“So, you are a Linguist? How many languages do you speak??”
If I had a dollar for each time I was asked this question, I would be a millionaire by now!
Being a Linguist and being a Polyglot are two different things:
A Linguist studies the science of language, its structures, systems for different languages, the sound systems, language families, how languages are processed inside the human brain.
A Polyglot, on the other hand, is someone who has an affinity towards learning multiple languages and may or may not have the knowledge of Linguistics.
These two could be mutually exclusive OR there could be an overlap between the two. In my case, I started out as a language enthusiast, went on to become a polyglot (I know 7 languages in varied capacities), a foreign language teacher and then studied Linguistics to understand the system of languages better.
How does Linguistics help in learning languages faster?
The knowledge of Linguistics opened me up to the ability of grasping, observing and reproducing languages better. Many people ask me which is the most difficult language to learn and I still do not know how to answer that!
The prime reason for that is that language learning depends on several factors, including the learner’s interest, intention and the amount of time they are willing to invest in the process. These factors are different for every learner, I share my opinions below based on my learning experience with these languages:
The ancient languages (Sanskrit and Latin) were hands down most difficult to learn because of the insane amount of declensions and conjugations to memorise. They also demand constant focus, committed reading time and grammar practice… Contrary to Latin, Sanskrit also has a different script (Devanaagari) for English speakers as an added challenge.
Next in line would be the South-East Asian languages: Chinese, Japanese and Korean (in that order), essentially because of the script and the tonal peculiarities. It took me a good 6 months of daily practice with the tones and the script. We also had a lot of old school memory drills where we had to learn paragraphs by heart and recite in the class. This technique was rather old school for my language learning taste but was surprisingly effective!
Once you get past the learning curve of the script, the grammars of East Asian languages are pretty simple; For Chinese, there are no complex verb compounds, no conditionals and the tenses are context dependent.
Hindi, English, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch are all inflectional languages so there is quite a bit of grammar involved with different tense forms to memorise and the difficulty level would depend on whether or not the learner is familiar with the Devanaagari script (for Hindi). English, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch use the Roman alphabet so that’s an advantage for the western population.
As apparent, there are different angles of deciding the said learning difficulty of different language families and eventually it comes down to the learner’s intention and motivation to achieve the target.
I hope that these tips help you approach language learning in a fun and joyous manner.
For any queries/comments or feedback on language learning, please comment below or write to me at prachiwritescopy@gmail.com 😊
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