Richard Simcott - Life in multiple languages [EN] - PG 2017

you so my name is Richard Simchat and and the language addict hello thank you so it's not always been like this for me I wasn't born speaking a million-in-one languages at the last count that someone told me that I speak and actually I was born just speaking well nothing actually English I didn't say very much in the very beginning but yeah I learned English and it's going okay and but I did have languages around me I guess you can guess the flags so I had Welsh because I'm Welsh heritage French because I had French young age at school and Thai because my stepmom was from Thailand so she was in my life from about the age of eight and so even though I'm not a fluent high speaker I did have it as an influence no way there's no way from well no I'm not Norwegian secretly and what happened was and I think this was a game changer early in my life where I was on holiday and this little boy ran up to me and said do you speak Norwegian in English and I went no naturally and he went often played with other kids who's did speak Norwegian or Swedish a Danish and I felt a little bit put out oh how very rude you spoke to me in English and asked me if I speak Norwegian but that experience and the languages around me combined with an obsessive compulsion to look at maps non-stop does anybody else relate to this I think almost every hand in the room you like languages you naturally are drawn to maps right because you want to see whether or spoken and who lives where and what and all this was kind of a precursor to me learning languages I was getting curious and decided I wanted to to learn so this is what you do but you're sort of you're building the success story so you know it's always a working process isn't it with language learning and it was especially as a child the French was pretty solid as a kid but my Spanish was broken I couldn't resist sorry there's actually a double meaning for this because Edison crack I thought I felt that the Spanish would like that so this was a kind of my situation and I was sort of feeling okay I've managed to learn Spanish French but maybe that's all I can learn maybe I can only really get very good at one language and that's French but actually no as things moved forward in my education I realized that I could collect Spanish and it only gets worse I'm sorry I can't guarantee the quality of the jokes but I did and I did learn Spanish and it went forward from there really you know I saw the similarities and it was in the same language group although I wasn't really that conscious of the language families and language groups of that age I was I was quite young and and naive and we didn't have this great community we have now it was in a time where I was the only lingual file in the village successfully but like every good lingual file I had my to-do lists and like to-do lists were based on things like how many people speak all of these languages which languages so they add to my wonderful list of languages and I looked at who speaks what and how many people I can converse with and we've all gone through this and then we look at which ones will help our career yeah because that's really important and I did the same things as everyone else and I've seen it online numerous times and then you start looking and you're fantasizing about language lists and you start adding small languages of the world I'm gonna be a sort of a bastion for all of these poor languages that are dying out and I'm gonna go out and learn them to be a field linguist and I'm going to do all these amazing things and you know and know them looking at the language families then and I start seeing that ok I'm learning that language well this one's really close so I could learn that one as well and that one and that one she go on and on and on until you've got a list of over 7,000 languages of the world and you're looking at the king okay first of all I've crashed I've bumped into something come down to earth with a bang and I now have a crazy list hey we've all been there right and while we're sharing why not but I decided that no one not this guy I'm not a robot I can't possibly do all of this even if I wish I could I can't I'm also not this guy who knows who he is oh the fuser and why is he relevant because he's the oldest biblical figure lived to 969 years old and won't live that long so I don't have the time to learn the languages either but University did happen and I could expand my portfolio and I went and I was drawn to Icelandic and that's why Icelandic Icelandic flag is bigger in this image because that was my drawer I was fascinated with Iceland and I don't know why just was drawn to me because it's cold and I like cold weather yeah I'm in the wrong country right but I was drawn to it and i found a degree course in combined languages where i could do icelandic but i had to do swedish and then I could add in Portuguese and Italian to my other languages for my degree that suited me just fine and I was continuing to look at other languages on the side as we all do we flirt with one flirt with another and that's just what we're like isn't it was sort of promiscuous language learners very often at these events but German was the game changer because before then my concentration and focus and my brain were all in the Romance languages pretty much I'd say okay I spoke other languages or bits of other languages but my main my main mentality was sort of towards these huge words if you ever hear somebody who speaks natively or a man's