3 Things That Can Happen to a Polyglot's Ears in a Big City
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- Опубліковано 2 чер 2024
- I share my recent experience overhearing languages in crowded environments in terms of a) a feast for the ears, b) gibberish/babel and its resolution, and c) strangely frequent instances of full-scale code switching. Subscribe to my monthly newsletter: www.alexanderarguelles.com/ne... Join my academy: www.alexanderarguelles.com/ac...
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Join my virtual academy and meet with me every week to get a systematic theoretical framework for long-term language learning in the Path of the Polyglot: www.alexanderarguelles.com/academy/ Join also to read and discuss French, German, Italian, and/or Spanish literature, to learn sacred languages such as Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, or Old Norse, to develop conversational abilities in Latin, and/or to read and discuss Great Books of Western Civilization or the Comparative History of Religions in English. And subscribe to my monthly newsletter at: www.alexanderarguelles.com/newsletter/
Estoy aprendiendo 17 idiomas y gracias a ti he aprendido formas y recursos que me vienen de maravilla. Muchas gracias maestro!
13 al mismo tiempo?
I did that for one month.
@@rafaelmonteirorodrigues4672 Si, llevo un año. Mi francés, rumano y hebreo han mejorado muchísimo. La cosa esta en la organización y mucha paciencia. Los asiaticos y eslavos se me hacen imposibles, pero ahi seguimos.
Te deseo el mejor de los éxitos.
Having grown up speaking 3 languages I switch between them pretty freely. I often hear people speaking various languages in the street.
Thanks for commenting.
My native is English and my wife's is French. She is also fluent in the Cameroonian language Douala and I've learned some of that, and we both know some Hebrew. We often switch back and forth between languages, sometimes in the middle of sentences. Sometimes it's for fun, sometimes for personal or language-specific vocabulary capacity, sometimes because something just "feels" better in one language, and about half the time I have no idea why. This is a common, maybe even universal, dynamic in multilingual families and is a hot topic in contemporary linguistics.
Yes, yours sound like "typical" code switching.
I appreciate you making this video because I experience the same thing.
Last year, when I flew to Hong Kong after staying in Japan for a week, I was waiting in line at immigration and overheard people speaking Chinese, but as they spoke, it sounded as if they were using Japanese words.
Maybe a better way to explain it is, if I really focused on their speech, I could tell it was Chinese (or at least logically knew this), but I could hear Japanese words jumping out of their speech.
Another example is when I was in Amsterdam during the summer on a crowded train after a long day, there were many languages being spoken around me and it sounded as if, say, the German speakers next to me were using Spanish words.
It seems to only occur in crowded urban environments usually when I am under stress from travelling, a long day out or simply having too many people around me.
Hello Robbie, and thanks for confirming that I am not the only one!
I work in a hospital in Houston, and just in my own experience I hear code-switching between nurses. To me it has been also been a surprise, but a welcome one. I hear it daily between the English-French speakers and the English-Tagalog speakers. We have the heaviest amount of English-Spanish speakers, but oddly enough I never hear code-switching from them. Many of them who come to mind that I know lament that their "Spanish is not very good," which I think might stem from cultural judgements compared to their Latin American families. They are certainly far better than me at Spanish and yet I am more eager to speak it. Anyway though, I really enjoy hearing the code-switching when I can. I personally couldn't say exactly the mechanism which causes the conversations to change back-and-forth.
Thanks for sharing your interesting exposure to and experience with this.
I remember years ago I was sitting by the San Juan River listening, meditating on the sounds of the waters far and near. I did this for half an hour or an hour… then, I went to a restaurant and all of a sudden while sitting their drinking and eating I could here all the conversations around me and usual sounds of a restaurant as though all the sounds were both distinct and a whole body at the same time. All the sounds were pleasant and amazing. Like a gentle beehive of sounds without hearing what anyone was actually saying. I’m sure I could have, but it was pleasant not to. The sound was enough.
At some point I have tried to cultivate this meditative state, I could even follow various conversations in two or three languages but I tended to loose it by participating in one or more of the conversations
Thanks for sharing!
