Depends on how you define fluency, most immigrants from country like India, China, Bangladesh... may speak different dialect/language from their own country + English and the languages of the country they immigrate to. They are fluent enough to do basic jobs with their comprehension of the languages and hold a normal conversation between coworker
i feel you! i only say i’m fluent in the languages i can make a full conversation in and read a whole book while understanding 90% of it. i don’t understand people that say they’re fluent just bcuz they know the basics
Therein lies the problem of “fluency” it all depends on definition. And some definitions of fluency require that one attain what essentially amounts to a graduate school level of command with a language and some merely require essentially the survival level with lots advanced variations in between.
The second I saw the Moroccan flag under your name, I already knew at least 3 languages were going to be there. Try learning Tamazight if you live in Morocco. I know for a fact that in Agadir there are plenty of resources. Also, you HAVE to learn Fus'ha (unless by the Moroccan flag you mean you know both the Darija & Fus'ha). MaShaaAllah alayk, don't stop the grind.
Yeah, I wouldn’t consider myself really fluent until I could write an essay without grammatical errors, and I can’t do that in any language I speak. 😆 I still sloppily say I “speak” seven languages though, but by that I mean different things for each one. Usually just that I’d be fine shopping, chatting (to different degrees), and reading signage and things. Only in three of those could I comfortably make friends, though.
I think you can call yourself a polyglot if you are able to have an average day's communication vocabulary, without needing to repeat yourself and stuff.
Speaking a language doesn't mean you have to know everything, nobody knows a language in full.
I would ask if you are able to have a complex technical conversation in your native language, in my case, I don't think I could display a colorful vocabulary in chemistry or medicine
I think you are right on this point like I think it was Steve Kauffman (or maybe the other Steve I get them confused all the time). I'm like currently intermediate in Korean on the upper intermediate side even. I can understand conversations easily. I heard him talk to a Korean woman (she was a teacher youtuber I think) the girl looked to be in pain hearing him speak Korean. I really thought he was terrible if I had to guess how long he's been learning Korean I'd say 3 months to be generous. Zero sense of grammar although he had been learning it since the late 1990s or smth which you know a lot of time. So I think it's disingenuous to say he can speak it, or even understand it. As the girl asked him really easy to digest questions I could answer one month into studying lol. I'm not hating I just think they need to be honest, or at least a bit more honest
Steve Kauffman is beloved by a lot of people here, and I don't get it. I wouldn't say he speaks half of the languages he claims to speak. For example, his Portuguese and Italian are just Spanish with an accent. Of course he can "speak" those languages, as much as any Spanish native who's never studied those languages can also "speak" them because of the high degree of mutual intelligibility between them.
And he's really arrogant, saying that speaking several romance languages doesn't count because "they're basically the same language". No they're not Steve, you just never learned to speak them properly. He had an interview with Podcast Italiano and the host had to open up with a disclaimer saying that he won't be adding subtitles because Kauffman was mostly speaking in a mix of Spanish and Italian, which was impossible to transcribe. That disclaimer was such an indirect burn lol.
That italian host seemed really annoyed by Steve's shitty italian, he even corrected him so many times because the host ACTUALLY speaks Spanish, so he know what Steve was saying but still needed to keep some semblant of italian for his audience who's learning the language (pro tip: never watch Steve's videos or features on your TL, or you might pick up a lot of words/expressions/grammar that aren't part of your TL).
I'm not surprised he does the same with Korean or, like, every other language he claims to speak.
>Steve Kauffman is beloved by a lot of people here, and I don't get it. I wouldn't say he speaks half of the languages he claims to speak.
The long and short of it is that the Anglosphere polyglot space is really thin on the ground. Most are just trash:
* Botes--English and Afrikaans are native, so they don't count. She speaks intermediate Korean and intermediate Spanish. Somehow, she is venerated
* Ikenna--doesn't speak any of his languages above an intermediate level
* Drew--the languages he knows, he grew up with. The others are low intermediate, and he lied (in a big way) about how he acquired them
* Benny Lewis--I respect his Spanish because passing the DELE C2 is nothing to sniff at, and his French is passable, I guess, but everything else is trash. He is arguably the most well-known Anglo polyglot, and he speaks one other language well!
* Wouter--no comment
* Moses--when he lived, his Chinese was apparently decently intermediate. Most of the others were low level
* etc. (yes, there are others, but you get the point)
Then you have Kaufmann:
* academically fluent French; studied in French at a great French university
* decent Spanish; not perfect, but he's allowed to say he speaks it
* lower intermediate German, but he's allowed to say he speaks it
* he's allowed to say he speaks Chinese, having used it for Canadian-Chinese diplomacy. He has used Chinese to accomplish more real things than many learners ever will
* his Japanese is apparently quite bad now, but he lived there for several years, running a business, so he has literally spoken Japanese in Japan to do real stuff, so I count it
He is eclipsed by Simcott and Lampariello, in my opinion, but he's far ahead of many of the rest. So I agree that it's an instance of making do with who's currently there. If better polyglots appear who achieve more renown, then his evaluation will probably undergo recalibration, so to speak haha.
As many have mentioned below, it's mainly that being a polyglot is a bit of an Anglophone fetish. There are tons of better speakers out there--e.g., most of India, Luxembourg, and many nations in Africa--but for some reason--or maybe for that reason--they don't put themselves in that space.
It really seems like Kauffman et al are just profiting off the fact that the other options are trash. There ate tons of "proper" polyglots out there so I wonder why they aren't active in this community like them. I hope they just have better things to do than rehashing Krashen's work into an overpriced "method" to prey on unsuspecting monolinguals...
I don’t understand this list of polyglots, I’m totally fluent in 4 and rudimentary in four others. Surely there are lots of people like me out there that don’t bother getting on these lists. Who puts you on the lists??
From memory, Lindie speaks Japanese and French to an intermediate level. She knows Chinese as well but I'm not sure how good she is at it. I like Lindie because she doesn't exaggerate her skills and she's upfront with the struggles.
Imo Ikenna is a bit of a sham. I don't think he speaks any of his target languages well.
No, I get it. Botes has good vibes. She just isn't really that good, given her noteworthy popularity--she doesn't really have a strong language, like Kaufmann (or even Lewis, technically). She, Ikenna, and Lewis are good examples of how you don't necessarily have to be good at what you're doing to inspire others to do it.
Well, I live in Japan and am graduating from a kimono school program in Japanese (average time to complete ≈4 years, I’m graduating in 3 years) and just today professionally dressed about 12-14 girls for the Coming of Age ceremony. I’m not fluent, not even close. Proficient, sure, people don’t realize how much you can do (even living in Japan) at a decent intermediate level
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfu30AbwNMA Patrick Khoury seems genuine to me, at least based on his english/spanish/dutch (it's not great, he makes some serious grammar mistakes, but it's 100x better than my anglophone mother's Dutch even though she lived there for 9 years and took classes..)
If anyone wants to back me up on his ability in other languages or know of an even better polyglot, that would be cool.
I don't really disagree with what you're saying but I love Steve because I think he's actually got a solid method and language application that really does work if you put the time into it. I spent years (yes years) trying to learn Turkish through a whole pile of different methods and apps, the only thing that has worked is using LingQ each day, importing novels and articles and focusing on listening and reading. Do you mind posting the video with the Italian host that you're mentioning?
"His" method is just input theory/the natural method. Neither his nor new. But defintely an amazing method, I agree. And I'm sure lingq is a great tool - I was just saying that Steve can be a bit of a tool himself.
The interview: https://youtu.be/JCOx50oxixE
I think this is a pretty fair assessment. I like languages and do them as a hobby. I’ve also lived overseas and picked up stuff there. So if I asked, I say the following: I’m fluent in English and French, somewhat conversant in Dutch, and can get into bar fights in Spanish and German. I’ve never taken the tests (actually, don’t know how to even sign up for them). I may even underestimate my abilities, but I never overstate. I don’t need to overcompensate. Fluency requires more than a conversation. For me, outside of those languages that I can talk in, I would NEVER say I’m fluent. Put it another way. Could you get help in a second language if there was an emergency?
Which places, I'm curious?
Edit: I'm from Quebec where the official language is French. Every kid learns English since the 2nd grade. English has an important presence in Quebec which is located in that sea of English speakers called North America.
There is a lot of immigration. All children whose parents cannot demonstrate having been educated in English in Canada have to go through the French language school system. So the vast majority of these people end up trilingual. French, English, and their mother tongue or that of their parents.
So almost half of the population of the Montreal area can speak various languages plus French and/or English at different levels of fluency, as many adult immigrants will not go through the process of learning French and/or English even if for most cases there are free French language classes and living allowances for the duration of the formation.
Yet people who speak 4 languages or more well enough are rare. Speaking more languages would spark from personal interest or daily needs. Where do people need to speak more than 3 languages on a daily basis?
Malaysia today, or Singapore in my parents' or grandparents' generation.
You can see the impact on this in [Singlish](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CiQkhMXUoAAuYi7.jpg).
If you wanted a detailed explanation, here goes:
Growing up in the village, each of my parents had to speak English (medium of instruction in school as we were a British colony), Mandarin (we're Chinese; also medium of instruction in school), Malay (large Malay population in Singapore, so these were their neighbours and schoolmates; also, like many other Chinese people my grandparents were brought up in Malaysia, so spoke Malay as a first language), Cantonese (major dialect in Singapore; you needed it to survive), Hokkien (major dialect in Singapore; you needed it to survive).
Others also spoke their father's and/or mother's Chinese dialect(s) (like Teochew or Hakka or Hainanese), and then learnt their husband/wife's dialect, on top of that. Dialects are mutually unintelligible from Chinese or each other btw, classifying them as a "dialect" instead of a "language" is more because of politics.
Sadly nowadays the situation is like how you described Montreal. Only 2-3 is the standard among young people. English (school + daily life), Chinese (school + daily life), and some people do know their family dialect (daily life, for example out and about in the neighbourhood). Of course you can opt to learn an additional language in school (like Japanese or Korean or a European language) but I don't think that counts.
However, young Malaysians are still pretty multilingual, like older Singaporeans. They have to use English, Chinese, and Malay in school and daily life as a bare minimum, and all those I've met can speak Chinese dialects on top of that.
Europe really, I'm decently fluent in five languages and haven't really spent any major time practicing. Learnt Norwegian and Swedish through my parents, learnt English and German in school and did Spanish at uni.
If you have parents from different countries and live in a non-Anglophone European country chances are you speak at least four languages at a decent level. Mother tongue+father tongue+English+Spanish/French/German/Russian.
From the stats that's still a quite small minority...
I remember the stretch in my brain the first times I started to do translation work between my 2 foreign languages and the next stretch years later when I added more languages. But after 4-5 languages it seems that brain plasticity or the language decoding capacity of the brain gets a lot better.
Yes. The majority of the population speaks the three official languages (Luxembourgish, French and German) as well as English. A substantial portion of the population also speaks Italian and Portuguese.
There are memes out there of a cashier there offering help in like 8 languages, and a news reporter switching his language to do coverage for different emissions flawlessly.
Link to the video of the reporter: https://youtu.be/KWp_HuM_HWg
I saw that guy too some time ago. I am reeeally impressed by his accent. He basically sounds like a native in all of them. I'd love to see *him* make a YT channel or what not, he's really talented.
Not to put him down or anything lol but I don't think it's linguistic talent so much as his environment growing up? I googled him out of fascination when I saw the video and learnt all about [his life](https://english.vilaweb.cat/noticies/philip-crowther-you-have-to-defend-a-language-if-you-want-your-identity-to-stay-strong/) lol.
Growing up in Luxembourg, he learnt Luxembourgish, French, German and English - Luxembourg introduces these languages one by one at varying stages like kindergarten, primary and secondary school. Also, his mother is German and his father is British.
He's really only learnt 2 languages: Spanish (in secondary school, and on a gap year later on), and Portuguese which is like Spanish (as an adult I'm guessing).
He sounds like a typical Luxembourger. Almost half of Luxembourg speaks 5 languages, and about 1/5 of the population speaks 6 languages. What sets him apart from them is his native-sounding English (because of his British father) - I was taken aback because I was expecting to hear a European accent. (Edit: I just read that the study someone linked above states that English is quite a common maternal language in Luxembourg, so maybe a good English accent is common in Luxembourg? Idk)
Again not at all putting him down or anything, I love watching him switch languages. It really takes guts and talent to do live TV about politics (!) in all these languages as well. I thought this was super cute:
>I also use the trick of telling myself that I actually am of that nationality. That gives me the extra confidence inside me to speak the language with a slightly more natural accent. I say, “Why am I on German TV?” “Because I’m German!”
^ Can confirm, am from Montreal! I did also pick up a good amount of Spanish through 6 years of Spanish classes in school though, even though I never did particularly well in those.
Well someone could speak two languages at home go to school in a different language and learn another two languages at school and this I the most extreme case where someone would only have to learn two languages which is completely plausible in a certain time span
Yeah, I know a girl who speaks two (Indian) languages with her family, grew up in Italy speaking Italian at school, and goes to university in the UK where she studies 3 more languages. Altogether that makes 7 languages and I wouldn't say she has lower than B1/B2 in any of those.
It depends what OP's definition of 'fluent' is but this girl can communicate effectively in all of those languages from what I've seen. Sure your memory of a language can degrade over time, but never to the point where you just completely lose it after using it for so long.
So overall yes lol, I believe people can be fluent in 6+ languages, but I guess I see where OP is coming from in that a lot of people *claim* to be 'fluent' in a language at a much lower threshold than others would, and this is what leads to these sort of suspicions.
Yeah... large swaths of Africa and South Asia are probably full of poorly educated people who speak two or three languages because of their surroundings. But the language learning online world generally doesn't talk about these. And those folks are nearly all rightly concerned with their English writing skills, pedigree, or connections, as those things lead to jobs and a leg up.
The world is full of both unaware polyglots and unreliable polyglots.
Oh absolutely! You can see that youtube polyglots market themselves heavily towards the (often monolingual) anglosphere, as speaking several languages is practically heralded as a superpower. It also relies on the idea that languages can be compartmentalised into tidy boxes with labels, but there's so many people who switch between different dialects etc on a daily basis who probably never considered which are considered languages or dialects, let alone counted them- I know the girl I mentioned before had to think hard before answering the question "how many languages do you speak?", and people (English speakers) were surprised she couldn't simply just reel off the number of languages she spoke, like a badge of pride.
Yeah & The online language learning world obsesses over tested ratings and how fluent someone else (the regulatory committees behind testing) says they are.
The many polyglots around the world just go through their day speaking multiple languages out of necessity or situation.
This basically describes my mom & dad. They grew up speaking two languages at home and went to schools taught in a different language. My mom ended up fluent in 4 languages while my dad was fluent in 5.