language you're speaking English they'll use things like oh if you have the occasion to and they will use these big words that we don't use in English in those ways but because I was so used to that going to German just flipped my mind completely and it was something that actually I felt a physical shift so when I talk about my life I mean the way it's changed you know there is there are real mental changes that I can perceive in my head when this occurred I was starting to use more basic vocabulary again thinking about you know in English learning words from German in English like do you have the Ken it's beyond my Ken and that's something that I didn't even realize we even said until I got to German from Kenan to know and also I was more focused on the way the grammar worked and how English was a Germanic language as well I picked up a bit of this really in Swedish and a few pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place but what so is it worth trying to divert to microphone my I would have a quiet and the way they get out but yet Germans of greatest was the game-changer for me like before any because that's the first real Germanic language that I learned to such an extent if I thought very very comfortable saying almost anything I wanted and the structure of the language and how it works with strong verbs you know swimming swamps wolf in English I recognize these patterns I was focusing more in a different aspect of my English because English is 60% French vocabulary so I very much focused on that means developing my English vocabulary in the Latin eight direction and now I was going back to the Germanic words of English and getting into that side of the language balance and then checking out this is a university again because English hello my back okay so I was living on that side of the room where Prague Castle is and every day I had to walk across Charles Bridge and by this time I was quite well-versed in fair few languages in fact there's one of my colleagues that I met there and they ruin one of them now good friends from Jessica is that and we were on the same course together in Prague and a really really weird thing started to happen because walking across that bridge I was hearing lots of languages look at all the tourists it was going from French to German to Danish to Dutch - who knows what it was just completely crazy and here's where the cons come in convict the cons get it alright I told you it gets worse and this was me looking very confused and sort of overwhelmed because it was like a radio someone turning the dial on a radio in my head now I don't know how many of you people feel this as well but I cannot chew now to language I cannot and once it's learnt it confirms especially the understanding it's really really difficult so I felt like this lady sort of just overwhelmed with all of this noise and it was this noise that was kind of attacking my head and I started getting headaches and I felt tired just walking across the bridge in Prague to go to University in the morning going from one language to another like this he's like one of those nerdy dogs in the car and and that's what I felt like I was going dizzy and I was going crazy with it and I think that's probably one of the only times in my life that I just wished I'd not bothered I have to be honest it's true but I did find solutions to this I found the bridge early in the morning like this and it later at night like this so I make my crossings when there were no tourists around I prefer to focus on languages and I'm and happy switching backwards and forwards and have done on my life since I started this journey and so it's not a problem to switch but it's just not the same as walking across a bridge and being bombarded with 15 16 17 18 how many languages one after another like this and as my life developed and changed I moved to different parts of the world I looked at maps and as I continue to do and still do to this day but I've moved to lots of different places and my language portfolio grew and I was I lived in the Netherlands I lived in Germany of course and I lived in Czech Republic and I spent time in Spain and France in Italy and Moldova and Bosnia and now I live in Macedonia so my life's been quite varied and travelling around Europe as well you know you get to use these languages and go from one to the other and I'm very fortunate to have been taught to do that but it all takes time [Applause] told you gets worse I think we're almost at the bottom okay I may find new depths yet okay and there was a wake-up call so it was I've got all these languages yes but how do I maintain them all of these lovely questions that people ask me how on earth do you do it you speak all these languages how did you keep them all up at the all at the same level oh and you're going to learn this and are you going to learn that and you're going to do this and you're going to do that and like I had a bit of a wake-up call moment when I landed in Macedonia seven years ago to live and my wake-up call was this working family I had a young daughter a wife and work I have to eat you then cannot live on languages alone okay so this is kind of the reality of life kicks in really for me here and I start looking at the community around me on which languages I can realistically use this isn't just the community in Skokie or the city where I live but also the community that I have online who my work colleagues are who my friends are where i realistically travel to often and I make decisions based on that so I don't