The 6-Language Factor - A Benchmark to Structure Your Progress
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- čas přidán 21. 08. 2024
- Knowledge of about 6 languages is a limit for multilingualism and a milestone challenge for polyglottery. Those interested in the challenge might do well to spread their 6 among a variety of suggested categories. Learning these 6 greatly facilitates learning still more, but 6 is also about the number of languages one can develop and enjoy maintaining simultaneously at high levels.
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Teilhard de Chardin once formulated a secret law of universe saying that higher complexity means higher consciousness. Maybe people who learn multiple languages intuitively strive for this increased brain complexity in order to achieve a higher state of mind. I use or learn six languages every day and I can’t understand why so many people find it more scary than desirable. Using only one language is like eating same food all the time.
Deep meditation over time is also very powerful!
Thank you so much for this great reference to Teilhard de Chardin! I do strive to emphasize the aspects of polyglottery and polyliteracy that transcend language learning alone.
@@YogaBlissDance how to do that?
Join my virtual academy to improve your abilities to read French, German, or Spanish literature, practice spoken Latin, learn to read Medieval languages, participate in Great Books discussion seminars, or get support for teaching yourself languages, including participation in study-with-me sessions: www.alexanderarguelles.com/academy/
Hi, your videos are always inspiring, I am a native spanish speaker from Argentina, currently learning Latin and Middle Egyptian, I want to learn Coptic in the future too. That's all I want, Spanish, English, Latin, Middle Egyptian and Coptic. My resources are Lingua Latina per se Illustrata and Allen's Introduction to Middle Egyptian. Yeah I am kinda obsessed with ancient languages, but I have to be realistic this time, five languages is my limit. I know deep in my heart that the common path is to learn French to use the rare Assimil courses. I need to plan my schedule, continue with your great work Alexander. Coptic is thrown there in the plan, because everyone says that I should understand Coptic to really appreciate hieroglyphs. Akkadian is very interesting, but I should focus myself in Ancient Rome and Egypt.
Thank you for the interesting and substantive comment about truly ancient languages. If I ever break my resolve to refrain from learning more languages, it would be to use Assimil's égyptien hiéroglyphique.
Fantastic video, Professor. I think it's quite easy to have polyglot inspirations, but I've noticed in my personal life that as much as I would like to speak many other languages, I still have other interests, namely 1) continuing to master my native language 2) socializing 3) music/other hobbies.
I am interested in how very related languages work to maintain themselves/each other. If I were to establish a "6 language" set, I could see this number being 6+native language, especially if 3 or so of the languages were closely related. To be theoretical, my list might be:
0. English (native)
1. Latin (cultural heritage)
2. Ancient Greek (cultural heritage)
3. French (world/political language)
4. Mandarin (political language)
5. Italian (heritage language)
6. Hebrew, Arabic, or Turkish ("exotic" language)
I am interested in how this number could fluctuate. Learning Latin, French, and Italian would probably allow those languages to maintain each other, as long as 1 or 2 are in use. Let's say that Mandarin, Italian, and Hebrew were learned to a B2 conversational level, I wonder if one could add another (especially an Indo-European language) at around that same level, let's say Croatian or Russian or German. It's a fascinating topic. Thanks for the video!
And thank you for contributing an intriguing list of candidates for your quest!
Thanks for this. I chose to aspire to learn 6 languages because it seemed like the most I could manage. It was nice to see that maybe it’s also a logical goal.
Hello and I take it this is Becky from last week - yes, it is a logical goal, and yes, YOU can do it within the next six years.
@@ProfASAr 🙂Thank you!
Very interesting video!
Here are my six:
1. English (native language)
2. French (political/academic language)
3. Ancient Greek (cultural heritage)
4. Modern Greek (personal heritage)
5. Amharic (interest language)
6. Perhaps Esperanto? The first 5 are the ones I am fairly set on right now, particularly Ancient Greek and Amharic.
Thanks for sharing your list and good luck in your studies!
I can carve and send you a wand if you'd like to try it! barring that, lovely work.
I was once told by a serbian that they have a local saying that roughly translates to "The more languages you know, the more human you are." and I'd have to incline to agree. Remembered it since
We have a similar saying in Afrikaans.
I would be very grateful to receive your wand!
Disagree ! It's perfectly possible to meet someone who speaks 5 languages BUT who has nothing amusing or interesting to say !!
A polyglot convention is the perfect place to prove this !!
@@2msvalkyrie529 but you have made a mistake. the people you have met may not have been interesting (and that does not necessarily relate to more human) but they could have been less interesting before they has learned several languages.
A handful seems like a very comforting number and something worth aspiring to, as well as managable in terms of maintenance once you have learned those. Reading a book in one, then shfiting to another till you make w whole round - I don't think much harm would stem from pausing with the other ones for a couple of weeks (even two-three months), if your command already allows you to read literature. A relaxed, comforting perspective, particularly compared to Polyglot's Daily Workout Horror Video. Have a good evening, Alexander. Thank you for the time.
Thanks, as always, for your words of appreciation. Yes, you can pause one language for a few months to read another, but it is hard to substantively read (for pleasure and content, an hour or so a day) more than this handful at a time. I've never heard the video the Michael Erard shot referred to as the "workout horror" video before!
