_roar Quadrilingual Octoglot Groupie Australia Joined 4353 days ago 89 posts - 184 votes  Speaks: Malay, Hokkien*, English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese*, French, German, Spanish Studies: Italian, Latin, Armenian, Afrikaans, Russian | Message 33 of 38 19 June 2012 at 4:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Serpent: True, maybe it's just that some (like me) are more hyperactive: After some French, we suddenly feel like reading a Spanish book or writing in German etc. Usually, how much time do you spend on one lesson, if you're using learning materials that are broken up into chapters or lessons? I understand that this depends with the difficulty of the lesson, as well as the intensity of study, but I would like to know if I'm going too fast, which is why I'm having trouble remembering things.
As for shadowing, I can never get the words to come out at the same time as I'm hearing them, because it takes some time for the words to get in through the ears and out through my mouth. Hence, I'm always a few seconds behind the recording, no matter how many times I do it (because it'll take the initial sound to prompt me to remember the phrase). Is this normal? Thanks for the links, I'll definitely check out this VK. tarvos: Would you say that it's possible to speak a second language (eg. English) as well as your native language or mother tongue, since you've been studying English for so long? I don't know whether the separation of 'mother tongue' from 'native language' is so distinct in Europe, but here it's very different, probably because the native languages of people in Asia are either Mandarin or English, and the mother tongues are Mandarin-related dialects or regional languages like Malay and Urdu. Apparently I have this strange habit of talking to myself in TLs, haha. Maybe that's sort of like your thought thing, but out loud. Speaking of accents, do you strive for your native accent (eg. Dutch) when speaking French, or do you go for the Parisian accent? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4492 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 34 of 38 19 June 2012 at 10:21am | IP Logged | ||
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It's certainly possible for me. I have been using it since I was a child, so anyone who
hears me speak English will think "he's a native speaker" (I have practically zero accent. That sounds like boasting, but my accent in English is really so faint intonation-wise and prosody-wise that I've fooled people before. Even linguists). I would also say that I dislike the notion of "studying" English because I really do not think, apart from a basic sense of the grammar, studying English has brought me anything. My English development was much more to do with exposure - I have been exposed and required to use it from such an early age onwards that for me a thought process in English is really no different from a thought process in Dutch. You have to keep in mind that I have watched, spent, and seen an ungodly amount of English, even as a child - I have spent hours and hours on video games in English, even when I was age 6 or 7. Thus I have always been very used to seeing and speaking it (been on holiday during that time in the States and Canada several times) that for my part, I don't experience a difference in expressing myself concerning any subject (and probably in terms of technical jargon, my English is more advanced than my Dutch precisely because I have the experience of knowing all these terms in English before I encountered their Dutch counterparts - I knew how to do multiplication and division in English at the same time as I learned their Dutch names, for example). For all practical purposes, I do not consider English my native language because I was not born in an anglophone country nor is any of my family English (so I would say I am only a Dutch native speaker and that Dutch is my mother tongue). I do, however, consider English a language I speak to the same level and degree of fluency. But again, I attribute the whole thing to exposure not study. I've just used it for so long and so often that I'm simply not phased by anything when it comes to that language. Mother tongue in Europe is a different concept because, UK and Ireland excepted, practically every country has a different mother tongue (in some countries it can even vary between regions, such as in Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland etc.) Because Europe has also experienced mass immigration, and because movement within the EU is free, intermarrying is also relatively common, meaning that household with a double lingo are not unheard of. However, most people here that aren't the result of a mixed marriage (or marrying someone from an immigrant group like the Turkish or Moroccans, or a colonial people like, for the Dutch, Indonesians, Surinamese, Antillians), consider their mother tongue and native language to be the same: Dutch (and I'm sure a German or a Frenchman would say the same thing). The language(s) of a country are the dominant ones. English is studied by many but in Germany, France, Italy, etc not everyone is fluent by any means. I always strive for an accent close to that of the natives of a country, but my accent in French is probably still riddled with Dutch (I've never had it formally assessed though). I will say that the standard of French I adhere to is NOT Parisian, for the simple reason that my French exposure has for a large part not come from France, but from Belgium instead. So I would describe the accent that I want to go for as more "Bruxellois" as opposed to Parisian. This is also because Belgian French is more melodic and I hate monotone speech (a reason I can sometimes get irritated by Dutch people speaking English with Dutch prosody, as it is painful to listen to without the proper melodical nuance that English generally requires). In Russian and German I simply aim for the standard accent, although my German is still Dutchified (and so is my Russian). I do use a couple Western German phrases like "ne" for "nein". I also have a hatred of soixante-dix and quatre-vingts-dix so I use septante and nonante instead (I do say quatre-vingts). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| catullus_roar Quadrilingual Octoglot Groupie Australia Joined 4353 days ago 89 posts - 184 votes Speaks: Malay, Hokkien*, English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese*, French, German, Spanish Studies: Italian, Latin, Armenian, Afrikaans, Russian | Message 35 of 38 23 June 2012 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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tarvos: Have you ever felt an interest for languages which are about to go extinct? I mean, language extinction is like the climate change of the linguistic world. Have you ever felt this obligation to learn at least one of these dying languages, if just to keep them alive a few more years?
I do think septante and nonante are more natural sounding, haha. Before I learned the numbers properly, I came up with 70 being septante and 80 being huitante. I guess it's just cinq --> cinquante, which is a reasonably predictable pattern. I guess it's the irregularities that make a language special though! As for accents, I think it's interesting to note that a Spanish accent (for me) is very difficult to obtain, while a German accent came much more easily, as did a French one. Maybe it's the proximity to English? And just an update, I've found a way to dramatically improve my Cyrillic alphabet. I changed all my interfaces into Russian, and even though I don't quite understand the words, I find this urge to read them out every time I see the words. (Eg. every time I get a Facebook notif, the message is now in Russian and I find myself deciphering it for kicks). So yes, finally it has worked! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4492 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 36 of 38 24 June 2012 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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No obligation at all, I do like Breton.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5651 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 37 of 38 24 June 2012 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | ||
I share your annoyance about quatre-vingt-dix, etc. Even after a lifetime of trying to learn French, this construction is still awkward for me. Almost as awkward is the Dutch construction of 2-digit numbers, reversing their order with respect to that in English and some other languages. After many years of studying Dutch, I still have a momentary hesitation each time I encounter or use 2-digit numbers. It seems particularly awkward when you are reading a long number such as 18,245,527 (18.245.527), when things read from left to right except the two digit reversals. Had you learned your French in Paris (as you learned your English by "using" it), quatre-vingt-dix would be as natural as eenentwintig, and septante would be awkward. But we all have to accept these things in French and Dutch, accented letters and difference scripts in other languages, English irregular pronunciation, etc. etc. as part of the mystique of "foreign" languages and part of the intrigue of learning them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4492 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 38 of 38 25 June 2012 at 12:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, I know, learning a language is all about learning to accept different logic. But if
you can take a little shortcut, why not? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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