randomly choose Zulu as a language when I know and realistic I'm not going to use it and when people ask me on on sort of videos on YouTube they post comments like oh you're not really a polyglot because you haven't learned Korean to see to level No but realistically if I did would I retain it living in Macedonia answers I've got a chance in hell so things became important these two things in particular the anchor and the bridge has anyone ever seen this before no you have I know you have no so the anchor is important because I have anchor languages and that isn't anchor my friend from Romania anchors from the sea and they also have bridges which you'll see the significance for in a minute so these are my main language is my main groups of languages okay this is where I guess this gets a bit geeky and interesting for a lot of you okay so I've used colors you've got the Germanic languages and I decided that actually what I need to do is to be able to have certain languages in a group in a language family group that are more important to maintain at a higher level than others so for me this is English of course as my native language I can drop English German and I use that with my daughter at home we speak it's one of my home languages and then I've got other languages that are kind of anchor so Swedish for me is the anchor in that on that side of the Germanic family so from the Swedish I sort of extrapolate my knowledge of other Scandinavian tongues and sort of dive into other things of interest that are related to it but then I have other languages that I've like Dutch for example I lived in the Netherlands for two years so my Duchess is kind of a semi anchor language for me and it helped me to learn Frisian and Luxembourgish and all of these other wonderful things that are related and that endless and dialects as well in between so this is why for me these are interesting I didn't necessarily see these as as languages I see them as a continuum of language dialects that sweep across Europe and certainly if you start off in the north of the Netherlands and you go down to buy an in Germany you follow a sort of a curve around you're gonna meet people all the way through who speak similar dialects to each other yeah I'm glad you'll agree with that so the next group of fun the next group of languages is there a manse which is my other strong group and French and Spanish are my anchors in that group and they're my anchors because they're the ones I learned first and they're also my home languages as well I use both French and Spanish with my daughter Frenchy's our first language together as well as English but we also speak in Spanish as well and Italians are semi anka because I did agree in the language and I've used it a lot my community base actually has Italians in it so I use it on a daily basis in Skopje and the other ones kind of float somewhere depending on the year depending on on the time of year where I am they will float around the Slovak group has some new colors in it who's excited about the new colors okay so the Slovak group and as you you probably aware there is kind of three main branches the Slovak language family and one side the West Slavic group is with Czech polish Slovak and Serbian you've got other languages in there as well sort of smaller languages and Czech was my first one so that's kind of been my anchor I wouldn't say it's a green language for me in this in the same way as French or Spanish or German I would say it's more of a semi anchor because it's not as strong anymore with the lack of connections to that to the country but it did serve as a very good base to learn polish and other languages later my main anchor though is Macedonian because it's my home language I've been speaking at at home for 13 years now so that's a fair while and from that I'd say that Bosnian Croatian Serbian has become a semi anchor as well because there's so much input from those countries in the Republic of Macedonia that you can't get away from it dialects of Macedonia some of them tend more towards the the northern countries some of them go more east towards Bulgaria of the dialects and so as with the Germanic there's a land there's a continuum of dialects that sort of inter interlocking in to react and living in Skopje very much the Skopje dialect is has a lot of influence from Serbian with words turns of phrase jokes will be told entirely in Serbian or shared on Facebook entirely in Serbian so it just naturally has become that for me Russian is a another one because it's in that other group of the Eastern Slavic so you must had only in and Bulgaria sorry Bulgarian Slovene Bosnian Croatian Serbian they're all your Slavonic languages and then you've got your Islamic which is Russian Ukrainian Belarusian as well which I haven't studied at all but Russian is therefore my anchor just by default my semi anchored that by default in that group within the Slavic languages now there are two red languages the Slovak and the Ukrainian and they're red because I decided quite actively and consciously at one point in my life that I would never ever learn those languages that's shocking if you yeah I just thought that they were too similar to languages I spoke polish took me a while to come around to polish was on that list and so was Bulgarian but I took them off the list because my my Czech felt ok and my Macedonian was really ok inter to handle that difference with Bulgarian and but with with Ukrainian I still feel this way that I won't learn it Slovak well I'm gonna blame Libya and I'm