Polyglots in the Wild - Today I Saw

General discussion about learning languages
MaggieMae
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Re: Polyglots in the Wild - Today I Saw

Postby MaggieMae » Thu Jun 30, 2022 2:44 pm

I live in the German part of Switzerland. Monoglots are rare here. By the time students hit 6th grade (11-12 years old), they are competent in Swiss German, High German, have studied English for 3 years, and French for 1. And that's just the native kids. Kids with migratory backgrounds typically add 1-3 languages to that list, even if they were born in Switzerland themselves. As adults, they tend to focus on either French or English, but that means even the people who want to be monolingual are still to a small degree bi- or trilingual because of the school system. (Enter debate on whether or not Swiss German counts as its own language for this figure, too.) And most people that work in any sort of service field are quad-lingual.

There are so many languages here, and I love it. :mrgreen:
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thevagrant88
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Re: Polyglots in the Wild - Today I Saw

Postby thevagrant88 » Thu Jun 30, 2022 10:35 pm

I mean, sure I’ve know many speakers of three or more languages. Many times. But it was always just who they were and their life circumstances though, they weren’t language nerds or anything. I’ve never ran into anybody casually studying Somali at the park.
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zenmonkey
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Re: Polyglots in the Wild - Today I Saw

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Jul 01, 2022 2:57 pm

thevagrant88 wrote:I mean, sure I’ve know many speakers of three or more languages. Many times. But it was always just who they were and their life circumstances though, they weren’t language nerds or anything. I’ve never ran into anybody casually studying Somali at the park.


This is what I'm talking about - language nerds somewhere unusual outside of school, classes, or libraries. I mean I could just hang out in the library language stacks and whisper 'Anki' and see who turns around.

No, I was excited because this was the equivalent of the 'Somali learner at the park' scenario.
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thevagrant88
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Re: Polyglots in the Wild - Today I Saw

Postby thevagrant88 » Fri Jul 01, 2022 3:11 pm

Yeah I’m not sure how I’d react to see someone reading an Assimil, Genki, TY on the bus. I suspect we’d become instant best friends, possibly life partners. House on a hill, white picket fence, nothing too crazy.
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Re: Polyglots in the Wild - Today I Saw

Postby philomath » Fri Jul 01, 2022 3:25 pm

The only person I can think of is my high school Spanish teacher. Besides being fluent in Arabic, English, and French (she was from Lebanon), she had also learned Spanish to fluency and was studying Italian and Russian. I think some other languages too. I used to have so much fun talking with her about languages after class!
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