Said Vance Home Gun, quoted in "The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages" (WaPo).
The hyperpolyglot carpet cleaner is Vaughn Smith. He began learning Salish because he liked its word for chicken — "skwiskws."
Vaughn makes an effort to get to know people in the language that shaped their lives. In return, they shape his. Welcoming him. Accepting him. Appreciating him....
But why hasn't his incredibly strong language skill led to a better job?
“Of course, I have tried,” he says. “But nothing has worked out.” Some days, he doesn’t necessarily want it to. He likes dressing casually, wearing one of the same 10 T-shirts from his favorite vacation spot, Bar Harbor, Maine. He likes being able to make his own schedule, where he can spend the day talking on the phone with his girlfriend who lives in Mexico. Or painting landscapes. Or working on his model train set. Or developing film photography. Or making brisket for his friends. He wants to be free to take his mom, whom he lives with, to the doctors treating her Parkinson’s disease. He wants to sit in coffee shops, drinking quad espressos and listening for accents that might lead to a connection with someone new.
There are people like this.
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If he has enough income for those hobbies, and isn't eking out an existence paycheck to paycheck, that sounds like a pretty nice life.
Learning languages is something I would love to be able to spend more time on -- at this point, I really only have English and Japanese and a bit of Korean. My spoken French and German are mostly gone, and reading comprehension sustained (if at all) only by reading the odd newspaper article. At one point, I wanted to study Mandarin and Amharic, but:
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to
As the poem goes. I would worry about insurance and elder care, though, particularly if my mother had Parkinsons.
Impressive. This account of course prompts the obvious question: can we scan this dude's brain to see how the wiring goes? Such an inquiry would illustrate the Romantic poets' indictment: "We murder to dissect," but it's how reductionist science works: to find out how a radio works, smash it to bits and study them.
The alternative is to admire and enjoy this guy living his life in his own way.
But his life is not "the" life of anyone else; certainly not a "stereotypical" life of a speaker of any of these languages. How can he "fully experience" the meaning, the feeling, the texture and context, of a given word in a given tongue? I have enough trouble even trying to do that in one language.
After reading this the first thought that popped into my brain - Rich Mom paying the bills. Not saying it is bad thing to enjoy and lounge around. If you have the means go for it.
Couldn't read the article, but it's fascinating. He obviously lives a life that he likes which is probably part and parcel of the way his brain works wrt language learning. I find that to be. . . .okay.
Forty years on a guys weekend to a Chiefs Game, I became friends with a guy that fixed auto radiators. It wasn't until the trip home he mentioned he worked for the State Dept as a Russian Translator. He traveled to Russia, 3 to 4 times a month to translate for high powered State Dept diplomats. The military had identified his language aptitude and zeroed in on his quick grasp of Russian.
I was never convinced it wasn't all a cover for spook work. Guy hiding out in a radiator shop in small town IA
This guy has accomplished enough in learning that many languages to probably feel like his life has been pretty successful. And he still has all this free time. Bravo! We should all be so fortunate. And as someone who has made different life choices, I hold no envy, resentment, condemnation or other ill will toward him.
The only caveat -- and this is general, not specific to this guy, to whom it may not apply -- is that when people make decisions in their life with the attitude that money is not a priority, there should be no individual or societal attempt, to any degree whatsoever, to equalize the money column vis a vis people who place a higher priority on money in making their choices.
Life is not all about money, as he proves. So don't use a single measure of people's lives to take from one and give to another, when the recipient may in fact be the richer of the two on balance.
The head janitor in my mother's system was an Eastern European refugee. Spoke 5 languages that we knew of. At any time, most of the janitorial staff consisted of other new off the boat refugees who hadn't yet mastered English. From the moment they started working for the school they were prepping to move on to something better. The key to moving on being mastering English.
