I grew up speaking Afrikaans and English. I still remember where it all began for me. I was in the bath going about life when I noticed a bottle of Sunlight on the counter. (Its a popular dish washing liquid). Then I started to think, "sun-light..." "son-lig..." "hmmmmm". That threw me down the rabbit hole of historical linguistics as well, where I discovered that the 2 languages are actually related. I took great interest in the history of the Indo-European languages, especially Germanic. Fast forward a few years, I decided to take learning Dutch seriously. I got to the point where I could understand 90%+ of conversational Dutch even at full speed, but still struggle to speak without sounding stupid as cognate words often aren't used in the same way I'm used to. After getting bored on the dreaded plateau, I decided to torture myself with German. I was surprised to see how many words are recognisable if you undo the HGCS. I pretty quickly got to the point where I can understand like 60% of conversational speech, but my ability to produce it is only like A2 at this point lmao. What I enjoy about German though is that I can guess a word I havent learned yet with about 50% accuracy. The other 50% of the time it is either completely wrong or humorously unfitting to the context. Once I plateau on German, I plan to study Norwegian next and I'm definitely looking forward to that! Enjoyed the video as always, looking forward to the next one!
My adventure with languages started many many years ago when, as a child, I found out that there were words in various languages on products like soap, shampoo and chocolate. So I was reading soap, Seife, jabón, zeep, mydło, savon... I was fascinated.
Wow! That's exactly the problem I have. I hate being asked how many languages I speak because I don't know the asnwer.I speak two languages fluently, I understand and speak in a very limited way another 6 languages, and I understand but don't speak another 5. I had studied probably around 50 languages in my life. I always protest when someone calls me a polyglot and I call myself linguaphile instead. Fantastic video. Thank you!
wow thats more than me I mostly learnt 4 at school and 8 through family; on top of that some game coding and some from cartoon's, movies & music which comes to about 22 or more.
@@david_oliveira71 I counted all languages I tried. I studied some of them (like Haida, Cree, Igbo, Upper Sorbian, Inuktitut and a few others) just for a couple of weeks. To get a general gist, to find out how they work, to say hello, thank you, etc. Some of them I needed to have simple chats with friends online. Just a dozen languages or so I studied for longer periods.
it gets even more confusing when you know the majority language of your country as well as a quite distinct local dialect which cannot be classified as its own language so a straight answer to the question would end with .5
1:12 i love your last reason! Definitely waiting for you to do slavic and romance language sound and grammar shifts just like you did with germanic languages. It was one of the best linguistics and eye-opening videos I've watched in my entire life :D
I only speak English fluently (I know a bit of German and French but not nearly enough to hold a conversation). I’ve always had an interest in Languages, and for a while I made conlangs (I’ve made 202 of which only 23 are anywhere near complete and only 4 can actually have anything resembling a conversation). The issue is, I have the motivation and the drive to learn them, but I have so many other interests that I just forget words constantly (hell I even do it in english lmao). The crux of it is: I can’t do it 😂 but all the power to those that can!
I wanted to learn French because I liked someone form school (They went to Québec to study abroad). I found Duo (circa 2014), when I could learn many languages. Then I found Dutch. Then I realized that French and other romance languages (I'm native in Spanish, know some Portuguese and Italian) and that English, Dutch and German are quite similar, investigated a little bit about their evolution in Wikipedia, found PIE and hyperfixated on historical lingüistics ever since. The fun part is, I preferred to research more about languages, and I forgot about my crush (we became friends for a while).
I tried over and over again to learn spanish as a kid, and was never able to, until I finally found a way to get it to stick in my head, and then I was like: "I want to learn as many languages as possible"
If many poliglots weren't saying they speak 34 languages when they can just say "hello" and "where is the library" in 32, people would understand better. Just saying "fluently x but I can speak a bit of y and z" would do
i go 6, en, my, nl, jp, cn, and WILDCARD so just whatever i can speak on demand, and wildcard because people will inherently ask what i mean by that at which point i can give the long answer.
Follow-up problem: Do I brag about speaking 3 Scandinavian languages when they are really more of a dialect continuum? Btw: The quality of your content improves so much when you take your time to enunciate, like you did here ;)
i can only speak a few languages but i can understand a lot. i can also cheat by only learning west European languages and counting stuff German and swiss German as separate .because i really noticed that despite me having a lot more interest in Asia compared to small European countries like Luxembourg .it doesn't change the fact that i can understand Luxembourgish after just a few days of study. while i have been try to get into korean for 6 years and i am making no progress despite me wanting to actually use the language unlike Luxembourgish that i just learned because i live close to it. and i also was bragging to a Swahili speaking woman that i have been learning many languages and she said what about Swahili .and then i was really struggling hard to think of something to say in Swahili but i couldn't remember anything i just wanted to speak Spanish instead .i couldn't just say no i don't know any Swahili but i don't know enough to say anything coherent .i had a similar situation with Khmer. in many languages i can understand people but can't talk back without sounding like a cave man like in Hungarian for example the grammar is too hard
You're a polymath when your interests diverge into two or more subjects above and beyond what your major and minor were in collage; if you only majored without a minor, then it would be three or more subjects above your college major.
Given that I've learned Yiddish and will soon learn German, which are super closely related and used to be considered the same language until not too long ago, I'd say you learning both Attic Greek and (Modern Greek?) would definitely count as two
I just assume that people want to know how many languages I can hold a conversation at a high level. For me it is Portuguese (N), English (C), and French (C), however the two latter I still need to practice from time to time, otherwise I start making silly mistakes, or forgetting specific vocab I'm around A2 in German, but I would say that I speak it. I can understand bits and pieces and hold basic conversations. However, I think it would be disingenuous of me to say that I speak it. I have some good notions of the inner workings of it, but I still mess up some basic things, like gender and prepositions. I wouldn't be able to read a book, watch a movie without subtitles, or hold up a debate. I'm working towards that goal, and I know that, the more I progress, the more I dilute my attention towards the first ones.
I'm actually both, I'm either learning something new about languages or trying to find a way to construct a language, usually I'm trying to make Portuguese more Germanic... So Far, I'm doing too bad hahahahah
yh when you tell them the language count they usually ask about your learning experience; I haven't got the time to explain why I know 22 languages as 17 are real the rest are from games, your right though, if you have a multi cultural like an african dad and an irish mum, then on top of that you learn another language through games and media; you might aswell learn the aliens languages too.
I speak English and Spanish fluently, Im learning Japanese by watching anime and reading manga as much as I can but I dont wanna be the creepy guy who speaks japanese so French is also my another aim to talk to people and make them think I'm distinguished, thou I dont care about the label of polyglot, I dont give a f, just wanna flirt in french lol, another thing I hate is the English language because since i was very little i was forced to learn it and not very good at it so I'll keep improving my french until it gets better than my english 😂
