How To Become Fluent In Chinese Quickly?

[Wippen (inactive)]

4 minutes ago, studychinese said:

developing" that skill. Your brain will handle it like it handles breathing, heartbeat, and other autonomic functions.

Btw do you keep it a "secret" in your surroundings so you don't come across as polyglottly. I know a girl who can also speak four languages but she wants to keep it under wraps so people don't think she is bragging.

[studychinese]

11 minutes ago, Tøsen said:

Btw do you keep it a "secret" in your surroundings so you don't come across as polyglottly. I know a girl who can also speak four languages but she wants to keep it under wraps so people don't think she is bragging.

 

It depends on the context of the situation I am in. I don't hide it but I don't volunteer the information either. If you volunteer the information then you become 'the polyglot guy', and there is nothing else to know about you. Usually the first time that someone realizes that I can speak a foreign language is when they see me use it in an organic situation.

[Lu]

Talking up polyglots like this gives me kind of the same feeling as reading what Americans who come to the Netherlands write about our biking culture. Here I am, just going about my day with my three languages (plus a bit of French and German), and suddenly there are people who go all hosanna on someone who can do the same thing but puts it on youtube.

 

When I was in university I had a summer job in a clothes distribution center, pretty simple work you didn't need any formal schooling to do, so there were quite some immigrants with limited Dutch (or limited Dutch diplomas) working there. One guy spoke something like five languages. He was from somewhere in Central Asia, I don't remember which country, and spoke the language of his own ethnicity, the official language of his country, could get around in the languages of a few of the neighbouring countries, and his Dutch was good enough to contribute to the conversations at the lunch table. I forgot if he spoke English as well. Granted he was pretty smart, but let's not forget, most of the world is multilingual. It's the monoglots who are the exception.

[somethingfunny]

Absolutely, I used to work with a Belgian guy in a university who spoke Dutch to his parents, French to his wife, German to his friends and English to me.  Didn't bat an eyelid.

 

What a twat.

[Lu]

2 minutes ago, somethingfunny said:

What a twat.

What do you mean? He was being polyglot at you?

[somethingfunny]

No, I mean I was (and still am) massively jealous.

[studychinese]

1 hour ago, Lu said:

Talking up polyglots like this gives me kind of the same feeling as reading what Americans who come to the Netherlands write about our biking culture. Here I am, just going about my day with my three languages (plus a bit of French and German), and suddenly there are people who go all hosanna on someone who can do the same thing but puts it on youtube.

 

It's ironic that their true skill is not their purported skill (language) but rather the skill that they do not mention at all (marketing). 

[Wippen (inactive)]

1 hour ago, studychinese said:

It's ironic that their true skill is not their purported skill (language) but rather

I think it is a bit unfair to put them all in the same box. The three I mentioned are talented language  grads and two of them are interpreters, being able to apply several of their languages for work.

 

Benny et Kaufmann Co. are business people first and foremost I agree and did not start out academically in that field.

2 hours ago, somethingfunny said:

No, I mean I was (and still am) massively jealous.

What is stopping you? With Chinese under your belt, every other indo European language would seem easy :-)

 

By the way, ever had this happening. People have heard you speak Chinese and think I want to do that. You go through effort helping them get started and after a few months they have abandoned it. Had already least three people doing that. Flattered of course and sad they did not stick at it (for them). Perseverance, discipline, sacrifice, stubbornness, single-mindedness, unwavering, unrelenting... There are so many applicable business skills I have learnt through learning Chinese.

[studychinese]

6 hours ago, Tøsen said:

and after a few months they have abandoned it.

 

That's why it's important to manage expectations and one of my biggest objections to what most of the polyglots are selling (with the exception of Kaufmann who does say that language learning is lifelong).

 

Realistic expectations about progress are important otherwise new learners may give up. 

[studychinese]

6 hours ago, Tøsen said:

I think it is a bit unfair to put them all in the same box. The three I mentioned are talented language  grads and two of them are interpreters, being able to apply several of their languages for work.

 

Maybe I'm blind but I didn't see you mention any particular three people on this thread at all. 

 

Edit: oh this - "Richard Simcott, Luca Lampariello and Robert Bigler". You mentioned them in the context of "neuro connections". 

 

None of them speak East Asian languages, right? Japanese, Korean, or Chinese? 

