Posted on 05/31/2015 8:01:33 PM PDT by Cronos
Out on a sunny Berlin balcony, Tim Keeley and Daniel Krasa are firing words like bullets at each other. First German, then Hindi, Nepali, Polish, Croatian, Mandarin and Thai – they’ve barely spoken one language before the conversation seamlessly melds into another. Together, they pass through about 20 different languages or so in total.
It can be difficult enough to learn one foreign tongue. Yet I’m here in Berlin for the Polyglot Gathering, a meeting of 350 or so people who speak multiple languages – some as diverse as Manx, Klingon and Saami, the language of reindeer herders in Scandinavia. Indeed, a surprising proportion of them are “hyperglots”, like Keeley and Krasa, who can speak at least 10 languages. One of the most proficient linguists I meet here, Richard Simcott, leads a team of polyglots at a company called eModeration – and he uses about 30 languages himself.
..Numerous studies have shown that being multilingual can improve attention and memory, and that this can provide a “cognitive reserve” that delays the onset of dementia. Looking at the experiences of immigrants, Ellen Bialystok at York University in Canada has found that speaking two languages delayed dementia diagnosis by five years. Those who knew three languages, however, were diagnosed 6.4 years later than monolinguals, while for those fluent in four or more languages, enjoyed an extra nine years of healthy cognition...
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Chinese -- from what my sister-in-law (a Japanologist with a passing knowledge of various Chinese dialects/languages) tells me is grammatically very simple -- just the pronunciation can be murder due to the tonal nature of the languages
Nah, you heard wrong, there is only ONE Chinese language, although there are at least five major dialects. And they are easy to learn, only a few grammatical rules and you are in business, learn ten of the official Mandarin words a day and you will be ordering in Chinese at the local Chinese takeout in a surprisingly short time.
Maybe you meant the written languages, each Asian country has their own. Again, easy to learn except Chinese and Japanese which used pictographs, and you have to learn 2,000 of the little buggers before you are literate. Fortunately, a hundred or so will get you bed, bred and fed, so I hear.
I wonder if those dialects are on the way to becoming separate languages — Ebonics I think may be going that way. Does it have a grammar (meaning repeatable rules)?
Umpbay
My wife speaks nine or so with ease. Watching a subtitled movie once, she was learning that language, too. Amazing to see. I had a year of German and two years of French 1 but it didn’t stick.
With Chinese, it is like learning two languages-— the abc one and the characters. It is one fascinating language, and although I’m not at all
fluent, I’m understood. I do a practice session, and get lost in the etymology of a character. I just love this language!!!!!!!
I learned formal French in HS and picked up a smattering of Polish later on through travels. If you don’t use it, you lose it.
In contrast Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian are pretty much mutually intelligible while even Polish, Czech and Slovak are somewhat (SOMEwhat) mutually intelligible. But all 6 of these are separate languages
I guess I never really took Russian because I thought it was beautiful. It certainly isn’t German. But it’s not Italian either.
I never heard a Russian tongue twister. To me the foreign language is a tongue twister. :)
True that, but somehow I never think of India as a country, only a bunch of mini-states. Can a country be a country if there is no common language? Look at Canada and what we are becoming.
A few rules of ebonics I can think of offhand are the simple use of the infinitive "be" instead of the conjugated forms of "to be" (I be goin' tu dih sto'; you be goin' wit me; he be meetin' up wit us), the absence of apostrophized possessives (den I be goin' roun' Darrell house) and certain situations where the verb is omitted ('cause Darrell mad). The use of "be" plus a gerund can also stand for several past, present or future verb tenses.
One of the more interesting African-American dialects is Gullah, which some scholars say is a language, and others say is a dialect. There is even a translation of the Bible into Gullah.
Have you tried an online course like supermemo.com that will help you get back to basic A1/A2 level?
No, I'm not familiar with that. Thank you for the info. I checked into it recently at the community college I attend, but you don't get credit for the first level so I was reluctant to pay money out for it.
I’ve been using Duolingo to learn French, and it’s free and IMHO just as good as any of the for-pay apps like Rosetta Stone.
What I like about Polish is once you do learn the way the vowels and consonants work, it becomes easy to sound out the words. It’s the ‘rz’ combination that tends to throw off most English speakers.
:)
I think Polish is one of the best languages for music listening, I’m probably now more familiar with Polish singers than the modern-day English singers.
Got any beautiful Polish music to share?
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