Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/How-to-become-a-polyglot

One may want to be a polyglot, but has no idea about what to do. I think it's time to give some guidance.

Motivation

Why do you want to learn many languages? It's a basic question, but it determines your level.

• If you mainly feel bored and want to do something in the spare time, then you can be a beginner forever. You don't want to endeavour, you just want to kill the time. Thus, you can't make real progress.
• If you mainly want to get a better job, then you can have useful skills, but nothing more. You have a goal, so you can make progress, but you are just interested in practical things, you just consider a language as a tool, so you will not dig into the languages and explore the cultures of the speakers.
• If you are mainly forced by your parents, relatives, etc. then I feel very sorry for that. I don't know how much progress you can make because it's mainly determined by your attitude. I can never approve to force others to do this. There are many ways to attract people to learn languages. Coercing is not attractive at all, so it's the worst thing to do.
• If you mainly want to touch the whole world, to make friends, and become a world citizen, and can spend time on it seriously, then you may be qualified to be a nice polyglot.

 Choice

Which languages do you want to learn?

• You may want to learn the easiest ones, which usually have close relation with your native language; you also may want to learn the hardest ones, to challenge yourself.
• You may want to learn the well-known ones, which have much influence around the world; you may also want to learn the rarely-known ones, to discover distinctive cultures.

It is all up to you.

You can try Esperanto and/or other constructed languagues, because they are usually made to be simple to be easy to learn. By learning an easy language, you can gain the experiences of which steps you should take to learn a new language. This helps you to learn a difficult language. From simple to complex, it's a universal rule.

If you want to learn a language that is not popular, you should know that the materials are relatively hard to find. You may have to pay, because free things can be unreliable. You even have to learn another language (usually well-known) before learning the language you want to learn. It's because the speakers of the firstly learned language have more knowledge of it. In these languages, there are usually a lot of loanwords, which means that if you know those languages being borrowed, you can learn vocabulary of it very quickly.

Perspective

Maybe changing the viewpoint can be better.

Many people carry the traits of their native languages - mainly pronunciation and word orders - when learning a new one. It may be fresh if you do this: assume that you didn't know any language. That is to say, forget how to express in your native language temporarily. Read the text in your native language, then pretend to have forgot your native language.

You will wonder how you can express your thoughts. If you can reach here, you have changed your perspective successfully. Yes, it is an urgent demand of using languages, instead of a duty to complete a school assignment. You desire to express, but you are assumed not to be able to express in any language, so you have got to accept the new one thoroughly.

Resources

If you have good tools, you will progress faster.

https://polyglotclub.com/wiki/Language/English/Culture/Internet-resources-for-polyglots

Pronunciation

You will surely face this problem first. As you are going to be a polyglot, you need to get to know International Phonetic Alphabet. IPA is not very hard to learn, if you know oral cavity well.

https://polyglotclub.com/wiki/Language/English/Pronunciation/International-Phonetic-Alphabet

 Numbers

When you learn numbers, you only know the rule of reading numbers, instead of knowing each word of numbers. It's because numbers are too many, you can't practice each of them. So you need more practice to get the hang of the rules of reading them.

Word Roots

Some materials teach you to memorise words with some interesting homonyms in your native language. Maybe it is effective, but it also has a side effect - when using words, you can't get rid of those funny stuff in your mind.

You should pay attention to word roots instead. This is the orthodox of memorising words. You will know how a word is assembled, and how to asseble according to the custom.

Adpositions and Affixes

To express you idea, subjects, verbs and objects are not enough. There are adpositions to enrich your sentences and affixes to modify your words. Affixes belong to word roots. I mention it outside "word roots" section, which is because it's clearer to put it together with adpositions.

Sentence structure

You should provide words of needed parts of speech, in correct order, to express your idea. That is to say, you should get to know the structure of the sentences. You can say you really know what a sentence means only when you know which part is playing which role. To reach this, you can get to know "parse tree", then try to draw them on your notebook, and induce the rules of sentence structure of a language.

But there are exceptions, which are caused by people's custom, such as "that thing is easy to do" should be "that thing is easy to be done". Though not being logical, they are still accepted, just because they are not making much confusion. You should know they are exceptions, then you will not be confused.

Moods and Tenses

There are several moods, in which subjunctive, conditional, imperative are the most common. In some languages, there are other moods such as inferential.

Tenses are very different between languages. For example, in some languages, past tense is the same with present tense, and other words can be used to indicate time if necessary.

Special rules

There may be complicated rules in a language, which can be avoided in other languages. This makes you upset. In fact, when parents are teaching their children, it is also annoying both of them, until the children get used to it. This is indeed a tragedy of the human.

Keep calm and carry on.