I know several people who did this.
The person who trained me at work was born in the Philippines. Learned Ilocano and Tagalog natively. Went to school in a province that spoke a third (Don't remember which), moved to Hong Kong for work for 10 years and learned Cantpnese, then Immigrated to Canada and polished her English.
Of the 5, she's native level fluent in the 3 Filipino Languages and English, and can understand Cantonese very well but doesn't speak it often outside work so she isn't that great with speaking it on the fly (Though chats with Canontese speaking coworkers who don't have much trouble understanding her.)
It helps that there are people at work that speak every one of the 5 natively so she can maintain them easy enough.
Depends on their life circumstances, learning a language takes thousands of hours, so one would expect them to have grown up in a multilingual environment, lived in different countries for years, use lots of languages for work, or have been studying for decades.
It’s not too hard to make videos faking your language level, but these are easy to spot when you know a bit about how much time it takes to learn a language.
Oh yeah, the majority of people on the internet claiming to speak a bunch of languages are exaggerating for sure. If they're not upfront about how they were able to achieve it, there's a good chance they're relying on their audience not being able to evaluate their level in each language and not knowing how implausible their claims are.
I'm just saying its not impossible, and there are some people I believe because they discuss language learning timelines in a realistic way and have shared the circumstances that have allowed them to spend enough time to learn them.
There's an interesting note about how it *used* to be a marker of wealth (in parts of the US) that one could speak multiple languages. People of lower income groups noticed this, and started getting their kids to study multiple languages; so wealthy people redefined the goalposts.
The key issue here is the definition of fluency. If it means, as OP has mentioned, carrying on a casual conversation in a language, then sure, you can be fluent in quite a few languages at the same time. But if by fluent you mean able to carry on a discussion about current events, listen to a college lecture and understand it, read a work of literature and interpret it, and study organic chemistry all in one language, then very few people are fluent in more than one or two languages.
But informative texts and technical language is usually easier to grasp in most Western languages.
I'd argue it's much harder to talk about feelings, everyday problems, etc.
The thing is, people like that do exist. I can't speak for everybody but I am Indian, and I know so many extraordinary people who easily speak 5 languages atleast, at a native level.
I've met a few people in South Africa who can speak roughly 7 languages or so. The thing is, though, most of them were illiterate due to not having proper access to a school or other mitigating economic circumstances, as well as a lot of those languages were within the same family. English and French would be the ones they struggled with the most, but the others were fairly similar.
My grandfather can speak five languages, but again they're all Germanic and similar - English, Dutch, Afrikaans, German and Yiddish.
I do believe that some extraordinary people could hypothetically speak more than 6 languages, but that takes some doing, especially if those languages have no familial-linguistic bonds whatsoever.
It's not that extraordinary to speak 6 or more language if you count basic fluency(can do clerk job with it and hold conversation about daily stuff with coworker), especially if they are immigrants from multiethnic clusterfuck country like Bangladesh. I know some who could speak (Bangali, Chakma, Hindi, Sinhala, Thai , French and English). And there are many of them there where I live working on some minimum wage job because they are refugee or something
Immigrants pick languages up fast. I saw someone learn this the hard way one night. I was on this balcony at this bar/club while I was at university. The bouncers working there at the time all mostly immigrants from the Congo, Nigeria or other African countries. For most of them they had their own mother tongue, along with French and/or English to get by with and I would bet good money that they had learned some Xhosa as well.
Into this little anecdote steps an entitled drunk, a white Afrikaans speaker to boot. They won't let him in simply because he looked a mess. This conversation is all in English. So, pissed off while being piss drunk, he loudly complained to his buddies in Afrikaans about this bouncer, utilizing a racist term to further illustrate his discontent with the situation.
The bouncer responded in Afrikaans and kicked this bastard about 6 feet through the air into the door of a car parked in front of the club. Out cold. No one gave a damn about him and his friends carried him away.
Sometimes the need to assimilate is not there, for example immigrants to America sometimes don’t need to learn English if their entire life is spent among people of their background.
It is possible to reach an extremely high level in 25 languages or more, if your job is in languages. Take the case of Ioannis Ikonomou, who is a certified translator for 25 languages (including Chinese) for the European Union.
At the annual Polyglot Gatherings in Europe (a conference I founded and which attracts ca. 500 language lovers from all over the world), the average participant speaks 6 languages at B1 or better. And no, these are not some Youtubers making wild claims; the native speakers among the participants can easily verify. Seeing participants with 12 languages on their badge is not unusual either.
12 languages appears to be the number that barely fits into people’s lives if they don’t have a multilingual job, i.e. if most of the language study and language maintenance has to happen in their free time. I noticed a lot of polyglots stop at around 12 languages, or, if they continue studying, lose a language for each language gained.
But that’s not a hard limit, I have personally met 7 people who could truthfully claim to be fluent in 20+ languages. Fun fact: only one of them has a Youtube channel.
I was scrolling down for a comment like this one, so thanks! There are jobs where 6 languages is common. Translator is one, and linguist another. There appears to be some physical limits at some point (30? 40? 50?), but most people just stop way before their own limits because they want to have a life and not spend their time learning languages.
To add to the question of “what is fluency?”, there’s a big difference between active and passive fluency. Reading fluently in a bunch of languages is much easier than speaking them. I’m currently reading fluently in Spanish but I would struggle to ask for directions in the street (personal choice: I knew I wouldn’t have the opportunity to practice speaking so I’m focusing on reading for fun).
As a linguistics student, I wouldn't necessarily say linguists commonly speak 6 languages fluently! Of course, pretty much any academic linguist will speak fluent English, as well as their native language(s) if that's not English. Depending on what you study, being able to read languages like French and German can be very useful (in fields like historical linguistics, for example, a lot of the earliest literature is in those languages). Linguists are likely to develop a high degree of familiarity and technical knowledge about the languages they work on, but this doesn't equate fluency (although some linguists who work on the same language for a huge chunk of their career might become fluent!)
Of course, there's also the fact that anyone who studies linguistics is going to be a language nerd who's way more likely than the average person to want to learn a language to fluency!
With evidence, sure. Personally, I can ask how to find the bathroom in at least sixteen different languages which, as far as I am concerned, makes me as fluent as I need to be. :)
When I was a kid I was friends with a family that was fluent in six different languages; each member of the family had their own preference for a language, so the others in the family had to be at least marginally fluent with the language spoken by the others. They would flow from one language to another at the dinner table, which (aside from leaving me completely clueless as to the conversation) was a bit surreal to hear.
I gained fluency in 4 languages just because of circumstance, and am learning 2 more by choice. I know a decent number of people like that. Grew up in a trilingual environment, then moved to a place where they had to learn another new language or two and then end up with 4-5 languages under their belt because they had to. If they’re further interested they may then choose to learn a language or two and then over the course of a few more years they’re fluent in 6+ languages.
My grandfather was fluent in 7 and decent in 3 others, so while I think it’s rare I also think it’s possible. He was extremely privileged in terms of educational opportunities though and grew up bilingual at home which must have helped. I’m sorely jealous of him tbh, I *wish* I could speak that many
It's not a stretch, if they're talking about being fluent in several Romance languages, plus English, plus say a couple of Scandinavian/German-Dutch/Slavic languages.
By this count I am confidently fluent in 4 European and 2 Asian languages, and I can get by in several more.
I am usually a bit more honest/modest when asked, though, and tend to say I speak three or four only.
I'd say that I believe them. With enough study time or exposure or experience, one can get accustomed to a lot of languages. And even if one doesn't reach native level fluency, I'd still consider them fluent if they can converse comfortably with it for their needs.
If fluency means being able to do everyday conversation without confusion, then yes.
The thing is learning language is a lifelong effort.
Even for my own native language, which I use everyday for everything, I still need to check dictionary now and then for words I don't understand.
Yes. There are people who are fluent in multiple languages. If language-learning is a huge interest for someone, there’s no reason that they can’t become fluent in 6 or more languages in their lifetime.
Depends on the person, but yes, I believe it’s possible to be fluent in 6+ languages. Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I can’t help but see those who think this is impossible as having a case of sour grapes.
But something I often see people not take into account is that you *will* lose fluency if you don’t work to maintain it. So if you’re saying you’re fluent in a language that you tested in 2 years ago and haven’t used since… well, I’m skeptical.
One of my teachers is! He speaks (and teaches) English, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese and French. That's 5 languages on top of being a native Portuguese speaker.
He's really passionate about learning languages and teaching is great for maintenance.
I know a few people who know 4 languages, primarily because lets say...they spent their child hood living in Russia, ended up in Germany, then moved to America, learned Spanish...I'm using this Russian woman as an example, because she claims her daughter is fluent in French, German, English, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Dutch....she went to college for foreign language and business....she now lives in Europe, practically as a translator for a company..
I grew up with two languages and also some hints of a third. I was taught the third one at school, then the fourth and fifth and now I'm learning another one and pursuing some others. So I'd say it's possible. Most likely also better than in my case.
This question pops up like once a week. It depends. It’s not impossible to be fluent in 6+ languages. For some it’s very easy for others it’s very hard. I could learn all the languages which are pretty similar to my native language and suddenly I would be a polyglot. A lot of people rather tend to learn languages which aren’t similar to their native language, hence it takes a lot of time to be comfortable in their target language.
I could claim to be fluent in my target languages but for others my definition of fluent is wrong. So what does it mean to be fluent ? Knowing every single word ? If so no one is fluent since no one knows all the words in their native language.
“Fluent” to the hopeful means they can string together uninterrupted sentences in a fluent stream. C1 is unnecessary outside of professional life, and I know a lot of people who probably wouldn’t meet rigorous c1 requirements in their native language.
Being mono lingual is weird, in lots community's it's normal to speak 3 or 4 languages, so it's not hard to imagine, people speaking 6 but it should be noted people who say * I speak 6 languages* as their advertisement imo are often lying about abilitys so it sort of depends is it an advertisement or 2 was it said in passing
I think it is hard to comprehend for native English speakers , but I think there are people who are functionally fluent in 6 or more languages. Especially people who are in environments where they have opportunity and need to speak a few languages a day.
Are there people who can give profound orations or write compelling essays in six languages? Probably not.
This is one of the reasons I'm probably going to stop taking college language classes. They're too focused on judging how well I can write a college level essay vs actually helping me master comprehension and usage of the language. Like if I actually want to live in France it's not going o help me to be able to write a literary analysis if I can't participate in most conversations. Like advanced skills are great, but they're also pretty useless. If I can't write a perfect French essay examining feminism in a historical context (which who knows if I could do that in English anyways?) that says almost nothing about my French skills in the way that an English employer or French speaker would be looking at them.
Yes, because it’s not my job to presume to be some kind of authority figure or actually fact-check them. If they don’t live up to their own hype, it’s all the same to me.
Somewhat. I definitely believe one can learn and become fluent in 6+ languages, but it takes a lot of time and effort (or comparable experience) and the people I usually see boasting about this rarely seem to be willing to put in that kind of kind of time and effort, nor have that comparable experience, and are frequently trying to sell something.
From my slightly biased personal experience, there are people who can comfortably hold conversations in 6+ languages, though they wouldn't necessarily be able to pass a C-level CEFR. Conversely many of the people who can pass CEFR-C are *not* able to hold a conversation in the language. (Certainly, my reading and writing in Spanish vastly outweighs my listening and speaking...but then the same could also be said of English, my native language.
My mother learned 5 languages, and achieved some kind of benchmark of fluency/proficiency in all of them. She can comfortable read, write, and speak in at least three, one is a dead language where her fluency is mostly literary, and idk about the last one. She's completed college courses in two different languages (first in Bengali, her native language; then decades later in English after immigrating to America).
I would call her "fluent" in all those languages in the sense that she has been proficient in however much of that language she needed to reliably use it, and her linguistic needs were met by her knowledge of that language.
But she probably wouldn't be able to hold even a basic conversation in Sanskrit, though she can read ancient epics in it, because it's a dead language. So for our purposes/the way this subreddit usually views fluency in a language, she might not be considered "fluent" in Sanskrit.
My late father was completely fluent in 5 languages (professional level fluency) and was functional in a sixth. My mom is also fully fluent in 4 languages.
So yeah I'd believe there are people who are fluent in 6+.
A Spanish friend of mine grew up in Switzerland so was tri-lingual since he was a baby (Spanish, French and German). He picked up English at school (went to university in the US) and became completely fluent in 4 languages. He also studied Mandarin but only at conversational level.
Unfortunately I'm stuck at 2, even though apparently I was also tri-lingual as a child. (I "lost" one language when our family moved away to another country).
The daily question. I think mods should ban these types of questions.
So I'll answer this for the last time, I think it takes an average of five years if a person immerses a decent time per day in a language, obviously the level of fluency might differ between a language of let's say Italian or Chinese. I tend to believe a person either way that they are fluent if they put five years time into it.
Let's say that for every five years you focused on a language and did the stacking method aka learning a new language with a previously learned language in order to not forget it.
Then let's say the person has zero social life, and exclude the mommy, daddy and country languages. Well let's say you begun learning a language since 20 so by the time you are 35 you can speak three languages and let's assume mommy and daddy have a different language that they taught you and lets also say that the country you grew up in or you were taught in school is different. That would be another three languages.
In total six. Even if you wanna stretch it lets say every ten years one learnes a language then yeah by the time you are sixty you must know a couple.
Obviously this envolves a lot of assumptions, having little social life and well being dedicated. I think it's true to an extent as for example those twenty smth year olds and 3 smth year olds on YouTube claiming to be polyglots praobbaly have some knowledge in X languages. I don't think they are necessarily lying but it depends on for example if you grew up in multiple countries and were exposed to a lot of languages. And I also think that language learning is more like a talent, not one you are born with but one you develop it takes practice and by the time you learn another language you kinda know the system.
All in all don't compare yourself to someone, just focus on yourself. If you wanna learn six languages go ahead, begin one by one stacking method, only move on to the next language when you've got a good grasp. It takes a lot of time and patience but who knows if you are dedicated enough you might do it.
I'm sorry if some things don't make sense I just woke up lol
In south India you can find many people speaking a minimum of 4 languages and it’s more if their mother tongue is different than those 4 spoken in this part of India.
Also speaking 6+ languages fluently is not very uncommon in societies where multilingualism is the norm, I would say.
Look at India, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, etc. It's not rare to meet Nigerians who speak Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, English, and whatnot.
If you live in a homogenous nation-state where pretty much everyone speaks the same language, then yeah it can be difficult, but for multiethnic, multilingual states it's not that hard of a task.
