How did people used to learn multiple languages?

[dubendorf]

tl;dr: How did people learn languages before Duolingo? (lol. A joke.)

I am currently reading Berlin Diary by William Shirer, who was an American living in Europe working as a foreign correspondent during the 1930s and 40s. Over the course of the book, he regularly travels between London, Paris, Geneva, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Prague, and Warsaw. As an American, he obviously speaks English, but he is apparently also fluent in at least French and German and, I believe, by his own account, speaks (bad) Italian. (Those are just the ones I am aware of.) FWIW, at the start of the book he is roughly age 30.

Likewise, his wife lives with him in Europe and apparently speaks fluent Danish as she helps communicate with correspondents in Scandinavia. She mainly lives in Geneva during the book so I presume she also speaks French.

I do want to state the obvious that most people during this time aren't foreign news correspondents and don't speak multiple languages and don't jetset (trainset?) around the world. Obviously, Shirer isn't a typical person at the time. Likewise, this was before English became the de facto international language and so perhaps there was more of a need to learn multiple languages if you wanted to travel.

That being said, I am curious how folks at this time and earlier (like the 19th century) learned multiple languages. From this thread there are some insights. There were bilingual texts and language textbooks (the Nature Method books were from the 1890s or so). Plus, obviously the wealthy could afford tutors. Was it common to learn languages in school for the few who went to college? Did people just "pick it up" on the road? Or did they just study a grammar book regularly?

The reason I ask is that language learning feels like a long and strenuous process that takes a lot of focused effort. And yet, it seems quite casual, I guess, that people had 3 or 4 languages in their pocket.

As another example, there is a guy in my Norwegian classes who, not to cast aspersions on him, doesn't seem particularly studious. He never does the homework and when directly asked a question never has the answer. And yet this guy is Albanian and lived for a time in Italy and is fluent in at least English, Albanian, and Italian. By contrast, most if not all of my academic friends basically only speak English or speak their native language plus English.

(The subtext of this, of course, is that I have been studying Norwegian quite aggressively for the better part of a year and casually for a year or two before that and yet I still feel like a baby. lol. If they could do it in 1930, is there hope for me? )

[DaveAgain]

As another example, there is a guy in my Norwegian classes who, not to cast aspersions on him, doesn't seem particularly studious. He never does the homework and when directly asked a question never has the answer. And yet this guy is Albanian and lived for a time in Italy and is fluent in at least English, Albanian, and Italian. By contrast, most if not all of my academic friends basically only speak English or speak their native language plus English.

Your Albanian classmate might have grown up able to see TV in Albanian, Italian and English (subtitled).

A member of the forum (Reineke) who no longer posts grew up in Croatia (?) but often watched TV from neighbouring countries, and attributed much of his language skills to that.

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There's a famous (Swiss?) polyglot, whose name I have forgotten , who used to listen to short-wave radio news broadcasts for much of his language learning.

EDIT
Barry Farber was born in 1930, so perhaps he might be a good match to your journalist author Mr Shirer.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 59#p166259

EDIT2
One history-of-language-learning-book I liked is, The teaching and cultivation of the French language in England during Tudor and Stuart times.

[Cainntear]

I think a large part of it is just that once you've successfully learned a couple of languages, you will have internalised the ways of working with the materials. My sister used to sweart that verb tables were essential for language learning because she'd learned several languages and had always used them. She insisted that MT couldn't be any good because he didn't use tables.

One thing I've always held to be true is that different methods work for different people not because people have different things that work well for them, but because people have different abilities to fill holes in the teaching.

If you have filled certain types of holes once, you'll be able to do it again and you won't be aware of the weaknesses in the methods because they're things you're already automatically able to compensate for.

In short: people who learned multiple languages in the old days were just people who were lucky enough to be able to learn from the material available to them.

[Le Baron]

People worked out basic stuff (or had it taught to them depending how extensive their education was), then went into the world and spent some time in engagement discovering that the reality of spoken language is more extensive than 'Pipkin's grammar of ...'

