The 6-Language Factor - A Benchmark to Structure Your Progress 

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Teilhard de Chardin once formulated a secret law of universe saying that higher complexity means higher consciousness. Maybe people who learn multiple languages intuitively strive for this increased brain complexity in order to achieve a higher state of mind. I use or learn six languages every day and I can’t understand why so many people find it more scary than desirable. Using only one language is like eating same food all the time.

Hi, your videos are always inspiring, I am a native spanish speaker from Argentina, currently learning Latin and Middle Egyptian, I want to learn Coptic in the future too. That's all I want, Spanish, English, Latin, Middle Egyptian and Coptic. My resources are Lingua Latina per se Illustrata and Allen's Introduction to Middle Egyptian. Yeah I am kinda obsessed with ancient languages, but I have to be realistic this time, five languages is my limit. I know deep in my heart that the common path is to learn French to use the rare Assimil courses. I need to plan my schedule, continue with your great work Alexander. Coptic is thrown there in the plan, because everyone says that I should understand Coptic to really appreciate hieroglyphs. Akkadian is very interesting, but I should focus myself in Ancient Rome and Egypt.

A handful seems like a very comforting number and something worth aspiring to, as well as managable in terms of maintenance once you have learned those. Reading a book in one, then shfiting to another till you make w whole round - I don't think much harm would stem from pausing with the other ones for a couple of weeks (even two-three months), if your command already allows you to read literature. A relaxed, comforting perspective, particularly compared to Polyglot's Daily Workout Horror Video. Have a good evening, Alexander. Thank you for the time.

Thanks for this. I chose to aspire to learn 6 languages because it seemed like the most I could manage. It was nice to see that maybe it’s also a logical goal.

Fantastic video, Professor. I think it's quite easy to have polyglot inspirations, but I've noticed in my personal life that as much as I would like to speak many other languages, I still have other interests, namely 1) continuing to master my native language 2) socializing 3) music/other hobbies. I am interested in how very related languages work to maintain themselves/each other. If I were to establish a "6 language" set, I could see this number being 6+native language, especially if 3 or so of the languages were closely related. To be theoretical, my list might be: 0. English (native) 1. Latin (cultural heritage) 2. Ancient Greek (cultural heritage) 3. French (world/political language) 4. Mandarin (political language) 5. Italian (heritage language) 6. Hebrew, Arabic, or Turkish ("exotic" language) I am interested in how this number could fluctuate. Learning Latin, French, and Italian would probably allow those languages to maintain each other, as long as 1 or 2 are in use. Let's say that Mandarin, Italian, and Hebrew were learned to a B2 conversational level, I wonder if one could add another (especially an Indo-European language) at around that same level, let's say Croatian or Russian or German. It's a fascinating topic. Thanks for the video!

Very interesting video! Here are my six: 1. English (native language) 2. French (political/academic language) 3. Ancient Greek (cultural heritage) 4. Modern Greek (personal heritage) 5. Amharic (interest language) 6. Perhaps Esperanto? The first 5 are the ones I am fairly set on right now, particularly Ancient Greek and Amharic.

I’m glad to hear I’m not crazy for wanting to learn multiple languages. I have a native English speaker from the United States i’ve taught myself Spanish, American Sign Language, Esperanto as a summer project last year, I can understand Tagalog but rarely speak it, i’m currently working on Italian and would like to learn Latin afterwards. If anyone has any recommendations outside of the usual lingua latina, please let me know. I would also like to learn Hawaiian and Japanese at some point. Another great video, I look forward to seeing you were institute grow, thanks for providing so much practical information and inspiration to the language learning community, Professor Arguelles

Fantastyczny kanał. Pozdrawiam

I can carve and send you a wand if you'd like to try it! barring that, lovely work. I was once told by a serbian that they have a local saying that roughly translates to "The more languages you know, the more human you are." and I'd have to incline to agree. Remembered it since

When I was in Turkey as a child, when my mother was teaching at an American school, one of the other teachers was from Africa. His son, who was 8, could speak 11 languages!! But after they spent a year in a year, he had already forgotten several of them. So sometimes they do pick up all 11 languages!

