How many languages do you speak?

[Sunspace]

13 as the cutoff age for learning new languages easily? I may have squeaked in with my beginner French in grade eight, then. How I wish I could have done immersion from earlier…

I found out a few years ago that my grandparents spoke fluent French and they kept it from their kids as a ‘secret language’! My mom never picked it up, and I had no idea of it when they were alive. And I know so many people whose parents just wanted them to fit in and never taught them their heritage language. Arrgghhh! Keeping a language from your kids is wrong, wrong, wrong. We need all the languages we can get.

@jovan

(By the way, I’m not trying to make this sound easy, or anything. Even with talent, the best strategy and total immersion, you’re looking at many, many hours of study.)

Or you could be like my friend Argilo. We started learning Esperanto at the same time, and he was fluent in six freakin’ months. Me? It’s been eight years and I am not close to reading Esperanto as well as I do in English. And he has a perfect accent too. :: grumble :: envious ::

Of course, he may be the single smartest person I have ever met in the flesh. Though I am sure there are peope as smart here.

[Shecky]

3 - English Spanish Portuguese. I had school for 5 years to learn hebrew, but only know the basics.

Does being able to order beer in 12 languages count?

[Johanna]

@Darryl Lict

Johanna, you must have both sides of your brain running full speed ahead.

They say in the ahem female brain* the corpus callosum is thinner, allowing better communication between the hemispheres. I wasn’t good at math but I was a musical child prodigy. Before I went with polyglot I was teaching myself one instrument after another, I would no sooner look at a new instrument, I started figuring out how to play it. I would like to know of any relationship between linguistic and musical areas of the brain. Language has Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, but what does musical skill run on? And where does poetry fit in relation to both language and music? People can sometimes learn to sing what they can’t say. Also, why is language genderized so that female brains handle it more easily? I was never better than average in math, though.

*Part of my hypothalamus is likely to be female; I wonder if that could extend to other parts of the brain. Just a whimsy, but sometimes great scientific discoveries have started as whimsy, like the Theory of Relativity. Every time I take one of those genderized cognitive skills tests, the results consistently show my brain functioning twice as female as male. On a scale where average male cognitive performance is 25%, androgynous is 50%, and average female is 75%, I wind up in the 65-70% range, roughly two-thirds toward the female end of the scale. Hadn’t thought about the spatial relations, Darryl, where does that fit in with the rest… I gave up on chemistry before getting to organic, where that would have been crucial.

[Darryl_Lict]

@Johanna

Hadn’t thought about the spatial relations, Darryl, where does that fit in with the rest… I gave up on chemistry before getting to organic, where that would have been crucial.

I kind of screwed up there. I was really talking about pattern recognition capabilities (which is probably correlated to spatial relationship capabilities) in order to pick up alphabets. I’m good at pattern recognition, but arabic looks like chicken scratching to me. I’m under the impression that there is a great deal of stylization amongst arabic caligraphy, but I can’t even imagine getting started.

@jovan

I believe - as far as the written language is concerned - that the internet is the greatest learning tool. Find a Japanese page about a subject that interests you, something that you would read if you could read. Scan it, try to find characters you know. Some that you don’t know will stand out. Maybe it’s their shape, maybe it’s because they come up often. You will find that these will be the easiest to learn. The more characters you know, the easiest they become to learn – you start recognising patterns, and your brain “loosens up”. The first 100 are a bitch. The next 200, are hard. However, once you get past about 1000, learning them becomes almost natural. It’s just a matter of exposure.

Good advice there. I’ve installed the East Asian language support and will start checking out some Japanese children’s fairy tales.

[Sleel]

@Darryl Lict

Johanna, you must have both sides of your brain running full speed ahead. Surely you must have mad skilz on the spatial relations in order to decipher all those alphabets. I’ve been trying to do Japanese kanji flashcards, but I seem to be too old to pick it up (and I aced all those spatial relationship tests).

Straight memorization is just about impossible for kanji. (Although, that’s how they’re taught to kids here. No wonder it takes them 12 years, up until the end of high school, to learn the basics). I’ve found that it’s much better to learn what the elements are and make up a story that relates to the core meaning. If you’re lucky, you can also make a mnemonic for the sounds too, but that’s a lot harder considering how different English and Japanese are. Any coincidences in sounds are very lucky.

