Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/How-to-become-a-polyglot
A Polyglot is someone with a high degree of proficiency in several languages. Learning a language is the discovery of a new world, and polyglots are able to connect their minds to each of these worlds. Do you want to become a polyglot but don't know how to achieve this goal? This article will give you valuable tips on how to start this journey on the right foot.
Necessity
Someday, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), people will not need to learn any foreign languages. Is it true?
If you have heard about this idea or you have asked it by yourself but somehow agree with this point of view, here is the argument:
If you were visiting a sick friend at the hospital, you would care the one you visit, not the other patients. This is because of familiarity, which has an effect on you mentally. Likewise, your proficiency of a language can determine your ability to perceive the speakers' minds. Please try watching videos about Sid Meier's Civilization V leaders, you would clearly find that only those who speak the language you know can touch your soul.
This is what the AI can't help you with. A language is more than a mean of communication.
If humans were always depending on AI, they would lose their value.
Motivation
Why do you want to learn languages? It's a basic question, but it will determine your future level of language proficiency.
- If you mainly feel bored and want to do something in the spare time, then you can be a beginner forever. You just want to spend time, but learning language is boring at intermediate stage and requires endeavour. Thus, you probably 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 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. There are many ways to attract people to learn languages, but coercing is not attractive at all, so it's the worst thing to do.
- If you mainly want to touch the world, make friends and can spend time on it seriously, then you may be qualified to be a nice polyglot.
Choice of Languages
Which languages do you want to learn?
- You may want to learn the easiest ones, which may have a close relationship 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.
If you ask me, my opinions:
- The most influential languages in the world
- The most influential languages with close relation to my native languages
- My personal preferences.
You can try Esperanto and/or other constructed languages because they are usually made to be easy to learn. By learning an easy language, you can clearly understand the skeleton of a language. This can be helpful before you to learn a difficult language.
If you want to learn a language that is not popular for learners, you should know that the materials are relatively hard to find. You will likely have to pay for it. You even have to learn another language before learning the language you want to learn, because the speakers of the firstly-learned language have better knowledge about it, or the language you want to learn is similar to this one. Many languages have a lot of loanwords, which means that if you know the languages being borrowed, you can learn the vocabulary of them quickly.
You will also need to know how long it takes to learn a language. There are an article by jason-oxenham-ceo and an article by Leon Ho to answer it.
Sequence of Learning
There is the following question: “Will it be easier or harder, if I learn this language first and that other language second, instead of learning this language first and that other second?”
If you want to learn two languages with similar grammar and the available materials are not of the same quality or are not equally suitable for beginners, it would be better to learn the one with better materials first.
In addition, the case “You even have to learn another language before you learn the language you want to learn” mentioned in the above section should also be taken into consideration.
Perspective
Maybe changing the viewpoint can be better.
Many people use their native languages when learning a new one. Why don't you try another approach?
Pretend that you have forgotten your native language. You will start to wonder how you can express your thoughts, like how to indicate yourself, other people or objects (pronouns and nouns), how to indicate an activity (verb and verb phrase), how to describe your observation towards specific objects (adjective), how to distinguish happened things, things happening and things to happen (tense: conjugation or adverb), etc.
With the use and experience of the language you will gradually manage to forget your native language for a while and not to translate your native language but to think and express yourself directly in the target language.
If you can do this, you have changed your perspective successfully.
It is an urgent demand of making use of languages, instead of a duty to complete a school assignment. You desire to express, but you assumed yourself unable to express in any language, so you have got to accept the new one thoroughly.
Integration
Let's imagine a scene: You have a word list, on the one side are words in your native language, on the other side are correspondent words in a language you've never learned. If someone alters before you see the list, you won't feel unnatural at all when seeing the wrong pairs. But if you already know these words, you would quickly find the problem out.
You could accept whatever interpreted at first, however, when you are familiar to them, you will not easily accept any change. This is because you have been integrated by native speakers. If you were more negative to your original culture, you would be even assimilated.
Most people are totally ignorant of the cultural diversity of the world. They regard the perspectives of the world and values at their hometowns as mostly universal. When they are abroad, they can experience the culture shock for sure.
To give an impression, culture shock is like touching a new genre of video games. Domestic cultural diversity is like different games of the same genre.
Integrations on this degree can be done only by living elsewhere for some longer time, not as a tourist, but an inhabitant.
Logic
An important part is logic. It is not only required in reading comprehensions or listening comprehensions, but also in daily life. It is life-changing and definitely deserves being taught in elementary school but the rulers don't want you be smart.
