The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages

August 28, 2018 8:06 AM

Superlative feats have always thrilled average mortals, in part, perhaps, because they register as a victory for Team Homo Sapiens: they redefine the humanly possible. If the ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes can run three hundred and fifty miles without sleep, he may inspire you to jog around the block. If Rojas-Berscia can speak twenty-two languages, perhaps you can crank up your high-school Spanish or bat-mitzvah Hebrew, or learn enough of your grandma’s Korean to understand her stories. What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?
posted by zeptoweasel (12 comments total)

"Hyperpolyglots, too, work harder in an unfamiliar tongue. But their “harder” is relaxed compared with the efforts of average people. Their advantage seems to be not capacity but efficiency. "

Interesting because I remember hearing the same thing about those people who can do amazing amounts of mathematics in their head. When given a math problem with lots of multiplications/division of very long numbers, the MRI showed an initial stress, then a relaxation along with more activity in a certain part of the brain, as though the brain was saying "Uh oh, big number calculation--wait a minute, I can send this to my built-in brain calculator--okay, here's the answer".

I wonder if there are preset functions that some people are born with that give their brains special skills (superpowers!). Or is it something we can all develop to one extent or another.
posted by eye of newt at 8:56 AM on August 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

oh god the head of the language department in my (admittedly v fancy) high school spoke 20something languages fluently and read/wrote in a bunch of other super ancient dead ones (where pronunciations are controversial i guess?) and he has been my lifelong inspiration to LEARN ALL THE LANGUAGES, except i often get overexcited and can't keep them separate in my brain and this leads to me earnestly addressing mystified germans in catalan

i'm currently learning nahuatl (although i should really be learning quechua) bc a mexican friend of mine was like yeah i'll give this a go too and now we excitedly shout vegetables and incompetently conjugated verbs at each other in DMs
posted by poffin boffin at 9:01 AM on August 28, 2018 [16 favorites]

I speak a few languages at various levels, and for me personally one of the biggest motivators to stick with it is getting positive reinforcement from a native speaker and learning where you could improve.

I was recently at a state park and a Spanish-speaking family was clearly trying to get a big group selfie, so I offered (in Spanish) to take a picture for them, asked them to stand up, asked if they were ready, counted to 3, etc. We weren't deconstructing Chaucer, but I got a ton of smiles and some free barbecue off their grill.
Really hardened my resolve to improve my Spanish because there was other stuff I wanted to say but wasn't able to.
posted by mike_honcho at 9:10 AM on August 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

haven't finished TFA yet, but I'm surprised to not see more about auditory processing. Maybe I have other stumbling blocks, too, but for me the fact that I have a lot of trouble filtering sounds / get overwhelmed to the point of pain and thus have like...no auditory memory is by far the hardest part about languages for me. Or rather, the first seemingly unsurmountable obstacle. It's frustrating.
posted by schadenfrau at 9:13 AM on August 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

I recently moved to Amsterdam and what is amazing is how, well, common it is here to speak multiple languages. You have the Dutch, of course, who speak Dutch and English. But, then this is a city of expats, who speak their native language and Dutch and English. And by expats I don't mean white-collar professionals, I also mean people who work at service counters and shops and elsewhere.

I just finished climbing lessons. My instructor was a Spanish guy who also speaks Italian, Dutch, and English fluently. And again, what is remarkable is how un-remarkable it is. I love language learning and this all makes me feel at home. Twenty-two languages is a bit of an extreme but I think anyone can feel confident in two or three if they are in the right environment.
posted by vacapinta at 9:18 AM on August 28, 2018 [10 favorites]

> I recently moved to Amsterdam and what is amazing is how, well, common it is here to speak multiple languages.

Without wanting to make assumptions about where you moved *from*, I would say that this will generally seem more amazing to anyone (like me) who is from an English speaking community, and not so much to anyone else. Needs must and all that.
posted by merlynkline at 9:46 AM on August 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Without wanting to make assumptions about where you moved *from*, I would say that this will generally seem more amazing to anyone (like me) who is from an English speaking community, and not so much to anyone else. Needs must and all that.

At least in America, I find a use for my pretty poor working knowledge of Spanish to come in handy at least once a month.
posted by Automocar at 10:26 AM on August 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

MetaFilter: i should really be learning quechua
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:44 PM on August 28, 2018

I want to be a hyperpolyglot more than anything else in the world

Like if I had a time machine I would actively be going back to myself and my parents at various stages of my life going, "Now add ASL, now add Korean, now add...."

Being able to communicate with anyone you meet???? Enjoy their culture!??? Talk to them about food and cats and dogs and books together immediately????? Um YES
posted by Hermione Granger at 5:06 PM on August 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

and for me personally one of the biggest motivators to stick with it is getting positive reinforcement from a native speaker and learning where you could improve.

Indeed. The converse is also true. My wife's ceaseless mocking was the primary catalyst in me giving up viet.
posted by smoke at 6:33 PM on August 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I don't know if I qualify as polyglot, really. Being Danish, I have several languages at my disposal as Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are like three dialects of the same underlying language. But I speak and read all three - plus English (as you can tell by me writing here), German, and Russian. Then I also understand Latin and Greek to some degree and can make my way in Dutch and Faroese. I'm only really comfortable, fluent and able to code-switch in three of these languages though - Danish, Swedish, and English.

Sure, there are some people who are pretty astonishing at languages (like Tim Doner - mad respect!), but what strikes me when I watch polyglot videos on YT is how poor some of these people are at the languages they profess to master. They can say "hello my name is" and then mutter some sentences in broken [language]. What does it mean to know a language? When can you say that you know a language?

Also, it is pretty easy to pick one language branch (like I have with German, English, and the Scandi languages) and just power through it. I have a lot of respect for people who choose to study several language families and not just one branch of one language family.
posted by kariebookish at 8:05 AM on August 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

I'm glad we eventually made it to Malta in that piece, as Maltese (Malti is an odd name for it in English) and French are the only languages outwith my own I've spent time in. I'm most polyglottaly curious about something the article didn't really address, which is how languages affect perception and thinking, and how having a lot of them changes one's outlook on classification and conceptual linkages.

I recently read an analysis of the Priestly Benediction from Numbers ("The Lord bless you, and make his face to shine upon you"), the oldest known written text from the Bible, by a Hebrew speaker. They pointed out a lot of the concepts encoded in the Hebrew - which has the Semitic punning three-root structure that clusters words that sound alike amid related concepts - reflected concrete concerns for a nomadic society. Totally missing from the English - although the KJV version retains a lot of power.

As was alluded to in the article, knowing that Hebrew structure helped in learning aspects of Maltese. It's a very striking attribute of Semitic languages compared to other families, so I was a bit disappointed that he knew Hebrew already, as it would have been interesting had this been the first exposure.

I think I'm really asking - what does poetry sound like to the hyperpolylingual?

(Oh, btw: "“And his excitement for my progress excited him to help us.” “Excitement about your progress,” I clucked. It was a rare lapse." Excitement for something is perfectly cromulent - you can be excited for, about, by or at, at least where I come from. For implies a continuity in the thing causing the excitement, but it's hardly a lapse to use it in that context.)

((btw II - does being a "gay, left-handed males on the spectrum" make you a winner of the polyglottery?))
posted by Devonian at 12:36 PM on August 29, 2018 [2 favorites]