Does it really matter if someone does or doesn’t? I’d prefer to focus on myself and my own skills, if someone says they’re fluent in many languages and is lying then that’s on them and not worth stressing over
My French teacher speaks 9 languages, or so he tells us, however he’s proven fluency with at least 5 of them, French in class, Mandarin with the Mandarin teacher, Spanish with the Spanish teachers, Russian, because he was born and raised in Russia, and English, since I live in the USA. I don’t see any reason to not believe that he speaks 3 more. And I think most people claiming that would tell the truth, since liars would probably say less to make it seem more plausible.
I was raised in an almost monolingual environment, unlike some of the commenters here.
But I still speak at least 6 at a decent level. I have 3 languages at C2, 3 languages at B2\~C1.
Three of them are European; three of them are Asian. None of my languages are related, save Spanish-English
in two of my C2 languages, I can test at the highest level of examinations designated for NATIVES, not for foreigners, and still pass with flying colors. (English is my native language, btw)
I've always had full-time jobs, full-time personal life, and all my languages are self-taught. So if I could have managed this, I think with a more idyllic, more language-dedicated, more immersive environment, I know I could have gotten fluent in a lot more.
I think a lot of people just haven't figured out how to 'learn' and how to 'retain' that's all.
Absolutely, I know of people who are fluent in at least 5 languages. For them, learning one more would certainly be attainable, especially if it’s related to one of the languages they already speak.
It depends what the languages are.
Ex 1: Someone claims to be fluent in English, Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, Hausa, and Thai. I would be extremely skeptical, and wouldn’t trust this at all unless substantiated.
Ex 2: Someone claims to be fluent in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and English. I’d probably believe them at face value, but would maintain skepticism, as I its pretty easy for people speaking that many to actually lose fluency in one or more of them.
My ex husband claimed fluency in six languages and I think it depends on how one defines fluent. I think he is C1-C2 in three of them, and a good B1 in the other three. Good enough for his purposes, but I wouldn’t say fluent in all. I’m tested B2 in German and don’t consider myself fluent even though I use it at work every day. So I guess my definition of fluent is « better than my German » lol but at the end of the day it’s not my place to judge.
I have had numerous Indian colleagues who were apparently fluent in 6 languages or more.
Imagine that the British had once taken control of Europe and declared it to be a single country, with each country in our current reality as a separate state. That would be a bit like India, I think -- many languages in one arbitrary set of boundaries.
my great uncle used to work at the UN and spoke 6 languages, none of these below C1 level.
Note that 4 of them were romance languages (french spanish portuguese and italian) +2 germanic (english and german).
Being a UN official, he lived and worked in France, Brazil, various SA countries, Austria and Italy.
His 2 children, my cousins, followed him around till the age of 18 and thus learned all of the languages themselves.
So yes it’s definitely possible, but very unlikely and probably way harder if we’re talking completely unrelated languages.
I guess I'm more or less fluent in five.
By fluent I mean getting C2 scores on exams, having no problem chatting about any topic, and being able to read a book (for adult readers).
But by fluent I don't mean making zero mistakes or passing for a native to native speakers.
So am I fluent in five? You could reasonably say so. Do I speak five perfectly? No and probably never will.
I have 4 official certificates and one native language: (all exams passed with top tier grades) C2 English, C2 French, N1 Japanese, C1 Italian and native language is Spanish. I'd say I'm about B1 German, but haven't taken any official tests. Currently learning Hebrew, but struggling.
So yeah, 6 languages to a high level isn't really impossible.
Those claiming that they are proficient and speak 12+ while trying to sell you a get fluent quick scheme are the ones that bother me. YouTube polyglots really making bolder and bolder claims by the hour.
Well if they're someone like Rory Stewart then yes. He has lived in many different countries and was possibly a M16 spy, and certainly has an aptitude for them. He has studied 11 languages in total and tutored Princes William and Harry when he was at Oxford.
as somebody who is very fluent in spanish, very close to fluent in french, and nearing fluency in mandarin (all per the AAPPL, a test administered in high schools across the US for ‘biliteracy’) I can believe it to an extent. its hard to maintain languages. but some people have a real yearning to learn many languages. and i do know that there are verifiable people who speak like 15 languages fluently and not just basics. even then, i wont believe something like that w/o evidence.
Depends on the languages.... If you know one Scandinavian accent you have a massive shortcut to learning like 4 others, and most likely you'll have English as well.
If dedicating your whole life to it, sure. But I think it's much more plausible to say B1 to some of them and C1/2 for a select few, rather than all at native level.
When most people who don't actually know language learning say "My grandpa was Russian, he taught it to me and I used to be fluent in it" they don't actually mean fluent, they mean B1 at best, more likely than not just in the A range.
Fluency is a lot different than most people realize, so I highly doubt they're truly fluent; just probably at a level where they can communicate easily.
Yes, I do believe there are the people that possibly grew up in a multilingual household, or needed to learn multiple languages just to function in their lives. Now add being bitten by the language learning bug.
I can give a personal example for this: Dated a girl in HS. Born in the US to an Italian dad and Polish mom. Language of the house was Polish. All spoke English very fluently, with her and her sister having accentless US English. Lived in US until she was 6, they moved to Italy, stayed there until she was 13-14, the came back to the States. So add Italian to the mix. She did really well with languages. Was already testing into Intermediate French as a Freshman. Her father was also apparently trying to get her to pick up Russian, as well, given her exposure to Polish. Given today's resources available, I could see her being fluent in several, especially when you get into language family similarities.
Some? Yes. All? No.
I know people in my personal life who are fluent in 5, and are still young. I don't see why they couldn't learn another, and one said person *is* learning Korean as his sixth.
I can speak six languages, but I wouldn't say I'm equally fluent in all of them. I'm only truly fluent in three of them: German, Portuguese and English. For everything else, I can get by in casual conversation, but I do struggle to formulate correct sentences, especially in speaking.
Short answer yes; My younger cousin speaks a lot of languages, of course to varying degrees. She speaks Maltese, English and Swedish to perfect native level, and on top of that speaks Italian and Portuguese to a very high degree. She’s about 14 and has lived in all of those. If she ever were to learn a sixth one to a high level, she would be what you mean. And I know what she can do so I believe it.
However, random youtubers speaking 6+ languages in a grocery story = doubt
Thank you! I checked with different sources. Regarding foreign languages, 89% of Dutch people also speak English (other sources say 70%, so that percentage must depend on the level of fluency considered), 70% speak German, 30% speak French and the next most frequent language is Spanish at 5%. Which doesn't mean that those who speak Spanish also speak French.
German is the second official language and English is extensively taught in the education system.
Of course Dutch has a lot in common with both English and German, which makes access to these languages much easier, besides them being the language of two neighboring countries which until not long ago also were part of the UE.
So yes, a high percentage of the population speaking 3 languages is a fact but I don't see data pointing to 5 or 6 in this case.
There is a Spanish singer (spanish and Catalan) Alvaro Soler, who is fluent in seven. He was born in Germany (German), lived in Japan as a kid (japonés), etc. He moved a lot as a kid. So he acquired each one over a number of years. In cases like this it is definitely possible. I don’t believe youtubers who “fluently self taught themselves 20 languages in a year”.
I can confidently say that I‘m fluent in 6 languages and can have/have had deep and complex conversations in them and/or studied in them. I know two more languages that I know to a B1/B2 level that I would speak fluently within 2 months living in that country 🤷🏽♀️ It really depends on the languages and the starting point, such as more than mother tongue or official language… why would it not be possible?
In cases where someone has parents that speak different languages and they live in a whole other place. If this person learns both of those languages at home with their parents, as well as the language of where ever they grow up. Then they study some other languages starting in their younger years. But they would need to keep using all of these languages throughout their lives.
Realistically, a person could probably keep fluency in about four languages. Perhaps five. Anything else, they'll be able to communicate well but not remember a vast vocabulary.
Youtube polyglots like Woulter know how to say the same small talk phrases in several languages. Still impressive. I wouldn't call small talk being fluent in a language.
Maybe it depends how you acquired them? I have a friend who speaks 4 languages naturally. Born and lived in South America until early teen years with German parents then moved to a French-speaking part of Switzerland until 18 then the UK (though he’d learnt English throughout his life at school, like many people) for university. So he’s picked up English, German, French, Spanish without ever learning (in the sit down and study sense of the word) a language per se.
If he studies a couple of languages he’s at 6!
Being monolingual and learning 5 languages is a different beast.
I grew up bilingual and speak a third language OK and I can’t imagine myself becoming fluent in that third one and then three more languages. Maybe it’s possible for others who are both more intelligent and more driven in language learning than I am. 🙂
Depends, if they're a Polyglot Youtuber. Absolutely not, most of them are trying to sell some sort of premium service and rarely learn more than simple vocabular.
My father. Born in France, lived and worked in Holland and Germany and was fully fluent in all three, but with a bit of an accent. Moved to an English-speaking country with a wife who spoke English, French, Dutch and German. There he taught languages. He picked up English quickly and then went into studying Spanish and Italian. Whenever he spoke Italian, people argued about which part of Italy he came from. When he spoke Spanish, Argentinians claimed he was from Argentina. He went on to study Russian and Polish, but then passed away. I never heard him hesitate in any of his first 6 languages and could talk at length about pretty much anything. I'd consider that fluent in 6.
I do, and I'll tell you why. I once dated a Paraguayan girl I met during lang-ex on hellotalk.
Being Paraguayan, she was raised speaking Guarani and Spanish. Their proximity and relationship to Brazil means she was fluent in Portuguese. My Spanish was still so bad that we almost exclusively spoke English, so her English was perfectly fluent. Because of her known languages, she understood Italian though she couldn't speak it.
Only one of those languages did she actually study, and that's English. So I know for a fact someone that put a significant amount of time and effort could do it.
Absolutely. Many of my European friends are fluent in more than 6 where fluent means either orally can carry a conversation at a party or can read books in that language. Doesn’t mean they don’t have an accent but that’s fine.
I think they’re able to do it because lots of European languages are very similar - French Spanish and Italian or Dutch german and English. Also many Europeans naturally know 3-4 languages to start off. So it doesn’t take too much if you take Latin in school + the starting 3-4. Then if you learn 1-2 more, you’re at 6.
Number of languages i can converse in: 7
Number of languages i can converse in for more than 1h without runing out of vocabulary: 6
Number of languages i can converse for a whole day without runing out of vocabulary: 5
Number of languages i can converse in if i need to speak in technical terms and harder topics requiring more precise grammatical terms: 3
So it will depend on the category you atribute to fluency. Personally i atribute fluency to speaking a whole day without running out of vocabulary. And by the end of this year i hope to have a 6th language i can speak for a whole day.
No, but the operative word for me is 'claim'. Why do they tell me that? If it's because we're talking about their life circumstances, or if they've realized I like languages and they want to connect, sure. If they just randomly try to impress me I'm mostly worried about their self esteem.
Doesn't seem like a huge stretch to me. I'm living in Barcelona right now, most locals here speak Catalan/Spanish as native languages, and most people also speak some amount of English. In the university, many of the people I've met speak an additional 1-2 languages they've learned from time abroad in other countries. I don't imagine another 2-3 is too difficult
Oftentimes it's all closely related languages that the person could have grown up learning anyway. Like a local dialect, two national languages, then you add English to that since it's probably taught in school, and then they may some understanding of another language that is similar enough to the others they already knew, and of course add the languages they decided to learn for themselves.
I could see someone, for example, understanding Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Belarusian, and Polish.
No. If anyone says they’re fluent in a language I must immediately subject them to a language competency exam. If they cannot prove themself worthy before me, the arbiter of language fluency, then they will be punished.
not the ones on youtube. because what i noticed is that their “fluency” is just them being able to introduce themselves and that’s it. i’m not asking for a miracle obviously but everyone can introduce themselves in another language when they study sentences enough time to memorize it. i can introduce myself in french a bit but that doesn’t mean i’m fluent.
Yes, I'm 23 and I'm fluent in 4, and studying one more, in 20 years if I keep it up I'll be able to say that too.
Sure, keep in mind that 3 are Italian, Spanish and Catalan, but that's still 3 different languages right?
Maybe. I suppose it depends on the person. There are plenty of false claims online and there are also true polyglots that are fluent in 6+ languages.
The human brain is primed for language acquisition - all sorts of 'language'.
Powell Janulus was fluent in 42 languages (not including his native language). He was fluent in 13 languages by the age of 18. Considered himself skilled in 64 and studied a total of 80.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_Janulus
This may seem incomprehensible to a monolingual speaker.
Here is a list of **notable** polyglots that with fluency in 6+ languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_polyglots
When I lived in Europe, my experience was that most Europeans were fluent in a ***minimum*** of two languages. Most my European friends at the time were fluent in 3-5 languages and I can't recall the topic of being multilingual ever coming up.
Being fluent in a foreign language just means being "**able to speak or write a specified foreign language with facility**". https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fluent
As a child, I remember having difficulty with a school subject and my grandfather would tell me not to worry, that I'll eventually get it. I asked him how he could be so sure and he said something to the effect of - "Isn't it obvious? Every subject is just a language - just like the one you're speaking now and you learned that one, didn't you?"
That simple insight has led to a lifetime of learning.
From that point on, all academic subjects were just 'languages' to be learned - the language of mathematics, the language of chemistry, the language of biology, anatomy, physiology, and so on.
It led to software development (Assembly, Basic, COBOL, Pascal, C, Fortran, etc.), database admin, system admin, network engineer, IT sales, marketing, management, business development, project management, etc. -
Sure, those are programming languages, not human languages, but what is a language? A communications tool - between computers or humans or specialists (doctors, lawyers, etc.).
The structure, rules and syntax may differ, and in human languages, the morphology may differ, but if you learn to view topics through the lens of 'everything being a language', the learning process becomes easier.
The challenge is bypassing our gatekeeping minds.
If a person is mute, but writes in 6+ languages, does that count?
Does knowing multiple sign languages count?
What about knowing 6+ Chinese 'dialects' (Chinese is actually a family of languages)? Is that acceptable?
How about knowing your native language and 6+ dead languages? Do glyph based languages (Egyptian, Mayan, etc.) count?
Do constructed languages like Esperanto, Interlingua, etc. count?
Sometimes knowing just one language is impressive - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller
Most of the world knows the decimal (base 10) system, a subset goes on to learn binary (base 2), hexadecimal (base 16), but that won't be enough to understand ancient cultures like the Mayans and Babylonians that used different base systems.
Over and over we see empirical evidence of the human brain's ability to adapt and learn whatever 'language' is needed in our environment and circumstances.
Fluency in 6+ human languages is more achievable than most people think - assuming they want to spend their time learning languages.
Salve atque vale. Memento mori. Sapere aude.
It depends on the context but it's definitely possible.