This dictionary is the best dictionary for learning kanji. Period. It kicks ass.

I found this book useful for learning to look at kanji as mini-stories or pictures rather than a scribble on paper. I don’t often use it anymore, but I think it’s good as a starting point; it’ll give you good visuals for learning quite a lot of the more common elements. Just remember that he deliberately ignores etymology sometimes in order to make a good memorable picture.

[Clothahump]

I speak fluent English. I studied German in high school and can still speak it, but not fluently. I lived in Indonesia for a while and learned Bahasa Indonesia; same as the German: I can still speak it but not fluently. I do not speak Spanish worth a damn.

[Johanna]

I used to have a fun hobby going for adult-education evening language classes in the excellent Fairfax County school system. I took Japanese, Lithuanian, and Hungarian. My Lithuanian teacher called these sorts of courses “oddball languages.” (except for Japanese.) Never got beyond beginner level with them, but the acquaintance still comes in handy, I’ve even gotten paid for translating Hungarian. (My first Hungarian translation was done right here in the SDMB; turns out I made only 2 errors in 5 sentences.)

[Omi_no_Kami]

@Johanna

YES, this is so true. Maastricht pinpointed one of the key facts for polyglots. Once you’ve delved into enough different ones, you start to recognize familiar processes, the linguistic universals that Chomsky wrote about keep turning up everywhere, you can recognize similar things happening in, say, Quechua as on the other side of the world. Once it all starts to look so familiar, the learning falls into place that much quicker.

What are you basing this on? Most defendable universals are primitives, and by definition the knowledge of their usage is inherent. I agree that learning languages additionally makes it easier to learn new ones, but I don’t think it’s because you’re somehow recognizing the magical essence of language; it’s because as you learn increasingly diverse typologies, your brain becomes increasingly adept at the type of search/sort and pattern recognition algorithmns language relies upon.

[Largo62]

I am fluent only in English, but I have remaining a vague understanding of German (4 years of it in school . . . more than 35 years ago). You really do lose it if you don’t use it. I grew up in Southern California, so can read signs and bus benches in Spanish.

I’ve always been interested in language to the extent that I have picked up words and phrases from several. But I have never really studied any but English. I can speak enough cuss words to get my butt kicked in Spanish, German and French. (Isn’t it funny that the first words you often learn in any language are the ones you dare not use in polite company?)

For some reason words just stick in my brain. Out of context they do me absolutely no good. A guy I worked with was named Cruz. One day, just to be a smartass, I called him Crux (Latin for the same thing). Then I realized that I also knew the equivalent in German (kreutz), French (croix), Gaelic (rood . . . although that really means “stake”) and, of course, English (cross). My spellings may have been off on any or all of those except the last.

I can say such things as hello and thank you in Chinese and Japanese, as well as all the others I mentioned above, except Gaelic, but I avoid doing so at work, where I meet people from all over the world, because natives then expect that I can go on talking to them in their language. The nature of my job doesn’t give me the time to explain that that’s all I know, so I just allow them to see me as the ignorant person I am.

I read (well, scanned) this entire thread, and I don’t remember seeing anyone who listed Elven or Klingon. But I don’t suppose those count.

[Angua]

I grew up tri-lingual as a kid, and so something seems to have stuck in my brain about learning languages. I speak English, German, Hindi, Urdu, Gujerati and Kutchi (a Sindhi dialect) fluently, and am functionally fluent in French, though my reading and writing is better than my speaking. Additionally, I have a small smattering of Polish, and can understand spoken Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, and bizarrely, Surinamese (its a Hindi/Dutch creole as far as I can tell, which would explain it).

I’m one of those wierd people who loves learning languages and figuring out how they all mesh together.

[vivalostwages]

English fluently. I used to speak a lot more and better Spanish but am out of practice.

I can also understand Latin, to a degree, having taken it for a year in college.

[Barrels]

Just because I have not seen it yet, I am fluent in American Sign Language. I know there are some deaf or HH folks on the boards so I know I’m not alone! English is my first language and I have a small amount of Spanish and French bouncing around up there.