[Wippen (inactive)]

19 minutes ago, studychinese said:

Edit: oh this - "Richard Simcott, Luca Lampariello and Robert Bigler". You mentioned them in the context of "neuro connections". 

 

None of them speak East Asian languages, right? Japanese, Korean, or Chinese? 

Robert Bigler speaks both Japanese and Chinese.  Robert is an Interpreter in other languages too.

Luca I think also speaks an Asian language. I forgot to mention "hard core" Donovan Nagel who is a linguistics graduate who  knowlegedable in that field, and happens to be a "polyglot" who has acoompblished both Arabic and Korean along with other languages including Chinese but I don't know how well.. Acutally his study tips are excellent, if you can ignore the fact he goes under the heading of a polyglot.

 

Most of these are on Youtube.

 

 

[Wippen (inactive)]

25 minutes ago, studychinese said:

(with the exception of Kaufmann who does say that language learning is lifelong).

Actually I have a problem with Kaufmann's business model. He is using other people ie his members to create (any) material. I cannot relate to this random learning model. I cannot recall the exact way he does it but I think you pay a fee so you can access material created by members and then you can use his tools to count the number of words you know using his unique word counting.  I think you can work up points and then exchange them for lessons if you create material.

 

Given the fact he has not got an academic background in languages I am not sure his method is academically sound.

 

Please correct me anyone if I am being unjust in my assessment here.

[studychinese]

1 hour ago, Tøsen said:

Most of these are on Youtube.

 

Got any links of them actually speaking East Asian languages (preferably unscripted, but also scripted if that is all there is). I don't accept any claims by "polyglots" on faith. I'm sure you understand why.

[陳德聰]

On 2018/2/22 at 3:22 AM, studychinese said:

It is not different from the case of the righteous man living in a neighborhood of a town known for foolishness, lawlessness, atrocity, and heartlessness. His action is so rare that it is always buried under the ugliness of his neighbors' activities.

Interesting translation, but I might have changed it a bit.

 

I used to run a multilingual meetup in my city that sort of became both an English conversation club and also a polyglot meetup. One day, someone from Steve Kaufmann’s site came to gave us a discount code. I tried it out, was disappointed, and moved on.

 

But I don’t think that Kaufmann’s language ability (which is just a product of general cognitive abilities) is lessened by his product being disappointing. I don’t think he can work as an interpreter into Chinese or Japanese but that’s not really a standard I think is useful.

 

Yes most of the world is multilingual, but that doesn’t mean that Kaufmann is not also multilingual and Benny is not also multilingual. Their products may not be very good but they are still multilingual, and not necessarily by coincidence of birth or learning environment, so there’s something there.

 

I agree that we shouldn’t put people on pedestals until they have a language from 5 diff language families (haha that was arbitrary), but I think the claim that everyone can be a polyglot through hard work is not fully genuine. There is something “different” about the brains of hyperpolyglots at least, is there not?

 

P.S. as far as I know Richard Simcott hadn’t tried East Asian languages when he got famous 5+ years ago, but Kaufmann and Lampariello had a conversation in Mandarin that I remember from when I still thought youtube polyglots were “cool”.

[studychinese]

2 hours ago, 陳德聰 said:

There is something “different” about the brains of hyperpolyglots at least, is there not?

 

You are getting at something important here. Yes if they actually have mastery in some of those languages, but no if they are just beginner levels in these languages. 

 

I once knew a guy that could do a "meet and greet" in about 10 languages. But his ability didn't go futher than that. Its not clear to me that a famous YouTube polyglot like Moses is any better. 

 

I think that as native background speakers of European languages we can in fact become polyglots, and can build on previous knowledge. We can learn Spanish, then Italian, then Portuguese or the Scandinavian language family, and so on. That's a natural progression for polyglots, and no, I don't think their brains are wired differently. 

 

Who is wired differently? Well, someone like the guy from the movie Rain Man. This kind of polyglot would have mastery in not just in the "close languages" but also the "distant languages" of East Asia. They would be able to pick up languages effortlessly. As far as I can see this isn't the case with any of the YouTube polyglots. 

 

I don't hate them I just think that their denial of opportunity costs in language learning does language learning itself a disservice. It's because of them that I have met people trying to study 5 languages concurrently and miserably failing at all. 

