Jack of All Language Trades?

The other day, Street Smart Language Learning was writing about serial language learning and its temptations. As he puts it:

As you progress farther and farther into the language, finding those discrete units that you don't already know takes more and more time. Thus, going from 90% to 99% proficiency will take a heckuva lot longer than going from 0% to 10%, or probably even 0% to 50%. The point of debate this brings up is whether it's better to get a bunch of languages up to 90% proficiency, or one or two up to 99% proficiency.

And that gets us to linguistic wanderlust, i.e., the desire to work on getting a new language up to 90% before the previous one is up to 99%. As Language Fixation describes, the speed at which you can do this always make it attractive to the serial language learner.

I think there's another element here, though: How much good does that last 9% do? I spent some time in grad school for French literature. As a result, I know a fair bit about how to discuss poetry in French. However, I don't know the word for monkey wrench. A few years ago, I sought to remedy this by asking a native French speaker. She didn't know the French word either, though she knew the English. For me, "monkey wrench" represents a gap in my French vocabulary. For her, it's a word she doesn't really need to use, so "Give me the wrench... no, the other one" is good enough for a native speaker. I think this is one of the really problematic parts of getting from 90% to 99% - you have to know more than a native speaker, because the language learning process tends to leave you with different lacunae in your vocabulary than the process of growing up in the culture. If your goal is to be grade-A fluent, that's something you have to deal with. But do you need to be at 99% to enjoy a language and its culture? Some people do, especially if the work or hobby that brings them to the language is really involved. But deciding to get acquainted with another language and culture, instead of developing a native's sensibilities for the one you're currently studying, is not an error. It's a choice.

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I'm enjoying a four day vacation right now. I thought about using the time to burrow further into Old Irish. But something told me I ought consider a different direction. So I'm reviewing my Latin. Over the last few days, I've gone through 8 of 12 lessons in the Cambridge Latin Course (Unit 1), 5 of 35 lessons in Lingva Latina (Part 1) and I've been reading at random from the 3rd year Oxford Latin Course. It's amazing how quickly it comes back.

There was a time when I was a serial language learner. I'd learned beginner stuff for 20+ languages and had only a tenuous grasp on more than one or two. (Hence the blog title.) But where the question used to be, "What new language are you studying?" it's now, "What language are you back to?" French, Italian and Spanish are always with me, of course. But generally, the other languages I study are languages I've looked at before. And each time I return to a language, I find that what I've learned about language learning and related languages since the last time makes the experience richer and makes points that formerly baffled me seem obvious. It's an approach that works for me because I'm not on a deadline and my real world use of language is mainly in coaching other learners and offering the necessary pleasantries to help people feel more at home - breadth of language experience serves me better than depth would anyway.

If you want to be - or your circumstances require you to be - a polyglot, I think the old thing about how much to learn before moving on, etc., can be a canard. At some point, you're going to become not a serial language learner but a circular language learner. If you're a serious student of language, you're probably still learning words in your native tongue. If that's not done with all the practice you've got in it, what chance is there that your German is done so that you're ready to move on to French? The other thing is that if you want to be a polyglot, you can't learn German, then forget it to focus on French. Sooner or later, you're going to have to find a way for the two of them to co-exist in your head.

Street Smart Language Learning was pivoting off a post by Language Fixation which included the following observation:

Another horrible side effect of this perceptual problem [of it taking to long to move from intermediate to advanced], is language wanderlust. I’ve personally studied probably 15 languages or so, and in most of them i’m still at a beginner stage. I think one of the reasons that i flip around so much is that when i’m starting to lose track of my progress in one language, and i’m unable to see the constant motion that’s happening, i start to itch for that thrill that comes with the seemingly rapid increase at the start of another language.

The answer to the problem, for me, is to replace the thrill of learning a new language with the thrill of rediscovering an old one. In this way, you can build a core of languages that you get progressively more comfortable with, rather than feeling like, I'm thinking about French today, but I have to do my German.

Some people, I know, are very smart, very disciplined, very intelligent in their execution of learning languages. If you're one of those people, I salute you in learning a language to 99% before flitting off to another one, if that's what you want to do. But if your long term interest is in having a strong foundation in a number of languages, the circular model is something you're going to wind up following if you want to maintain multiple languages. So if you've got that Wanderlust, don't fight it. Channel it, and over time you'll see your understanding of multiple languages grow.