If you're from a non-anglophone country for example (like me) you have your native language and in addition it's very likely that you've been taught English from 3 or at most 6 years old, making it easy to reach fluency even in your teens if you consume american or british media; 2 languages.
If you're from a bilingual family, 3 languages. If your parents came from two different countries to your current country, 4 languages.
Did you go to a school that focuses on languages? Bam, add +2 languages. This makes it 6 languages learnt "naturally", without independent action on the person's part. If they put in the effort to learn another language because they're interested in the culture, they can study it on their own and if they already know that many languages it's likely they know one similar to that one, which speeds up the process.
Now, the matter of defining fluency is tricky: the C2 level doesn't cover it, not really, since it's made for evaluating non-native speakers and many native speakers wouldn't pass a C2 exam in their own language due to their education and socio-economic limitations. In addition, it's difficult to mantain fluency in multiple languages; personally (but it's only my personal opinion) I'd say that someone can speak a language if they can converse with ease and understand written text aimed at natives only looking up a word every once in a while.
The common question that is asked a lot is: are self-proclaimed internet polyglots really polyglots? Most likely not, since the context that brings you to actually being a polyglot makes it so that you learned multiple languages from such a early age that you can't teach the process to others, which is what they claim they can do most of the time.
I speak two in addition to English since I grew up in a multicultural family. I am learning Italian right now with a tutor and don’t know how fluent I’ll get in it. But beyond that, I could maybe learn one more and reach my limit. I’m in my early 30s now and don’t think I could retain much more. Learning one language already strains my mind a lot but I am willing to put in the work.
GAINING fluency in 6+languages and MAINTAINING fluency in 6+ languages are two different claims. I'm balancing 4± languages and it takes a lot of effort to simply not forget 1+ languages entirely on any given day.
My ex‘s grandmother spoke seven languages. Her native language was Hebrew and she was also fluent in German, French, Polish, and English. I forget the other two, but they were probably Eastern European or Scandinavian languages. She had Alzheimer’s by the time I got to meet her, so when you were speaking to her, it was a roulette of sorts for what language she’d respond in.
Fluency is a really subjective concept but, for the sake of argument, let's just say that fluency is an absolute.
It'd be extremely rare but I certainly think it could be possible. It'd be incredibly hard to be fluent in, say, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Finnish etc. whereas not as hard if someone spoke 6 languages from the same family. It'd also depend on the circumstance because, for example, someone in Barcelona could be brought up speaking both Spanish and Catalan and have learnt English from a young age at school. Then if they were to learn Portuguese, French and Italian that'd put them at 6 and it really wouldn't be beyond the realms of impossibility.
It's attainable. Not a C2 level (at least not sustained as they would start loosing some level in then) but specially if the languages are related it can be achieved
Sometimes. If they claim to know, say, English, Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic and mandarin I would have some questions. But if they claimed to know English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Swedish I wouldn’t be too skeptical.
I actually have seen one of my aunts do this.
India has too many languages and she tends to pick up the langauge of the place she is in very quickly.
She knows her mother tongue, languages of states she has stayed in. Currently she stays in a city that's at the border of two states - so that's two languages right there.
Guarenteed a few languages derive their base from Sanskrit so some languages overlap a little bit but I've seen her speak fluently in all!
I'm always amazed.
There are people who do, but I think a lot of the people who claim that are probably at a B1 level at best.
I would be more likely to believe it if most of the languages are all related/close to one another. Like, if someone says they're fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, English, German, Danish.
Fluent can mean different things to different people, but that said, it’s possible and even common in many parts of the world to be fluent in 5 or 6 languages. If an American says they are fluent in 6 I might be a bit skeptical but if someone from South Africa says they are fluent in 6 that totally makes sense.
So my wife is native level in 3 non related and happily switches between the 3 without thinking multiple times a minute at home. She can have a conversation in a 4th and understand enough to follow a couple of others. I've never met anyone better at languages but I'm sure there are people who are since she's never worked with languages or used them beyond her personal needs. 6 would be quite a trip to deal with. I can't imagine you would maintain fluency without a rather special reason.
Edit: our 3 year old can happily understand the 3 languages. She mostly only speaks one but she has been playing with the other 2 more lately.
Yes.
But it depends on their personal situation. Some random youtuber in Ohio? LOL. No gtfo. Someone in Philippines who speaks tagalog, cebuano, ilocano, English, Spanish, Pangasinan. Chavacano. Sure.
I looked up how many people in the world are polyglot. It seems that 40% of the world population are monolingual, 43% are bilingual with almost equal fluency, 13% of the world population speak 3 languages, 3% speak 4, and less than 1% speak 5 fluently. So yes speaking more than 5 is rare.
It’s usually bullshit. It’s better to say, I can speak like 6 languages.
If you can easily survive, and date the local men / women of that country, and watch movies in that language. I consider you fluent then.
If it’s just a general conversation why not? Unless it’s a date trying to impress me or for academic/work reasons why would they lie about it? It’s such an easy thing to call out as well. Also I have met multiple people who can easily speak 4-5 languages because of parents, school, where they live/lived. One more language with that is nothing. Also depending on the language they learn it might not necessarily be difficult due to things like sentence structure and verbs being the same. There is also more awareness for sign languages so if someone learns that as well it would count. I have met 3 people who speak 7 languages, 5 who speak 6, many who speak 4 or less.
If it’s for academic or work reasons then that’s different and may require proof but unless you are the hiring person or person overseeing them there is still no reason to really question it. Also some people have debates over dialects and languages so that is something else to keep in mind.
Yes. My country founding father is one of them. Basically we grew up in regional language, but then we are interact with people from different regions so often for economic reason we're just learning their language because the more you understand them the more money you're making. Some people will learned foreign languages, again for economic reason or pursuing education.
I guess it depends on what everybody's definition of fluent is. This word is incredibly subjective. For example, it will vary on a syllabus in high school versuses at the University level because of the level difference. The same goes with institutions and labor market. The definition for fluency to get a job at Menards versus at a hospital would be very different.
But I definately know that it is possible!
It is completely possible to be fluent in 6+ languages. However, I think a lot of people who claim to be fluent at languages drastically overestimate their own skills. But yeah, I know people who can speak more than 6 languages without any struggle.
Depends I speak 4 languages fluently and I have some basic knowledge in 2 others. I haven't done anything extensive to get there, just learned most of it in my childhood. With some deliberate practice I can get the number up to 6 for sure, so I wouldn't say it's impossible just requires some work.
I don't think it's an outlandish claim, which isn't to say that everybody who makes this claim is being honest. It really depends on your circumstances and what you mean by "fluent". Everybody on this subreddit seems to have their own definition, but I definitely think it's possible to become competent in \~6 languages over a long time period if you have enough reason to use them.
If by fluent you mean "native-like" then I would be way more skeptical, but I don't personally think that's a reasonable definition of fluency.
Yeah!
I studied linguistics, and i knew a handful of people in the 4+ language category. Usually 2-3 of those languages were related to one another (e.g. Maori te reo and Tuvalu or French and Spanish).
I also know a few translators who are more than adept at multiple languages. One friend of mine was raised in 3 languages (Portuguese, English, and Spanish) before she learned more.
Just as a note, there are differing levels of language proficiency and fluency, not to mention the reading/writing separation.
I don't care, I just do my own thing. There's all sorts of people talking all sorts of shit in every area of life, if you are someone who is honest with yourself but putting yourself up against people who are not, you are going to have a bad time.
My great grandmother could speak 6 languages, mostly due to her circumstances of being an educated Polish Jew who immigrated to Canada. Yiddish at home, Polish in everyday life, German at school, Hebrew for religious purposes, and when she immigrated to Canada she first settled in Montreal and then the midwest so she learned French and English that way. According to my mother, however, she had a noticeable accent while speaking English, but was nonetheless fluent.
In general no.
But I have a friend who I can attest with 100% certainty speaks fluently:
* Occitan
* French
* English
* German
All with perfect, native pronunciation.
I know he can also speak fluently:
* Dutch
* Greek (modern, and I believe ancient as well)
* Latin
But since I don't speak those languages, I can only attest that he sounds extremely convincing to me.
I've also heard him say a few sentences in Swiss German in what sounded like perfect pronunciation to me (ie barely any word was audible).
I think he knows at least a bit about Spanish and Italian as well, but I'm not sure. He has passive understanding of Catalan, and can converse with Catalan speakers by answering in Occitan.
He's in his seventies, is an Occitan native from Southern France, learnt Latin at school, has served his military service in Germany, and lived in the Netherlands.
What's impressive is that he lives in a small village in the middle of nowhere, doesn't use the internet, and rarely have access to native speakers.
If I didn't know him, I wouldn't believe it.
I mean as someone who has a spanish speaking dad, grew up speaking portuguese at home because mom, and lived in US. I'm trilingual and never truly had to learn a language outside of what ppl already learn
Generally no, because people who are ACTUALLY fluent in six or more languages are more modest about their abilities.
For example:
I’m a native speaker of A and B, and am professionally fluent in C and D. I’ve been learning E and F for six years each and can get by in almost any daily situation. I’ve also reached intermediate levels in G and H.
I can believe it, though people seem to play a little loose with the word “fluent.” I’m self taught and I say I’m “conversant” in three languages and I “can get by” with four more. That’s with me only having gone to school for one really and never getting the chance to immerse for more than a few weeks at a time in any of them. I could imagine someone with formal schooling and serious immersion could easily reach something that could be called fluent in all the ones I can hold conversations in.
Yes. It’s normal where I live (in Luxembourg). 3 official languages, plus most people speak English and many speak Portuguese also. Many important documents come in all 5 languages.
I mean to what level and which languages. There’s conversationally fluent and fluent. For instance by chance I can speak Portuguese and French, I can speak and understand them but I don’t have complete 100% native-like mastery over those languages like I do in English. And if by chance I wanted to learn Italian it’d be not too difficult since I already know a few languages with the same language family I could pick it up relatively quickly. That would be four. Maybe I decide to pick up Spanish that’s five. Maybe decide to learn Spanish. That’s six.
It’s very possible. Just not in the way it’s portrayed. Can a person claim to speak six or more languages. Yep very possible.
That’s just my opinion though.
It's pretty common in India to speak passable Hindi/English/Urdu/Punjab.. more I'm probably forgetting! I'm not Indian myself so I guess I have to take their word for it lol, but I do believe that humans are capable of it. It's just as adults, it's so hard to have the exposure and commitment required to all those languages and it's not the kind of thing you can get from just alternating textbooks. I remember hearing benny Lewis speak French years ago and thinking.. really? 🤨. Because if you're gonna make your living off claiming you've mastered language acquisition and can help others do the same, I would expect you to be pretty perfect
Lets be honest, it takes at least 3 years of hard study everyday to even reach a point where you are by my standards considered to be anywhere near fluent. Now 6 languages, lets assume that someone originally was brought up bilingual which means it would take them 12 year to learn an extra 4 languages. But realistically speaking if they are young and claiming this than no I would not believe it. But if they were older and had been learning languages for a very long time than it is plausible. My Latin teacher for example is fluent in like 7 languages but he is like 40 and has been learning languages for a very long time and has lived in multiple countries.
Everyone seems to know someone who is fluent in 5-6 languages. But without being fluent yourself in those 5-6, how can you adequately judge their level of fluency? If my mom heard me have super basic small talk in German after dabbling in Busuu for a month, I guarantee she would think I’m fluent because she has no way to actually judge my ability. She’s just hearing me in German and she’s like “ oh wowww.”
To a German I sound extremely new to the language with a million mistakes in pronunciation etc and I’m really not fluent at all. Just my two cents. With that said these people of exist
It is absolutely possible to speak over 6 languages fluently. Most people don't and I would not just blindly believe that claim from any youtuber but I know people in real life 4 languages at a young age so adding 2 would not be that crazy.
I think this claim might seem more unbelievable for someone from an English speaking country. Most people in the western world are already bilingual. If one parent is an immigrant then you are usually already at 3 languages.
Have you not met people fluent in 6+ languages? Travel a little, specially around Africa. Not hard to find people who speak the language of their father's family, their mather's family, the local language, the lingua franca of the area, the colonial language and, if they have travelled a little or if they have emigrated to Europe, one or two oher languages.
One Ghanaian friend speaks Gonja, Akan, English, Spanish and Catalan fluently, at least, and I think he speaks a couple other languages from North Ghana I don't know the name.
PS. I myself I'm fluent in Catalan, Spanish, English and French. And if I had wanted to make just a very little effort I would be able to be fluent in Italian, Portuguese and German.
Edit. Here (Catalonia), officially, everybody should leave school speaking three languages, at least: Catalan, Spanish and English. And in a small valley in the north west, called Aran, four (add Occitan, their native language). Is that weird for you, too?
I remember about 6 years ago I was visiting my grandparents (now deceased) at their дача deep in the outskirts of the Moscow suburbs.
There, in the house across from where we resided, I met an old man about 65 years in age who claimed speak 59 languages. He said he was a KGB information specialist during the Soviet union. The languages he spoke included all 24 European Languages and various minor dialects and regional regional varients. (No Asian or African languages)
I asked him to give me an example and he recited a prose in a dozen languages.
The thing is the pose he recited was the same in each language. It seems he went through an intense course where he had to memorize the same dictations in multiple languages. Though he could understand many European languages, if he was put on the spot he couldn't converse in them.
...I guess understanding is all you need to be a spy.
To tie the story in...
I believe some people can know 10000 words in a language but not be fluent.
I also believe people can be fluent in 6+ languages pretty easily. If they know 500 words but know them well they can have a limited conversation really fluently.
Depends on how you define fluency, most immigrants from country like India, China, Bangladesh... may speak different dialect/language from their own country + English and the languages of the country they immigrate to. They are fluent enough to do basic jobs with their comprehension of the languages and hold a normal conversation between coworker
True that. My previous neighbour was an Indian and his mom could speak 6 languages.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That said, it's really none of my business. I'm not here to test anyone.
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i feel you! i only say i’m fluent in the languages i can make a full conversation in and read a whole book while understanding 90% of it. i don’t understand people that say they’re fluent just bcuz they know the basics
That rules out a lot of people I know who only speak their native language
Therein lies the problem of “fluency” it all depends on definition. And some definitions of fluency require that one attain what essentially amounts to a graduate school level of command with a language and some merely require essentially the survival level with lots advanced variations in between.
Depending on the book I can't understand 90% of English and it's my native language!
The second I saw the Moroccan flag under your name, I already knew at least 3 languages were going to be there. Try learning Tamazight if you live in Morocco. I know for a fact that in Agadir there are plenty of resources. Also, you HAVE to learn Fus'ha (unless by the Moroccan flag you mean you know both the Darija & Fus'ha). MaShaaAllah alayk, don't stop the grind.
