Different paths but one common goal
For the untrained eye, polyglots all look alike. They speak “many” languages and that’s it. The reality is quite different. There are 3 kinds of polyglots who follow different patterns but follow the same goal: gather knowledge in multiple languages.
1. The Language Family-focused polyglot
The first one, and most often found around the world, is the language-family focused polyglot. These are the people who learn 10 or more languages in 5 years. You could think they are “geniuses”, but they aren’t. Their system is much simpler.
The two most common ones are the “Europe-focused” (1) and “East Asia-focused” (2). …
How to come to the conversation mentally ready
No matter which language I learn, I am always afraid of my first conversation with a native speaker.
I am an introvert who already struggles with starting conversations with strangers in my native language. Add in the pot an extra language I don’t feel confident in, and I freeze or run away.
That’s why, as someone who loves learning languages to speak them with native speakers — I know, ironic, right? — , I had to find ways to prepare myself for that dreaded moment.
Most of the advice online around speaking is focused on how to find people. …
That you can add to your life as well
Disclaimer: This article was originally written (by myself) and published on Tuto.ai
Learning a language really isn’t as hard as we make it to be.
Even though I’m just a muggle who wasn’t “gifted” with the mythical “language gene”, I’ve learned to speak 6 languages and dabbled in 10 others. What helped me achieve this isn’t some secret recipe. It’s a set of habits I’ve taken from others and developed myself.
More than a decade after starting to learn languages on my own, these are the habits I’ve found every highly effective language-learner had set.
1. They Know and Revisit Why They Learn the Language
Polyglots may seem like some…
From a gift I was supposed to receive 22 years ago
As I cleaned a closet in the house I grew up in, I fell upon a game for 8-year-olds still intact. When I asked my mother, she told me it was supposed to be a Christmas gift for when I was 8 or 9. It had just been lost in the mess of the house.
It wasn’t the first gift we had found many years too late. But this one was my favorite type when I was growing up: a Meccano.
Looking at it brought back many memories I thought I had lost and made me realize some things about…
Misbeliefs
And no, it’s not about the French beret
I’ve heard all kinds of stereotypes about French people in my life. There are almost as many as there are French people. Most were said as jokes. But there were people actually believing some of them to be true.
No one — I hope at least — still believes most French people wear beret, right? We don’t. You may find a few here and there in Paris but chances are they’ll be from the military.
As a Frenchman having lived abroad for a total of 7 years, I’ve been the trigger to conversations about French people more times than I’d…
5 things I had to unlearn on my journey to polyglottery
School can be great for many things. It could even be awesome for learning languages but that’s, unfortunately, not the case. We’ve all experienced it. We spend almost a decade learning a language in class only to forget it soon after we’re done.
Even though we know classes didn’t teach us well how to learn languages, most people who try to do so on their own later repeat the same errors.
Those people often soon give up learning a new language, thinking they’re “not cut out for it”. They’re wrong. The problem isn’t them. …
Once you become one with the language, you will never even consider giving up
Learning a language isn’t just about sitting behind a desk with textbooks. The goal is to make the language become a part of you.
Just like you don’t think about how to construct sentences in your native language, you should become able to concentrate on the content of your sentences rather than their construction.
It’s not just about learning the language, it’s about acquiring it, playing with it, and making it your own.
In my experience learning 6 languages, I’ve found a few methods that help a lot towards this goal. I hope they can help you too.
Try New Things
When you…
This simple practice helped me shed light on what’s good in life
I love tiny tips that have a much larger impact than it seems at first.
Standing up every hour for a minute might not seem like much but it can avoid a lot of problems down the road. This is the power of tiny habits.
One other tiny thing I love is the power of questions. How you frame a question frames the answer you’ll get. Ask the right question and you’ll get the right answer. Ask the wrong one and you could fall into a downward spiral.
Most times something unfortunate happens, we let ourselves fall into negative questions…
And that you could easily avoid
Japanese is among the most learned languages in the world. As a result, the internet is full of resources to learn it.
I’ve been learning Japanese for more than a decade and met countless people who tried to learn it too. Most quickly felt overwhelmed and gave up in a matter of weeks. The rest somehow improved but I’ve seen some mistakes being repeated over and over again.
They can all be fixed later but the sooner you know them, the easier it is to fix them and make leaps of improvement in the language.
Mistakes are a natural process…
“Try it. It’ll feel liberating,” my flatmate said.
I was born to be bald and I’m finally at peace with that.
My dad lost most of his hair above his head before he turned 35. My 4-year-older brother has always been an indication of how my hair would be a few years later, especially considering that I started balding before he did.
I don’t remember exactly when I first realized I was balding, but I remember what caused it. I had seen an old picture of myself and thought “Wow, that’s a lot of hair”. Another thought then followed:
“Damn. Already?”
The process sped up throughout my twenties…