I can't relate at all but it was interesting and thanks for sharing! The only "polyglot thing" I experience that I think is weird and possibly unknown to the mainstream population is that, meaning comes into the brain on a completely separate channel from metainformation like "what language is this?". I will specifically listen to Cantonese radio on Spotify and for some reason a Mandarin song is jammed in the middle of so many dozen Cantonese songs. I go to add one a like to my personal Cantonese song playlist (I like to keep them separate) and only at the last second realize "wait hold on there, wrong language this is Mandarin". It really takes some effort to realize what language I'm hearing at times (especially when I already had a certain expectation in mind about it being Canto). I also can really mess myself up by thinking about events that happened in Japan last month and then suddenly engaging in some way with Spanish here in Argentina (both 2nd languages to me). For example, I'll approach a counter to order and have already imagined my conversation with the barista in Japanese before realizing I almost made a huge blunder addressing her in Japanese.
i had a really embarrassing moment me and some family members were watching a tv show in the opening there was a boat with a Mexican flag and the people were speaking Italian but my brain was already set to Spanish and i was trying to brag to them that i could understand it without subtitles. and i closed my eyes and i was like what kind of Spanish is this supposed to be ? and only after a minute did i realise that it was Italian and i started understanding it .
Thanks for confirming the oddities.
Code-switching definitely happens a lot more than you’d naively expect. I notice it when trying-not-to-eavesdrop-while-appreciating-a-foreign-language a lot!
Agreed on the gibberish to clarity! I have often had the exact experience you describe, where I don’t understand a thing and seem swayed between different languages, only finally to realize I do understand and it may even be my own native language being spoken.
Ah, so I am not the only eavesdropper.
I just discovered your channel. I’m not currently learning a language. American English is my first language. I understand what amounts to about kindergarten level Spanish. I’ve been working a crazy amount of hours at my job this month, though, and for some reason find your videos valuable in decompressing from the stress. You might have an unintentional ASMR going for you here.
Well that is indeed good to know!
This is like the 5th comment I've seen of people saying they use the prof's voice as ASMR 😂
Glad to have more videos from you, Professor! Now that you mention it, yes, I have experienced that. I would listen to people and it would not sound like Russian until a couple of minutes in. Didn't give it much mind though.
Hello Yan! Don't know if the Moscow metro is as noisy as New York's subway...
@@ProfASAr It probably is. I recall it being fairly similar on the noise level when I was there.
Gibberish to clarity, and the reverse. Both of these in a small setting, no crowds. Focused on everyday work in the US, before I looked up from my desk, I was puzzled by a stream of nonsense words directed at me. Looking up, I recognized a German acquaintance, quickly realized I needed to "shift gears" and thereupon commenced a normal conversation "auf deutsch", which I was capable of but not expecting. Conversely, once as a houseguest of a Dutch couple for several days, I would join them for the evening news on television. Things were comfortable and relaxed, and halfway through the broadcast I realized I was following everything being said. Then my brain told me, "Wait, this isn't English", and from that point it was all a foreign language again.
Small settings and no crowds - interesting!
Vivo en un pueblo turístico y siempre estoy tratando de identificar los idiomas que la gente habla. Muy a menudo tiendo a pensar que se trata de alguna lengua escandinava y la mayoría de las veces termino reconociendolas como algún dialecto suizo alemán o de los países bajos...qué puedo entender mucho mejor y antes me pasaba lo mismo con el portugués europeo que me sonaba mucho a ruso y me tomaba mucho tiempo identificarlo. las lenguas balcánicas me sonaban a griego y no importa que ahora tenga mayor sensibilidad para diferenciarlas sigo teniendo esa predispoción, aunque ahora entienda mucho mejor el ruso y tenga mayor familiaridad con otras lenguas y pueda diferenciar otras lenguas eslávicas.
Lo del cambio de idiomas en un contexto internacional es mucho más común de lo que pudieramos suponer. A veces después de un gran esfuerzo por identificar el acento, o la lengua que se está hablando resulta que cambian a la lengua materna de uno de los dos hablantes o al inglés para tratar temás más elaborados y luego de que se acaba el suspenso, todavía se atreven a ordenar comida en un español muy respetable... siempre me queda la duda si es mi cerebro el qué está haciendo la traducción... ;)
Un tercer fenómeno interesante es que muchos turistas no entienden cuando se les habla en su propia lengua materna por que están hablando otra lengua o tratando de entender una tercera y no se imaginan que alguien pueda estar hablandoles en su propia lengua materna... y otras veces entienden y contestan en la lengua que estaban hablando sin percibir que tu les has dicho algo en su propio idioma...