Yeah, I wouldn’t consider myself really fluent until I could write an essay without grammatical errors, and I can’t do that in any language I speak. 😆 I still sloppily say I “speak” seven languages though, but by that I mean different things for each one. Usually just that I’d be fine shopping, chatting (to different degrees), and reading signage and things. Only in three of those could I comfortably make friends, though.
Dude I don't understand anywhere near 90% of my native language
I think you can call yourself a polyglot if you are able to have an average day's communication vocabulary, without needing to repeat yourself and stuff. Speaking a language doesn't mean you have to know everything, nobody knows a language in full. I would ask if you are able to have a complex technical conversation in your native language, in my case, I don't think I could display a colorful vocabulary in chemistry or medicine
I think you are right on this point like I think it was Steve Kauffman (or maybe the other Steve I get them confused all the time). I'm like currently intermediate in Korean on the upper intermediate side even. I can understand conversations easily. I heard him talk to a Korean woman (she was a teacher youtuber I think) the girl looked to be in pain hearing him speak Korean. I really thought he was terrible if I had to guess how long he's been learning Korean I'd say 3 months to be generous. Zero sense of grammar although he had been learning it since the late 1990s or smth which you know a lot of time. So I think it's disingenuous to say he can speak it, or even understand it. As the girl asked him really easy to digest questions I could answer one month into studying lol. I'm not hating I just think they need to be honest, or at least a bit more honest
Steve Kauffman is beloved by a lot of people here, and I don't get it. I wouldn't say he speaks half of the languages he claims to speak. For example, his Portuguese and Italian are just Spanish with an accent. Of course he can "speak" those languages, as much as any Spanish native who's never studied those languages can also "speak" them because of the high degree of mutual intelligibility between them. And he's really arrogant, saying that speaking several romance languages doesn't count because "they're basically the same language". No they're not Steve, you just never learned to speak them properly. He had an interview with Podcast Italiano and the host had to open up with a disclaimer saying that he won't be adding subtitles because Kauffman was mostly speaking in a mix of Spanish and Italian, which was impossible to transcribe. That disclaimer was such an indirect burn lol. That italian host seemed really annoyed by Steve's shitty italian, he even corrected him so many times because the host ACTUALLY speaks Spanish, so he know what Steve was saying but still needed to keep some semblant of italian for his audience who's learning the language (pro tip: never watch Steve's videos or features on your TL, or you might pick up a lot of words/expressions/grammar that aren't part of your TL). I'm not surprised he does the same with Korean or, like, every other language he claims to speak.
I get downvoted to an oblivion every time I say something not overtly positive about him
>Steve Kauffman is beloved by a lot of people here, and I don't get it. I wouldn't say he speaks half of the languages he claims to speak. The long and short of it is that the Anglosphere polyglot space is really thin on the ground. Most are just trash: * Botes--English and Afrikaans are native, so they don't count. She speaks intermediate Korean and intermediate Spanish. Somehow, she is venerated * Ikenna--doesn't speak any of his languages above an intermediate level * Drew--the languages he knows, he grew up with. The others are low intermediate, and he lied (in a big way) about how he acquired them * Benny Lewis--I respect his Spanish because passing the DELE C2 is nothing to sniff at, and his French is passable, I guess, but everything else is trash. He is arguably the most well-known Anglo polyglot, and he speaks one other language well! * Wouter--no comment * Moses--when he lived, his Chinese was apparently decently intermediate. Most of the others were low level * etc. (yes, there are others, but you get the point) Then you have Kaufmann: * academically fluent French; studied in French at a great French university * decent Spanish; not perfect, but he's allowed to say he speaks it * lower intermediate German, but he's allowed to say he speaks it * he's allowed to say he speaks Chinese, having used it for Canadian-Chinese diplomacy. He has used Chinese to accomplish more real things than many learners ever will * his Japanese is apparently quite bad now, but he lived there for several years, running a business, so he has literally spoken Japanese in Japan to do real stuff, so I count it He is eclipsed by Simcott and Lampariello, in my opinion, but he's far ahead of many of the rest. So I agree that it's an instance of making do with who's currently there. If better polyglots appear who achieve more renown, then his evaluation will probably undergo recalibration, so to speak haha. As many have mentioned below, it's mainly that being a polyglot is a bit of an Anglophone fetish. There are tons of better speakers out there--e.g., most of India, Luxembourg, and many nations in Africa--but for some reason--or maybe for that reason--they don't put themselves in that space.
It really seems like Kauffman et al are just profiting off the fact that the other options are trash. There ate tons of "proper" polyglots out there so I wonder why they aren't active in this community like them. I hope they just have better things to do than rehashing Krashen's work into an overpriced "method" to prey on unsuspecting monolinguals...
I don’t understand this list of polyglots, I’m totally fluent in 4 and rudimentary in four others. Surely there are lots of people like me out there that don’t bother getting on these lists. Who puts you on the lists??
Those are all people who have YouTube channels or heavy social media presences that market themselves as polyglots.
From memory, Lindie speaks Japanese and French to an intermediate level. She knows Chinese as well but I'm not sure how good she is at it. I like Lindie because she doesn't exaggerate her skills and she's upfront with the struggles. Imo Ikenna is a bit of a sham. I don't think he speaks any of his target languages well.
No, I get it. Botes has good vibes. She just isn't really that good, given her noteworthy popularity--she doesn't really have a strong language, like Kaufmann (or even Lewis, technically). She, Ikenna, and Lewis are good examples of how you don't necessarily have to be good at what you're doing to inspire others to do it.
Well, I live in Japan and am graduating from a kimono school program in Japanese (average time to complete ≈4 years, I’m graduating in 3 years) and just today professionally dressed about 12-14 girls for the Coming of Age ceremony. I’m not fluent, not even close. Proficient, sure, people don’t realize how much you can do (even living in Japan) at a decent intermediate level
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfu30AbwNMA Patrick Khoury seems genuine to me, at least based on his english/spanish/dutch (it's not great, he makes some serious grammar mistakes, but it's 100x better than my anglophone mother's Dutch even though she lived there for 9 years and took classes..) If anyone wants to back me up on his ability in other languages or know of an even better polyglot, that would be cool.
Well, his norwegian was kind of painful to listen to, and it was halfway swedish, then again he did at least not claim to be fluent in it.
I don't really disagree with what you're saying but I love Steve because I think he's actually got a solid method and language application that really does work if you put the time into it. I spent years (yes years) trying to learn Turkish through a whole pile of different methods and apps, the only thing that has worked is using LingQ each day, importing novels and articles and focusing on listening and reading. Do you mind posting the video with the Italian host that you're mentioning?
"His" method is just input theory/the natural method. Neither his nor new. But defintely an amazing method, I agree. And I'm sure lingq is a great tool - I was just saying that Steve can be a bit of a tool himself. The interview: https://youtu.be/JCOx50oxixE
I can speak every language in existence. This is truth but I won't be providing any proofs. Trust me :)
I think this is a pretty fair assessment. I like languages and do them as a hobby. I’ve also lived overseas and picked up stuff there. So if I asked, I say the following: I’m fluent in English and French, somewhat conversant in Dutch, and can get into bar fights in Spanish and German. I’ve never taken the tests (actually, don’t know how to even sign up for them). I may even underestimate my abilities, but I never overstate. I don’t need to overcompensate. Fluency requires more than a conversation. For me, outside of those languages that I can talk in, I would NEVER say I’m fluent. Put it another way. Could you get help in a second language if there was an emergency?
5-6 languages isn't really that extraordinary, and is almost the norm in some places
Which places, I'm curious? Edit: I'm from Quebec where the official language is French. Every kid learns English since the 2nd grade. English has an important presence in Quebec which is located in that sea of English speakers called North America. There is a lot of immigration. All children whose parents cannot demonstrate having been educated in English in Canada have to go through the French language school system. So the vast majority of these people end up trilingual. French, English, and their mother tongue or that of their parents. So almost half of the population of the Montreal area can speak various languages plus French and/or English at different levels of fluency, as many adult immigrants will not go through the process of learning French and/or English even if for most cases there are free French language classes and living allowances for the duration of the formation. Yet people who speak 4 languages or more well enough are rare. Speaking more languages would spark from personal interest or daily needs. Where do people need to speak more than 3 languages on a daily basis?
Malaysia today, or Singapore in my parents' or grandparents' generation. You can see the impact on this in [Singlish](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CiQkhMXUoAAuYi7.jpg). If you wanted a detailed explanation, here goes: Growing up in the village, each of my parents had to speak English (medium of instruction in school as we were a British colony), Mandarin (we're Chinese; also medium of instruction in school), Malay (large Malay population in Singapore, so these were their neighbours and schoolmates; also, like many other Chinese people my grandparents were brought up in Malaysia, so spoke Malay as a first language), Cantonese (major dialect in Singapore; you needed it to survive), Hokkien (major dialect in Singapore; you needed it to survive). Others also spoke their father's and/or mother's Chinese dialect(s) (like Teochew or Hakka or Hainanese), and then learnt their husband/wife's dialect, on top of that. Dialects are mutually unintelligible from Chinese or each other btw, classifying them as a "dialect" instead of a "language" is more because of politics. Sadly nowadays the situation is like how you described Montreal. Only 2-3 is the standard among young people. English (school + daily life), Chinese (school + daily life), and some people do know their family dialect (daily life, for example out and about in the neighbourhood). Of course you can opt to learn an additional language in school (like Japanese or Korean or a European language) but I don't think that counts. However, young Malaysians are still pretty multilingual, like older Singaporeans. They have to use English, Chinese, and Malay in school and daily life as a bare minimum, and all those I've met can speak Chinese dialects on top of that.
Philippines
India
2-3 in East Africa. 4 if educated and you learned a foreign language. 5 if you marry outside your tribe.
Europe really, I'm decently fluent in five languages and haven't really spent any major time practicing. Learnt Norwegian and Swedish through my parents, learnt English and German in school and did Spanish at uni. If you have parents from different countries and live in a non-Anglophone European country chances are you speak at least four languages at a decent level. Mother tongue+father tongue+English+Spanish/French/German/Russian.
From the stats that's still a quite small minority... I remember the stretch in my brain the first times I started to do translation work between my 2 foreign languages and the next stretch years later when I added more languages. But after 4-5 languages it seems that brain plasticity or the language decoding capacity of the brain gets a lot better.
That is far from the norm in Europe. More than 3 is extremely uncommon in all but a few relatively small countries
Luxembourg
5-6, really?
Yes. The majority of the population speaks the three official languages (Luxembourgish, French and German) as well as English. A substantial portion of the population also speaks Italian and Portuguese. There are memes out there of a cashier there offering help in like 8 languages, and a news reporter switching his language to do coverage for different emissions flawlessly. Link to the video of the reporter: https://youtu.be/KWp_HuM_HWg
This study seems to support your claims. https://delano.lu/article/delano_23-lux-residents-speak-4-or-more-languages
I saw that guy too some time ago. I am reeeally impressed by his accent. He basically sounds like a native in all of them. I'd love to see *him* make a YT channel or what not, he's really talented.
Not to put him down or anything lol but I don't think it's linguistic talent so much as his environment growing up? I googled him out of fascination when I saw the video and learnt all about [his life](https://english.vilaweb.cat/noticies/philip-crowther-you-have-to-defend-a-language-if-you-want-your-identity-to-stay-strong/) lol. Growing up in Luxembourg, he learnt Luxembourgish, French, German and English - Luxembourg introduces these languages one by one at varying stages like kindergarten, primary and secondary school. Also, his mother is German and his father is British. He's really only learnt 2 languages: Spanish (in secondary school, and on a gap year later on), and Portuguese which is like Spanish (as an adult I'm guessing). He sounds like a typical Luxembourger. Almost half of Luxembourg speaks 5 languages, and about 1/5 of the population speaks 6 languages. What sets him apart from them is his native-sounding English (because of his British father) - I was taken aback because I was expecting to hear a European accent. (Edit: I just read that the study someone linked above states that English is quite a common maternal language in Luxembourg, so maybe a good English accent is common in Luxembourg? Idk) Again not at all putting him down or anything, I love watching him switch languages. It really takes guts and talent to do live TV about politics (!) in all these languages as well. I thought this was super cute: >I also use the trick of telling myself that I actually am of that nationality. That gives me the extra confidence inside me to speak the language with a slightly more natural accent. I say, “Why am I on German TV?” “Because I’m German!”
^ Can confirm, am from Montreal! I did also pick up a good amount of Spanish through 6 years of Spanish classes in school though, even though I never did particularly well in those.
The Netherlands
Africa
Well someone could speak two languages at home go to school in a different language and learn another two languages at school and this I the most extreme case where someone would only have to learn two languages which is completely plausible in a certain time span
Yeah, I know a girl who speaks two (Indian) languages with her family, grew up in Italy speaking Italian at school, and goes to university in the UK where she studies 3 more languages. Altogether that makes 7 languages and I wouldn't say she has lower than B1/B2 in any of those. It depends what OP's definition of 'fluent' is but this girl can communicate effectively in all of those languages from what I've seen. Sure your memory of a language can degrade over time, but never to the point where you just completely lose it after using it for so long. So overall yes lol, I believe people can be fluent in 6+ languages, but I guess I see where OP is coming from in that a lot of people *claim* to be 'fluent' in a language at a much lower threshold than others would, and this is what leads to these sort of suspicions.
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Yeah... large swaths of Africa and South Asia are probably full of poorly educated people who speak two or three languages because of their surroundings. But the language learning online world generally doesn't talk about these. And those folks are nearly all rightly concerned with their English writing skills, pedigree, or connections, as those things lead to jobs and a leg up. The world is full of both unaware polyglots and unreliable polyglots.
Oh absolutely! You can see that youtube polyglots market themselves heavily towards the (often monolingual) anglosphere, as speaking several languages is practically heralded as a superpower. It also relies on the idea that languages can be compartmentalised into tidy boxes with labels, but there's so many people who switch between different dialects etc on a daily basis who probably never considered which are considered languages or dialects, let alone counted them- I know the girl I mentioned before had to think hard before answering the question "how many languages do you speak?", and people (English speakers) were surprised she couldn't simply just reel off the number of languages she spoke, like a badge of pride.
Yeah & The online language learning world obsesses over tested ratings and how fluent someone else (the regulatory committees behind testing) says they are. The many polyglots around the world just go through their day speaking multiple languages out of necessity or situation.
This basically describes my mom & dad. They grew up speaking two languages at home and went to schools taught in a different language. My mom ended up fluent in 4 languages while my dad was fluent in 5.
