Hello!

This is my third blog post for language learning. I wanted this to be first, however, since Valentine’s Day, and Chinese New Year was last week, I wanted to post on Romance languages and a fun little challenge for myself. I love the holidays, so I wanted to do something with the theme. I will, however, post on Mondays unless there is a holiday or I am traveling, I’ll try to blog about my trip as much as possible. So, here we are. My third blog post.

Now, to answer the question you came here for:

What is a polyglot?

So, in case you didn’t know, people that are fluent in many languages, are called polyglots, this is a Greek word, meaning many tongues. When polyglots think of some examples of polyglot, we think of Benny Lewis, Steve Kaufmann, Luca Lampariello, Richard Simcott, and many more. Many of these people have expressed their own method of learning languages. Thanks to Benny Lewis’s Fluent in 3 Months course, I have gotten to know many of these polyglots. He even talks about polyglots that he doesn’t necessarily agree with.

How Can I be one? 

To be short and sweet, if you grew up in a bilingual household, you’re already there. If like me and grew up in a monolingual home, you’re halfway there.

Your next step is defining what fluent means to you. I would go over this, but I would strongly suggest buying or checking out Benny Lewis’s book Fluent in 3 Months at your local library before buying it if you’re unsure. I plan on doing a more intense review of my reasons in a later post. However, some of you are about the free resources, and I get it. I’ll go over it for you.

Lewis claims that fluent has a different meaning for everyone. He also states that if your goal is to learn everything about everything, you’re trying to be more fluent in other languages than your native language(s). This really made me take a step back. I don’t know a thing about sports. So much so, that at my dad’s super bowl party, I asked him what inning it was. How could I expect myself to know everything about sports in Spanish or French?

Next step is, when you’ve defined your end goal, make mini goals. New Year’s resolutions saying “the end of the year I’ll be fluent in Spanish”, is not that specific. Benny Lewis talks about this in his book as well as talks about it more in his blogs, and his YouTube videos. Specific goals are the key. “I’d like to be B2 in the CEFR scale in Spanish by the end of the year”, is the suggested format for language goals. Lewis, creates a project pyramid, dividing goals with 3 months at the top, then month 1-3 as the next level, then weeks, then days. He said this method is great for 6-month goals as well. The months 1-3 would be divided into three columns of 2 months.

A little side note, I know I keep referring to Benny Lewis’s book, however, I just wanted to say, that I believe that his method can get you to fluency in three months, I do believe that it’s a great method for setting goals and helping with languages.

Hyperpolyglots?

If you’re really extra, you can be a hyperpolyglot. I believe Steve Kaufmann talked about hyperpolyglots on his YouTube channel, claiming that they are “fluent” (in their definition) in 6+ languages. Richard Simcott describes himself as a hyperpolyglot, you can see it on his blog. He speaks around 30 languages. However, I don’t remember if he’s fluent in exactly 20 or not.