gonna blame the polygon gathering you're all to blame for me having broken that rule with Slovak because I did it for the challenge and I couldn't resist the challenge JPM and of course there are other languages that I've dabbled in from the india this is only the indo-european group mainly I'm concentrating on I've studied languages from Asia as you've seen before and possibly heard of Chinese Japanese but these are the languages at the side of just the other indo-european languages I felt just enriched my understanding of the base of indo-european languages and that's kind of how I am at the moment I like to delve into languages and see what things are in similar looking at bridges between them and that's where the bridges come in because there are bridges between the different groups within Europe whether it's expressions whether it's borrowings of vocabulary or grammatical borrowings believe it or not Macedonian has attributes from Turkish grammar in it which isn't even an indo-european language because it has the idea of mish which of anybody who studied Turkic languages is a past tense used when you were not present to witness the event a Macedonian has that it's the normal L form that you have in all the other Slavic languages but in Macedonian it's used differently so these bridges even start crossing over and this is why I added Turkish in here because Turkish is one of the languages of my community it's one of the languages I come across pretty much on a daily basis Turks don't tend to speak other languages usually so I get to use my Turkish and very happy about that so that in a nutshell is sort of where I am and these languages in black sometimes will go up in a level sometimes will be down in a level it doesn't really worry me too much you may also notice and keen Esperantists will notice that I thought Esperanto on this list how many of you offended by that no one good ok I've put it under romance and it's purely subjective I don't think that Esperanto is agreed upon as a Romance language but in my brain it's it's in my romance brain and that's why it's there it just sits there in my head so that's why it's there and I use some of these languages just in different occasions so Esperanto I normally only ever use in these kinds of it's Ladino again I got to use it a bit when I was in Thessalonica the polyglot conference there and I imagine I'll get to use it again Romanian rarely get to use I use some a use some Romanian sometimes in Macedonia because there are a Romanian speakers or Vlad speakers which is a similar language and Portuguese I go through fits and starts of using it it's a language I didn't agree level and recently I went from I tried to do Brazilian Portuguese from my European Portuguese as well and I made a video about that on my youtube channel about me going to Brazil and trying to learn how to speak but as he later there's a lot of fun so this is kind of my language story and I don't like to go on too much I do like to give chance for questions so I hope that was interest go for it so I welcome questions and I know that the scope of any of these presentations because there you know you can only go so far into the detail so I realized that the detail is actually in the Q&A at the end but I hope the overview has given you some yes okay it's anyone got a mic yes yeah if you speak loudly I can which languages didn't make it to the list and why well all of them made it I showed you the slide seven thousand eight they all made it it's like it's an it's kind of like asking a kid in a in a sweetshop you know which which one don't you want you know if you most of us in this room if we go into a language bookshop even if it's a language you've not even thought of all heard of immediately we're definitely going to learn it okay well thank you and yes so how I made a living I have been in a number of different jobs in the very beginning I worked in IT and I was a network engineer and I used to use 8 languages a day for my work which helped me to learn to switch between languages also sort of private meetings with friends and things that helped me with that too in social situations and I did that in a number of places so I worked in the UK for on German teams or you know a different language team but I also worked in the Netherlands as a network engineer and then I studied at University in Prague and I studied the University in in a few other countries like Italy and Spain and for either courses or for four years and then I got a job in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the Diplomatic Service and I was based in embassies in a few countries and that helped me to go to some countries that otherwise I possibly wouldn't have anticipated visiting or let alone living in including Moldova and then now I work from home I am the languages director of a social media management agency called the social element and we have projects in multiple languages and yeah sort of sharing that with you if anybody's interested in that kind of work in moderation community management engagement copywriting even feel free to reach out to me if you're interested in the kind of work I do because there are projects that come up for a number of languages and that's really how I do it it allows me the flexibility working from home the flexibility to to be around to live in different places to spend now extended periods and not just a holiday where I can set up an office in a country for the say a month next month I'm going to endure this month actually I'm going to Indonesia