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

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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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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 the 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.
  3. 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.
  4. If you mainly want to touch the whole world, to make friends, and become a world citizen, 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 mother tongue; 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 all depends on 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, which 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.

Perspective

Maybe changing the viewpoint is better.

Many people carry the traits of their native languages 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, you would forget how to express in your native language temporarily, then you would be not restrained by it, and could accept the new perspective of the new language without hindrance.

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. It's not hard to understand if you listen to them. https://polyglotclub.com/wiki/Language/English/Pronunciation/International-Phonetic-Alphabet

Sentence structure

You should know how important logic is. Just like you should provide enough premises to make a conclusion, 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 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.

(to be continued)

Contributors

GrimPixel, Vincent and Maintenance script


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