"Talking to yourself as a way of preserving the language" - I think this simple yet not easy advice would be a great material for a video, Alexander. You have shown us scriptorium, shadowing, polystenics - so how about this one? I think it would be of great value, particularly if someone got excited about trying it out, and then lost all gas when actually attempting: "like... what I am going to say here, duh?, kinda weird talking to an open window".
Thank you kindly. You can always watch more of my videos, but I think you have already done that. The purpose of my academy is to give people who really value what I have to say an opportunity to interact with me. Have you perhaps considered any of the offerings?
Thank you for another great video! This topic hit home for me; I spent my twenties living in five different countries, but regrettably I've since let just as many languages fall by the wayside. I definitely want to get serious about reviving them, one of the main victims being my Korean, which used to be near a C1 level.
Just recently found your chanel and it's already one of my favorite language channels on here. I'm a pretty passionate language learner now but I still forgot the languages I studied in high school and the first 2 years of uni (Latin ,Turkish and little bit of French). At some point, I become more intressted in East Asia as an area of study and put all my energy into learning Japanese for 4 years, later I also started learning Classical Japanese, Mandarin-Chinese and the Manchu language. Unfortunately, I put exactly zero effort into maintaing Latin and Turkish. I do regret that to some extent and part of me wants to get back to these 2 or French, but so far there's always been another new language that I end up studying instead.
What a lovely video on this often-overlooked topic! The analogy between reviving a language and learning to read an older version of one's native language is quite interesting and I'm not sure I've ever thought about it that way. When it comes to 1700's Russian it's usually the case that only the vocabulary and the syntax differ from the contemporary language, so, yes, in a way you only really have to get yourself in the headspace of using these words and learning to recognise the unfamiliar syntactic patterns. As another anecdote that you could add to your collection: I'd first studied German at around 14-15, and quit it after a year. Some 3 years after that I found myself sitting on an airplane next to a Polish gentleman who was speaking to a French lady of Polish origin in German, and I was stunned at how I was able to follow their conversation and understand everything that was being said. The only languages that I was using besides Russian were English, Japanese, and tentatively OC Slavonic and Polish, so nothing closely related to German. Really strange how that worked.
Thank you, Yan, for your substantive comment, as always. I believe this topic came up during our post lecture discussion circle as I recall pulling down my copy of the Слово о пълкѹ Игоревѣ, which has a bilingual Russian - Old East Slavic format. I know there is an authenticity debate about this date, but it is earlier than the 1700's. Have you ever held this in your hands and looked it over?
@@ProfASAr No, I didn't even realise that that book that you'd shown me was bilingual! I am however pretty certain that Слово о пълкѹ Игоревѣ is from around the XI-XII centuries, originally, at least. I _am_ however reading the Primary Nestor Chronicle (Повѣсть временныхъ лѣтъ) and I'm enjoying it quite a bit, but that one is written in OCS, and the only thing that impedes comprehension are the syntactic oddities.
If you would like to study with me via Zoom to learn to read medieval languages, to improve your ability to read French, German, Latin, or Spanish literature, to participate in Great Books seminars, or to get guided consultation for teaching yourself a foreign language, please apply at alexanderarguelles.com/academy/
Hello professor Arguelles, it is really great having you back since along time, I admire your work and follow you a decade now. In your previous video you gave a lot of information about learning Korean. It would be great if you do so with more of the languages you have studied. I am interested in the Urdu language some years now apart of other languages but I face the problem of the lack of materials in one hand and on the other the Pakistani people to whom I am related speak panjabi as their mother tongue and do not speak urdu at all with each other. They also do not read and write in panjabi so also the goal to communicate with them in this language is an unfulfilled task. It would be great help for a bunch of people out there if you show us some of your resources and how you treat the material in the languages you have learned in which no assimil method is available. Thank you . My best wishes to you and your son to fulfill his goals.