I’m glad to hear I’m not crazy for wanting to learn multiple languages.
I have a native English speaker from the United States i’ve taught myself Spanish, American Sign Language, Esperanto as a summer project last year, I can understand Tagalog but rarely speak it, i’m currently working on Italian and would like to learn Latin afterwards. If anyone has any recommendations outside of the usual lingua latina, please let me know.
I would also like to learn Hawaiian and Japanese at some point. Another great video, I look forward to seeing you were institute grow, thanks for providing so much practical information and inspiration to the language learning community, Professor Arguelles
Wheelock's Latin, Ecce Romani or Learn Latin via Ovid are great, but LLPSI is the best one. Shadowing helps a lot.
@@fedecalace8632 gratias tibi 🤙🏽
Thank you for your kind words of appreciation, and best of luck to you on your journey. You are far from crazy, or alone, in your drive to learn multiple languages!
Huh, it's interesting how you've proposed these categories. Here's my list for them:
World language: English
Classical language: Latin
Major languages of culture: French, German
Something exotic: Japanese
Ancestral language: Old Church Slavonic
That does make 6 for me and it's a 6 that I have been doing the longest out of all my languages! I did study Polish as well but that one came later
Thank you, Yan, for sharing your list, and for confirming the "law" - if it is one.
Fantastyczny kanał. Pozdrawiam
Dziękuję!
I have never liked liked audiobooks, because you can't pause an actor and ask him what such and such word means. If I see an unknown word, I click. That's a rule.
I now use ReadEra, a PDF, Mobi, Epub and everything else reader and even in its free version it now has TTS which is quite good for a few languages and acceptable for most. So, now I can read more, by alternate between silent reading, reading out loud, and listening and reading. Every time I see an unknown word, I pause and use Google Translate, which is built-in, or click on the dictionary option which leads me to an internet page and a Google search for the definition of that word. Works with idioms too. Suffice to say, I've been reading way more this way, because reading is tiresome, but reading this way is a lot less tiresome.
Thank you for sharing your method. I am sure many digital natives will find it very useful, but old-timers like me will stick with paper books.
When I was in Turkey as a child, when my mother was teaching at an American school, one of the other teachers was from Africa. His son, who was 8, could speak 11 languages!! But after they spent a year in a year, he had already forgotten several of them. So sometimes they do pick up all 11 languages!
There are indeed always individual exceptions to rules.
Love the cat ❤️
Have you seen his short feature? czcams.com/video/vI3eoYg3hXU/video.html
@@ProfASAr When you see how he was moving his tail from the beginning, it came as no surprise when he chose to watch the rest of the video at a later date.
@@markbr5898 Yes, he usually stays for the whole lecture, but he had other plans that evening.
@@ProfASAr this has made my day 🥰🥰
@@ProfASAr Is s/he "shadowing" in his/her own way?
Thank you for the excellent video! Let’s see… In my case, I grew up multilingual in 3 languages: English, Kannada and Hindi, in that order of proficiency. I currently live in France, so learning French has been my first real language learning experience, since the other languages I just acquired as a child. I would very much like for my 5th language to be German once my French is up to speed, for a number of reasons; I love the sound of German and how precise it seems, I have/have had friends and family there, and I feel French and German together would improve my understanding and use of English as well. What 6th language would you recommend me? :)
Thank you for providing your interesting background. If there is nothing in particular that catches your fancy, then perhaps something ancient that is also living? It seems as if both Latin and Sanskrit might be your cultural ancestors. Assimil makes courses for both of them so that you can learn to speak as well as read them from a French base. What about that?
@@ProfASAr Thanks for your response! :) There's no doubt learning Sanskrit would be help improve my Hindi and Kannada vocabulary too. What steers me away from Sanskrit however is how inextricably linked it is to the Indian far-right who use it as a talking point for Hindu nationalism (as is Hindi, for that matter). As someone who grew up in this environment, it is hard to isolate and appreciate Sanskrit just for itself, but I'll consider it! Latin seems like an interesting option too. Like you said, it's great that Assimil's French editions can now be a stepping stone to other languages. In any case, I have no problem taking things slowly and figuring out what comes next since French and German will keep me occupied for many years to come :D
@@trevorguy63 It's a such a shame sanskrit has that type of connotation for you. Anyway, sorry if a bit personal, and it's totally ok if you don't want to answer, why was your english the one of highest proficiency? I know indians use english a lot and know, but I found it interesting it was even stronger as a language for you than kannada.
Thank you for this video. We often need a reminder not to fly off the rails with a bunch of languages if we want to be able to a use handful comfortably, as you say. This also helps me realize that my goals are quite modest and doable and therefore less daunting.
Thank you for the substantive appreciation.
How would you compare the difficulty of ancient languages like Ancient Greek or Sanskrit with Arabic or Korean? Is it just not a fair comparison because there isn’t really a communicative aspect to the ancient languages?
