Speak Five Languages
Lakia Limthong
When I arrived in Milan I had a clear purpose: to learn languages. I arrived speaking the basics of the two languages I wanted to learn (English and Italian), but this didn't stop me in the slightest to make my goal clear, from the first moment I had to give everything to improve my language level.
Then, when I was still not even fluent in Spanish, I met people who spoke up to 5 languages... Five! How did they do it? That's where I wanted to go, because they seemed as normal as me. They were not surrounded by books 24/7: they went out, ate and drank. Nothing suggested to me that they had anything I couldn't get, so I asked them and that's where everything I'm going to talk about in this post came from.
Why don't we always learn languages properly?When we study subjects such as memory in psychology, we come to the conclusion that there is no magic wand that can make you remember everything you look at accurately. But there are techniques to increase the effectiveness of memory. The most important thing when it comes to memorising something is to pay attention to it! Yes, you read that right, we must pay attention to what we are doing or we won't learn anything. If you spend hours and hours in an English academy while yawning, looking at the time and switching off, you're not going to learn anything!
The same applies when you go abroad. If you go to London to learn English, but your conversations are based on using the translator, blurting out everything that's written there and forgetting about it, you're not going to learn any English! The good thing about being on Erasmus is that we are usually interested in what surrounds us. Therefore, although we are not aware of it, we are paying more attention to all the variables around us. Why? Well, if you don't have your 5 senses focused on understanding the person you have just met, you will never be able to answer what they have just said. If you don't make an effort to communicate in the best possible way with your German friend over coffee, it will be an hour where instead of laughter and experiences, you will share yawns and awkward glances.
I was very curious about how to learn languages faster as I was surrounded by polyglots, so I needed their advice on how to become a polyglot or at least how to learn languages and get the most out of the experience.
A polyglot is someone who knows and speaks several languages and is able to use them without difficulty to communicate, so if you are bilingual or trilingual you are also considered to be a polyglot. But what is perhaps most striking to us is when someone speaks more than 4 languages, some of them not so similar. So, how do they do it?
How to become a polyglot: 5 steps to learning a languageThose people I met who spoke so many languages seemed to do so without any difficulty. So I decided to ask how they had learned so many languages. I found several things quite interesting and came to the conclusion that, by following these steps to learn a language, you can be a polyglot.
Either with or without subtitles in the target language, watching TV series and films in their original version will help you to train your ear for learning several languages. While you're watching that love story, drama or adventure you've been looking forward to, you'll be learning a language!
If your level is very advanced, forget about the lyrics. Even so, it will be a good way to improve your grammar, as there is always something we fail at. If your level, like mine, is almost non-existent, don't worry! You are already at the first level of learning. I recommend you to download Genius, an app where you can find the original lyrics of almost all the songs you like.
This programme consists of flash cards to memorise vocabulary and concepts, and was recommended to me by my good friend Ibra, who is a polyglot and speaks Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Polish and English. I'll try it out to see how it goes, but they say it works very well for learning several languages.
This is very important on your Erasmus, here you will have a unique opportunity to perfect this point. When you speak, you first have to understand what you have been told and process it. Then you have to make sense of it in order to answer coherently, and finally express your opinion. Don't worry if you don't follow these steps to perfection. My beginnings with language learning have been more like a monkey with cymbals in my head than an information processing scheme, but that's what the next point is for.
Keep your chin up with the mistakes you make and laugh a lot at the stupid things you say. No one has ever died making a linguistic mistake while having a coffee, you don't have to be ashamed of it, at least you are trying. Let those around you know that you need their help, you need to be corrected to improve your skills and learn the new language. If your mission is to go through a maze and you are always going in the wrong direction, you will never get through it. You need to change direction until you find the right one, at which point you will have increased your learning.
My mission with this post is not to post boring grammar every day so that we all go over irregular verbs together. It is important to make learning something motivational, something to have fun and that we want to repeat day after day. That is my mission!
Laugh, try, fail... there is nothing wrong with any of these processes. You don't have to make an angry face while reading an English grammar book in order to learn. Academies are very positive for our improvement, and language classes are great to give you a good base and to meet and talk to people who are learning like you. But I also want to show you that learning a language in 6 months is possible if you know how.
There are other languages I really enjoy studying. Sadly, I sound like Sloth from The Goonies when I speak these: Italian, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic (aiming for Levantine), Greek, Turkish, and Norwegian. The last is hardest to learn, as they all speak flawless English.
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Some years ago, Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, was sitting around a campfire in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. He'd recently had a conversation with a New Guinea friend who spoke a total of eight languages: five were local to the friend's village and the friend had just picked them up as a child, the other three he learned in school.
Diamond tried a simple experiment. He asked the number of languages spoken by each of the 20 New Guineans gathered around the fire with him. The smallest number, he reports in his new book The World Until Yesterday, was five. "Several men," he wrote, "spoke from eight to 12 languages, and the champion was a man who spoke 15." These weren't dialects, but mutually unintelligible languages.
I'm no linguistic whiz myself. My French is mired at the high-school level, sufficient only for terse, present-tense conversations. My Swahili is limited to extremely useful phrases from my fieldwork days, like Wapi nyani leo? (Where are the baboons today?) Although learn-Italian-now tapes are strewn around my house, my progress in that language comes in fits and starts.
A person like me would be an anomaly in many of the small-scale societies that Diamond writes about. The thesis of The World Until Yesterday is that we in industrialized societies have much to learn from people who make (or recently made) their living by hunting-and-gathering or small-scale farming. (In a later post, I'll return to this overall theme of the book.) Knowing several languages is one of Diamond's prime examples.
In places like New Guinea, people in adjacent communities often speak completely different tongues. "To trade, to negotiate alliances and access to resources, and (for many traditional people) even to obtain a spouse and to communicate with that spouse requires being not merely bilingual but multilingual," Diamond explains.
Is our country really so mono-lingual? Earlier this week, I queried linguist Dennis Baron on this point. "Census figures from the 2009 American Community Survey," Baron told me, "show about 20 percent of residents over age five speak a language other than English at home. Most of them also speak at least some English, and those who don't are learning it."
Perhaps two percent of U.S. speakers of languages other than English don't speak English itself, so we can estimate that about 18 percent of Americans are bilingual. (We don't even reliably track how many people speak more than two languages, Baron says.)
Of course 18 percent isn't an insignificant part of the population, but let's consider the context for this number. "Over time," Baron noted, "today's bilinguals will likely slip into monolingual English use, or their children will." Bilingualism just isn't welcomed here with open arms.
As Baron put it, there's "significant support for English-only. Most of this is disguised or patent resentment toward immigrants, and it occurs both in areas with significant immigration (big cities, the Southwest, Florida) and those with few non-anglophones (Iowa, West Virginia)."
When a Spanish-version recording of the national anthem was released in 2005, Baron recalled, "there was much public opposition, and George W. Bush made a statement against it. At the time, there were four Spanish translations of the national anthem on the U.S. State Department Spanish-language website. They disappeared overnight."
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