Re: bilingual texts, I really have found those useful in my Spanish learning, especially early on. These days I mostly use my kindle, since I only need to translate a few words here and there. The old interlinear style seems to have fallen out of favor, but for those interested, Latin interlinear texts from the second half of the 19th century are surprisingly readily available for not much money. I have several (they look great on the shelf) and I plan to one day use them for actually learning Latin. Thanks for another great video.
Thank you for commenting. I assume by the Latin interlinear texts you mean Dr. Giles Keys to the Classics? Those are also available in Greek and I believe even a few in Hebrew. Interlinear texts are clearly harder to produce than bilingual ones (especially with different word order) and so I imagine that is why they have fallen out of favor.
@@ProfASAr the ones I have are Hart and Osborn's Virgil from 1853 and Translation Publishing Co.'s Caesar from 1918, although I've seen a handful of others, mostly in used bookstores, over the years. I suspect that since the percentage of the population who are interested in learning Latin has declined over the last century or so, they sit on the shelves collecting dust for years before someone comes along who's willing to give them a good home.
I speak spanish fluently now somewhere in the b2 getting closer to c1 now after a year and a half. Back in 2019 i would speak with brazilians and could understand it fluently as well as burmese through an ease dropping method with basics for portuguese with spanish rosetta stone since the languages are somewhat similar. With burmese im surrounded by natives and knew the basics through translation from my wife. Portuguese was forgotten from losing the friend group i had online and not searching for others to talk to at the time and burmese because of a bad experience i had. Saying all that in on the verge pf relearning those two now with portuguese being immersion based and can understand 80% as now im watching television and netflix, so its very enjoyable amd coming back to me now. Burmese is at about 45-50% understanding pnly understanding the topic being spoken and the feeling about said topic though i give it time to grow. My method is mainly comprehensible input but of i find the resources are scarce then i learn through anyway i can to get that a2 level vocabulary and dive into media, livestreams, movies, tv, or articles and am satisified when incan understand 70% of the language. Though for some reason the words dont come out until ive hit that 90% or b2 level as its like my brain cant seem to even form sentences yet i could understand them or get the gist more than i could speak.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience with Burmese and Portuguese. I am sure those who find this video interesting will benefit from what you have shared.
Hello my friend once again you have a done a great video ! I have a suggestion to you. I believe that people would enjoy if you would do a detailed video about farsi any subject of the language, the way you learned it or perhaps problems you ran into while studying it. I know i would be truly interested in your journey or learning farsi. All the best to you.
Hello professor! Awesome video! I’m curious if you have ever mentioned why you taught your children French over German. The biography on your old website made it seem like you slightly preferred the latter. Sorry if that’s too personal just curious as a bilingual parent myself. Keep up the good work ;).
We lived in Lebanon, which is a Francophone country, when they were of age to begin speaking, so there was lots of reinforcement for French. I was looking at sending them to a German language school if we could have stayed there, but alas the Israeli invasion drove us out.
This is so interesting to me, I know 11 languages, and I have never forgotten or gone backwards in any of them, sure my talking will get super rusty, but NEVER my understanding, I can't even fathom how someone can lose their language comprehension, all I can think is that they didn't truly love the language and just never again watched a film or read a book in that language... really tragic, after putting so much work. I think you are right Professor, that's why polyglots don't forget, cause we love languages and we always circle back, even if it's interacting with another language in the same language family, it seems to keep all the other "family members" fresh, 😄
(고양이가 너무 귀엽다^^) Thanks for these videos, Professor. Not sure how I missed your channel for so long. Great content, and you're oddly interested in the languages I'm interested in (which is not very common!), so your advice is particularly applicable.
I studied Swedish during my elementary school but pretty much forgot it afterwards. I still remember many words and understand some simple things though.
@@ProfASAr Yes, and it's even our second official language. I'm Finnish but everything here is written in Swedish as well, so you can't completely ignore it. How should I revive it? Starting with textbooks and then short stories?