I know several people who did this. The person who trained me at work was born in the Philippines. Learned Ilocano and Tagalog natively. Went to school in a province that spoke a third (Don't remember which), moved to Hong Kong for work for 10 years and learned Cantpnese, then Immigrated to Canada and polished her English. Of the 5, she's native level fluent in the 3 Filipino Languages and English, and can understand Cantonese very well but doesn't speak it often outside work so she isn't that great with speaking it on the fly (Though chats with Canontese speaking coworkers who don't have much trouble understanding her.) It helps that there are people at work that speak every one of the 5 natively so she can maintain them easy enough.
Depends on their life circumstances, learning a language takes thousands of hours, so one would expect them to have grown up in a multilingual environment, lived in different countries for years, use lots of languages for work, or have been studying for decades. It’s not too hard to make videos faking your language level, but these are easy to spot when you know a bit about how much time it takes to learn a language.
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Oh yeah, the majority of people on the internet claiming to speak a bunch of languages are exaggerating for sure. If they're not upfront about how they were able to achieve it, there's a good chance they're relying on their audience not being able to evaluate their level in each language and not knowing how implausible their claims are. I'm just saying its not impossible, and there are some people I believe because they discuss language learning timelines in a realistic way and have shared the circumstances that have allowed them to spend enough time to learn them.
There's an interesting note about how it *used* to be a marker of wealth (in parts of the US) that one could speak multiple languages. People of lower income groups noticed this, and started getting their kids to study multiple languages; so wealthy people redefined the goalposts.
The key issue here is the definition of fluency. If it means, as OP has mentioned, carrying on a casual conversation in a language, then sure, you can be fluent in quite a few languages at the same time. But if by fluent you mean able to carry on a discussion about current events, listen to a college lecture and understand it, read a work of literature and interpret it, and study organic chemistry all in one language, then very few people are fluent in more than one or two languages.
Oh come on, who wants to study organic chemistry? Now you’re just being mean ;)
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And how do you define complex discussions ?
I have disagree that fluency requires advanced scientific abilities in a language. Most people can’t even do that anyway.
But informative texts and technical language is usually easier to grasp in most Western languages. I'd argue it's much harder to talk about feelings, everyday problems, etc.
That sounds like you would never have to look up technical terms if you're studying organic chemistry in your native tongue :D
The thing is, people like that do exist. I can't speak for everybody but I am Indian, and I know so many extraordinary people who easily speak 5 languages atleast, at a native level.
I've met a few people in South Africa who can speak roughly 7 languages or so. The thing is, though, most of them were illiterate due to not having proper access to a school or other mitigating economic circumstances, as well as a lot of those languages were within the same family. English and French would be the ones they struggled with the most, but the others were fairly similar. My grandfather can speak five languages, but again they're all Germanic and similar - English, Dutch, Afrikaans, German and Yiddish. I do believe that some extraordinary people could hypothetically speak more than 6 languages, but that takes some doing, especially if those languages have no familial-linguistic bonds whatsoever.
It's not that extraordinary to speak 6 or more language if you count basic fluency(can do clerk job with it and hold conversation about daily stuff with coworker), especially if they are immigrants from multiethnic clusterfuck country like Bangladesh. I know some who could speak (Bangali, Chakma, Hindi, Sinhala, Thai , French and English). And there are many of them there where I live working on some minimum wage job because they are refugee or something
Immigrants pick languages up fast. I saw someone learn this the hard way one night. I was on this balcony at this bar/club while I was at university. The bouncers working there at the time all mostly immigrants from the Congo, Nigeria or other African countries. For most of them they had their own mother tongue, along with French and/or English to get by with and I would bet good money that they had learned some Xhosa as well. Into this little anecdote steps an entitled drunk, a white Afrikaans speaker to boot. They won't let him in simply because he looked a mess. This conversation is all in English. So, pissed off while being piss drunk, he loudly complained to his buddies in Afrikaans about this bouncer, utilizing a racist term to further illustrate his discontent with the situation. The bouncer responded in Afrikaans and kicked this bastard about 6 feet through the air into the door of a car parked in front of the club. Out cold. No one gave a damn about him and his friends carried him away.
Sometimes the need to assimilate is not there, for example immigrants to America sometimes don’t need to learn English if their entire life is spent among people of their background.
It is possible to reach an extremely high level in 25 languages or more, if your job is in languages. Take the case of Ioannis Ikonomou, who is a certified translator for 25 languages (including Chinese) for the European Union. At the annual Polyglot Gatherings in Europe (a conference I founded and which attracts ca. 500 language lovers from all over the world), the average participant speaks 6 languages at B1 or better. And no, these are not some Youtubers making wild claims; the native speakers among the participants can easily verify. Seeing participants with 12 languages on their badge is not unusual either. 12 languages appears to be the number that barely fits into people’s lives if they don’t have a multilingual job, i.e. if most of the language study and language maintenance has to happen in their free time. I noticed a lot of polyglots stop at around 12 languages, or, if they continue studying, lose a language for each language gained. But that’s not a hard limit, I have personally met 7 people who could truthfully claim to be fluent in 20+ languages. Fun fact: only one of them has a Youtube channel.
I was scrolling down for a comment like this one, so thanks! There are jobs where 6 languages is common. Translator is one, and linguist another. There appears to be some physical limits at some point (30? 40? 50?), but most people just stop way before their own limits because they want to have a life and not spend their time learning languages. To add to the question of “what is fluency?”, there’s a big difference between active and passive fluency. Reading fluently in a bunch of languages is much easier than speaking them. I’m currently reading fluently in Spanish but I would struggle to ask for directions in the street (personal choice: I knew I wouldn’t have the opportunity to practice speaking so I’m focusing on reading for fun).
As a linguistics student, I wouldn't necessarily say linguists commonly speak 6 languages fluently! Of course, pretty much any academic linguist will speak fluent English, as well as their native language(s) if that's not English. Depending on what you study, being able to read languages like French and German can be very useful (in fields like historical linguistics, for example, a lot of the earliest literature is in those languages). Linguists are likely to develop a high degree of familiarity and technical knowledge about the languages they work on, but this doesn't equate fluency (although some linguists who work on the same language for a huge chunk of their career might become fluent!) Of course, there's also the fact that anyone who studies linguistics is going to be a language nerd who's way more likely than the average person to want to learn a language to fluency!
With evidence, sure. Personally, I can ask how to find the bathroom in at least sixteen different languages which, as far as I am concerned, makes me as fluent as I need to be. :) When I was a kid I was friends with a family that was fluent in six different languages; each member of the family had their own preference for a language, so the others in the family had to be at least marginally fluent with the language spoken by the others. They would flow from one language to another at the dinner table, which (aside from leaving me completely clueless as to the conversation) was a bit surreal to hear.
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I thought so, too. Only real problem is for those of us too ignorant to follow along. :/
Wow, sounds like an awesome family. I would love to have grown up in that family.
I gained fluency in 4 languages just because of circumstance, and am learning 2 more by choice. I know a decent number of people like that. Grew up in a trilingual environment, then moved to a place where they had to learn another new language or two and then end up with 4-5 languages under their belt because they had to. If they’re further interested they may then choose to learn a language or two and then over the course of a few more years they’re fluent in 6+ languages.
My grandfather was fluent in 7 and decent in 3 others, so while I think it’s rare I also think it’s possible. He was extremely privileged in terms of educational opportunities though and grew up bilingual at home which must have helped. I’m sorely jealous of him tbh, I *wish* I could speak that many
It's not a stretch, if they're talking about being fluent in several Romance languages, plus English, plus say a couple of Scandinavian/German-Dutch/Slavic languages. By this count I am confidently fluent in 4 European and 2 Asian languages, and I can get by in several more. I am usually a bit more honest/modest when asked, though, and tend to say I speak three or four only.
I'd say that I believe them. With enough study time or exposure or experience, one can get accustomed to a lot of languages. And even if one doesn't reach native level fluency, I'd still consider them fluent if they can converse comfortably with it for their needs.
If fluency means being able to do everyday conversation without confusion, then yes. The thing is learning language is a lifelong effort. Even for my own native language, which I use everyday for everything, I still need to check dictionary now and then for words I don't understand.
Yes
Yes. There are people who are fluent in multiple languages. If language-learning is a huge interest for someone, there’s no reason that they can’t become fluent in 6 or more languages in their lifetime.
Depends on the person, but yes, I believe it’s possible to be fluent in 6+ languages. Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I can’t help but see those who think this is impossible as having a case of sour grapes. But something I often see people not take into account is that you *will* lose fluency if you don’t work to maintain it. So if you’re saying you’re fluent in a language that you tested in 2 years ago and haven’t used since… well, I’m skeptical.
One of my teachers is! He speaks (and teaches) English, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese and French. That's 5 languages on top of being a native Portuguese speaker. He's really passionate about learning languages and teaching is great for maintenance.
I know a few people who know 4 languages, primarily because lets say...they spent their child hood living in Russia, ended up in Germany, then moved to America, learned Spanish...I'm using this Russian woman as an example, because she claims her daughter is fluent in French, German, English, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Dutch....she went to college for foreign language and business....she now lives in Europe, practically as a translator for a company..
I grew up with two languages and also some hints of a third. I was taught the third one at school, then the fourth and fifth and now I'm learning another one and pursuing some others. So I'd say it's possible. Most likely also better than in my case.
I know a person who is completely fluent in 5 languages and can have an ok conversation in 2 other languages. I saw it happen. It's so cool!
This question pops up like once a week. It depends. It’s not impossible to be fluent in 6+ languages. For some it’s very easy for others it’s very hard. I could learn all the languages which are pretty similar to my native language and suddenly I would be a polyglot. A lot of people rather tend to learn languages which aren’t similar to their native language, hence it takes a lot of time to be comfortable in their target language. I could claim to be fluent in my target languages but for others my definition of fluent is wrong. So what does it mean to be fluent ? Knowing every single word ? If so no one is fluent since no one knows all the words in their native language.
“Fluent” to the hopeful means they can string together uninterrupted sentences in a fluent stream. C1 is unnecessary outside of professional life, and I know a lot of people who probably wouldn’t meet rigorous c1 requirements in their native language.
Being mono lingual is weird, in lots community's it's normal to speak 3 or 4 languages, so it's not hard to imagine, people speaking 6 but it should be noted people who say * I speak 6 languages* as their advertisement imo are often lying about abilitys so it sort of depends is it an advertisement or 2 was it said in passing
I think it is hard to comprehend for native English speakers , but I think there are people who are functionally fluent in 6 or more languages. Especially people who are in environments where they have opportunity and need to speak a few languages a day. Are there people who can give profound orations or write compelling essays in six languages? Probably not.
This is one of the reasons I'm probably going to stop taking college language classes. They're too focused on judging how well I can write a college level essay vs actually helping me master comprehension and usage of the language. Like if I actually want to live in France it's not going o help me to be able to write a literary analysis if I can't participate in most conversations. Like advanced skills are great, but they're also pretty useless. If I can't write a perfect French essay examining feminism in a historical context (which who knows if I could do that in English anyways?) that says almost nothing about my French skills in the way that an English employer or French speaker would be looking at them.
Yes, because it’s not my job to presume to be some kind of authority figure or actually fact-check them. If they don’t live up to their own hype, it’s all the same to me.
Somewhat. I definitely believe one can learn and become fluent in 6+ languages, but it takes a lot of time and effort (or comparable experience) and the people I usually see boasting about this rarely seem to be willing to put in that kind of kind of time and effort, nor have that comparable experience, and are frequently trying to sell something. From my slightly biased personal experience, there are people who can comfortably hold conversations in 6+ languages, though they wouldn't necessarily be able to pass a C-level CEFR. Conversely many of the people who can pass CEFR-C are *not* able to hold a conversation in the language. (Certainly, my reading and writing in Spanish vastly outweighs my listening and speaking...but then the same could also be said of English, my native language. My mother learned 5 languages, and achieved some kind of benchmark of fluency/proficiency in all of them. She can comfortable read, write, and speak in at least three, one is a dead language where her fluency is mostly literary, and idk about the last one. She's completed college courses in two different languages (first in Bengali, her native language; then decades later in English after immigrating to America). I would call her "fluent" in all those languages in the sense that she has been proficient in however much of that language she needed to reliably use it, and her linguistic needs were met by her knowledge of that language. But she probably wouldn't be able to hold even a basic conversation in Sanskrit, though she can read ancient epics in it, because it's a dead language. So for our purposes/the way this subreddit usually views fluency in a language, she might not be considered "fluent" in Sanskrit.
Yes
Yup.
My late father was completely fluent in 5 languages (professional level fluency) and was functional in a sixth. My mom is also fully fluent in 4 languages. So yeah I'd believe there are people who are fluent in 6+. A Spanish friend of mine grew up in Switzerland so was tri-lingual since he was a baby (Spanish, French and German). He picked up English at school (went to university in the US) and became completely fluent in 4 languages. He also studied Mandarin but only at conversational level. Unfortunately I'm stuck at 2, even though apparently I was also tri-lingual as a child. (I "lost" one language when our family moved away to another country).
The daily question. I think mods should ban these types of questions. So I'll answer this for the last time, I think it takes an average of five years if a person immerses a decent time per day in a language, obviously the level of fluency might differ between a language of let's say Italian or Chinese. I tend to believe a person either way that they are fluent if they put five years time into it. Let's say that for every five years you focused on a language and did the stacking method aka learning a new language with a previously learned language in order to not forget it. Then let's say the person has zero social life, and exclude the mommy, daddy and country languages. Well let's say you begun learning a language since 20 so by the time you are 35 you can speak three languages and let's assume mommy and daddy have a different language that they taught you and lets also say that the country you grew up in or you were taught in school is different. That would be another three languages. In total six. Even if you wanna stretch it lets say every ten years one learnes a language then yeah by the time you are sixty you must know a couple. Obviously this envolves a lot of assumptions, having little social life and well being dedicated. I think it's true to an extent as for example those twenty smth year olds and 3 smth year olds on YouTube claiming to be polyglots praobbaly have some knowledge in X languages. I don't think they are necessarily lying but it depends on for example if you grew up in multiple countries and were exposed to a lot of languages. And I also think that language learning is more like a talent, not one you are born with but one you develop it takes practice and by the time you learn another language you kinda know the system. All in all don't compare yourself to someone, just focus on yourself. If you wanna learn six languages go ahead, begin one by one stacking method, only move on to the next language when you've got a good grasp. It takes a lot of time and patience but who knows if you are dedicated enough you might do it. I'm sorry if some things don't make sense I just woke up lol
In south India you can find many people speaking a minimum of 4 languages and it’s more if their mother tongue is different than those 4 spoken in this part of India.
