Sprechen Sie Deutsch? *UPDATED*
Bookworm on Mar 07 2009 at 2:40 pm | Filed under: Uplifting stories
I’m a nincompoop when it comes to learning languages. My pronunciation is flawless, but my inability to grasp foreign language grammar structures (despite being quite adept at my own), coupled with my lazy memory, mean that, despite have studied myriad languages, I’ve never mastered any.
Daniel Tammet is a linquistic horse of a different color. (And yes, I hear the moans of agony about that strained,, even broken metaphor, but I’m feeling metaphoric today, and just can’t seem to stop myself.) A language savant, who sees words in color and numeric patterns, he recently mastered German in a week. He’ll add this skill to the more than ten other languages he’s already taught himself:
Tammet is a savant. As a child he had epileptic seizures. Doctors later diagnosed him with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. He mastered the world of emotions only through hard training.
Numbers and foreign words, on the other hand, come to him naturally. He sees colors and shapes where most people see only plain words and numbers. He’s memorized the number pi to 22,514 digits. He knows instantly that January 10, 2017, will be a Tuesday. And he’s a fleet-footed traveler in the rocky terrain of languages.
Tammet can speak Romanian, Gaelic, Welsh and seven other languages. He learned Icelandic in a week for a TV documentary, at the end of which he gave a live interview on television. He felt somewhat nervous, but was able to speak quite fluently with the show’s host. He even dared to make a joke in Icelandic, which is generally dreaded for its complexity. He still speaks the language today.
You can read more about this fascinating man here.
UPDATE: Here’s a video of his Icelandic challenge:
Related posts:
- The fallacy of verbal facility
- The few, the proud . . . the honest *UPDATED*
- English as a first language
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Growing the grassroots…
The gal who started the Marin conservative gatherings that I’ve had the pleasure of attending sent out a broadcast email reminding all conservatives, especially those trapped in blue communities, that it’s not enough to sit at home, read the blogs……
He ought to try Japanese, it’s like a language from another planet. I’ve worked on it for two years, got straight A’s in three semesters of college courses on it, and I still feel like a total idiot at it. Three character sets, 2000+ characters, somewhere north of 130 verb conjugation combinations (plus adjectives and adverbs that conjugate), about a half-dozen different numbering and counting systems, more homophones than you can shake a stick at, and so on and so forth.
Wow! I always thought Chinese was the most difficult language. It sounds as if there are an enormous number of candidates for that title.
Just out of idle curiosity, have any of you ever tried those Rosetta Stone language programs? They always sound so good in the advertisements and I wonder about the real world success rate.
I can tell you that they’re pretty darn expensive. Someone on my Freecycle group was looking for one for her husband, who is active duty military. I suggested that he try the DLI – they might be able to offer him something, but then thought I’d check out my usual sources to try to help her out. Hah. They run 3-4 hundred dollars. Used one are not available – that I could find. Some of the reviews I found were less than totally complimentary, but I suspect language acquisition is a _very_ personal thing.
You might try that Before You Know It site (byki) – their free download is supposed to be pretty good, although my husband says that while they’re good on vocabulary and repetitive speaking, they’re weak on rules of grammar. But I suspect most of the “learn the natural way” methods are probably light on grammar and sentence structure – depending on the development of the language “ear” to instruct.
I don’t know a whole lot about Chinese, but Japanese uses the same 2000+ character set plus a couple more of their own invention. Spoken Chinese uses a tonal system to make different sounds, which makes figuring out how to say a word you’ve read very difficult and it’s hard to develop an ear for the tones without a lot of exposure. One of the reasons Japanese has so many homophones is because they adopted Chinese readings for most of the characters, but the tonal system didn’t translate, so characters which sound different in Chinese because of varying tones ended up sounding the same in Japanese.
Oh, and neither Japanese nor Chinese have spaces between words. Imagine trying to learn English if therewerenospacesbetweenwordsandyoucouldn’ttellwhereoneendedandthenextbegan.
Spoken Chinese uses a tonal system to make different sounds, which makes figuring out how to say a word you’ve read very difficult
usually it is just context. You can figure out the word’s meaning from context, even if you can’t pick up the tone differences.
Oh, and neither Japanese nor Chinese have spaces between words.
The spaces are in the character recognition protocols. Chinese written with English characters do have spaces.
The spaces are in the character recognition protocols.
Even English can be read without spaces if you know the language, but to do so you have to have enough knowledge and vocabulary to pick the words out of the string of characters. This presents a barrier to people trying to learn a language with such a “character recognition protocol” — you have to know the language in order to read it, but you can’t get to know it without reading it. It doesn’t make learning the language impossible, but it does make it a lot harder.
By the way, I don’t think Japanese is a more difficult language to learn than English, we have plenty of our own idiosyncrasies to confuse people. What’s interesting is how unique Japanese is in the world. The closest language is Korean, but the difference between Japanese and Korean is about as big as the difference between English and Russian — and that’s the closest Japanese gets to another language. Learning a Latin-based European language is simple stuff in comparison.