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john234 Newbie United States Joined 6357 days ago 15 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 17 of 38 05 January 2008 at 11:51pm | IP Logged |
Professor Arguelles,
I would also be very interested in reading your book. I am 26 years old, and my goals are to learn German, French, and Spanish, and to read Koine Greek. I know you have stated that your calling is to coach those who can conceive of learning ten or more languages. Nonetheless, your posts have been very useful to me both for practical advice on shadowing and transcription and also for inspiration as to what is possible with systematic study over time. I also enjoyed your earlier anecdotes about practicing Romansh by visiting a village in Switzerland and learning Swedish in Sweden. I know you have a full schedule, but I do hope that you will find a way to share your book, even if only in draft form, in the near future. Thank you for the time you spend contributing to the forum.
John
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| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7236 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes
| Message 18 of 38 06 January 2008 at 5:37pm | IP Logged |
I do feel that my experience can be of uniquely valuable assistance to those who can conceive of learning ten or more languages, but are there even ten such individuals alive? In any case, I am also more than happy to help all serious students of languages, such as you yourself. A desire to learn four languages is certainly more than respectable, and I would like to live in a world in which all educated individuals did this as a matter of course. If my writings can have an influence in that direction, then I will be overjoyed. I must say, though, that I am somewhat perplexed by the mixed signals I get from this forum—on the one hand, there is a continuous stream of calls for me to get my book out, but on the other hand, when I get to writing and sharing the unfinished portions, as I did in the time management thread and am trying to do in the thread on ideal systematic training in polyglottery, I get discouragingly little feedback…
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6683 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map
| Message 19 of 38 10 January 2008 at 1:33pm | IP Logged |
Professor Arguelles,
If your book on polyglottery gets out I'm certainly going to get a copy. I have read the books of Kato Lomb and Spivak in their free internet versions, and I must admit that it is easier to download something without paying a cent to the author, but good books deserve to be savoured in their printed forms even if it means that you have to order them from abroad. On the other hand, your three-lingual dictionary that received such as dismal tratment from the publisher may not be too relevant for me personally as I'm not going to learn Korean. I certainly hope you find a more trustworthy publisher for the work on polyglottery.
As for the amount of feedback on your postings about time management and the school dedicated to polyglottery I think that you have had extremely positive response from those who have commented. Those who didn't comment may have done so because they can't really see themselves sticking to such a strenuous and rigid work program as you have been describing, and they are not yet in a position to think about what they really would do if they woke up one morning with twenty languages on their hands to tend to. Besides, high numbers of responses are not always a good thing. Maybe the longest thread on this forum got so ugly that the administrator chose to bar its main protagonist from active participation. At least that won't happen in this more quiet subforum.
Edited by Iversen on 11 January 2008 at 2:21am
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6419 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 20 of 38 12 January 2008 at 7:40pm | IP Logged |
ProfArguelles wrote:
I do feel that my experience can be of uniquely valuable assistance to those who can conceive of learning ten or more languages, but are there even ten such individuals alive? |
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As I have previously indicated, I am one such individual. I cannot claim perfection in my attempts to reach this goal, by any means, but it is certainly something I can conceive of, and I am actively studying, experimenting, and building on the base I have, albeit in a more haphazard way than is ideal. I am also actively investigating how I can arrange large chunks of time for language study, to decide whether I would like to strongly commit to this goal, rather than merely strongly considering it.
ProfArguelles wrote:
In any case, I am also more than happy to help all serious students of languages, such as you yourself. A desire to learn four languages is certainly more than respectable, and I would like to live in a world in which all educated individuals did this as a matter of course. If my writings can have an influence in that direction, then I will be overjoyed. I must say, though, that I am somewhat perplexed by the mixed signals I get from this forum—on the one hand, there is a continuous stream of calls for me to get my book out, but on the other hand, when I get to writing and sharing the unfinished portions, as I did in the time management thread and am trying to do in the thread on ideal systematic training in polyglottery, I get discouragingly little feedback… |
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I cannot provide meaningful feedback to your time management thread at present. I am working 17 hours some days, almost always more than 8 on the rest (excluding a 2-hour commute), and frequently work on weekends. It is all I can do to maintain some semblence of language study given this.