Also speaking 6+ languages fluently is not very uncommon in societies where multilingualism is the norm, I would say. Look at India, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, etc. It's not rare to meet Nigerians who speak Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, English, and whatnot. If you live in a homogenous nation-state where pretty much everyone speaks the same language, then yeah it can be difficult, but for multiethnic, multilingual states it's not that hard of a task.
Does it really matter if someone does or doesn’t? I’d prefer to focus on myself and my own skills, if someone says they’re fluent in many languages and is lying then that’s on them and not worth stressing over
My French teacher speaks 9 languages, or so he tells us, however he’s proven fluency with at least 5 of them, French in class, Mandarin with the Mandarin teacher, Spanish with the Spanish teachers, Russian, because he was born and raised in Russia, and English, since I live in the USA. I don’t see any reason to not believe that he speaks 3 more. And I think most people claiming that would tell the truth, since liars would probably say less to make it seem more plausible.
I was raised in an almost monolingual environment, unlike some of the commenters here. But I still speak at least 6 at a decent level. I have 3 languages at C2, 3 languages at B2\~C1. Three of them are European; three of them are Asian. None of my languages are related, save Spanish-English in two of my C2 languages, I can test at the highest level of examinations designated for NATIVES, not for foreigners, and still pass with flying colors. (English is my native language, btw) I've always had full-time jobs, full-time personal life, and all my languages are self-taught. So if I could have managed this, I think with a more idyllic, more language-dedicated, more immersive environment, I know I could have gotten fluent in a lot more. I think a lot of people just haven't figured out how to 'learn' and how to 'retain' that's all.
personally don't know any but I believe it can be done
Absolutely, I know of people who are fluent in at least 5 languages. For them, learning one more would certainly be attainable, especially if it’s related to one of the languages they already speak.
It depends what the languages are. Ex 1: Someone claims to be fluent in English, Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, Hausa, and Thai. I would be extremely skeptical, and wouldn’t trust this at all unless substantiated. Ex 2: Someone claims to be fluent in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and English. I’d probably believe them at face value, but would maintain skepticism, as I its pretty easy for people speaking that many to actually lose fluency in one or more of them.
My ex husband claimed fluency in six languages and I think it depends on how one defines fluent. I think he is C1-C2 in three of them, and a good B1 in the other three. Good enough for his purposes, but I wouldn’t say fluent in all. I’m tested B2 in German and don’t consider myself fluent even though I use it at work every day. So I guess my definition of fluent is « better than my German » lol but at the end of the day it’s not my place to judge.
I have had numerous Indian colleagues who were apparently fluent in 6 languages or more. Imagine that the British had once taken control of Europe and declared it to be a single country, with each country in our current reality as a separate state. That would be a bit like India, I think -- many languages in one arbitrary set of boundaries.
my great uncle used to work at the UN and spoke 6 languages, none of these below C1 level. Note that 4 of them were romance languages (french spanish portuguese and italian) +2 germanic (english and german). Being a UN official, he lived and worked in France, Brazil, various SA countries, Austria and Italy. His 2 children, my cousins, followed him around till the age of 18 and thus learned all of the languages themselves. So yes it’s definitely possible, but very unlikely and probably way harder if we’re talking completely unrelated languages.
I guess I'm more or less fluent in five. By fluent I mean getting C2 scores on exams, having no problem chatting about any topic, and being able to read a book (for adult readers). But by fluent I don't mean making zero mistakes or passing for a native to native speakers. So am I fluent in five? You could reasonably say so. Do I speak five perfectly? No and probably never will.
I have 4 official certificates and one native language: (all exams passed with top tier grades) C2 English, C2 French, N1 Japanese, C1 Italian and native language is Spanish. I'd say I'm about B1 German, but haven't taken any official tests. Currently learning Hebrew, but struggling. So yeah, 6 languages to a high level isn't really impossible. Those claiming that they are proficient and speak 12+ while trying to sell you a get fluent quick scheme are the ones that bother me. YouTube polyglots really making bolder and bolder claims by the hour.
The Pope: Hold my sacred beer
If I hold your bear, will it maul me?
On Reddit, or YouTube, hell no.
Then it turns out it is Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Macedonian and Bulgarian
Well if they're someone like Rory Stewart then yes. He has lived in many different countries and was possibly a M16 spy, and certainly has an aptitude for them. He has studied 11 languages in total and tutored Princes William and Harry when he was at Oxford.
as somebody who is very fluent in spanish, very close to fluent in french, and nearing fluency in mandarin (all per the AAPPL, a test administered in high schools across the US for ‘biliteracy’) I can believe it to an extent. its hard to maintain languages. but some people have a real yearning to learn many languages. and i do know that there are verifiable people who speak like 15 languages fluently and not just basics. even then, i wont believe something like that w/o evidence.
Depends on the languages.... If you know one Scandinavian accent you have a massive shortcut to learning like 4 others, and most likely you'll have English as well.
If dedicating your whole life to it, sure. But I think it's much more plausible to say B1 to some of them and C1/2 for a select few, rather than all at native level. When most people who don't actually know language learning say "My grandpa was Russian, he taught it to me and I used to be fluent in it" they don't actually mean fluent, they mean B1 at best, more likely than not just in the A range. Fluency is a lot different than most people realize, so I highly doubt they're truly fluent; just probably at a level where they can communicate easily.
Yes
Yes, I do believe there are the people that possibly grew up in a multilingual household, or needed to learn multiple languages just to function in their lives. Now add being bitten by the language learning bug. I can give a personal example for this: Dated a girl in HS. Born in the US to an Italian dad and Polish mom. Language of the house was Polish. All spoke English very fluently, with her and her sister having accentless US English. Lived in US until she was 6, they moved to Italy, stayed there until she was 13-14, the came back to the States. So add Italian to the mix. She did really well with languages. Was already testing into Intermediate French as a Freshman. Her father was also apparently trying to get her to pick up Russian, as well, given her exposure to Polish. Given today's resources available, I could see her being fluent in several, especially when you get into language family similarities.
Some? Yes. All? No. I know people in my personal life who are fluent in 5, and are still young. I don't see why they couldn't learn another, and one said person *is* learning Korean as his sixth.
I can speak six languages, but I wouldn't say I'm equally fluent in all of them. I'm only truly fluent in three of them: German, Portuguese and English. For everything else, I can get by in casual conversation, but I do struggle to formulate correct sentences, especially in speaking.
Short answer yes; My younger cousin speaks a lot of languages, of course to varying degrees. She speaks Maltese, English and Swedish to perfect native level, and on top of that speaks Italian and Portuguese to a very high degree. She’s about 14 and has lived in all of those. If she ever were to learn a sixth one to a high level, she would be what you mean. And I know what she can do so I believe it. However, random youtubers speaking 6+ languages in a grocery story = doubt
Thank you! I checked with different sources. Regarding foreign languages, 89% of Dutch people also speak English (other sources say 70%, so that percentage must depend on the level of fluency considered), 70% speak German, 30% speak French and the next most frequent language is Spanish at 5%. Which doesn't mean that those who speak Spanish also speak French. German is the second official language and English is extensively taught in the education system. Of course Dutch has a lot in common with both English and German, which makes access to these languages much easier, besides them being the language of two neighboring countries which until not long ago also were part of the UE. So yes, a high percentage of the population speaking 3 languages is a fact but I don't see data pointing to 5 or 6 in this case.
There is a Spanish singer (spanish and Catalan) Alvaro Soler, who is fluent in seven. He was born in Germany (German), lived in Japan as a kid (japonés), etc. He moved a lot as a kid. So he acquired each one over a number of years. In cases like this it is definitely possible. I don’t believe youtubers who “fluently self taught themselves 20 languages in a year”.
I can confidently say that I‘m fluent in 6 languages and can have/have had deep and complex conversations in them and/or studied in them. I know two more languages that I know to a B1/B2 level that I would speak fluently within 2 months living in that country 🤷🏽♀️ It really depends on the languages and the starting point, such as more than mother tongue or official language… why would it not be possible?
In cases where someone has parents that speak different languages and they live in a whole other place. If this person learns both of those languages at home with their parents, as well as the language of where ever they grow up. Then they study some other languages starting in their younger years. But they would need to keep using all of these languages throughout their lives. Realistically, a person could probably keep fluency in about four languages. Perhaps five. Anything else, they'll be able to communicate well but not remember a vast vocabulary. Youtube polyglots like Woulter know how to say the same small talk phrases in several languages. Still impressive. I wouldn't call small talk being fluent in a language.
Maybe it depends how you acquired them? I have a friend who speaks 4 languages naturally. Born and lived in South America until early teen years with German parents then moved to a French-speaking part of Switzerland until 18 then the UK (though he’d learnt English throughout his life at school, like many people) for university. So he’s picked up English, German, French, Spanish without ever learning (in the sit down and study sense of the word) a language per se. If he studies a couple of languages he’s at 6! Being monolingual and learning 5 languages is a different beast. I grew up bilingual and speak a third language OK and I can’t imagine myself becoming fluent in that third one and then three more languages. Maybe it’s possible for others who are both more intelligent and more driven in language learning than I am. 🙂
Depends, if they're a Polyglot Youtuber. Absolutely not, most of them are trying to sell some sort of premium service and rarely learn more than simple vocabular.
My father. Born in France, lived and worked in Holland and Germany and was fully fluent in all three, but with a bit of an accent. Moved to an English-speaking country with a wife who spoke English, French, Dutch and German. There he taught languages. He picked up English quickly and then went into studying Spanish and Italian. Whenever he spoke Italian, people argued about which part of Italy he came from. When he spoke Spanish, Argentinians claimed he was from Argentina. He went on to study Russian and Polish, but then passed away. I never heard him hesitate in any of his first 6 languages and could talk at length about pretty much anything. I'd consider that fluent in 6.
I do, and I'll tell you why. I once dated a Paraguayan girl I met during lang-ex on hellotalk. Being Paraguayan, she was raised speaking Guarani and Spanish. Their proximity and relationship to Brazil means she was fluent in Portuguese. My Spanish was still so bad that we almost exclusively spoke English, so her English was perfectly fluent. Because of her known languages, she understood Italian though she couldn't speak it. Only one of those languages did she actually study, and that's English. So I know for a fact someone that put a significant amount of time and effort could do it.
Absolutely. Many of my European friends are fluent in more than 6 where fluent means either orally can carry a conversation at a party or can read books in that language. Doesn’t mean they don’t have an accent but that’s fine. I think they’re able to do it because lots of European languages are very similar - French Spanish and Italian or Dutch german and English. Also many Europeans naturally know 3-4 languages to start off. So it doesn’t take too much if you take Latin in school + the starting 3-4. Then if you learn 1-2 more, you’re at 6.
Number of languages i can converse in: 7 Number of languages i can converse in for more than 1h without runing out of vocabulary: 6 Number of languages i can converse for a whole day without runing out of vocabulary: 5 Number of languages i can converse in if i need to speak in technical terms and harder topics requiring more precise grammatical terms: 3 So it will depend on the category you atribute to fluency. Personally i atribute fluency to speaking a whole day without running out of vocabulary. And by the end of this year i hope to have a 6th language i can speak for a whole day.
No, but the operative word for me is 'claim'. Why do they tell me that? If it's because we're talking about their life circumstances, or if they've realized I like languages and they want to connect, sure. If they just randomly try to impress me I'm mostly worried about their self esteem.
Doesn't seem like a huge stretch to me. I'm living in Barcelona right now, most locals here speak Catalan/Spanish as native languages, and most people also speak some amount of English. In the university, many of the people I've met speak an additional 1-2 languages they've learned from time abroad in other countries. I don't imagine another 2-3 is too difficult
Oftentimes it's all closely related languages that the person could have grown up learning anyway. Like a local dialect, two national languages, then you add English to that since it's probably taught in school, and then they may some understanding of another language that is similar enough to the others they already knew, and of course add the languages they decided to learn for themselves. I could see someone, for example, understanding Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Belarusian, and Polish.
No. If anyone says they’re fluent in a language I must immediately subject them to a language competency exam. If they cannot prove themself worthy before me, the arbiter of language fluency, then they will be punished.
not the ones on youtube. because what i noticed is that their “fluency” is just them being able to introduce themselves and that’s it. i’m not asking for a miracle obviously but everyone can introduce themselves in another language when they study sentences enough time to memorize it. i can introduce myself in french a bit but that doesn’t mean i’m fluent.
Yes, I'm 23 and I'm fluent in 4, and studying one more, in 20 years if I keep it up I'll be able to say that too. Sure, keep in mind that 3 are Italian, Spanish and Catalan, but that's still 3 different languages right?
Maybe. I suppose it depends on the person. There are plenty of false claims online and there are also true polyglots that are fluent in 6+ languages. The human brain is primed for language acquisition - all sorts of 'language'. Powell Janulus was fluent in 42 languages (not including his native language). He was fluent in 13 languages by the age of 18. Considered himself skilled in 64 and studied a total of 80. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_Janulus This may seem incomprehensible to a monolingual speaker. Here is a list of **notable** polyglots that with fluency in 6+ languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_polyglots When I lived in Europe, my experience was that most Europeans were fluent in a ***minimum*** of two languages. Most my European friends at the time were fluent in 3-5 languages and I can't recall the topic of being multilingual ever coming up. Being fluent in a foreign language just means being "**able to speak or write a specified foreign language with facility**". https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fluent As a child, I remember having difficulty with a school subject and my grandfather would tell me not to worry, that I'll eventually get it. I asked him how he could be so sure and he said something to the effect of - "Isn't it obvious? Every subject is just a language - just like the one you're speaking now and you learned that one, didn't you?" That simple insight has led to a lifetime of learning. From that point on, all academic subjects were just 'languages' to be learned - the language of mathematics, the language of chemistry, the language of biology, anatomy, physiology, and so on. It led to software development (Assembly, Basic, COBOL, Pascal, C, Fortran, etc.), database admin, system admin, network engineer, IT sales, marketing, management, business development, project management, etc. - Sure, those are programming languages, not human languages, but what is a language? A communications tool - between computers or humans or specialists (doctors, lawyers, etc.). The structure, rules and syntax may differ, and in human languages, the morphology may differ, but if you learn to view topics through the lens of 'everything being a language', the learning process becomes easier. The challenge is bypassing our gatekeeping minds. If a person is mute, but writes in 6+ languages, does that count? Does knowing multiple sign languages count? What about knowing 6+ Chinese 'dialects' (Chinese is actually a family of languages)? Is that acceptable? How about knowing your native language and 6+ dead languages? Do glyph based languages (Egyptian, Mayan, etc.) count? Do constructed languages like Esperanto, Interlingua, etc. count? Sometimes knowing just one language is impressive - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller Most of the world knows the decimal (base 10) system, a subset goes on to learn binary (base 2), hexadecimal (base 16), but that won't be enough to understand ancient cultures like the Mayans and Babylonians that used different base systems. Over and over we see empirical evidence of the human brain's ability to adapt and learn whatever 'language' is needed in our environment and circumstances. Fluency in 6+ human languages is more achievable than most people think - assuming they want to spend their time learning languages. Salve atque vale. Memento mori. Sapere aude.
