kitakitsune wrote:

This thread had a lot of potential...

Threads like this turn me off from forums. Too much debate and not enough collaboration on helping fellow learners. (Not directing this to anyone but you'll notice this if you read a few threads).

Last edited by ta12121 (2012 February 23, 9:44 pm)

I just reread his second (i think) post. I admit it is somewhat intense haha

TheVinster wrote:

HonyakuJoshua seems like the type of guy that might invite himself to parties to boast about himself. No offense but just admire the 20-year-old's commitment and motivation to do what he's even done so far. Don't overanalyze it too much. It's not like he won the competition so that he could say HonyakuJoshua respected him.

The person is gifted he has a skill that none of us has. Am I impressed by his skills? Yes. Do I admire his "commitment and motivation"? No. However, I do admire his humility. When I originally saw this post it just didn't interest me. We are all just as committed to our studies as he is. We all have our own motivations for studying languages. We are all admire different things.

That's odd that his Afrikaans would be almost native-live but his Dutch would be a little "off."  I thought they were closely related languages.

kusterdu wrote:

That's odd that his Afrikaans would be almost native-live but his Dutch would be a little "off."  I thought they were closely related languages.

I know very little about Afrikaans or Dutch but Swedish and Danish, two closely related languages, sound completely different. The vocabularies overlap to a very large extent, but the difference in pronounciation is ridiculous

SomeCallMeChris wrote:

My understanding from talking to people from India is that no outsiders learn the local dialects. Everyone speaks some combination of Hindi, English, and Punjabi so you would only need three languages to interpret pretty much everything in India.

There's no need for any 100-dialect superstars when everyone is somewhat multilingual. Without solid evidence, I would assume the same situation holds in other areas with many dialects, hence the prominence of Mandarin/Cantonese in China, French in Africa, etc. (I don't think Spanish in South America is the same, I believe the original languages have largely fallen into disuse.)

More particularly, without solid evidence, I wouldn't believe the existence of a super-polyglot just because an area happens to have many dialects. Such a person may exist, or they may not, but the dialects don't prove anything about such a person's existence.

Sorry to necropost but in the book babel no more there are references to multilinguals in the amazon and india who speak six languages and the anthropologist Arthur Sorensen is quoted as saying that everyone knows three four or more languages in the north west of the amazon along the Vaupes river. i am trying to find the article. I thought i had read something like this before.

thanks. Looking back on this thread I agree with everything that I said.