They all also had to be introduced to America and the way we do things. At the end of one fiscal year my mother was balancing the books- and they didn't balance. One of the recent employees hadn't cashed a paycheck. (This was in the olden days before direct deposit and all that kind of stuff.) My mother called him in and asked why not. Head janitor came with him. Turns out he had lost his paycheck- and didn't tell anyone because he was afraid he'd get in trouble... what would have happened in the COMMUNIST country he was from. My mother was only concerned with balancing the books. She stopped payment on the 4 month old missing check, and issued him a new one on the spot. Both the head janitor and my mother had to explain he didn't have to pay her off for the new check...
I was lucky. My dad was stationed in Puerto Rico and Spain so I had Spanish down by 9th grade. When I was in the Navy, I attended DLI twice for Russian then Filipino. My current job (language issues for the Navy) has given me expose to 6 others plus I muck around with a few others. I do something with the languages every day; only sustained training will give someone gains.
When I was in college, I spent a lot of time and effort studying foreign languages. My major was Slavic Languages. I studied also German and French and dabbled in more languages.
I lost that drive a long time ago. I have been married to a Lithuanian for 26 years, and much of my social circle is Lithuanian, and I have been in Lithuania many times. I have studied my way through Lithuanian-language textbooks a couple times and have become able to read a newspaper fairly well with a dictionary.
However, I don't stick with it, despite the opportunity that I have to speak and listen to Lithuanian every day. My wife and I talk a mish-mash of English and Russian with each other.
After I moved to New Jersey in 2000, I found that our cable TV has several Spanish-language stations. I taught myself to read Spanish fairly well, and then I spent a lot of time watching Spanish-language movies on TV. Often I was able to find a movie that I could watch in English and in Spanish. Eventually, however, I drifted away from doing that.
A few months ago, I began teaching myself Italian. I found that there are hundreds of YouTube videos that help people learn the Italian language. (This is true of many other languages, but I have studied only Italian on YouTube.) Watching such YouTube videos is a superb method of studying a foreign language.
It seems to be a pretty good business too. People make the YouTube videos for free and then arrange to get paid for supplemental instruction and materials.
On YouTube I have seen people who speak five or six languages quite well. Many of the people in my social circle speak at least three languages quite well. However, I think that six must be the practical maximum.
I can read many languages, but the only foreign language I still can speak much is Russian. Still, I think that studying foreign languages is fun and interesting. At this point in my life, though, it's a self-indulgent waste of time.
You have to persist in studying foreign languages. If you do not do so, then your ability decays. I just do not have my younger drive to master speaking them. I have too many English-language books that I want to read.
When I am in Lithuania, I can talk with almost everybody. Everybody older than 30 speaks Russian well, and everybody younger than 30 speaks English well -- and many people speak both languages well.
Jordan Peterson and Linguist John McWhorter have an interesting conversation about the theories of language.
👉🏽 https://youtu.be/u9quq9NGUcM
i had a young lady who worked for me who spoke 8 languages. we hired her on the spot during her first interview.
of course she was young, blonde, 6 feet tall and liked to wear short skirts.
And then there was her masters degree in economics.
Mike Sylwester: good on you for learning Italian. I picked it up in college so that I could get a semester in Florence. What a blast. It's a lovely language IMHO, with rational spelling and pronunciation, huge borrowings from Latin (obvi) and for me the continuing enjoyment is to read Dante in his own words.
There is something about working in another language that colors the experience in ways that one's native tongue does not. That's why translation is such a personalized art, certainly for literary works.
One of my professors at seminary, Gleason Archer, could read and/or speak something like 30 languages. He taught New Testament Greek, biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Akkadian, Egyptian, Syriac, and Latin. I took his Latin class but dropped out.
He would take students on a tour of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. He would read directly from the monuments and tablets, proceeding from Sumarian to Babylonian to Akkadian to Egyptian without once looking at the translation placards.
Watched a documentary on Savants. One was able to go to Norway(or somewhere) and learn the language well enough in a weekend to speak and joke make jokes with an interviewer.
Most of the savants were exceptional in some way without effort, but mentally challenged in everyday stuff.
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