Example: In German, masculine singular nominative article is “der”. If “der” appears in a German text, it means masculine singular nominative article. Right?
In logic, it can be written in syllogism:
- All German masculine singular nominative definite articles are “der”.
- The word in the German text is “der”.
- The word in the German text is German masculine singular nominative definite article.
This fallacy is called “undistributed middle”.
There is a list of fallacies. If you didn't understand logical fallacies, you would fall into confusion easily.
In reading or listening comprehension, for example, if the text only says “He likes apples” and the question is “Does he like pears”, the logical answer is “I don't know”; if the text only says “He has two cars” and the question is “How many cars does he have”. the logical answer is “no less than two”; if the text only says “He has a laptop and a phone and no other electrical devices”, the question is “How many computers does he have”, the logical answer is “If the phone falls into the category of computers, then 2; otherwise 1”.
You could sometimes find that the question creators have bad logic.
To improve your logic, you can read logic books. There are free ones:
- forall x: Calgary. An Introduction to Formal Logic by P. D. Magnus and others
- A Modern Formal Logic Primer by Paul Teller
- Logic: A Study Guide by Peter Smith
In addition, you can try to find plot holes in fictions, and discuss them in forums like the subreddit.
If you are still not determined to learn logic, let me try once more: It slows your brain's aging.
Attitude towards Mistakes
The impression plays a big roll. By reducing the impression of mistakes, you can instantly feel the strangeness when a mistake is made. For example, when you hear “a apple”, you can immediately know what type of mistake has been made.
In the ideal situation, when you makes a mistake, it can be instantly corrected. But in reality, you will make mistakes without noticing them. If you keep a log of your mistakes and their types, they would be prevented easily.
Free or Paid
Do you want to spend money on learning languages?
You should know the limitations of free resources:
- They may not be very reliable. Also, it is harder to find out its errors if you have only one material.
- You will lack proper training, especially on speaking and writing. You can find native speakers online, but few of them have teaching skills. You can chat online, but without payment, no individual and no group can keep you practising and point out all your mistakes.
Many people become upset and quit it on their endless ineffective ways. It is clear that if you pay and pay the right ones, you will save a lot of time, and even save your determination.
But if you learn easy languages such as Esperanto, there is no much difference between the free and the paid.
Methods and Experiences
You need to be both the coach and the athlete, especially when you don't rely on paid services.
You may have heard this tone: you will succeed as long as you work hard. This is a trap. You also need good methods. There are some people that can act as a coach, take care about how you learn, for a price. But if you choose to do it on your own, you will gain more, if you are insightful.
As a coach, your methods of learning should suit your own habit and be effective. You can find other people's methods and choose the suitable ones. If you are sure that a method is wrong, abandon it and choose another one right away. When you find something hard to go through and there is no experience for you to learn from, you need to find a way on your own. And if you like, share your experience with others, even if that method failed. Also, you should watch yourself, don't goof off. Do not rely on the “word of the day” illusion. If you are really interested in learning languages, you shouldn't learn only one word or two each day.
As an athlete, you should do enough exercise. Having suitable methods is an aspect, having enough experiences is the other. An athlete should practise an action over and over again every day. It's same with learning languages. You should be practising over and over again.
There are some tips on
They just some advice. I don't follow that “drink caffeine”, for example.
If you want to follow that "Take up a musical instrument", you can try the virtual piano, accordion or melodeon.
Good scheduling is important. There is an article and a picture showing how to schedule your day effectively. You can also practise the pomodoro technique.
You may find two things in pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary are similar and easy to be confused with each other. You need to pick one of them (usually the more frequently used one), try to be familiar with it and ignore the other for some time. Avoid learning easy-to-confuse things at the same time.
You may need to dig into linguistics to have a better understanding. There is a good playlist for it.
There is a great finding called “forgetting curve”. It should be taken into consideration. Always prepare to forget and review.
You can practise meditation as it is proved to be beneficial in many aspects. You will be able to focus on tables of declensions, pronouns, and so on, then recall them quickly.
You also need to learn actively, so that you won't forget it easily. There is the Cone of Experience, it's not based on statistics, however. There are also things called active and passive learning, which should be considered. Contributing to Polyglot Club Wiki is also active learning.
Resources
If you have good tools, you will progress faster.
https://polyglotclub.com/wiki/Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/Internet-resources-for-polyglots
Essential Terms
These words are for language learning.
When you understand their meanings, you won't be frustrated by encountering unfamiliar terms from time to time.
Pronunciation
You will surely face this problem first. As you are going to be a polyglot, you need to get to know the International Phonetic Alphabet. IPA is not very hard to learn if you know the structure of oral cavity.