Thanks for the question, which you already answered the way I would have done.
as someone who has been learning all these languages (except for Arabic), Ancient Greek defo has been the hardest. there are just too many exceptions (to the many existing rules), and this comes from someone who already speaks language with lots of morphological patterns (Icelandic). Nonetheless it is very rewarding
"but 6 is also about the number of languages one can develop and enjoy maintaining simultaneously at high levels. "
I don't know if I agree with this. If someone knows 6 languages from different families, it doesn't take much more effort to add another in same family. I don't think a French reader has to give up his habit of reading French literature if he wants to learn Spanish too. I prefer to think of it terms of branches instead like a Slavic branch, a Romance branch, a Germanic branch...since there's so much vocabulary shared among languages if you've learned the major vocabulary from the etymological sources of Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit.
I quite agree with your general analysis and emphasis upon branches. However, you missed the word "enjoy" in my sentence. For me, this essentially means "read" - read not just to maintain the language, but to relish the book I am reading - which means read it for at least an hour, ideally several, per day. There have been times in my life when I focused on language only, systematically balancing and maintaining more than this. When you focus on the content of the book you are reading, you need to devote more time to this.
Thank you Professor for your very inspiring and useful videos.
I’ve learnt Turkish to an upper intermediate level. Yet, I want to reach an advanced level in it so that I can read literature and academic books. But now, I really want to learn French too (from scratch). How should I divide my time between them? Which one should take the biggest portion of time everyday ? I don’t want my Turkish to lag behind.
Thanks a lot professor 😊
You might consider finding Turkish materials and textbooks for learning French, that way you could use both at the same time.
Amazing 😊 I‘ll try to find these 😊
Thanks a lot professor 😊
You have a combination of accents, I guess from Colombia maybe? In English there is a little British influence, so it's hard to tell.
Thank you for your weekly videos. May I please ask a question. What do you think would happen to my German, which is at a high B1, if I pause studying it and study Danish or Swedish for 6 months and then return to German?
Best case (and most likely) scenario: you will find that the Scandinavian languages are incredibly easy because of your German base and you will make rapid progress in them, so the same thing will happen when you take up German again. However, do you really need to study just one at a time? I have talked at length in other videos about the advisability of simultaneous over sequential study. Could you not put German on a back burner and just do a bit of review each day while you focus on Scandinavian, rather than pausing it altogether?
Most people comment about the cat, but I'd like to just say that his rocking chair looks absolutely magnificent
The cat loves the chair, too, with or without me in it.
I have a question: is it never too late to try learning multiple languages? That's my main mental hurdle at this point. I'm bilingual but I want to learn another or more languages to read and learn the intellectual histories of other cultures. I never seem to be able to overcome that hurdle. It is like doubt and it is unfortunate that I feel this way.
What would help you overcome that doubt? An example of an older person who has learned and continues to learn many languages? If you don't know him, please have a look at some of the videos here on CZcams by Steve Kaufmann.
I've often lamented being born "handicapped" while growing up as I grew up in a monolingual household. However, over the decades since, I started to question if this "curse" was really without benefit. I've encountered a whole ton of Asian Americans who speak a second language at a passable level due to growing up with parents that spoke it. What I started to notice was that, seemingly more often than not, when they try to write English, their strongest language, they'll write things here and there that have grammar I find to be completely non-native and quite peculiar sounding. While even with monolingual speakers I realize not everyone has a penchant for structuring things properly when writing, the kind of mistakes I see these Asian folks making are not ones I've seen a 100% monolingual make, no matter how unskilled at writing they are. I think this may relate to grammar errors so extremely nuanced that, upon revision, the bilingual cannot readily perceive as erroneous. I don't think this is universal, as I believe that any bilingual of this sort that pays extraordinary attention to their language use (for example, those who are fans of writing) will not have these issues. But it *has* led me to wonder if the *average* person out in society, especially being average insofar as not being extraordinarily attentive with how they use their native language, will pay a definite price for being bilingual that the lazy monolingual will not. Thoughts? Has anyone else noticed this or am I crazy? It may be noteworthy that I've noticed this mostly with Asians, as those language are not related to English. A Mexican, otoh, may actually reinforce his English knowledge with Spanish to some degree. (Again, this is just my wild speculation.)
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this matter. I have never noticed the particular phenomenon that you describe, but perhaps others have?
Yes, this is a real phenomenon and you are correct that it occurs in some but not all cases. I have also noticed that this only occurs in people who grew up with both parents speaking a language different than that of the local culture (e.g., Mandarin-speaking parents raising kids in the U.S.), and not when parents each speak a different native language (one English-speaking parent and one Mandarin-speaking parent, in the U.S.).
Please note ! It's a myth that everyone in Switzerland speaks 3 languages ! It's very uncommon to meet fluent
French speakers in Zurich for example . Similarly it's very rare to meet fluent German speaker in Lausanne.. I speak from experience...
Thank you for sharing your experience.
I'm curious, what would you say to those who say that machine translation makes polyglottery obsolete?
Machine translation might make the profession of translator obsolete someday, but I doubt it will ever have any influence at all upon anyone with polyitis.
Do you speak koine Greek ?
Speak? No, but I can read it passably well.
Such a delicious cat 😋🍴
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Tempus, vel Merlin?
@@ProfASAr Merlin