Becoming an Amateur Polyglot

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• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The text is mostly good advice, but there are hidden catches and assumptions.

  Counting the languages that you speak: yup. Language learning is quantitative and multidimensional.

  Why learn a foreign language when soon we will have AI auto-translate from our glasses and other wearables? This is a valid question for work related purposes but socially it’s not. […]

  I wouldn’t consider it a valid question even for work-related purposes. It simply assumes that machine translation tech will reach a point, in the near future, that it’ll stop translating things wrong, or at the very least it’ll stop vomiting certainty on what it gets wrong. I wouldn’t put my trust on this given that LLMs are reaching a dead end, and it’ll take a while before they’re superseded by another tech.

  I agree with him on a social level. Language plays such a big role on most people’s identities that it’s simply foolish to disregard it.

  One of the most important things when learning a language is motivation.

  At the end of the day, motivation is a proxy for exposure. You can learn without motivation, as long as something forces you to interact with the language; you’ll hate yourself in the process though.

  Why am I saying this? Because that exposure is key. Going the extra half hour to do stuff related to the language pays off, even if you aren’t that motivated.

  apps

  I’m skipping that part as I bloody hate phone programs, so my advice on this wouldn’t be helpful.

  Learn only 4 tenses. […]

  As it is written, his advice only works for Indo-European languages from Europe that follow that weird “past/tense/future oh wait let’s mix aspect into the bag” pattern. Plenty languages don’t do this; for Mandarin for example this piece of advice would be foolish (the language doesn’t split tenses). Also, good luck distinguishing present and future in Arabic.

  That said, the core of the advice - focus on grammatical features with higher usage - is rather sensible. And it can be extended into other things.

  For example, in Latin if you pick the whole declension table you’ll have

  • seven cases (nom, acc, gen, abl, dat, voc, loc)
  • five “main” declensions with quite a few sub-declensions
  • singular and plural

  That’s around 100~200 endings. But eight of them are bread and butter - nom/acc, 1st/2nd non-neuter, singular/plural. Learn those eight first, before ever thinking on the others.

  Forget complicated spelling and especially accents in French if it’s not entirely necessary. There is no need to learn if a word takes a ` or ‘ if you know how to pronounce it correctly. (Edited because I wrote intonation instead of spelling in the first draft).

  That works for French because diacritics in French are mostly etymological, and the distinctive ones are between similar vowels. For some languages however this is bad advice:

  • Irish - if you don’t know which vowel is long, you probably don’t know which vowel should be pronounced on first place. You won’t be understood.
  • Spanish - the acute can be skipped, sure, but it’s such a low-hanging fruit that you’d be a fool for doing so. Instead skip the z/c/s distinction, as even in dialects with said distinction they sound similar anyway ([θ] and [s] are rather clothe thoudth).

  The real advice here would be, instead: ask non-native speakers of said language what’s important to learn first. [Caveat lector: I don’t speak Irish, I’m saying this based on its orthography.]

  When you look up a word in one language, do it for all other languages too. The mind works like a database and each row has columns for each language you speak. Fill that database up!

  You’ll probably merge the semantic fields of each word, or spend N times longer to memorise a word.

  me irritated) amigo, entiendes que estoy hablando en tu idioma? (native speaker) yes but I also want to practice my English!

  That’s mostly entitlement from the author’s part, expecting that others should go out of their way to teach him a language. His example is specially good because it’s blatantly obvious that those sentences are not from a passably proficient Spanish speaker. (I wouldn’t get “sobre las 7?” for example, if not due to English - he’s translating “about the 7” word-by-word)

  Remember - one of the key roles of language is communication. For a lot of people, if you get it, then it’s fine, be it in Mandarin or English or Spanish or Javanese or whatever.

  Fixing this piece of advice would yield something fairly obvious - get people to use the language with you, who are in the same page. If you’re doing any sort of language exchange, then demarcate times; for example once I was doing it with a German speaker who (for some puzzling reason) wanted to learn Portuguese, and we simply split “one hour each language”.

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