Do you know any polyglots?

I know a German lady who works in tourism who can speak English, Irish, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and is studying Mandarin Chinese now.

Shes inundated to do tours...

I used to learn Serbo-Croatian when thet were still considered one language (you have to be fairly careful to observe the differences), German, Italian and English. It would fairly common where I come from. I was only ever decent in English (and Slovene obviously) and pretty rubbish in other languages and it gets worse if you don't use them. I completely lost the ability to speak German and Italian after not using them for 20 years. I could probably communicate with a Croatian or Serbian but only because there are certain similarities to Slovenian.

Learning languages is not that hard when you come from small nation and you are surrounded by countries who speak different languages. But you want to use the language or you will lose it.

Anyway I know quite a few people who can still speak three or four languages fluently.

Yes I knew a guy would could speak 6 languages. He was a professional interpreter. He told me that Irish was the hardest to learn, in fact I think he said he gave up on it.

Apart from Irish at school I never studded a second language until last year, something I always wanted to do and practically because I wish to emigrate at some stage and I guess a second language would help. Anyway, I have to say I find the process of learning a second language to be utterly tedious not least because it's a very slow process. As someone previous said it certainly seems to be a skill that suits some ppl and not others.

Edit: I do see thought how if one has learned a second language that a third one is easier to learn. I studied Spanish and as a result I can make out some French text where I couldn't before.

Nosnon wrote: »

A guy I use to work with spoke, read and wrote 7 languages. He's from Latvia and after 2 years living around Kildare improving his English he upped sticks and moved to deepest darkest Connemara to learn Irish. He achieved his goal to speak,read and write it in about 3 years.

Last time I spoke to him on Facebook he was in New Zealand trying to learn Maori and was then planning to head to America to try some Native American languages.

He is a welder by trade so can go anywhere but also his grandmother left him (only grandchild) about €5m when she passed away.

A welder you say ?
I've a gate that needs fixing , does he do nixers ?

Eastern Europe s usually know a good few at least 3 always find it funny when people go e puts out how these uneducated people taking are jobs and not able to speak English it's there third language give them a break ffs

Is it necessary to learn all these languages?

If you speak more slowly and a bit louder and point a lot, you can still get your point across to the natives.

riffmongous wrote: »

Well I meant that it's completely different to the other 2 languages, you could also say Russian, Ukrainian, Polish is less impressive

Although personally I do find Russian hard to learn, harder than the Balkan slavic languages for sure

I never learned Russian but I can tell few words and there is familiarity in language. Among Slavic languages I would find Polish the most different from others (but that's just my impression). But in general if your mother language is germanic (English, German...) you would probably find it easier to learn other germanic languages. If it's romance (Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese) it's probably other romance languages. It probably also depends what languages you border on because they tend to mix.

There's a work colleague at the Airport who is fluent in 7 languages, who can easily pick up hints from a person to start speaking to them in their language right off the bat... to their surprise.

Me? I pretty much only speak English. :pac:

My brother is fluent in High German, Basel Deutsch (a Swiss dialect), French, and Italian - he can converse in Spanish and Portuguese and has retained a smattering of Irish (did his Leaving Cert through Irish back in the day).

His daughters are all fluent in German, French, English and Italian. One also speaks Brazilian Portuguese, while another had added Spanish and Basel Deutsch to her string of languages.

The weird thing is he speaks English with a hint of a German accent but his Swiss reared daughters speak English with a distinct Cork accent. When he's home people usually assume he's the 'foreigner'.