Feeling like you will never master a second language?
How's this amazing man? Polygot - Carlos Freire and Richard Simcott is pretty impressive too!
Transcript of Carlos' interview
A TV interview with Carlos Freire, the man who knows over a 100 languages.
transcript given with the interview
...the russian dictator Stalin. "I've studied over a 100 languages and one of the hardest is Georgian." In his book Poems of Babel prof. Freire translated 60 poems from different languages to Portuguese. Some languages were translated for the very first time to Portuguese as the impenetrable Quechua, the bolivian indians language. Prof. Freire has studied languages for 40 years. He researches every year at least two new languages. He untagles grammar, vocabulary, syntax and the phonology of every single language. At his 74 years old and at the peak of his erudition, he says that one of the most interesting languages is Esperanto, which was created by an intellectual. "By the linguistic point of view, Esperanto is perfection. The main reason it didn't became an international language is that it's not interesting, politically speaking, to others countries that use English as their predominant international language." But what really amazes him is the Chinese language. "It has music, literally! Why? Because Chinese is a tonal language. It has 4 musical tones. An ideogram represents an entire word. You have to study Chinese as a whole. You need to know all of the subjects to really know the language."
4 Answers
Now I shall really have a" Fissy hit " I cannot even get one right . Was he ever
a member of SD ? His avatar wasn't Lazarus was it ? 
En nuestra pais vive una señora ,quien era intérprete en 16 idiomas. Ella escribió un libro muy interesante y ingenioso. En ese libro leyo la frase, que me guia en el aprendizaje de lenguas: La lengua es la uniqua cosa , cual vale la pena saber aunque mal.
In our country we had a lady , who used to be an interpreter of 16 languages. She wrote a very interesting and witty book. In this book I read the sentence , which guide me in the learning of the different languages: The language is the only knowledge , which worth having even badly.
link text The language that was spoken by Kiwi in her formative years was extremely
interesting and shows the level of intelligence that my dear friend had in
order to have risen above this tremendous handicap.
For me, I'm only a beginner in Spanish but learning vocabulary is a LOT easier for me because I already know two languages (Advanced in my first and intermediate in my second language). But Spanish might actually be easier to learn because my vocabulary in my first language helps me learn my second language which has 5000 words that have some Spanish origin. I have known my second language for seven years but I am very lazy at practicing it so I didn't improve much over seven years but I am learning Spanish and my second language at the same time.
For me this is one of those cases where learning two languages is good but I don't recommend doing this unless you know you can learn both well without getting confused or if you can't put any links between the two or more languages.
I don't want to become a polyglot. But I am sure that it gets easier as you know more languages.