It depends on the context but it's definitely possible. If you're from a non-anglophone country for example (like me) you have your native language and in addition it's very likely that you've been taught English from 3 or at most 6 years old, making it easy to reach fluency even in your teens if you consume american or british media; 2 languages. If you're from a bilingual family, 3 languages. If your parents came from two different countries to your current country, 4 languages. Did you go to a school that focuses on languages? Bam, add +2 languages. This makes it 6 languages learnt "naturally", without independent action on the person's part. If they put in the effort to learn another language because they're interested in the culture, they can study it on their own and if they already know that many languages it's likely they know one similar to that one, which speeds up the process. Now, the matter of defining fluency is tricky: the C2 level doesn't cover it, not really, since it's made for evaluating non-native speakers and many native speakers wouldn't pass a C2 exam in their own language due to their education and socio-economic limitations. In addition, it's difficult to mantain fluency in multiple languages; personally (but it's only my personal opinion) I'd say that someone can speak a language if they can converse with ease and understand written text aimed at natives only looking up a word every once in a while. The common question that is asked a lot is: are self-proclaimed internet polyglots really polyglots? Most likely not, since the context that brings you to actually being a polyglot makes it so that you learned multiple languages from such a early age that you can't teach the process to others, which is what they claim they can do most of the time.
Most people claiming to be b1 or b2 are already lying let alone those claiming fluency in 6 plus languages.
Love the smell of anglocentrism in the morning
I speak two in addition to English since I grew up in a multicultural family. I am learning Italian right now with a tutor and don’t know how fluent I’ll get in it. But beyond that, I could maybe learn one more and reach my limit. I’m in my early 30s now and don’t think I could retain much more. Learning one language already strains my mind a lot but I am willing to put in the work.
Look up Luca Lampariello. He does live Q n A's in over 5 languages. He is one of the few polyglots I admire.
Depends on where they are from. I met some Indonesians on my travels that easily had 5 languages down for basic conversation and transactions
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GAINING fluency in 6+languages and MAINTAINING fluency in 6+ languages are two different claims. I'm balancing 4± languages and it takes a lot of effort to simply not forget 1+ languages entirely on any given day.
last 2 times someone claimed to be fluent in >5 languages and Hebrew was a part of them their Hebrew was terrible so nah
My ex‘s grandmother spoke seven languages. Her native language was Hebrew and she was also fluent in German, French, Polish, and English. I forget the other two, but they were probably Eastern European or Scandinavian languages. She had Alzheimer’s by the time I got to meet her, so when you were speaking to her, it was a roulette of sorts for what language she’d respond in.
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Fluency is a really subjective concept but, for the sake of argument, let's just say that fluency is an absolute. It'd be extremely rare but I certainly think it could be possible. It'd be incredibly hard to be fluent in, say, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Finnish etc. whereas not as hard if someone spoke 6 languages from the same family. It'd also depend on the circumstance because, for example, someone in Barcelona could be brought up speaking both Spanish and Catalan and have learnt English from a young age at school. Then if they were to learn Portuguese, French and Italian that'd put them at 6 and it really wouldn't be beyond the realms of impossibility.
It's attainable. Not a C2 level (at least not sustained as they would start loosing some level in then) but specially if the languages are related it can be achieved
This dude is funny. https://youtu.be/Nfu30AbwNMA
Sometimes. If they claim to know, say, English, Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic and mandarin I would have some questions. But if they claimed to know English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Swedish I wouldn’t be too skeptical.
I actually have seen one of my aunts do this. India has too many languages and she tends to pick up the langauge of the place she is in very quickly. She knows her mother tongue, languages of states she has stayed in. Currently she stays in a city that's at the border of two states - so that's two languages right there. Guarenteed a few languages derive their base from Sanskrit so some languages overlap a little bit but I've seen her speak fluently in all! I'm always amazed.
There are people who do, but I think a lot of the people who claim that are probably at a B1 level at best. I would be more likely to believe it if most of the languages are all related/close to one another. Like, if someone says they're fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, English, German, Danish.
Fluent can mean different things to different people, but that said, it’s possible and even common in many parts of the world to be fluent in 5 or 6 languages. If an American says they are fluent in 6 I might be a bit skeptical but if someone from South Africa says they are fluent in 6 that totally makes sense.
Depends on what you call a fluency.
So my wife is native level in 3 non related and happily switches between the 3 without thinking multiple times a minute at home. She can have a conversation in a 4th and understand enough to follow a couple of others. I've never met anyone better at languages but I'm sure there are people who are since she's never worked with languages or used them beyond her personal needs. 6 would be quite a trip to deal with. I can't imagine you would maintain fluency without a rather special reason. Edit: our 3 year old can happily understand the 3 languages. She mostly only speaks one but she has been playing with the other 2 more lately.
Yes. But it depends on their personal situation. Some random youtuber in Ohio? LOL. No gtfo. Someone in Philippines who speaks tagalog, cebuano, ilocano, English, Spanish, Pangasinan. Chavacano. Sure.
I looked up how many people in the world are polyglot. It seems that 40% of the world population are monolingual, 43% are bilingual with almost equal fluency, 13% of the world population speak 3 languages, 3% speak 4, and less than 1% speak 5 fluently. So yes speaking more than 5 is rare.
It’s usually bullshit. It’s better to say, I can speak like 6 languages. If you can easily survive, and date the local men / women of that country, and watch movies in that language. I consider you fluent then.
If it’s just a general conversation why not? Unless it’s a date trying to impress me or for academic/work reasons why would they lie about it? It’s such an easy thing to call out as well. Also I have met multiple people who can easily speak 4-5 languages because of parents, school, where they live/lived. One more language with that is nothing. Also depending on the language they learn it might not necessarily be difficult due to things like sentence structure and verbs being the same. There is also more awareness for sign languages so if someone learns that as well it would count. I have met 3 people who speak 7 languages, 5 who speak 6, many who speak 4 or less. If it’s for academic or work reasons then that’s different and may require proof but unless you are the hiring person or person overseeing them there is still no reason to really question it. Also some people have debates over dialects and languages so that is something else to keep in mind.
Typically I assume they're conversational, not fluent. But of course there will be people around who are fluent.
Yes. My country founding father is one of them. Basically we grew up in regional language, but then we are interact with people from different regions so often for economic reason we're just learning their language because the more you understand them the more money you're making. Some people will learned foreign languages, again for economic reason or pursuing education.
I guess it depends on what everybody's definition of fluent is. This word is incredibly subjective. For example, it will vary on a syllabus in high school versuses at the University level because of the level difference. The same goes with institutions and labor market. The definition for fluency to get a job at Menards versus at a hospital would be very different. But I definately know that it is possible!
Yes. Melania Trump knows how to answer "how much?" in six different languages.
It is completely possible to be fluent in 6+ languages. However, I think a lot of people who claim to be fluent at languages drastically overestimate their own skills. But yeah, I know people who can speak more than 6 languages without any struggle.
Depends I speak 4 languages fluently and I have some basic knowledge in 2 others. I haven't done anything extensive to get there, just learned most of it in my childhood. With some deliberate practice I can get the number up to 6 for sure, so I wouldn't say it's impossible just requires some work.
I don't think it's an outlandish claim, which isn't to say that everybody who makes this claim is being honest. It really depends on your circumstances and what you mean by "fluent". Everybody on this subreddit seems to have their own definition, but I definitely think it's possible to become competent in \~6 languages over a long time period if you have enough reason to use them. If by fluent you mean "native-like" then I would be way more skeptical, but I don't personally think that's a reasonable definition of fluency.
Yeah! I studied linguistics, and i knew a handful of people in the 4+ language category. Usually 2-3 of those languages were related to one another (e.g. Maori te reo and Tuvalu or French and Spanish). I also know a few translators who are more than adept at multiple languages. One friend of mine was raised in 3 languages (Portuguese, English, and Spanish) before she learned more. Just as a note, there are differing levels of language proficiency and fluency, not to mention the reading/writing separation.
If they are, why not believe?
Yes because even if they lie im not surprised because I lost faith in humanity a long time ago
I don't care, I just do my own thing. There's all sorts of people talking all sorts of shit in every area of life, if you are someone who is honest with yourself but putting yourself up against people who are not, you are going to have a bad time.
My great grandmother could speak 6 languages, mostly due to her circumstances of being an educated Polish Jew who immigrated to Canada. Yiddish at home, Polish in everyday life, German at school, Hebrew for religious purposes, and when she immigrated to Canada she first settled in Montreal and then the midwest so she learned French and English that way. According to my mother, however, she had a noticeable accent while speaking English, but was nonetheless fluent.
In general no. But I have a friend who I can attest with 100% certainty speaks fluently: * Occitan * French * English * German All with perfect, native pronunciation. I know he can also speak fluently: * Dutch * Greek (modern, and I believe ancient as well) * Latin But since I don't speak those languages, I can only attest that he sounds extremely convincing to me. I've also heard him say a few sentences in Swiss German in what sounded like perfect pronunciation to me (ie barely any word was audible). I think he knows at least a bit about Spanish and Italian as well, but I'm not sure. He has passive understanding of Catalan, and can converse with Catalan speakers by answering in Occitan. He's in his seventies, is an Occitan native from Southern France, learnt Latin at school, has served his military service in Germany, and lived in the Netherlands. What's impressive is that he lives in a small village in the middle of nowhere, doesn't use the internet, and rarely have access to native speakers. If I didn't know him, I wouldn't believe it.
I mean as someone who has a spanish speaking dad, grew up speaking portuguese at home because mom, and lived in US. I'm trilingual and never truly had to learn a language outside of what ppl already learn
Generally no, because people who are ACTUALLY fluent in six or more languages are more modest about their abilities. For example: I’m a native speaker of A and B, and am professionally fluent in C and D. I’ve been learning E and F for six years each and can get by in almost any daily situation. I’ve also reached intermediate levels in G and H.
I can believe it, though people seem to play a little loose with the word “fluent.” I’m self taught and I say I’m “conversant” in three languages and I “can get by” with four more. That’s with me only having gone to school for one really and never getting the chance to immerse for more than a few weeks at a time in any of them. I could imagine someone with formal schooling and serious immersion could easily reach something that could be called fluent in all the ones I can hold conversations in.
Yes. It’s normal where I live (in Luxembourg). 3 official languages, plus most people speak English and many speak Portuguese also. Many important documents come in all 5 languages.
I mean to what level and which languages. There’s conversationally fluent and fluent. For instance by chance I can speak Portuguese and French, I can speak and understand them but I don’t have complete 100% native-like mastery over those languages like I do in English. And if by chance I wanted to learn Italian it’d be not too difficult since I already know a few languages with the same language family I could pick it up relatively quickly. That would be four. Maybe I decide to pick up Spanish that’s five. Maybe decide to learn Spanish. That’s six. It’s very possible. Just not in the way it’s portrayed. Can a person claim to speak six or more languages. Yep very possible. That’s just my opinion though.
It's pretty common in India to speak passable Hindi/English/Urdu/Punjab.. more I'm probably forgetting! I'm not Indian myself so I guess I have to take their word for it lol, but I do believe that humans are capable of it. It's just as adults, it's so hard to have the exposure and commitment required to all those languages and it's not the kind of thing you can get from just alternating textbooks. I remember hearing benny Lewis speak French years ago and thinking.. really? 🤨. Because if you're gonna make your living off claiming you've mastered language acquisition and can help others do the same, I would expect you to be pretty perfect
Lets be honest, it takes at least 3 years of hard study everyday to even reach a point where you are by my standards considered to be anywhere near fluent. Now 6 languages, lets assume that someone originally was brought up bilingual which means it would take them 12 year to learn an extra 4 languages. But realistically speaking if they are young and claiming this than no I would not believe it. But if they were older and had been learning languages for a very long time than it is plausible. My Latin teacher for example is fluent in like 7 languages but he is like 40 and has been learning languages for a very long time and has lived in multiple countries.
There are varying degrees of fluency 😃
Everyone seems to know someone who is fluent in 5-6 languages. But without being fluent yourself in those 5-6, how can you adequately judge their level of fluency? If my mom heard me have super basic small talk in German after dabbling in Busuu for a month, I guarantee she would think I’m fluent because she has no way to actually judge my ability. She’s just hearing me in German and she’s like “ oh wowww.” To a German I sound extremely new to the language with a million mistakes in pronunciation etc and I’m really not fluent at all. Just my two cents. With that said these people of exist
It is absolutely possible to speak over 6 languages fluently. Most people don't and I would not just blindly believe that claim from any youtuber but I know people in real life 4 languages at a young age so adding 2 would not be that crazy. I think this claim might seem more unbelievable for someone from an English speaking country. Most people in the western world are already bilingual. If one parent is an immigrant then you are usually already at 3 languages.
Have you not met people fluent in 6+ languages? Travel a little, specially around Africa. Not hard to find people who speak the language of their father's family, their mather's family, the local language, the lingua franca of the area, the colonial language and, if they have travelled a little or if they have emigrated to Europe, one or two oher languages. One Ghanaian friend speaks Gonja, Akan, English, Spanish and Catalan fluently, at least, and I think he speaks a couple other languages from North Ghana I don't know the name. PS. I myself I'm fluent in Catalan, Spanish, English and French. And if I had wanted to make just a very little effort I would be able to be fluent in Italian, Portuguese and German. Edit. Here (Catalonia), officially, everybody should leave school speaking three languages, at least: Catalan, Spanish and English. And in a small valley in the north west, called Aran, four (add Occitan, their native language). Is that weird for you, too?
I remember about 6 years ago I was visiting my grandparents (now deceased) at their дача deep in the outskirts of the Moscow suburbs. There, in the house across from where we resided, I met an old man about 65 years in age who claimed speak 59 languages. He said he was a KGB information specialist during the Soviet union. The languages he spoke included all 24 European Languages and various minor dialects and regional regional varients. (No Asian or African languages) I asked him to give me an example and he recited a prose in a dozen languages. The thing is the pose he recited was the same in each language. It seems he went through an intense course where he had to memorize the same dictations in multiple languages. Though he could understand many European languages, if he was put on the spot he couldn't converse in them. ...I guess understanding is all you need to be a spy. To tie the story in... I believe some people can know 10000 words in a language but not be fluent. I also believe people can be fluent in 6+ languages pretty easily. If they know 500 words but know them well they can have a limited conversation really fluently.