PeterMollenburg wrote:Hi Ogrim,
I hope things are well with you and your language learning is going well. You have a remarkably high number of languages at B2 or above. How do you do it? And, i'm curious, any knowledge of the Alsatian language?
PM
Thank you for the question PM. The answer has to be a bit longish, but as it is not the first time people ask this, I've decided to reply as honestly and succinctly as I can.
I start with a couple of
caveats: Firtly, I have no certificates to prove my level in any of these languages, it is an autoevaluation to the best of my abilities. Secondly, my level may vary depending on whether we talk about reading, listening, writing or speaking. My indication of a B2 is sort of a "middle point" - for a language like Catalan I am probably a C1 in reading, a strong B2 in listening, a B1 in writing and a weak B1 in speaking. I just can't put all that information in a short profile like this.
How do I do it? Well, I am not so young any longer, I have spent many years juggling several languages at the same time. After many years I can say that learning a language well takes time. I should also say that the majority of my languages are from the Romance family, so I've got a lot "for free", at least when it comes to comprehension due to similarities in grammar and vocabulary between these languages. That being said, I have had the opportunity to live in different countries and be in a position where I just have to use several languages every day. Maybe the best answer to the question is in something I wrote in my log on HTLAL back in 2015, so I will quote that rather long post, with a few modifications to reflect changes in my situation:
The multilingual everyday life
After some hesitation I have decided to write about my everyday multilingual experience on the forum to share an experience which maybe someone will find interesting, and which goes some way to explain the list of languages and the levels indicated in my profile.
Norwegian is my native language, and from a young age I got interested in learning languages. I did a degree in Romance linguistics at the University of Oslo, where I spent six years full-time studying Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, Catalan and Romansh, as well as Latin.
I left Norway more than 20 years ago to work in other European countries, and since then my main working language has been English. It is also 20 years ago that I married a Spanish girl, so the family language is Spanish. Since I moved to France almost 10 years ago, my second working language and my “street” language” is French. Now this may seem like a nice “compartmentalisation”, but it is not as straightforward. I don’t use only Spanish at home, or only English when writing documents at work, or only French when I do my shopping. Life is more complex, and to illustrate it, here is what could be described as a typical day in my life:
I usually walk to work listening to the radio, it can be BBC4 or France Info, to get an overview of the news. If something particular has been going on in, lets say Germany or Spain, I may listen to NDR Info or Cadena SER instead. Arriving at work, I order a coffee and croissant (in French), and have breakfast, sometimes with an English-speaking colleague. If I arrive early at work, I spend the first twenty minutes quickly checking out the news on websites in any of my languages. Then I might have a meeting, where we will mostly speak French, although both working languages may be used indistinctively. After that I spend some time answering e-mails, again in both English and French, I may draft a memo for my Director in French and (as I work in HR) prepare a vacancy notice in English. With a few colleagues I speak Spanish, and with another a little bit of German, but mostly we stick to the two official languages. If the phone rings and I don’t recognise the number, I never know whether I will be talking French or English. In the lunch break, if I have time, I normally spend half an hour reading something on the web in Russian or, when time allows, do a little bit of Arabic.
At least twice a week we go across the border to Germany, so then I speak German, although it is often limited to interaction with shop attendants, and with waiters if we stop for a drink or a meal before heading home. It does happen from time to time that I get engaged in longer conversations in German.
I try to fit in some real study time every day, my priority still being to improve my Russian, but now with Arabic and Greek added.
I don't watch a lot of TV, but I have a wide choice both through my cable provider and through apps on my tablet, so depending on what goes on in the world, I may watch programmes in Spanish, Catalan, French, German, Russian, Portuguese etc.
Then there is the time I set aside for reading. I read a lot of news and subscribe to a number of electronic newspapers and magazines in French, German, Spanish, Romansh and Russian. I normally also read two or three books in parallel, there is always a Russian book on my reading list, and then I alternate between books in all the other languages. Right now I am reading books in Russian, German, Catalan and French, next month it may be Russian, Portuguese and Romansh.
All this sounds great, right, a dream come true for any polyglot? Yes, it is mostly a positive experience, but it is also challenging and sometimes frustrating. Challenging because switching between at least three languages regularly throughout the day, every day, actually takes a lot of energy, even when you are confident and "fluent". The frustrating part is that I use two of my languages professionally, and this means ideally working at a C2 level both in oral and written communication. I think I am more or less at that level in both French and English on a good day, but sometimes when I get tired, especially my French suffers and suddenly I am no longer able to express an idea with the clarity that I want. This is frustrating, especially if it is an important conversation where you want your arguments to be listened to, or you have to draft an e-mail explaining why you cannot accommodate a request from a colleague.
Speaking Spanish with my wife comes automatically and without any effort, after so many years it is natural. However, what all this means is that I hardly use my native language, except for the occasional phone call to relatives back in Norway, the few times I go back to visit and whenever I feel like reading a book or watching a TV programme in Norwegian. I don’t think that my Norwegian has “declined”, but sometimes I actually have to make an effort to speak Norwegian well. A curiosity in that regard is that I have difficulty finding the right vocabulary to describe what my job is about, as all my job-related terminology is in English and French. Still, when I speak Norwegian, most of the time the effort involved is much less than when I juggle between two or three other languages at the same time.
I have the opportunity to live this multilingual life partly by choice, partly by chance. I would not want to switch it for a monolingual (or bilingual) life in Norway, and although it feels good sometimes to be in a purly Norwegian-speaking environment, I would miss my multilingual experience if that were to be a permanent state of affairs.