When dealing with sound changes, you might feel it hard to memorise the rules. Just remember: native speakers do so, because they tend to be lazy on pronouncing words. You can just let it happen: ignore sound change rules and just pronounce what it “should have been”, read faster. You will naturally realise how to be lazy and understand why they are lazy.
Vocabulary
If you do not have the determination of spending time on memorising vocabulary, you would be unable to speak the language freely.
I am fed up with the metaphor comparing vocabulary to food. In my own opinion, one's vocabulary is pieces of the world that one can depict.
You must overcome the frustration of forgetting most of the words you've just learned. Don't expect to memorise them once and for all, be prepared to review every word you've met many times later. A little tip that people should have learned in primary schools: read the word 3 times, then read its meaning 1 time.
Remember that your confidence will grow following the growth of your vocabulary.
A word may have different meanings and when you read or listen to something, it is the context that determines the word's meaning.
Words in two languages are usually not one-to-one correspondent, i.e. no corresponding word in another language with the exact meanings as that one. Even if two words in two languages have the same meaning(s), their usages and frequencies are often not all the same.
According to Word Counter, you need to know around 40 000 (uninflected) words to reach native speaker's vocabulary level. Assuming that the law of the vital few can be applied here, you need to master about 8000 words to communicate fluently.
To build your vocabulary, you can follow this way:
- Find a flashcard deck in considerable size and practise;
- Visit the frequency list, find words that you are still not familiar with under a specific frequency, create your own flashcards and practise.
- Increase the frequency range and repeat the last step.
Alternatively, you can find a dictionary file with considerable number of words or scrape from the web, then try to convert it to TSV file, import it as a flashcard deck and practise.
Of course, practising flashcards is not the only thing to do. Reading texts is important, too.
To start from basic words, you can alternatively try the Swadesh list, create your own flashcards and practise.
Dictionary
You may hesitate on choosing a dictionary. First, see which brands have good reputation; second, see what you need:
- if you are a beginner of the language, then a dictionary with 5 000-10 000 entries is enough for your current level;
- if you want to use for daily life, then a dictionary usually with 30 000-50 000 entries is enough;
- if you want the words as many as possible, then buy the thickest one, which usually have more than 100 000 entries, but you will need to spend more time on finding the entry you want as well as more money;
There is a page of the statistic of Wiktionary.
You may want to ask: when should I choose a dictionary with 10 000-30 000 or 50 000-100 000 entries? Well, if you want a bit more than these recommended numbers, you can try them.
There is an article on how to choose a dictionary.
Now you may want to memorise all words in a dictionary. Good, but that should be done after having a good command of the most frequently used words. With these words, you can start your reading and listening practice and build your confidence.
If you think you should obey the dictionaries, you've got yourself wrong. Do not worship the authority. It's because of that they can reflect the reality, dictionaries become authoritative. It is the people that defines what a dictionary should be, not the other way around.
I won't forget that national college entrance exam preparation: the teacher told us to forget some Chinese words' readings and learn new taught ones, because the new edition of the authoritative dictionary that dictates the exam's correct answers was published. Finally even the teacher also messed up some readings.
Etymology
Some materials tell you to memorise words with some interesting homonyms in your native language. This is superficial and won't help you to understand its underlying structure. Maybe it is effective, but it also has a side effect: when using these words, you can't get rid of that funny stuff in your mind.
You should pay attention to the word roots an affixes instead. This is orthodox of memorising words. You need to know how a word is assembled, and even how to assemble in this language's style.
But this only helps you to understand them. To get familiar to them, you need to memorise by rote.
Wiktionary has “Etymology” for many words in several languages.
There is already a list of English roots of Greek and Latin origin.
Definition
There are several words with similar meanings. Which one to choose?
You should understand the difference between “translation” and “definition”. Translation is for knowing the meaning of a word, a phrase or a sentence in another language, while definition is for understanding the word and avoiding any ambiguity. Usually, definitions are written by native speakers for native speakers, so you need to read the definition in the language you are learning.
It would be very boring to search for the definition of every word. The best way is learning it through a large amount of reading with searching for the definition as a supplement.
Adposition
Adpositions are easy to know and hard to master. For example, English beginners are usually confused about the use of “on”, “in”, “at”. Then you can consult a dictionary. You may find more than 10 meanings of such a word, but don't be upset, because words with so many meanings are few.
Dictionary definition is not enough at all. You can see which adpositions have the similar meaning, and pay attention to distinguish them when you are reading.
