Polyglots, Language Maintenance and Lucky Seven

Polyglots

As a language addict, I start with the best of intentions for sticking to one particular language till I've achieved a particular goal. It doesn't always work. Lately, I've been reading about famous polyglots again. I blame The Linguist Blogger. Sure, I'd been straying a little bit - listening to ItalianPod and FrenchPod (and even some SpanishPod), while listening to my Michel Thomas Mandarin and fussing with my Brezhoneg Buan hag Aes. But mostly I was focused on learning Breton and trying to make something of my Mandarin. Then, yesterday, I encountered this: How Many Languages Is It Possible to Learn? What's worse, it included links to earlier posts on famous linguists past and present. And then there's this sad piece of news:

If you have a life that not only gives you the opportunity but also necessitates that or greatly benefits from knowing thirteen languages well then you will probably speak thirteen languages well. If you have a very monolingual lifestyle then even maintaining one other language will most likely be quite difficult.

Well, actually it's good news if your life's journey requires you to be a polyglot - you have a fair shot at pulling it off. But for the aspiring polyglot who lives a monolingual life, it's a tough thing to hear. It jibes with my own experience however: I make almost no effort to learn Spanish, but my Spanish keeps improving, albeit at a glacial pace, because I use it at work. My French is humming along because I speak it with several colleagues. And my Mandarin and Italian - which I've far less occasion to use - always seem rusty, no matter whether I study hard or let my studies slide. For Mandarin, especially, I'm tempted to think that I need either to ramp up my studies enough to use it almost exclusively with the Mandarin speakers I know, or forget it.

Which brings us to language maintenance...

You always hear about bilingual children and how great it is to teach your kid a second language. Actually working in the language business, I know better: Children will do everything they can to avoid having to maintain an extra language unless it's absolutely necessary. I expect it's the same thing with adults, though we never think of it that way: The world traveler maintains at least the basics in a few languages because frankly his life is all the easier for the mental exertion required to maintain them. If you're maintaining your Russian because you like to imagine yourself the kind of person who would read Dostoevsky in the original, but you've no one to actually speak with or who will even understand your explanations of why it makes the difference, your brain is going to be very cross with you for all the energy you make it spend on something that doesn't otherwise make it easier to plan out your life. That's why we do the stuff with movies, chat groups, etc. You're not just immersing yourself in the language so you can absorb it better. You're also fooling your neurons into believing its worth their time to make the connections to maintain another language. This makes me wonder: Maybe the answer isn't just more exposure, longer immersion periods, better memory tricks, etc. Maybe what we really need is a way to replicate the psychological pain of being in a foreign environment and not being able to communicate unless you really learn.

And now something completely different...

Lucky Seven

Isn't it funny that the great lucky number would be the number of things we could keep in our mind at once! Isn't it funnier still that we don't do more to exploit this!

I've been fooling around with Iverson lists still more. I'm finding that even going through the process once is far better than anything I've used before. Yet when I pick up my language books, the vocabularies are for thirty and forty items. Michel Thomas Mandarin is teaching one or two things at a time. Phrasebooks have four items for one thing and thirty-four for the next. I'm thinking there's another way to do this. Imagine if when you opened your Lonely Planet phrasebook before going into the restaurant, you found a list of seven things to say and seven things you might like to eat and drink. Imagine if your textbook broke vocabulary down into blocks of seven or less, with the items in each block related. Would it make a difference?

A lesson might go like this:

Vocabulary
A
Another
I would like... please.
Please give me...
Cup
Cup of coffee
Cup of tea

Structures:
I would like a cup of coffee, please.
I would like another cup.
Please give me a cup of tea.
Please give me another cup.

Once you've got those, the next lesson could be seven items about glasses of water and mugs of beer and such, with one or two more structures ("I could go for...", "There's something wrong with this..."). In seven items, you've got eight sentences. In fourteen items, you can drink tons of stuff or send it back.

This sort of thing always looks good in theory, is harder to do in practice. But I notice that lots of little books do things by the tens, when humans do things by the sevens. Where one goes with these musings is hard to say. But one thing that could be immensely useful is to find out how the top polyglots chunk the language data they're learning. Maybe the key isn't whether they use bilingual or monolingual dictionaries or listen to the radio instead of watching movies. Maybe the key is to find out how many words they jot down before skipping a line, and how many flashcards feels like too many, that sort of thing.

Just a thought.