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Re: OT: How common is it to speak 5+ languages?

From:Sai Emrys <saizai@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 21:35
> >So, how common would you say it is for someone to be conversant enough > >in 5+ languages where it's more than what your average "teach > >yourself" book is going to prepare you for?
From my experience: I speak a bunch. English, Spanish, French, Russian, ASL pretty much fluently (though half-illiterate in Russian, since I learned it at home and never read much; can't write at all) - "fluently" as in "good enough to hold intelligent (intelligble?) conversation on most common topics". It wouldn't be too hard to break my vocabulary knowledge with jargon, but I learn that fast; just a matter of experience. I know a few more - Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin - from school, but never got good enough to have a critical mass of it, and so they have declined a lot since then (sad, since my once-almost-fluent Japanese is now just able to do phrases). This, however, seems to be a major aberration around here (Bay Area, CA currently; upstate NY before). My parents know several Cyrillic languages - both Russian immigrants; I have a cousin (a poet / Russian teacher at NWU) who knows about a dozen languages fluently, half of them close relatives. I've a few friends - generally children of immigrants - who grew up speaking some relatively-obscure branch (e.g. Latvian) and then learned the more common one (e.g. Russian). Plus English makes 3, and it's not that unlikely to learn one or two more in high school or college. Native English speakers wouldn't get that head start. I suspect that people in Europe would be more easily exposed to a wide variety of languages (geographically), and hence more likely to speak several. I remember asking a customs agent once about this, and they said it was part of the job requirement to speak at least [some list of 5+]. - Sai

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Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>