Maintaining Multiple Languages At Once - Richard Simcott at the Polyglot Gathering Berlin 2014 

And when they are at school they speak English with a Chinese accent and spell it the Spanish way!

theatisgr ....nope, that's not how simultaneous language acquisition works. People speak English with a Chinese accent when they have learnt Chinese as a native language and then pick up English much later and impose phonetic and phonological patterns of Chinese upon English. So, such language interference doesn't happen for simultaneous native language acquisition. Thanks for being an ignoramus (or a boring troll).

theatisgr Lol, at least I understood that you were just cracking a joke :)

+Jaime Benito de Valle Ruiz si ellos no hablan inglés en la casa sólo lo adquieren al llegar a la escuela y por la tele si es que entendí bien?

Francisco Fuentes Mis hijos hablan inglés mucho mejor que el español o el chino, porque el inglés lo practican al menos 35 horas a la semana. Sin embargo, en casa casi toda la tele es en español, porque la tele la controlo yo. En sus escuelas/guarderías su inglés está por encima de la media pese a que lo han aprendido en sus escuelas; ambos se expresan con precisión, y mi hija sabe leer en inglés y español desde que tiene 6 años. La presión de tener que aprender tres gramáticas, lenguas y pronunciaciones les ha hecho más flexibles y críticos con su aprendizaje del inglés, no más incapaces.

Hola Maria! Soy de Barcelona y me ocurre igual. Supongo que el problema es que la cultura española en cuanto a los idiomas es bastante mediocre y la gente suele exigir que niveles bajos porque es la expectativa. No hay pasión por dominar un idioma porque es algo que precisamente la gente aborrece, lo cual resulta curioso si tenemos en cuenta que España es un país plurinacional con distintas lenguas habladas en el estado.

Wünsche Dir viel Erfolg! Ganz toll, dass Du Deutsch lernst, egal was die Spanische Gesellschaft denkt. Hauptsache ist, dass Dein Leben dadurch bereichert wird

EstreitoCaminho verdade

Esse cara tem dicas muito boas

I particularly liked the part about language etiquette!

are you from Luxembourg ?

gaudii--genitivus casus

+peter browne I believe the correct Latin would be "Re vera linguae fons sunt gaudii et satis est mihi eas discere"

yes, indeed I forget to put gaudium into the gentive

Eodem mihi.

MyArtist21 Learning a language takes time. I am still learning chinese...it has been 9 years.

I grow up speaking French and Romanian. I learned English in school and university. And after, I started to learn alone: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Latin, and Esperanto. Now I'm studying: Danish and Swedish.

+Ma ria Really? It's English!

I wondered 'cause he talks Spanish like a native as well

just because you disagree with something doesn't make it false.

@@martinet1985 they never said it's false, they just disagreed

se puede aprender idiomas por internet...

kaczynski S Hi. Do you remember where you heard this? I’m interested to look into it.

I heard it too, its from some old Russian book written during imperial times of Russia but I only heard people referring to it and never could find it. It goes like this: everyone can speak fluently 5, median number is 7 and absolute people with exceptional talent can reach fluency in up to 9

Although I might be mistaken and it could be written in 1910-1930s, but I am certain about source

+Petr Kolman I wanted to hold this view of language learning myself. Unfortunately, it seems the evidence is against it. You seem to be confusing stylistic command of a language (what we call usage) with thinking. Language is a tool of human thought, but they are not the same thing. So I'm not sure if your brain "resets" to a dominant mode if not mainly through habit. It doesn't look like humans "create" there reality through set linguistic structures; read why humans effortlessly adopt other symbolic forms of expression such as mathematics, chemical notation, and the visual arts. it doesn't look like flying a plane, programming a computer, or mining uranium depend on native language capability. Countries like Japan, Malaysia, and Kuwait with wildly unrelated languages have adopted the same industrial model born out of England, and it doesn't look like any country "interprets" scientific knowledge differently and adopts technologies that's specific to the native language. So I am wondering for those who speak multiple languages if they are more "tied" to the native language or if they truly gain a different perspective?

I totally agree. this is why I'm focusing on only French

FatherElectric Yea it is impossible to be 100 percent fluent in another language on all levels.

Uh? It's stretching it to think that people can only talk "flawlessly" about philosophy or science in at most two languages. Also... that's... with the resources we have now, it's totally possible to have a "really sophisticated knowledge of language" without living aboard 15+ years (???) It was even expected from people (students, teachers) in Humanities, in France, back in the days albeit in Latin and Ancient Greek. How can one live in Ancient Greece for 15+ years? (I reckon this would be made simpler with a time machine...) Anyway, maybe if you research learning disabilities you might find a way to work around your issues when it comes to reading texts*, but keep in mind that philosophy and science are supposed to be challenging (at least sometimes) in any language. You may also have skipped (or learned badly) basic concepts of the subjects you deem important while learning them, as you seem to be really enthusiastic when it comes to learning; this would make more advanced concepts difficult to understand. That's something I used to do regularly, so I see how sometimes the basics seem boring but reviewing them after advancing to more complicated concepts might make them less boring and allow you to understand things better? * It's not always as portrayed in the medias, so if you're from an older generation and it wasn't well-known at the time, you might not suspect it when mild; you may be able to read the text fine but have a harder time with meanings and LDs impact other aspects of life. I knew a girl who said her dyslexia also made learning sign language harder, for example, and a friend with dyscalculia has trouble with time and reading maps which you wouldn't see as directly linked to math. People focus generally on reading, counting and such because that's where you see children struggling more obviously, it doesn't mean LDs only impact academic abilities.

I agree that you can't really speak 20-30 languages fluently, but that's not what most polyglots claim they can do anyway. Most of them admit honestly that they have varying levels of ability in each of the languages they learn. Nobody claims they can discuss serious philosophical or scientific topics in all 20-30 languages flawlessly, but it doesn't mean they can only discuss "easy topics" only. A polyglot may have studied Science in English but spends a lot of time reading Chinese literature, studying philosophy in Greek and reading news in Spanish. Obviously they will be able to discuss the respective topics in each language better, but it doesn't mean they can only talk about the weather in each language. Your statement "you will always have one predominant language that will enable you to describe reality fully precisely" shows you've never been near people who grew up bilingual or trilingual. People like us are used to using multiple languages in our lives to describe our reality. We think in multiple languages depending on the situation, and our brain doesn't register that "I'm thinking in X language". It just happens. And when you gain ability in your third/fourth/fifth language, you start to be able to think in those languages too without any translation from your native language(s).