The first step to becoming a polyglot is to learn one more language.
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here and today I want to talk about
how to become a polyglot.
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So how do we become polyglots?
Now the reason I'm talking about this is because, um, my wife and I were playing
golf the other day at our golf club with a couple, uh, probably in their sixties.
And often you, you know, you're, you're teamed up with people you don't know, this
was our first chance to meet this couple.
And they told us they were going on a bicycle trip with their friends,
eight couples going to Girona in Spain, uh, to bicycle around in Catalonia.
So I said, are you going to learn Catalan or Spanish?
Of course, I was going to push LingQ, you know.
So, which I did of course, but to no avail.
Uh, and so I said, are you gonna learn Catalan or Spanish or Spanish?
And the answer was, well, I've heard that you can get by with English.
All right, true enough.
Perhaps, maybe, maybe not.
I don't know.
In the city of Girona, uh, certainly at the hotel and the restaurants you
can get by in the shops, but then, um, outside of Girona I don't know.
I think if you're in a little town and you get a flat tire and you're in trouble,
uh, maybe English is not so common.
I simply, I just don't know.
But for me, if I were going on a bicycle trip to Catalonia, I would learn Catalan.
Now I speak Spanish, but so I have the mentality of a polyglot
to me that would be fun.
Fun to explore Catalan, if I learned Catalan, I would read
books about Catalonia in Catalan.
I would speak to people in Catalan.
I, that gives me a great sense of pleasure.
I, I feel that I'm enriching my life by learning another language, connecting
with people in their language.
I have the mentality of a polyglot.
Uh, I tweeted about this and I called this the English language disease, that English
speakers, they have the option, or they think they have the option of not learning
the language because we can get by.
And most of the responses to my tweet, we're very much in agreement.
Gee, that's too bad, blah, blah, blah.
But one fellow from England, or maybe he was somewhere else.
But his, his description showed that he's from Manchester, he says where I
live, there was just a Portuguese person showing a Danish person around our
compound and they were speaking English.
That's just the reality.
That's how it works.
Too bad.
So that person also doesn't have the mentality of a polyglot.
So number one, to become a polyglot, you have to want to become a polyglot.
You have to like speaking languages, not just one, but several.
So that is a mindset.
Okay.
The second thing is, you know, I didn't set out to become a polyglot.
I had not really heard the term polyglot in English.
To me, a linguist was someone who spoke several languages, but I also
didn't set out to become a linguist.
I got interested in French.
And then I had the opportunity to learn Mandarin and then I was in
Japan, so I learned Japanese on my own.
And stepping back when I was in France, I would hitchhike around
in Europe and I would always try to speak uh, the local language.
So I think what I find, what I think is useful to note there is that the
first step to becoming a polyglot is to learn one more language.
Okay.
Because for people who have never really acquired fluency in another language,
who have never converted themselves into a fluent speaker of another
language, they don't have that feeling.
So the...
you can't, sort of skip past the stage of learning one
language to become a polyglot.
You learn one language.
You now feel confident that you can learn languages.
You enjoy the process, or maybe you don't.
Um, I think if you're doing it the right way, you can enjoy it.
And then what happened to me and I think what would happen
to a lot of people is you...
"gee, I learned one language.
Now I'd like to learn another language."
Because the experience of speaking another language, of connecting with
people in their language is so rewarding that we want to do it again and again,
and that sense of satisfaction that actually we were able to succeed
in, in this task, which is not such an easy task, uh, but that sense of
satisfaction makes us want to do it again.
Now, another thing about becoming a polyglot, in my
opinion, we shouldn't be afraid.
Obviously, when we go from language now B to language C and then
language D that means that we aren't spending time on language B.
So we're leaving language B because I firmly believe we
never master another language.
We can always improve in that other language.
And yet we make the decision, I'm not going to become even better.
Let's say my best foreign language is French.
So I'm not going to become even better in French.
Or let's say that the next language is Japanese.
And I know there are great gaps in my Japanese learning.
Okay.
I'm not going to work on becoming even better in Japanese.
I'm going to go and explore a new language.
So there's a choice there.