On your polyglottery thread, I created a fairly long post, asking a number of questions, most of which are still unanswered, and have been offline on vacation so have not yet created another with the questions which are still pertinent. I'll also need to start saving it and running the program 'diff' to find out where you are making changes - it is not immediately obvious where you are making revisions in your post.
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| Languagelover1 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6409 days ago 63 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Spanish
| Message 21 of 38 13 January 2008 at 4:00pm | IP Logged |
Dear Professor Arguelles,
Thank you so much for taking the time to write to us on this forum. I have been very interested to read about
your proposed Polyglot Academy. Perhaps many people on here, like me, haven't commented because we are too
old to benefit from such an academy ourselves. In my own case I now have a mortgage and all the commitments
of adult life but if I were 18 or even in my early 20's again I couldn't imagine a course better suited to my
interests or a better form of intellectual development than the one you have outlined in such fine detail. I also
marvelled at the self-discipline that you exercise when I looked at your timetable for language studies. Utterly
amazing!
The main reason for my writing is to add my voice to the others who have requested that you publish your book
on polyglottery soon. I'm finding it very difficult from this forum to get the gist of shadowing and I'm looking
forward to reading what you have to say on the matter in the chapter that you have written on this. In the
meantime, are there any other texts in English or Spanish on learning languages that you think worthy of
recommendation?
I look forward to your reply. Many thanks
Stephen Picksley
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| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7236 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes
| Message 22 of 38 13 January 2008 at 9:02pm | IP Logged |
Mr. Picksley,
Perhaps this is an opportune time to announce that I am currently taking active steps to join the computer age by setting up my own website. I do not know how long it will take, but I had my first meeting with the designer last week, and I specified that I wanted one of the “pages” to contain links to the chapters of this treatise. I will also have a “page” with audio and video, and I plan on making a training video for shadowing in particular. That should help somewhat, but as I believe I have articulated elsewhere not too long ago, even when I work with students one on one in real-life tutorials, it generally takes several weeks and lots of correction from me before they learn to do it properly.
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| senor_smile Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6366 days ago 110 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Russian
| Message 23 of 38 14 January 2008 at 2:03am | IP Logged |
Professor Arquelles, I have not as of yet contributed anything to your portion of the forums, and to date have honestly not contributed much to these forums at all. I have however greatly benefited from the little that I have read that you both originally contributed about shadowing techniques, as well as all of the new posts you have made. I have been particularly aided by your spreadsheet of language review.
I am a 24 year old full-time college student. As well, I have a full-time job and a 1 year old daughter. Needless to say, I am quite busy. As I do not have lots of spare time during each week, I attempt to devote as much of my free time that I'm not spending with my daughter to language study. I have wanted to compose a more thorough message to you for some time to get some advice on both being able to focus better, and how to better manage the little spurts of time I do have. My goal is to be fluent in at least 30 languages, if not more. I am a learner that loves to learn not for the goal of reading literature, but simply to be able to communicate in any fashion in many language, be it reading, writing, listening or speaking.
At a later time, hopefully sooner than later, I wish to more thoroughly explain my situation and current background in languages, in order to get some solid advice from such a seasoned expert.
In response to your question "I do feel that my experience can be of uniquely valuable assistance to those who can conceive of learning ten or more languages, but are there even ten such individuals alive?" I am not entirely sure if there are ten or more individuals alive that meet such criteria, but I am indeed one such individual with the will to do so.
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| mumusik Newbie Korea, South Joined 6286 days ago 38 posts - 38 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean
| Message 24 of 38 18 January 2008 at 8:29pm | IP Logged |
교수님,
my copy of the Korean Newspaper Reader has arrived. I'm excited! There is no recommended way to approach the articles... Here's what I did for the first one.
1. Read the article and the vocabulary list.
2. Copy the article and the vocabulary list by hand, reading aloud.
3. Attempt my own translation to English.
4. From the translation at the back of the book, translate back to Korean several times until I am close enough.
If you have time, I would appreciate any guidance.
Thank you.
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