With regard to my own personal experience, I spent many years attempting to learn Italian on and off. Whilst never a great speaker of it, I could put sentences together to have basic conversations and due to 1000s of hours spent watching cycling on RAI Sport my comprehension was pretty good. A few years later after a gap of no language study whatsoever, I decided to acquire Spanish. I consciously avoided Italian so as not to mix the two languages. It worked. Whilst I'm currently an intermediate Spanish speaker, I can say little more than ciao in Italian. Funnily enough, my comprehension of RAI Sport's cycling coverage is still very good. As for your point to polyglot's forgetting languages, surely Steve Kauffman is a case in point here. He has said on many occasions that languages he had studied intensively over a period of a few months or even a few years have fallen by the wayside when he moved on to a new language, leaving him unable to do more than make basic utterances in those forgotten tongues. Thank you for the great video Professor.
Thank you for the substantive comment, sharing your experience with Spanish and Italian. And also for confirming that polyglots who cram languages in intensively and then move on are some of the most likely candidates to suffer language loss. My own Finnish is another case in point.
Great talk (as always) professor! If we are to expand on this notion of “learning as remembering”, and go to the example you used toward the end (namely, moving from Modern to Middle to Old English); is it then the case that the most optimal pathway (time management and learning wise) would be: French, Spanish -> Latin (sequential) Or: French, Spanish + Latin (simultaneous) Or is this a case (given the fact that Latin is so embedded in the modern Romance languages) that you’re going to have a “Spanish and/or Portuguese + Italian garbledigook” scenario here; rather than something harmonious (as one would have moving from Modern to Middle to Old English)? Thanks again for all your hard work!
Thank you, Ahmed, for a great comment, but the issue is too complex to answer in the comment section so please pose it next Friday in our language learning consultation session.
I think one difficulty that you will find here is that moving from Modern English to Middle English to Old English is a straight shot in development, whereas moving from Spanish/French to Classical Latin is not. While it would be reasonable to take your Spanish back nearly a millennium to read El Cantar de Mio Cid in its original language, taking it back another millennium simply isn't possible, because we don't have works written in Vulgar Latin. While you'll certainly not be starting from zero, since you'll have many cognates available (most of which you already have from English), and similar verb conjugations, expecting Don Quijote to Cicero to take a similar level of effort as Chaucer to Beowulf is, in my opinion, setting yourself up for disappointment.
I might speak some if it is relevant in any follow-up videos to my son's project. However, making videos whose only purpose is to show off my language skills is just not my style.
@@ProfASAr Thank you for your response. You could make a video that isn't just for the purpose of demonstrating your skills. Perhaps you could discuss the history of the Korean language while speaking Korean? that way it would be educational and not just for the purpose of showing off? You could add Eng subtitles I suppose. But if not, I understand. Thank you for your time and consideration
I forgot my magic language Farsi bc I moved from my family to a white family and now I haven’t spoken it for 6 years but I spoke it for 7-8 years bc I grew up in Afghanistan but I have now forgotten everything
I know Europeans (including myself) who became highly fluent (but not native level) in a second or third language, then abandoned those extra languages for years, but somehow maintained high levels of fluency. Perhaps both a very high level of fluency + shared roots of European languages + age of studying helped; not sure. Regardless, I'm not confident a bloke who worked in Japan in the 1990s would maintain much Japanese today.
hello, sir, it's such a pleasure to watch all of your videos since you are indeed a professional and there re loads of false polyglots on RU-vid who profess to know somewhat around 20 language but in fact don't, so, I trust only you anyway, I have a question for you, and would be grateful to you if you asked me. I am a learner of English(b1-b2 level), and I m currently struggling with making improvements, I feel stuck, devote much time to English and end up with no knowledge, I feel like the reason is the way I learn words and technics I apply in order to enrich my vocabulary,could you please tell me the best way to expand vocabulary?
Reading is the best way to improve your vocabulary. I have made several recent videos about this. Please watch them to get an idea for different approaches to reading at different levels.
@@ProfASAr okay, I am going to, but let me please ask another question I am concerned about, should I translate new words to my mother tongue language or just write down the definition in a targeting language? let me know if there is an answer to this question in ur previous videos
What are some good tips of studying the russian language? I used to live in Ukraine for one year and studied the language. But I never could get at level at a conversational level. Basic dialogue and that’s about it.
