Taken from: www.focus.pl
Translated by: Anna Duda
The first few foreign languages are the most difficult to acquire. However, the next several dozen are a piece of cake. What makes hyperpolyglots learn foreign speech so successfully?
C-3PO, a robot from Star Wars, claimed he was familiar with over 6 million forms of communication. A human can’t hold a candle to him, but among the representatives of Homo sapiens impressive examples of downright collector’s passion for foreign languages can also be found. The most motivated people not only know several dozen of them, but also learn new ones within a few weeks. A recently published book Babel No More by a linguist and journalist Michael Erard, tells what is needed to have such results. It shows that the path to linguistic proficiency leads through the use of certain tricks and systematic work in solitude.
Confession in Sardinian
Giuseppe Mezzofanti, an Italian cardinal who lived in Bologna in the beginning of 19th century, is a linguistic legend. The biographers claimed that he knew up to 72 foreign speeches, i.e. the number of tongues spoken by the people when God, according to the Bible, mixed up the languages of the Babel Tower’s builders. Other reports show that Mezzofanti knew well only 60 of them, including Polish, Arabic and Hebrew. People who, like Mezzofanti, dabble in between ten and twenty up to several dozen tongues are said to be hyperpolyglots. An effort put into acquiring languages could be even more beneficial today than in the past. New job markets are opening up for Polish people, domestic entrepreneurs do businesses all over the world. As for travel agencies, they tempt with holidays anywhere in the globe. In 1960, 25 million people set out abroad. In 2008, it was 924 million tourists travelling to foreign countries. According to United Nations World Tourism Organization, by 2020 this number will increase to 1.6 billion. More and more often we come face to face with representatives of other nations and even though English has become the lingua franca of our time, learning other languages, such as Chinese, opens up numerous opportunities.
Mezzofanti’s method is hard to be found in recommendations of modern language schools. His idea of learning was asceticism: he ate little, never drank wine, slept supposedly three hours a day, to learn new languages all night. And in this regard he was extremely efficient. One day a woman approached him, wishing to confess in a Sardinian dialect which Mezzofanti didn’t know. He asked her to come in two weeks. When she appeared in the prescribed time, he was able to accept the confession and give an appropriate penance.
Shadows and screams
The problem with Mezzofanti lies in the fact that everything we know about him are anecdotes - most of them come from the book by Charles William Russell The Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti. It includes few scientifically proven facts that could be useful to contemporary scholars of language and human capacities. From this point of view, more valuable is information about hyperpolyglots living in the 20th century, such as a Hungarian Lomb Kató, a translator of 10 languages who didn’t believe in linguistic talent and emphasized the proper motivation to learn and devoting it at least few minutes a day. Most valuable for researchers, however, are contemporary hyperpolyglots.
One of them, 48-year-old Alexander Arguelles, last year published in The Guardian an article about how he learned 50 languages. Arguelles started late – he took up the first foreign language at the age of 11. It was French, and the learning process didn’t go too well. Arguelles was even close to give it up. It was a German language course that brought the breakthrough. At the age of 20 Arguelles already knew that the purpose of his life will be learning as many foreign languages as possible. Today he speaks about 40 languages, and is superficially familiar with a few more. Helpful was the fact that he repeatedly changed his place of residence. Born in the USA, he studied in Berlin and South Korea; now lives in Singapore. Arguelles, like other hyperpolyglots, stresses the importance of systematic work in solitude: reading, studying and practising grammar. He uses his own technique which is called shadowing: learning while walking briskly outdoors, he repeats out loud new words he hears from a Walkman. “For five or six years, before I married and had children, I would study for 16 hours a day. I'd transcribe Irish, Persian, Hindi, Turkish, Swahili. Gradually, all these wonderful languages started to swim into focus, and ever increasing numbers of great works became accessible,” writes Arguelles.
The more tongues he knew, the easier he learnt new ones: while acquiring, a learner realizes that there are structures common to all languages. This experience seems to confirm the hypothesis put forward in the 1960s by Noam Chomsky about the existence of universal grammar, lying at the root of all languages on Earth.