[Lu]

1 hour ago, 陳德聰 said:

but I think the claim that everyone can be a polyglot through hard work is not fully genuine. There is something “different” about the brains of hyperpolyglots at least, is there not?

I don't know what a hyperpolyglot is, but no, I don't think there is something inherently special about polyglots. I think almost everyone has the ability to know at least three languages, and the main difference between people who do and people who don't is environment and/or spending the time and effort on it, not some neurological oddity.

 

Someone who speaks Shanghainese with her grandparents, Mandarin with her parents and English at the English corner is a polyglot (speaking languages from two vastly different families, even), and I think we can all agree that there are literally tens of millions of people in China alone who can do something like this.  And in the Netherlands, there are again literally millions of people who speak Dutch, English and at least one other language. Most of my friends are polyglots. Many countries have more than one official language and many of the people in those countries are polyglots.

 

Of course, if you grow up in the US, with English all around you and everyone everywhere speaking English to you, you don't have an environment conductive to learning more languages, which means it all comes down to time and effort. And not everyone has that, or has it for long enough to learn another language. That is what makes American polyglots special: their perseverance. And good for them. But it's not a neurological thing, or at least not a neurological language thing.

[陳德聰]

Everyone has the inherent ability to learn multiple languages from exposure in their environment. Language ability is supposedly just a collection of cognitive faculties that we all have. But that doesn’t mean everyone has the same level of cognitive faculties, and the idea that all one needs is hard work to accumulate a bunch of languages aside from the one(s) they got for free from their environment seems misleading. If you have poor memory store/recall from the get-go, you’re going to have a very rough go of learning new languages.

 

I was going off an understanding of hyperpolyglots as people who accumulate a ridiculously massive number of languages to fluency through hard work as opposed to exposure in their environment, but when I re-read the article in TIME where I first encountered the word, I found the bar apparently has been set much lower than that. The article points out that in most multilingual communities, people generally speak up to 5 different languages. So he arbitrarily says hyperpolyglots have 6+ languages.

[somethingfunny]

I'd imagine that we all have the inherent ability to learn multiple languages up to a certain age of development.  After that, I think 陈德聪 is right and there is something different about the brain of an effective language learner that allows them to easily acquire another language as an adult.  I think a couple of hours in an evening French class will show pretty clearly that some people just don't have the kind of brain which absorbs a new language.  To put it another way, the girl that speaks Mandarin and Shanghainese does so because she was raised in that environment.  Her English is probably not as good because she started learning it a little older, but it's still decent because she's been at it for eight years.

[Lu]

1 hour ago, somethingfunny said:

but it's still decent because she's been at it for eight years.

Exactly. Time and effort. Perseverance.

Sure, some people are better at learning new languages than others, and some indeed have such a hard time with it that they will effectively never learn. But I do believe that, with time and effort, almost everyone can learn several languages, even when they start late.

[Shelley]

I definitely think environment has something to do with it but also to a lesser degree genes. I do believe there are some people who are predisposed to learning languages because of the way their brain is wired.

My grandfather was professor of languages at Bonn University before the war and he could speak 7 languages and read and write a further 14. He translated Shakespeare into Arabic and collected Arabic/Turkish/Egyptian proverbs and sayings and translated them in to English and was going to collect them all into a book, sadly not something he completed before he died in the 1970s. I have his rough drafts somewhere (safe but not immediately to hand)  He was Turkish/Egyptian so lived in multi language environment

 

My mother spoke English, German and French. I was born in Montreal , Canada and had to learn French too, from the very start I was surrounded by language. My mother and her sister used to talk to each other in German so "the children" didn't understand but eventually we understood enough to make them have to stop if they really wanted a private conversation, they were usually gossiping about the people in the street where we lived.

 

When I came to the UK I was surprised at the lack of interest in languages my classmates had, I couldn't understand why no one had to learn another language as in Montreal you actually had to learn French to certain standard to graduate from High school.

 

This is one of the several reason why I decided to learn Chinese, I felt I was familiar with European languages, Arabic and Russian were not appealing, I didn't like the actual sounds of the languages  and so I thought why not go for something completely different and hopefully interesting, I wasn't disappointed.

 

In short, I think there will always be people who will never manage to learn a new language no matter how hard they work and others who pick up languages like fallen apples, but even those people have to work hard to get to a useful level.