You sacrifice sort of what I would consider the futile pursuit of perfection.
Now other people can disagree and they want to pursue perfection, that's fine.
I'm not sort of making any value judgements, but I think to be a
polygloy, it's different than trying to become perfect in one language.
So we accept the fact that we're going to not be as good in some of
the languages that we have learned.
We even accept the fact that there's going to be interference, not only from our
own language, which is always the case, but there's going to be interference from
these languages that we have learned in the new languages that we are trying to
learn, because I find myself sometimes when I'm searching for words in Russian
the other day I hadn't spoken Russian for a long time and I was speaking Russian I'm
searching for words and up comes Persian.
So the more languages you have in your head bouncing around as
your brain is going down different pathways to find words there greater
likelihood is that it's going to go into some rabbit hole, as they say.
Uh, where you're into an yet another language.
So I think part of becoming a polyglot is accepting that you're
going to be less than perfect.
That means you're going to speak with mistakes.
Your pronunciation may not be perfect, but you have this, this, um, sense of
achievement and the, the, uh, intellectual stimulus of discovering a new world
yet another new world with all of the people, and as you learn another
language, then the people of that language come alive, the history comes alive.
And so I think the secret to being a polyglot is to be interested in many
different languages and cultures.
Um, it may be that some people are motivated to learn languages in order
to demonstrate that they they're able to learn languages and, and you
know, like another notch on my belt.
I only had eight languages now I have nine.
And that can also be a valid, um, you know, motivation for becoming
a polyglot, just to demonstrate your prowess at learning languages.
Uh, I wonder if that can sustain you though, because if all
you want to do is show off.
Look, I can say a few things in this other language.
That doesn't take a lot of, of time and effort and you can get to
where you can say hello, how are you in many different languages.
And, uh, that too is fun.
I'm not criticizing that, but in so far as my own motivation as a polyglot,
if you look at my experience, not with Persian and Arabic, which are
my 19th and 20th languages, I've been at them for more than two years.
It's not a, it's not like three months.
And, uh, I'm continuing to discover new things about those
languages in those cultures.
And I do want to get back to Turkish and I hear that we have, we may have
our LingQ mini stories done up in Urdu, in which case, once we get LingQ 5.0
launched, we will add Urdu and then I would like to get into Urdu as my
approach into the south Asian languages, because then because I'm a bit lazy at
learning new writing systems, then I won't have to, you know, learn either
Hindi or Punjabi writing systems.
And I'll still be able to get some sense of the sounds of, of those languages.
I may still end up learning the writing system, we'll see.
But you know this again, as a polyglot, I have this tremendous
world of languages to look forward to, and I don't know which languages
I'm going to explore in the future.
Uh, I think we'll have Tagalog.
We'll have Vietnamese at LingQ.
Thai, maybe, uh, maybe Indonesian, maybe Swahili something
on the African continent.
I don't know.
But as a polyglot, my motivation is to get in there and explore
these, but I recognize that each and every one of them is going to
be a lot of work, uh, but enjoyable.
And, but for me, that's fine.
That's what I have to look forward to.
So perhaps that's my perspective on how to become a polyglot.
But to summarize, you have to be motivated to learn languages.
You have to be interested in learning these languages.
You have to be interested in a particular language.
You learn them one at a time.
And as you achieve success in one language, you may find that you're
motivated to learn another language.
You have to be unafraid of interference from languages that
you have previously learned.
You have to be unafraid of the fact that some of the languages
that you have learned will actually get very, very rusty.
You may in fact, not be able to speak in that language.
Like if you were to ask me now to speak in Romanian or Greek, I
would, I wouldn't be able to do it.
And yet I know that I have learned those languages to a level where I
went to the country and I was able to communicate and that's okay because I
can't, you know, if you have 20 pots on a stove, it's very difficult to keep
them all, you know, simmering without burning any one of them or without
the fire going out here and there.
So that's fine.
So all of those things, I think, uh, are part of the, the, um, you know, at least
in my case, the attitude of a polyglot, I can't speak for other polyglots.
So there you have it.
How to become a polyglot.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Thank you for listening.
Bye.