Fetusflooded withtestosterone
Is really stubbornness and working oneself to the ground enough to master further foreign languages? Many researchers believe that at the root of such passion lies talent, and perhaps even the unique architecture of the brain structures. The fact that something like this might actually exist, is shown by the case of Emil Krebs, a German diplomat who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th century and knew 68 languages. Krebs left science a legacy of his own brain. Examination conducted shortly after his death by Oskar Vogt detected above-average density of neurons in Broca's area, an even structure occurring in both hemispheres of the brain, responsible for language functions.
In turn, studies conducted a few years ago by researchers at the University of Düsseldorf showed that a portion of Broca's area was extremely enlarged not only in the left hemisphere (as it was expected, since this hemisphere is responsible for the linguistic skills), but also in the right. In a different fragment of Broca's area an unusual asymmetry was recorded. For now, the scientists are not able to interpret these results, but they believe that the uniqueness of the examined brain areas can be the source of Krebs’ linguistic talent.
The explanation of where such talent can originate from is provided by the Geschwind-Galaburda hypothesis. It assumes that language skills can be the result of variations in hormone levels in fetal life. This hypothesis was put forward in the 1980s by two American neurologists: Norman Geschwind and Albert Galaburda. They observed that the left hemisphere in rat fetuses developed little slower in those periods when followed by an increase in testosterone levels. Then the cells destined for the left hemisphere migrated to the right hemisphere. If a similar phenomenon occurred in humans (which is very likely), then the fluctuations in testosterone levels would be responsible for a whole group of abilities and cognitive deficits.
Similarly, in the case of hyperpolyglots we can observe a certain grouping of characteristics that may indicate the existence of predispositions to linguistic talents in the brain, resulting from the Geschwind-Galaburda hypothesis. The majority of hyperpolyglots are men (about 75 percent), many of them are homosexual, left-handed people, often having problems with spatial orientation. All these features, as well as language skills, are associated with enlargement of the left hemisphere of the brain, associated with testosterone levels. The statistical link between certain characteristics does not necessarily mean that there is a direct relationship between them, but this hypothesis doesn’t stop to rankle the scientists.
Language ofhallucinations
Is it possible to accept the idea that people with particular linguistic talents are a kind of savants - people who like the film character Rain Man are brilliant in only one field, and in other areas of life resemble helpless children. There are cases of such linguistic geniuses. The most spectacular example is Daniel Tammet, a 33-year-old British, who not only has a talent for languages, but also for mathematics. He’s also the master at memorizing and holds the European record for reciting number Pi digits from memory (he knows 22514 of them). Tammet is an epileptic and suffers from autism. His linguistic talent is best illustrated by the way in which he learned Icelandic, considered one of the most difficult languages. Not knowing it completely, Tammet went to Iceland and after a week of intensive course appeared in an Icelandic television program, conversing freely with the hosts. People such as Tammet are rather exceptions in the world of hyperpolyglots. Though among the linguistic geniuses there are many recluses. Most often hyperpolyglots activate socially when they can speak in a foreign language. To understand the significance of such contacts for language learning, just look at those areas of the world where at the same time several languages are spoken. Their inhabitants acquire new ones without any effort. One such area was for example Mezzofanti's Italy. Few people remember that when in 1860 the Italian republic formed, only 10 percent of the people of this country spoke the Florentine dialect, which today we consider to be Italian language. Similar phenomenon occurs in modern India where people use 29 tongues: Hindi mixes with Urdu, Bengali, Kannada and English. In some African countries even small children know up to eight local languages.
Multilingualism is however not the same thing as hyperpolyglotism. In the latter case, always one language (the mother tongue) will be privileged - the others are re-imposed on it. It is shown by the cases of mental patients who heard voices or had hallucinations only when they were using their native language - not the other ones, mastered later. Such cases were investigated by Dr. Felicity de Zulueta, a psychiatrist from the UK. Similar studies indicate the limitations encountered by the learners of multiple languages. New ones will always be like in a separate pocket (though not in a separate area of the brain). Therefore, while a hyperpolyglot is able to master several languages, none of them will he know as much as his own. Another difficulty of being a hyperpolyglot lies in the fact that language is not just words and grammatical structures, but also the cultural context in which they occur. Therefore, mastering the language requires vast knowledge and acquiring it takes time. The more languages you know, the harder it gets to find emotional contact with all cultures they represent. So if you don't have time for poring over books constantly, you can always get down to English. This language isn’t rather possible to be skipped.
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