How Polyglots Learn Languages - the military and multilingual language enthusiasts

Multilingual sign in Switzerland, photo by Sphoo in Wikipedia.

I watched two videos on  how polyglots learn languages.

The US Military

The first looked at how the USA military trains those in the armed forces, , army, navy and air force, including doctors, interpreters, engineers, rescuers and others, to speak the language like a local.

The first thing we learned was which languages are easiest, with the shortest number of weeks of training. The European languages French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese. Next German and Indonesian. Later, other languages. The hardest are the Asian ones, Chinese, Japanese, Korean.

The recruits are rested on their ability to recognize shapes and patterns. If they pass this abstract test, they are then asked to submit three languages which they want to learn. These lists are compared with the military's needs.

No surprise there. But even the easiest languages require more than a year, 52 weeks, of study, a whole day, five days a week. 

The amount of learning is pretty impressive, too. Homework an be a couple of hours spent learning 80 words, and using them in sentences. That makes my thoughts of learning one word a day, or ten words a day, look pretty paltry.

The importance of this video for me was that it showed you in detail how languages are learned. Not just a guesstimate on the number of hours, but practical training. How it is done for people who will be using it in real life.

What kept them going through all the intensity? The appreciation that they were being paid whilst learning a new language, a skill for life.

After that, something lighter, how polyglots had learned multiple languages, not under pressure from doing it for a living, and not having to use it afterwards in life and death situations.

Polyglots

The video

Polyglot systems

On youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROh_-RG3OVg

Easy German, Italian, Spanish

I searched on the internet for my daily dose of duo lingo German and up popped a site discussing how effective it was to learn by this method. The writer of the blog post had done the duo lingo course in German. He found it very effective for learning vocabulary quickly, less effective for understanding spoken German or speaking it.

I thought the way you could click on the sound was quite useful. I can see that putting together a sentence might be harder. But I wasn't expecting everything form the course. As far as I was concerned, anything was better than nothing.

I have Earworms discs in several languages. They give you whole sentences spoken. You can follow the text or just listen to the repeats of the disc. The text is in very small font.

For me the great advantage of the duo lingo system is that you have to concentrate. (I suppose some people would prefer to hear a disc in the background.)

My problem was I'd given up all my other courses. the duo lingo is in such tiny chunks that you can do a couple of minutes each day, however busy you are.

However, to address the rproblme of learning to understand the spoken language, I followed the recommendation of one of the comments. They suggested using Easy Languages on You Tube which is in several languages including German, Italian and Spanish. It's quite entertaining. I watched one on Mexican phrases or proverbs.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, researcher, English teacher and tutor.