Judging Multilinguals Fairly
People who have never heard multiple languages coming out of one mouth are likely to be full of awe if they hear someone who speaks multiple languages. They may even be jealous.
Have you ever met a "perfect" multilingual? Have you ever met anyone who speaks, writes, reads, and understands five languages without error?
I've met many people who speak and understand languages, but if you looked that their written work it would be something like this.
"Hi! I'm Gianni T. My mother 1/2 Italian and 1/2 Japnese so I am being 1/4 Italian. I spek three languges good, but I don't like study."
That doesn't look so great in English, but "Gianni" actually speaks English very well with a nice accent and I don't notice these errors in his spoken English. What do you think? Is he multilingual? In my book he is, but don't hire him as a translator.
You can listen to many multilinguals on Youtube. Some of them will make you cringe, but they can converse.
The James Bond-type multis won't be posting their samples, lol.
Multilinguals just like to trick people who are ignorant of languages, other linguistically knowledgeable people know it's all in jest.
It wouldn't take much to fool people on youtube especially with "exotic" languages. French and Spanish are too common, mess up with these and many people would know, but a lot of people wouldn't be able to tell with Arabic.
There are quite a lot of multilinguals (well, trilinguals at least) in Europe, and i mean GOOD ones. There are loads of people who speak say, their native tongue, English, and either French,German or another neighboring language if not all of them.
Multilinguals in Europe (educated people):
Catalonians: Catalan, Spanish, English + maybe French
Finland: Finnish, Swedish, English
Netherlands: Dutch, German, English
Switzerland: German, French, English
Flemish: Flemish, French, English
etc
Sophisticated multilinguals would have to be like our professor who learns languages every single day and spends a huge part of his life on them.
... but we don't all have to live like him. If all you want to be a multilingual is just a couple of languages (instead of 2 dozens), then to be speaking and writing with no errors you are to, indeed, put some efforts. I don't think I can do it at the moment, even as a fairly proficient user and as a student (many write worse English than I do; mine isn't good, either).
There's nothing like that. You can consider multilingualism from different POVs. It may be a nice thing when you can compare multiple languages as a linguist, but you would sound like a fool to go for an entirely unrelated field. For one thing, I won't consider African languages AT ALL, for instance, if I'm not going to be a linguist, when I can't even read a single native text regularly in daily life. For another, I won't even consider a regional language (like Portuguese) if I don't have much social and cultural contact with it.
That is to say, I think our professor has a lot of good reasons to learn dozens of languages, but I, a mere mortal, can only learn a fraction of his collection just to enlighten myself. After a year of discovery, I find it I can learn any language but I just can't learn many. What a shame.
Higgins: [Nepommuck] can learn a language in a fortnight - knows dozens of them. A sure mark of a fool. As a phonetician, no good whatever.
I agree that trilinguals are common in Europe. They aren't so common in Japan (like "Gianni"). I'm thinking of multilinguals who speak six, seven, eight languages. Do you know many who have mastered all four language skills?
Those are rarer, but some do exist. Especially people from mixed backgrounds in Europe. I'd say 99% of them live off their languages. I knew a German who spoke:
German, English, French, Spanish, Swedish, Italian and Swiss-German.
This person was a language teacher and she had lived all around Europe and was married to a French/Spanish/Italian speaker.
Not bad, but they are all European languages and I'd probably count that as six, not seven. Swiss German is different, but not so far distant from German. Three of them are romance languages. I guess I see this as two language families, so, yes-very believable.
If I spoke English, German, French and Russian, I'd think that counts more than 6 languages! By then I'd have two native and six of four families under my belt.
Ummmm how exactly are French English German and Russian six languages?
let's see.. 1 - English, 2 - German, 3 - French, 4 - Russian, 5-.. uh
4!=6 => contradiction, original assumption of 6 languages must be false.
He speaks Cantonese and Mandardin Chinese as well.
Maybe we could say five and a half languages because Cantonese and Mandarin aren't really "written" differently. They differ in sound. An Italian who sees "Je vois un chien." will not know immediately what that sentence means in French even though both are romance languages, but a Cantonese speaker looking at same sentence in Chinese characters would probably know that it means "I see a dog."
If Xie learns French and Russian, I will be impressed-far more impressed than the lady who translates IE languages because I know how far apart French and Russian are from Cantonese and Mandarin.
犬 Chinese (one possible character)