Thank you for the excellent video! Let’s see… In my case, I grew up multilingual in 3 languages: English, Kannada and Hindi, in that order of proficiency. I currently live in France, so learning French has been my first real language learning experience, since the other languages I just acquired as a child. I would very much like for my 5th language to be German once my French is up to speed, for a number of reasons; I love the sound of German and how precise it seems, I have/have had friends and family there, and I feel French and German together would improve my understanding and use of English as well. What 6th language would you recommend me? :)

Thank you Professor for your very inspiring and useful videos. I’ve learnt Turkish to an upper intermediate level. Yet, I want to reach an advanced level in it so that I can read literature and academic books. But now, I really want to learn French too (from scratch). How should I divide my time between them? Which one should take the biggest portion of time everyday ? I don’t want my Turkish to lag behind. Thanks a lot professor 😊

Thank you for your weekly videos. May I please ask a question. What do you think would happen to my German, which is at a high B1, if I pause studying it and study Danish or Swedish for 6 months and then return to German?

Thank you for this video. We often need a reminder not to fly off the rails with a bunch of languages if we want to be able to a use handful comfortably, as you say. This also helps me realize that my goals are quite modest and doable and therefore less daunting.

Huh, it's interesting how you've proposed these categories. Here's my list for them: World language: English Classical language: Latin Major languages of culture: French, German Something exotic: Japanese Ancestral language: Old Church Slavonic That does make 6 for me and it's a 6 that I have been doing the longest out of all my languages! I did study Polish as well but that one came later

I have never liked liked audiobooks, because you can't pause an actor and ask him what such and such word means. If I see an unknown word, I click. That's a rule. I now use ReadEra, a PDF, Mobi, Epub and everything else reader and even in its free version it now has TTS which is quite good for a few languages and acceptable for most. So, now I can read more, by alternate between silent reading, reading out loud, and listening and reading. Every time I see an unknown word, I pause and use Google Translate, which is built-in, or click on the dictionary option which leads me to an internet page and a Google search for the definition of that word. Works with idioms too. Suffice to say, I've been reading way more this way, because reading is tiresome, but reading this way is a lot less tiresome.

How would you compare the difficulty of ancient languages like Ancient Greek or Sanskrit with Arabic or Korean? Is it just not a fair comparison because there isn’t really a communicative aspect to the ancient languages?

You have a combination of accents, I guess from Colombia maybe? In English there is a little British influence, so it's hard to tell.

I have a question: is it never too late to try learning multiple languages? That's my main mental hurdle at this point. I'm bilingual but I want to learn another or more languages to read and learn the intellectual histories of other cultures. I never seem to be able to overcome that hurdle. It is like doubt and it is unfortunate that I feel this way.

Most people comment about the cat, but I'd like to just say that his rocking chair looks absolutely magnificent

"but 6 is also about the number of languages one can develop and enjoy maintaining simultaneously at high levels. " I don't know if I agree with this. If someone knows 6 languages from different families, it doesn't take much more effort to add another in same family. I don't think a French reader has to give up his habit of reading French literature if he wants to learn Spanish too. I prefer to think of it terms of branches instead like a Slavic branch, a Romance branch, a Germanic branch...since there's so much vocabulary shared among languages if you've learned the major vocabulary from the etymological sources of Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit.

Love the cat ❤️

I'm curious, what would you say to those who say that machine translation makes polyglottery obsolete?

I've often lamented being born "handicapped" while growing up as I grew up in a monolingual household. However, over the decades since, I started to question if this "curse" was really without benefit. I've encountered a whole ton of Asian Americans who speak a second language at a passable level due to growing up with parents that spoke it. What I started to notice was that, seemingly more often than not, when they try to write English, their strongest language, they'll write things here and there that have grammar I find to be completely non-native and quite peculiar sounding. While even with monolingual speakers I realize not everyone has a penchant for structuring things properly when writing, the kind of mistakes I see these Asian folks making are not ones I've seen a 100% monolingual make, no matter how unskilled at writing they are. I think this may relate to grammar errors so extremely nuanced that, upon revision, the bilingual cannot readily perceive as erroneous. I don't think this is universal, as I believe that any bilingual of this sort that pays extraordinary attention to their language use (for example, those who are fans of writing) will not have these issues. But it *has* led me to wonder if the *average* person out in society, especially being average insofar as not being extraordinarily attentive with how they use their native language, will pay a definite price for being bilingual that the lazy monolingual will not. Thoughts? Has anyone else noticed this or am I crazy? It may be noteworthy that I've noticed this mostly with Asians, as those language are not related to English. A Mexican, otoh, may actually reinforce his English knowledge with Spanish to some degree. (Again, this is just my wild speculation.)

Do you speak koine Greek ?

Please note ! It's a myth that everyone in Switzerland speaks 3 languages ! It's very uncommon to meet fluent French speakers in Zurich for example . Similarly it's very rare to meet fluent German speaker in Lausanne.. I speak from experience...

Such a delicious cat 😋🍴

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