In this modern world where the view that some people pick up things faster than other people is considered too 'elitist' and not inclusive, the question has altered to: 'if we have better materials/methods now and anyone can learn a language, how come it's still so hard for me?'

It's because the hard and sometimes tiresome facts of learning a language haven't changed, but the expectations have.

[dubendorf]

Your Albanian classmate might have grown up able to see TV in Albanian, Italian and English (subtitled).

A member of the forum (Reineke) who no longer posts grew up in Croatia (?) but often watched TV from neighbouring countries, and attributed much of his language skills to that.

-------
There's a famous (Swiss?) polyglot, whose name I have forgotten , who used to listen to short-wave radio news broadcasts for much of his language learning.

I assume this is a large part of it. Just being exposed to TV or radio. I naively think it feels unlikely that this would work because I have listened to what feels like many hours of Norwegian podcasts and it just sounds like nonsense, but I guess if you do that for 10 or 20 years then you will learn something.

EDIT
Barry Farber was born in 1930, so perhaps he might be a good match to your journalist author Mr Shirer.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 59#p166259

EDIT2
One history-of-language-learning-book I liked is, The teaching and cultivation of the French language in England during Tudor and Stuart times.

This is fascinating. I will have to read Farber's book as well as Lambley's. I like the anecdote about Farber learning that the Norwegian word for squirrel is "Acorn."

[dubendorf]

I think a large part of it is just that once you've successfully learned a couple of languages, you will have internalised the ways of working with the materials. My sister used to sweart that verb tables were essential for language learning because she'd learned several languages and had always used them. She insisted that MT couldn't be any good because he didn't use tables.

One thing I've always held to be true is that different methods work for different people not because people have different things that work well for them, but because people have different abilities to fill holes in the teaching.

If you have filled certain types of holes once, you'll be able to do it again and you won't be aware of the weaknesses in the methods because they're things you're already automatically able to compensate for.

In short: people who learned multiple languages in the old days were just people who were lucky enough to be able to learn from the material available to them.

It does feel right that different things work better for one person than another whether it's because of "learning styles" or just personal preference or their ability to work around the weaknesses of the method. I assume people who learned multiple languages in the past had the right combination of 1) motivation, 2) opportunity, and 3) luck. Luck because they either became exposed to language learning by chance or they happened to find the right materials that worked for them. This would kind of explain why people had no more trouble learning languages 100 or 200 years ago than today. The hard parts of learning haven't changed demonstrably.

This also helps explain why there are such drastically varying opinions and fads in language learning from "just watch TV" to "just use verb tables" (or whatever). It all kind of "works" if the right material lands in the right person's lap under the right circumstances.

[dubendorf]

People worked out basic stuff (or had it taught to them depending how extensive their education was), then went into the world and spent some time in engagement discovering that the reality of spoken language is more extensive than 'Pipkin's grammar of ...'

In this modern world where the view that some people pick up things faster than other people is considered too 'elitist' and not inclusive, the question has altered to: 'if we have better materials/methods now and anyone can learn a language, how come it's still so hard for me?'

It's because the hard and sometimes tiresome facts of learning a language haven't changed, but the expectations have.

Yes, Shirer wasn't fussing over how many languages some guy on Youtube could learn. He was just living in Europe and figuring it out. I guess if someone has the opportunity to travel or study then they just kind of figure it out with whatever materials are on hand, whether it is a grammar book, a radio, or strangers willing to chat. Novel apps/books/courses hasn't change the basic facts of the time, opportunity, and motivation needed to learn a language.

