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9/2/13 13:34We got snow! Enough snow for a two-hour delay, not enough snow to seriously impede the running of errands. Tomorrow will be a good day for eating curry and hot pot.
I finished Babel No More, which is a book about hyperpolyglots. It's definitely a book of journalism rather than a book of linguistics, but as the author points out, linguists aren't really interested in hyperpolyglots because if you speak ten or twelve languages you are way outside the norm of what humans do with languages, in terms of personal motivation and time spent and also the distinction between "learning" and "acquisition" -- the difference between memorizing all the verb tenses, let's say, and having a gut feeling about what sounds right in a given sentence. There are people who speak 8 or 9 languages but use some of them only with a very restricted vocabulary and context -- maybe you use the language of tribe X only to trade cattle with them or something. And there are people who speak 4 or 5 languages and are fluent in all of them and use them daily, but it seems that 4 or 5 is probably the limit for that. Maybe 6, if you stretch. (Even the hyperpolyglots that the author talked to more or less admitted that they could only have spontaneous conversations in about 4-5 languages, and needed a bit of study to "reactivate" the other ones.)
I thought the book went off the rails a little bit when it went into the Geschwind-Galaburda hypothesis, which is the idea that there's a genetic connection between left-handedness, homosexuality, polyglottism, autoimmune problems, learning disorders, and talents in music, art, math, and foreign languages, which is related to prenatal spikes in testosterone exposure. I sort of look sideways at anything that looks like evolutionary psychology -- not that it's all nonsense, but so much of it is nonsense that just props up preconceived notions of Women Are Like This/ Men Are Like This. I think the low number of female polyglots is adequately explained by the barriers, until quite recently, for women getting involved in the military and diplomacy and international travel. There is also a free time issue, but it's not as if most men OR women typically have 14 hours in a day to devote to languages!
I think I was hoping to get good language learning tips from the book, which I didn't really get; but what I did get from it was valuable, because it was a reality-check on the idea that somehow I was Failing At Languages because I wasn't one of those people who could speak eight of them (you kind of need a monomaniacal obsession and a LOT of free time, and there's probably a certain amount of genetic talent that also helps a lot, even if Geschwind-Galaburda turns out to be completely false); and it was a reality-check on the idea that I should feel bad about being much better at reading any of my foreign languages than at having conversations even on very simple topics, because that actually seems to be pretty across-the-board among people who aren't multilingual from a young age. It's not my fault for being introverted or shy; it's actually a really hard thing because your brain needs to process a ton of stuff really quickly.
I actually feel kind of comforted by being almost at my limit for open language slots in my brain, so after I get a decent handle on Mandarin I can just worry about improving the languages I've already got rather than adding new ones.
I finished Babel No More, which is a book about hyperpolyglots. It's definitely a book of journalism rather than a book of linguistics, but as the author points out, linguists aren't really interested in hyperpolyglots because if you speak ten or twelve languages you are way outside the norm of what humans do with languages, in terms of personal motivation and time spent and also the distinction between "learning" and "acquisition" -- the difference between memorizing all the verb tenses, let's say, and having a gut feeling about what sounds right in a given sentence. There are people who speak 8 or 9 languages but use some of them only with a very restricted vocabulary and context -- maybe you use the language of tribe X only to trade cattle with them or something. And there are people who speak 4 or 5 languages and are fluent in all of them and use them daily, but it seems that 4 or 5 is probably the limit for that. Maybe 6, if you stretch. (Even the hyperpolyglots that the author talked to more or less admitted that they could only have spontaneous conversations in about 4-5 languages, and needed a bit of study to "reactivate" the other ones.)
I thought the book went off the rails a little bit when it went into the Geschwind-Galaburda hypothesis, which is the idea that there's a genetic connection between left-handedness, homosexuality, polyglottism, autoimmune problems, learning disorders, and talents in music, art, math, and foreign languages, which is related to prenatal spikes in testosterone exposure. I sort of look sideways at anything that looks like evolutionary psychology -- not that it's all nonsense, but so much of it is nonsense that just props up preconceived notions of Women Are Like This/ Men Are Like This. I think the low number of female polyglots is adequately explained by the barriers, until quite recently, for women getting involved in the military and diplomacy and international travel. There is also a free time issue, but it's not as if most men OR women typically have 14 hours in a day to devote to languages!
I think I was hoping to get good language learning tips from the book, which I didn't really get; but what I did get from it was valuable, because it was a reality-check on the idea that somehow I was Failing At Languages because I wasn't one of those people who could speak eight of them (you kind of need a monomaniacal obsession and a LOT of free time, and there's probably a certain amount of genetic talent that also helps a lot, even if Geschwind-Galaburda turns out to be completely false); and it was a reality-check on the idea that I should feel bad about being much better at reading any of my foreign languages than at having conversations even on very simple topics, because that actually seems to be pretty across-the-board among people who aren't multilingual from a young age. It's not my fault for being introverted or shy; it's actually a really hard thing because your brain needs to process a ton of stuff really quickly.
I actually feel kind of comforted by being almost at my limit for open language slots in my brain, so after I get a decent handle on Mandarin I can just worry about improving the languages I've already got rather than adding new ones.