How to become a Polyglot, or speaker of many languages? Who in your family and circle of friends is a polyglot?

 Poly means many. Poly as in Polytechnic, a college which teaches many practical subjects. Where you can learn languages.

I wrote, initially humorously:

A polyglot is somebody who speaks more languages than I do. 

Or can fool me into thinking they do, with a few words to a waiter. 

I learned French and Latin at school. Latin is not spoken anywhere. I see it only on tombstones in Roman museums. Such as the Roman museum in Caerleon, just across the border into Wales, a short drive from the motorway.

As a result of my knowing only two spoken languages, anybody who learned French and Spanish at school seems  to me to be a polyglot. The same goes for French and German, French and Russian, or Chinese, Malay and Indonesian (the latter two very similar). If you count American and British English as two, then I speak three language.

I learned half the Hebrew as a child in Hebrew lessons which kept me out of my parents' way at weekends. Hebrew is the fore-runner of Greek and the Russian Cyrillic alphabet used in Russia and Bulgaria. I didn't pick up any Russian when visiting the country, but got going with Cyrillic in Bulgaria when the free city walking tour gave us their advertising address card with the Cyrillic alphabet translated and phonetic on the back.

My husband learned German and Russian at school and is trying to pick up French. We collect a list of French words used in English, and have about 300, not counting cooking terms, of which there are a huge number.

That's enough about me. Now let's talk about you. Many people pick up a smattering of languages from their parents or grandparents. 

You can feel friendly or hostile to a foreign language. My father learned German at school but after WWII was hostile to the language, although my parents were happy with the next generation of Germans and had German au pair girls.

I discovered from my widowed father, when he was in his nineties, that as a child he had picked up a few words of Yiddish from his grandmother - which one? I think his paternal grandmother. She spoke no English. 

My mother spoke no Yiddish and was irritated by people who tired to speak Yiddish words to her. Odd, because she was keen to learn Italian, which she learned with m father at a language group meeting in people's homes. My parents picked up Spanish from having a winter home in Spain where they escaped the British winter when they were old and frail and retired.  I am surprised that my mother did not take the opportunity to  simply politely interrupt the flow of conversation to have asked the speakers of Yiddish to translate. (We lived in Edgware around the corner from the synagogue where Anne Frank's father was a member, after world war II, as I learned from his step-daughter's book, unknown to us and most people in the area.) 

Yesterday I asked a Romanian young woman for the words one and two in Romanian.

I read labels on clothes and ingredients lists on food from the supermarket. I am always looking for words which are similar to English.  

Useful Websites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_language

Useful Websites

About the author

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer,  teacher of English, other languages, and English as a Second Language. member of five toastmasters speaking groups.

Angela Lansbury