Collocation
Collocation requires much attention. A sentence with a wrong collocation is just like a wrongly buttoned shirt. The example on Wikipedia is good: It's natural to say “strong tea” and “powerful computer” but unnatural to say “strong computer” and “powerful tea”.
Again, a large amount of reading with searching for the definition as a supplement is the best method for it.
Number
When you learn numbers, you only know the rule of reading numbers, instead of knowing each number, because the numbers are too many. So you need more practice to get the hang of the rules of reading them.
Flashcard
When you have downloaded Anki, ForgetMeNot, Mnemosyne or something else, preparing to create flashcards at the first time, maybe you don't know how to create them to learn efficiently.
My experience: meanings on the front side, word/phrase on the back side. When you see the meaning, you need to recall the word. The recall should be like this: words in the learned language -> concept -> word in the language to learn. Comparing to seeing the word and recalling its meanings, this helps you to learn the word on expression instead of recognisation, as well as recalling the word's synonyms.
Meanings should be brief as well as being commonly used. You can search a word in a dictionary, omit the unimportant meanings, then pick the first section of text in the first meaning, see if there are other meanings that appears to have relatively large difference with the meaning you just picked. You don't need to write too much on the flashcards. You will learn the similar meanings with the one you picked through reading instead of flashcard memorisation.
Another question: there are different levels of efficiency: “again”, “bad”, “good”, “easy”, what's the standard for choosing from them?
In my opinion, according to the average speaking rate, recognising the word in less than 1/4 seconds for “easy”, 1/4 ~ 1/3 seconds for “good”, 1/3 ~ 1/2 seconds for “bad”, more than 1/2 seconds for “again”. But for recalling, the time limits may be longer: 0 ~ 2 second for “easy”, 2 ~ 3 seconds for “good”, 3 ~ 4 seconds for “bad”, more than 4 seconds for “again”.
Maybe you need a metronome to find out how fast they are:
Sentence
Sounds natural
Sometimes you say something correctly in grammar, but it is unnatural for native speakers. The reason is that there may be multiple possible ways to express an idea and the unnatural one is not commonly used. Good grammar is just a necessary condition for formulating naturally. A simple example is, if you feel hungry, you usually say in English “I am hungry”, a subject-copula-predicative structure; in German, it's “Ich habe Hunger”, a subject-verb-object structure; in Korean, it's “배고파” or “배고픕니다”, a conjugated verb in plain or humble form. You may use uncommon structures, but people won't easily understand. This is why you should read and listen a lot even if you are already good at the language's grammar.
To formulate sentences like a native speaker, you need example sentences. Tatoeba and services using its data is just what you need: Find a sentence in the language you know, try to translate it naturally, finally see the translation by the native speaker. There are also Anki shared decks of example sentences but the sides are reversed and requires changing the card layout manually. If you can't find a good one on Anki shared decks, you can go to Tatoeba's download page to download sentence pairs, open the TSV file with a text editor, divide it into smaller files and import to Anki.
Don't forget that proverbs are not instantly understood if translated into another language word by word; idioms are almost exclusive to the language. It would be a real joke if you translate “it's Greek to me” into Greek word by word.
Parse Tree
You should provide words of needed words in different parts of speech, in the 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 that which part is playing which role. You can get to know some syntax knowledge and the “parse tree”, then try to draw them, and induce the rules of sentence structure of a language.
There is a video about how to draw parse trees.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
But notice that there are exceptions due to the custom, such as “that thing is easy to do” should be “that thing is easy to be done”. Though being irregular, they are still accepted, just because they are not making much confusion.
Ambiguity
It is almost impossible to avoid ambiguities in natural languages. They exist almost everywhere. Here are examples. Usually people have been used to perceive in a particular way, so that they can efficiently ignore other possible interpretations than the common one, but there's no consensus. As a result, you should try to avoid them, make it a bit clearer.
Some languages are more strict than some others. If you really want to avoid them, try Lojban.
Reading
When you are reading, you may want to read every word through your mouth. But it limits your speed. Your elementary school teacher may want you read word by word, with voice or not, but it will be inappropriate when you are already a teenager. You are potentially able to view the text line by line.
There are tools that helps improving reading speed like this open-source one.
Of course, you should get all the important information of a text. Speed is secondary.
That is not to say that you should not read aloud.
Another thing to notice is that there are a lot of material on the Internet to read, but not all of them are grammatically correct. Don't expect native speakers always speak correctly. For English, there are also a lot of non-native speakers making all kinds of mistakes on the Internet. As a result, choosing the right material to read is important.
