What is the point of mastering/learning so many languages?

General discussion about learning languages
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Re: What is the point of mastering/learning so many languages?

Postby Iversen » Fri Nov 05, 2021 6:40 pm

If I just had studied English (in addition to my native Danish) would I then have been better at it? No - it might conceivably have made a difference if I had lived for a long time in an Anglophone country because I then would have known some more idioms for small-talk and more names for gadgets and toys, but since I don't live there I don't need them.

So why a third language? Well, German is our neighbour to the South and I have access to a lot of television from Germany - people in Copenhagen may be more oriented towards Sweden, and if I lived there I might not have had German in school, but it would have been a great loss, given our geographical position. As for French - well, that's what I studied, and you have to study something . and again, would my English have been better if I didn't add those languages? Of course not - English is so pervasive here in Denmark that the time I have spent on other languages wouldn't have mattered much - but my travels abroad would have definitely been more boring.

After that - well, I have learnt most Germanic and Romance languages to a level where I don't need to spend all my time studying any of them. It took time to learn them, but now they are basically 'for free'.

But then I'm also studying a bunch of Slavic languages for the moment. If I had concentrated on one of them (for instance Russian) and listened to a lot of speech in it, maybe even spent some time travelling around in a relevant location, then I might already now have spoken it well enough for a monolingual trip of a week or so (which is my criterion for claiming that I speak a language), but I have made another choice: to study more or less the whole group at once. And that is of course a debatable choice, but the question remains: did my old languages suffer as a result of this? Well, last time I went to the language café at the main library in my town I spent around 1½ hour chatting away in Spanish with a group that included two native speakers (one from Spain, the other from Argentina), who spoke at full throttle to each others and to us Danes, and I had no problems keeping up the speed or level in my own contributions. I could have read a lot of Spanish novels and newspapers and watched videos in Spanish in the time I have spent on the Slavic languages (and Greek and Albanian and Esperanto and Indonesian and Irish), but it doesn't seem that my ability to communicate in the language has suffered.

So what have I lost by adding more languages? Nothing really - except time, which I could have wasted on smalltalk in Danish or football or... well, I had almost mentioned music, but I did in fact spend a lot of time of music so that time-consuming activity should be blamed as much as adding a few languages more to the collection.
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Re: What is the point of mastering/learning so many languages?

Postby jimmy » Fri Nov 05, 2021 7:54 pm

I think I can simplify the answer by this response as reason:

"to understand something better always..."
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Re: What is the point of mastering/learning so many languages?

Postby Le Baron » Fri Nov 05, 2021 10:07 pm

Everything is fleeting in this world and when you go it mostly fades away. So if anyone decides there is something more 'worthy' on which to spend their time, then okay, but remember that it all goes the same way in the end.

Most of life is spent working (and it's getting worse with higher retirement ages) and then you get how much time to spend afterwards? That could be an argument for either opinion: that life is short and shouldn't be wasted trying to accumulate multiple languages you might not even use; or that it may help you to extract more out of life than was otherwise possible.

I guess we can choose either (or somewhere in between).
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Re: What is the point of mastering/learning so many languages?

Postby IronMike » Sun Nov 07, 2021 2:38 pm

For me it started for work. I needed Russian proficiency. I had already been somewhat interested in languages leading up to that, but DLI got me more interested. So of course when I worked in West Berlin I had to learn German. Then it just kept on.

Now, I'd like to have pretty good proficiency in 3-4 languages besides English. Why? Mostly reading, but then also I like being able to speak with native speakers of those languages as well.

As for the brag/show off aspect, not so much. I mean, is it really impressive that it took me 30+ years to get a 3/3 in Russian? Not really.
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Re: What is the point of mastering/learning so many languages?

Postby Diomedes » Sun Nov 07, 2021 3:38 pm

IronMike wrote:As for the brag/show off aspect, not so much. I mean, is it really impressive that it took me 30+ years to get a 3/3 in Russian? Not really.


In my view, it is really impressive, because it shows a lot of resilience. You probably started and interrupted this project several times, because life has its challenges, and in the end you succeeded. You have my respect.
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Re: What is the point of mastering/learning so many languages?

Postby Ug_Caveman » Tue Nov 09, 2021 3:31 pm

I successfully convinced a class of 15 year old science students that in order to be a good physicist, one must master Latin, German and French - with the following justifications:

The first two for reading Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and Einstein's Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie, which I explained to them lost so much true meaning in translation - and that in order to get the most out of a visit to CERN, they would have to be able to speak French in order to blast hadrons around Switzerland. Apparently I'm rather good at convincing my students of total nonsense...

I'm not entirely sure which is harder - learning those three languages or mastering tensor calculus...

In terms of a more serious answer - everyone has a different reason for accomplishing something. In my case my language study is mostly out of desire as opposed to any real practical application (even before COVID I'd not been abroad in five years.) Now I'm also not a hyperpolyglot, but I'd like to be - and my answer wouldn't change much. It's mostly a pursuit of desire and interest above practical applications.
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Re: What is the point of mastering/learning so many languages?

Postby kelvin921019 » Fri Nov 12, 2021 3:35 pm

It's can be just a hobby / pastime / interest. If you don't see the point of doing it, don't do it.

Sometimes I just don't know why when it comes to learning language you need a strong reason or justification for doing so. It's to me like playing sports or learning a musical instrument. I don't need to explain to people how the sound of guitar is so fascinating and I find playing guitar helpful to my life, I just learn it and play it (even tho not good at all).
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Re: What is the point of mastering/learning so many languages?

Postby ulum » Mon Nov 15, 2021 11:34 am

acorngalaxy wrote:
Isn’t it like eating a hamburger, but with nothing in between the buns?


Since you like metaphors, I don't need to visit the Mariana Trench to enjoy the sea. A few meters from the coast is usually enough to have a good experience of the sea.

einzelne wrote: the level when you can comfortably read Dante in Italian


Dude, not even Italians can read Dante in Italian.
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Re: What is the point of mastering/learning so many languages?

Postby rdearman » Mon Nov 15, 2021 11:45 am

Even Dante couldn't read Dante.
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Re: What is the point of mastering/learning so many languages?

Postby Iversen » Mon Nov 15, 2021 12:44 pm

Even I can read Dante's comedy in Italian - I just don't know what it means. :lol:

In actual fact I read the entire Inferno (the most only interesting part) during my study years in the 70s, and the footnotes took up as much space in the book as the text itself because Dante refers to not only a multitude of contemporary persons and events, but also to sundry classical topics (albeit as they were interpreted during his lifetime, which isn't always as we interpret them now). There are some old words and expressions (and a lot of apostrophes) in the language, but not enough to prevent me and modern Italians from reading the book from an edition with footnotes. Whether we care to do so is another matter.

Reading Dante is not worse than reading Shakespeare.
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