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Sebastian Heine | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6925 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes  Studies: Uzbek | Message 1 of 32 25 August 2007 at 10:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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For forum members able to read German, here's a brief story about a 22-year-old German student of "IndoGermanistik" who knows 35 languages.
http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/campus/661053/drucken/ 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6446 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 2 of 32 25 August 2007 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Very impressive. It would be interesting to know which languages he speaks. They Pashto, Persian, Urdu, and some others, but don't give a full list. Apparently he's really into Middle Eastern languages.
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| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6925 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 3 of 32 25 August 2007 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was also a bit disappointed that they didn't get into what languages he knows, but I suspect that, given his field of study, they likely include a lot of dead Indo-European languages that might well be classified as dialects as well as languages, and for which a reading knowledge alone may be considered sufficient. Still, and especially in light of his young age, I wouldn't want to take anything away from him. He's clearly an extraordinary individual. (I also like the fact that he attributes it to long hours of hard work; no matter how gifted a person may be, I don't think you learn languages well unless you put in a lot of hours.)
I was reminded of another such individual, a bit further along in his career, Jost Gippert. Here's a popular article on him that I recently ran across (also in German): http://www.fr-online.de/in_und_ausland/wissen_und_bildung/ak tuell/?em_cnt=1184365&sid=916ad964f1c4183eb947e812541084d2 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Zorndyke Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6739 days ago 374 posts - 382 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Czech | Message 4 of 32 26 August 2007 at 2:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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Gippert's claims sound odd to me. He says he doesn't know how many languages he speaks, because after 100 he stopped counting. He says he can't speak all of them fluently, but he can understand the spoken forms of all those languages and read them fluently. Edited by Zorndyke on 26 August 2007 at 2:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6925 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 5 of 32 26 August 2007 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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I suspect that, in the cases of both Heine and Gippert, the distinction between linguists/philologists, on the one hand, and polyglots on the other, likely applies, at least to some degree. The former, based on the needs of their professions, may develop in-depth knowledge of several languages, but because they often focus more on either theoretical issues (linguists) or comparative studies (philologists), knowledge ABOUT the language, or indeed a number of languages, may be more important to them than developing advanced-level fluency.
Gippert used to run a seminar on Zazaki (an Iranian language, similar to Kurdish, spoken in Turkey) at Frankfurt University. I once saw him deliver a speech to a gathering of Zazas on his theory that Zazaki had descended from Parthian. He gave his presentation in German, and I very much doubt that he could have done it in Zazaki. So in speaking of the language knowledge of such people, I think we have to recognize that they often don't speak the languages they work on all that fluently. I saw the same thing with some of my university professors, who were well known as scholars, but in some cases knew the languages almost entirely from books, and couldn't really speak at all. I was pretty critical of this at the time, but now recognize I should have been a bit more tolerant: when these people learned the languages, audio/video/internet materials weren't available, and given the Cold War conditions that prevailed, you couldn't go off to Mongolia and places very easily to learn them on the spot. Also, as noted above, their main focus was not on spoken fluency, but on historical/comparative studies, etc., for which written materials were key. As for forgetting the number of languages one knows, this doesn't strike me as so odd, in that I suspect a lot of us have "played with" various languages just to see that they're like, without having studied them in depth, to the extent that, especially if we have a knowledge of related languages/dialects, we can put a few simple sentences together and understand similar constructions, partially from what we've learned about the language(s) in question and partially by "triangulation" from related tongues. To what degree one counts these varies from individual to individual, I suspect, although I generally think it preferable to speaking of "knowing a little of" languages rather than simply "knowing" them, unless I'm really pretty confident in the languages in question. In general, though, I think that, except for a very small number of truly extraordinary genius types, the Law of Strawberry Jam applies to language study: the wider you spread it, the thinner it gets. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6140 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 32 26 August 2007 at 9:51am | IP Logged | |||||
Agreed! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| zorglub Pentaglot Senior Member France Joined 6781 days ago 441 posts - 504 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (Written), Turkish, Mandarin | Message 7 of 32 28 August 2007 at 2:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
Agreed too, Had I spent the same time on just one language, I would speak it much better. But I'm happier with speaking more languages worse... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| castiwo Newbie Joined 6051 days ago 2 posts - 4 votes | Message 8 of 32 25 September 2007 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I meet Sebastian Heine often. Here I witness that his ability to read and write apart, he can speak very well too in a lot of languages. With me he speaks in close-to-fluent-Urdu. He has been practicing Pashto with a colleague of mine who is 'pathan'.
To my surprise, today we were all sitting together, with an other mate of our who is 'sindhi' and Sebastian was communicating with the three of us in all the three different languages, not only that, he was also translating the stuff to one another. He is so skilled that he was able to crack multiple jokes on the occasion and we couldn't control our laughter. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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