Yeah, we get enough of those from the submissions.
The submitter can click "Edit" to restore their original title after the autoshortener has changed it; but there is no way to tell HN "Please use exactly this title in the first place."
(I remember this submission of mine being affected by the autoshortener, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114482 "How thumb indexes are cut" autoshortened to "Thumb indexes are cut".)
Most cases of people speaking 10+ languages lean heavily on speaking many closely related languages in a family, which most people already cope with pretty well.
Learning phrases is not learning a language. Again, you're doing nothing to explain the very real phenomenon of individual differences in second language acquisition.
Would you say they're wrong? When, according to you, has someone learned a language? You don't get a medal at some point, you learn a language when you can do things with it.
Computer languages seemed a match for this facility (despite being the token graphic designer in the comparative programming languages course I was the only one who managed to do all of the Lisp problems successfully), but these days I find myself dragging blocks around to rough out designs using: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ rather than directly programming in OpenSCAD (or even the new Python variant: https://pythonscad.org/ ) and wonder if it is a consequence of my choosing to express myself through drawing rather than by words when I was young.
First of all, why had nobody mentioned linguistics as a field of study by the time I had finished school? I don't think I had learned anything at all in this area until after university, and it's so incredibly rich and fascinating. I reckon the kids lose a lot by having French/German/Spanish/etc without any form of linguistics involved, where they can have a little look at the language from a different perspective.
Second, I take issue with the idea that you can't learn a language to fluency in adulthood. Like the guy in the article. I think it's really all economics:
- When you're a kid, you have no opportunity cost. Taking the time to repeat something you pronounced wrong costs you nothing, because you're just playing.
- When you're a little bit older, you want to socialize. You can socialize with your friends without speaking perfectly, and they find it awkward to correct you.
- When you're an adult, you have to work. Most jobs don't require you to speak fluently, so you don't. Jobs that require native fluency will be taken by people who had low opp cost, aka natives or early learners.
The only people who consciously try to learn a language to native level are the people in this article, who seem to be able to do it. To me they are the evidence that this would work, if only you defied your economic incentives.
The obvious parallel is coding languages. You might have dabbled in Rust as a JS or cpp guy, but once someone is paying you to write it for a living, you take the time to actually learn the idiomatic ways to do things, the libraries to use, and so forth.
It also seems obviously true that everyone can learn a bunch of languages. The old people in my family speak three languages, plus the local language of where they ended up as refugees, plus English. Most of them are not university educated, they just grew up with a bunch of languages. People who grew up at a language border tend to speak a a couple as well, and people who met a spouse from another place, eg I have a friend who learned Swedish due to moving over the bridge, and Spanish having married a Mexican.
On the computer side, writing more than one language is probably by far the norm, who doesn't write python along with something else?
Similarly, the French Foreign Legion seems to be quite successful at teaching French.
English has 1 million words
College graduates have a 30,000 word vocabulary
High school graduates have a 10,000 word vocabulary
TV vocabulary is 2,000 words
What this means to me, is that I can get along in another language by learning only 2,000 words.
Of course there will be a room for improvement ... but you will be able to get along in foreign language speaking environment and bootstrap from there.
When hearing about hyperpolyglots I always have some doubt. Some people believe they know a language when they have a vocabulary of a few dozen words. That might be enough to order food at a restaurant but I don't think is what most people would consider "speaking a language". How many of the 22 languages Rojas-Berscia "has command of" can he speak at a highly-proficient level like CEFR C2? I'm guessing not many.
The question of linguistic distance is also rarely touched upon in these articles despite being of critical importance. It's far easier to learn Italian when you already speak French, Spanish, and Portuguese. A quantitative analysis of hyperpolyglots ought to have some sort of "linguistic range" measure to capture the distance between the different languages you speak proficiently.
huitzitziltzin•4h ago
And the title should be “…who speak many languages.”
Speaking one language may be something of a mystery but to most of us it’s at least a familiar state.