[daegga]

More time because of servants. Private tutors. Slow (and therefore extended) travel.
The illiterate didn't write books.
I used a direct method textbook from the 1910s for starting Spanish (All Spanish Method by Guillermo Hall). It describes small group lessons in New York. And should help other teachers to use this method. Between the lines you could read that the fictional course attendants were rather wealthy. They were "decent" people and wouldn't (couldn't, there are social rules) mingle with "indecent" ones (so also not in language courses).
Some countries in the 19th century had literacy rates of 10%. If you were literate, you were already part of the elite and you could often afford a lot. That's the normal life we get presented most of the time in books. The average (educated) Joe from the books isn't the average (educated) Joe from today.
Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale gives us some glimpses into the school system of Naples in I think the 30s or 40s from the perspective of the lower class. There were entrance tests into secondary school. You weren't expected to pass them without hiring a tutor. Since primary schools wouldn't even teach the necessary subjects, at least not to a sufficient level. So we have 2-3 people of a (poor) district then go on to secondary education and learn Latin and Old Greek. Languages which are deemed too hard to learn today for our "no child left behind" pupils who have to attend secondary school.
The irony is that in the past many wanted to go to school but couldn't. Now everybody has to go to school, but nobody wants to (put in the effort). Motivation is also a factor that makes imperfect methods work.

[iguanamon]

Yes, with money a lot of problems can be solved. The Spanish telenovela I'm watching on RTVE ("La Promesa" 85 out of 462 episodes- what am I thinking !) had a brief conversation about the mother's son who had an English nanny back in the early 1900's. She said it took her a long term to fix his Spanish "R's", but he was fluent in English.

I grew up with considerably less resources, far from a major metropolitan area, with virtually no immigration to speak of. I learned as best I could with the limited resources I had available to me. It wasn't until I could get out of town that I could speak and advance with native-speakers of Spanish. Watching telenovelas on cable TV with Spanish-subs was a huge help... then came the internet.

Yeah, people learned languages before mass media/internet, but they typically weren't middle/working class, nor did they live in rural areas (unless landed gentry). Things are so much easier now. Cheap airfares, mass immigration, the internet, have all democratized language-learning. With sufficient time and enough motivation, anyone with an internet connection has all they need to learn a language on their own nowadays.

In the old days- I didn't even know what was available... or where and how to get it. If you lived out in the country far from a city, the odds were definitely stacked against you.

[Iversen]

Some of us are old enough to have lived long ago before the advent of internet, but we had libraries and bookstores with dictionaries and grammars and text books which sometimes even had vinyl records or cassettes attached (though you couldn't bet on them having those things - and I personally never used those aural sources because they were abominably slow and irritating). In my family we only got a TV set when I was around 8 years old, and in the beginning we only had one single Danish channel, although it also sometimes showed films and other stuff in English. After a couple of years they invented cable TV and we also got programs in German and Swedish. And in school we got English from 4. class (where I was 10½ years old) and German was added one or two years later, followed by French and passive Latin even later. I learned basic Italian and Spanish from textbooks at home.

I am also old enough to have benefitted from a more lax attitude to study plans at the university .. and from being born at precisely the right time to buy Interrail cards from they were introduced in 1972.

So we didn't have Google translate or Youtube or Wikipedia or anything like that, but we had enough resources to learn half a dozen languages or more if we just chose do do so. When I entered university at the tender age of 18 I knew at least the basics of something like seven languages, but in some cases almost entirely from written sources. For instance I had hardly heard any spoken Italian or Spanish when I first visited the relevant countries, but when I arrived at Milano Garibaldi a misty morning in 1972 during my first Interrail trip I knew enough Italian to ask for directions to the Duomo and later on to ask for a granita di mente in a bar (green sludge ice with mint taste)- and the Italians seemed to understand what I said. What more could you ask for with that background?

Today we have got all the resources of the internet to help us, but the problem could be that the internet also lures people to waste their time on all sorts of irrelevant distractions - and I include Anglophone commercials and facebook and MusX and mindnumbing reality TV and other dire abominations among those distractions. And maybe people also expect everything to be easier than it really is because of the sheer multitude of resources they now are offered - but not all of those resources are really worth the time you spend on them. In the old days we had just the books and some TV programs and limited travel opportunities, so maybe we just took more care to squeeze every bit of learning out of the few resources we had...