If you want to read something short, you can go to social media, but be careful that the platforms are trying to manipulate you (There is also a Time article from the manipulators' point of view). When getting information from media, please always ask yourself how much left-wing and how much right-wing ideas you have received and if they are balanced. I know that a lot of Westerners see left-wing as naturally righteous and right-wing as naturally demonish, some else exactly the opposite. Also, don't read your domestic media only, because the bias can exist nationwide or even continentwide.
You may wonder what to read. You can just pick something you know well, go to the corresponding Wikipedia entry and start reading. Because you are familiar with the topic, so you can expect what vocabulary you are going to see.
If you want to go to news websites, always keep in mind that they are trying to persuade people in most cases (if not always).
Listening
The average speaking rate shows that you normally need to recall 2~3 words, including their denotations and connotations, in a second. You also need to pay attention to the sentence structure, otherwise you wouldn't see the forest for the trees.
Keep listening to audios that you can understand as much as possible. When you are familiar enough with the language, you can predict words when hearing the first syllables.
Before practise listening, you should have enough knowledge of the pronunciation, vocabulary, sentence structure and also reading comprehension.
Proper names in the listening material, unless known, should be avoided as much as possible.
When you find something that you can't understand and you don't have the transcript, follow these steps:
- Slow down the recording
- Recognize each syllable
- Recognize each word
If you still failed, try some similar phonemes (with different places of articulation and less likely with different manners of articulation), such as [m] for your recognized [n], [t] for your recognized [ʔ]; maybe you have recognized an open syllable as a closed syllable, or reversely; maybe the vowel is not pronounced clearly, then you should try to recall any word with the same consonants before and after it.
If still failed, the speech recognition can help.
If you want to listen to music, be aware that not every song's lyrics are grammatically correct, not every singer's pronunciation is standard.
Irregular Rules
There may be irregular rules in a language, which takes much time to be mastered but can be avoided in other languages. This makes learners upset. In fact, when parents are teaching their children, it is also annoying for both of them, until the children get used to it. This is indeed a tragedy of the human. Kind of institutionalisation.
Keep calm and carry on.
Reality
You may have got a nice score in an exam, but it doesn't mean that you can wield the language as you wish. Many people feel confident until they go abroad. They just don't know how to express instantly and precisely in diverse situations, in real life.
There are people working on learning languages through virtual reality, but for now, enough money is required. Here is an article about it.
Mondly has AR for learning languages.
Viewing Cultures
When looking back at history, you may find things primitive and dumb. But if you look along the history timeline, you can find things advanced and amazing. An example is Windows 95. You will have different opinions when comparing it with Windows 7 and Windows 1.0.
When I was a kid, I knew almost nothing and found that everything was attractive. I thought foreigners could float in the air like what I did in my dream. Now my horizon is more and more opened and I've realised that everything is losing its splendour as I get more and more familiar with it. So do the exotic feelings. At the same time, my ability of imagination is also declining if I don't often do so.
You may have learned the geography and history of a country, but you still don't totally understand the culture of it.
You will need to learn other subjects like sociology and psychology. With knowledge of them, you will even find that you have a new understanding of your own country.
Free books with public license of sociology and psychology can be found at this page, under “Social Sciences”.
The society is like the computer: If you live with it for daily tasks as a common person, everything appears in order; but if you have deeper knowledge of it, you would find that defects and loopholes are everywhere like that some ”conspiracy theories” are actually the reality.
In the modern time, all kinds of ideologies have been emerging. They collide with traditional cultures and make the human society more and more sophisticated. Politics and religions are unavoidable if you want to have a deeper understanding of a culture. I have found a video game series good at showing different aspects of different ideologies: Fallout (before 4). I was stunned by the Fallout 3 quest Tenpenny Tower.
Cultures are not all compatible with each other, just like that not any random people can be friends. You may strongly oppose some ideas in another culture. It doesn't mean you are a racist if you speak it out, however, you should try your best to not do so in a rude way.
Taking foreigners' opinions on your culture is also important. The Chinese poem Writing for Xilin Temple's Wall (《題西林壁》) can tell the reason for that:
橫看成嶺側成峰，遠近高低各不同。
不識廬山真面目，只緣身在此山中。
Ridges in front and peaks to the side,
Mountains in different shapes far and wide.
Of Lushan's true facade one can never know,
If one stays within the mountains so.
Listening to the opposite side with as much patience as possible. You will almost certainly experience cognitive dissonance, which feels like you have been an idiot until now. If you haven't experienced so, you definitely should try this. The simplest way is to record your own voice and listen to it.
(Source)