Muchas gracias por compartir todas estas observaciones interesantes.
code switching on the streets is about efficiency and pleasure to use all languages you have on your pallet. it's nothing special and happens just naturally, especially for us who grew up with these multiple languages without ever thinking of us as "polyglots"
Thanks for sharing.
Dear Professor, I know this is off topic but would it be at all possible to digitalise Buske’s Japanisch Intensiv II + III as well as the corresponding audio files? While Japanisch Intensiv I seems to be readily available, the other two books seem to be lost media as they are not available anywhere.
Thank you!
I do have those volumes and they are doing no one any good sitting on my shelves. My goal is to make my library available to academy students during "live weeks" going forward, and they could then borrow books like these.
its always harder to understand when they are not talking to you directly like i go to a Turkish barber but i always have a hard time understanding anything but when i watch Turkish UA-cam they speak so clearly its almost like a different language. i was at a lake and it was so diverse it was almost funny i noticed i had an easy time understand some Spanish people but i had a harder time understanding the Ukrainians and there were a lot of Africans were i wasn't sure what language they were speaking sometimes. i could pick out some of the words they were saying because they are in a lot of bantu languages but i wasn't sure if it was one that i started studying or just something that is related. a few years ago i was in Disney land Paris i just started learning Spanish and Russian but i was quite frustrated since i don't know any French yet and even in Disneyland a lot of the staff doesn't know English and there were many people from all over the world there i even saw some people speaking welsh. since 2020 i don't go outside as much as in the 2010s and 2000s but i started learning a lot more languages .
Thank you for sharing your interesting experiences with this.
I haven’t had the experience but I wonder: since the brain is a predictive interpreter, and since you have so many predictive algorithms to apply (languages), is the abundance of input confusing your brain as to which predictive model to apply? So rather than being overstimulation, it’s confusion as to which algorithm of interpretation to apply. Once you settle on, say, the fact that you’re hearing Hebrew, your brain can apply the algorithm and understand without the sensation of stress. Just a thought. Thanks for the interesting video.
Thanks sounds plausible - thanks!
я не особо хочу изучать языки но вы очень меня вдохновляете тем что занимаетесь одной Темой углубляетесь в неё и постоянно совершенствуйтесь В ней
Спасибо. Сосредоточенность и мастерство - это передаваемые навыки.
@@ProfASAr
Code switching also applies to my work, we say the accounting terms and IT-related vocabulary in English and it makes sense to do so. If someone tells me the same in my mother tongue, I am confused and it takes mental effort to understand. Maybe it's just that the terminology is not that developed or that the company language is English, i am not sure.
Thanks for the IT perspective.
I don't live in the US, so I don't know what is like to live in a big city like NY, so for me is pretty strange to think of a tiny space, like a train, where the people there talk different languages at the same time, but I bet it must be pretty confusing to anyone!
I think most people just block it out as background noise.
When people are lacking words in their native language they might use English words to better explain what they are talking about. I know recently I was listening to 2 people speaking and heard random English words like bank, or account, or "online banking." Since it was at a bank it made enough sense to be able to understand what they were talking about but they were speaking a different language mainly. I think it was phillipino since it kind of sounded spainish asian to me. I also sometimes have to hear a bit on heavy british accents before i can understand them. I wouldn't consider myself poly amorous since I lack too much vocabulary to speak a different language.
Thanks for sharing the anecdote.
What you are experiencing professor or at least what I think you are experiencing is Brain-Fog. Your Brain has way been with languages too much and is performing exercises you normally perform in your language routine like translating audio in your own mind(The older you get the more this happens) and is being unable to focus on what’s actually happening normally this happens to people who watch way too much content but you might also be experiencing this due to your routine . You should let your Brain rest , meditate and read but not in a way that needs too many exercises like reading in a language you want to improve in.
Thanks for your analysis - I don't agree that that's what is going on here, but who knows?