for a month and then in August I'm going to spend the month in in Quebec so I'm gonna get chance to sort of focus on different languages that way as kind of my play project things you're welcome okay well I think that's the thing you don't always keep them all up there are certainly some languages that are in black that are weaker than others some of them are fairly strong and I can turn on at any time but I think one of the key things I do in my brain is I'm very conscious of when I'm speaking one language how it's different to another language in the group or other languages in the group so when I learn Slovak I learnt the word scaredy for ugly but then I knew the word in Czech is bascially V and then I found out that actually you can say in Slovak as well so it's really interesting when I make those links because it helps me make the whole language more memorable and how a language might might differ for example and talking about differences in in grammar like in Catalan you know is it's kind of an oddball in the in the romance group because vite vite fair I did and normally with the verb form of to go you would normally talk about the future in most other languages in their romance family so remembering that is is quite it's quite fun and it's it it just makes it easier to do that I guess but definitely there's a decrease in inability because I'm not using them so often that's why when I travel I do try and use them whenever I can oh wow okay teaching my daughter's a little bit beyond the scope of this presentation but in in short it's something there's no there's no in short about this it's a huge process but yeah I'd basically use play active play with her when she was a baby as she spoke English French and Macedonian from the get-go so they were just normal speaking and then when I introduced Spanish and German she was 18 months old or 16 months old and I did it through active play so I took her to a special place in in the city and a play area and we used to play together actively I would use real-life interactions to make the language come alive for her and then with Italian I she want we were hanging out with a lot of Italians and she'd not really had that much experience so what I did is I just spoke for a few 10 15 minutes a day just in a little bit of Italian with using specifically the words that were different from Spanish so that she could follow more Italian and there are kinds of tricks and techniques I use and also kids are awful they don't want to learn languages normally and really don't so their choice is to communicate and they will communicate in the easiest way possible or the only way possible if that the other person doesn't speak another language that they know so they will they will often refuse or try and divert to another language that you speak better and the key to that is just offering them a choice and not giving them close questions so you say you know G like vanilla ice cream or chocolate and then they have to repeat either chocolate or vanilla at the bare minimum and it's easier for them to repeat it in that language because they've just heard it then it is for them to translate it and then say any other one usually also bribery works I've gotten I've actually my ethics are terrible so I will you know children are great manipulators so use the manipulation tactics on them as well and no no don't say I won't love you anymore that's that's a bit far but but definitely things like and she say that I don't understand when you're saying in German Oh vehicle II voted younger she coffin or Papa yeah [Applause] yeah I'm not I'm not very moral Francesca yeah so would I choose check as my first Slavic language if I could go back in time and I'm not one to think about what could have been the woulda coulda shouldas I'm not like I'm not that guy so I'd say no I wouldn't change it and it was actually a complete accident that I ended up going to the Czech Republic I was supposed to go to Damascus to learn Arabic I've been studying Arabic at Leiden University in the Netherlands for about six months with a private tutor and my plan was to go to Damascus because I thought Arabic would be a better fit for the Foreign Office and also interesting for me and the University and the Mascis didn't get back to me in time and I had to make my preparations to leave so I applied to Prague University because I'd been in Prague and I've got a smattering of the language while I was there for a few months and so I decided that I would do that instead because I thought at least the Slovak language is good visas for Russia and all that was too complicated so and we still needed it at that time the visa for Ukraine as well so Russian was kind of out so I thought well the next best thing check and that's how I did it and I stand by that decision why not pour me in Arabic we have had a very bumpy rocky road there's been about three occasions where I should have learnt Arabic and I yeah it's always took at a very basic level ok I've got one here [Music] good question how much how do I find the time to learn languages and with family and work and everything else and how do I organize it well having five languages spoken at home helps in the wider community I could probably tack on another five six seven at least to that with my regular sort of interactions with people around me and my community so that takes me to about 11 or 12 us I don't know and then there are trips from there you can go to neighboring countries very quickly and very easily from Skopje Greece is just a couple of hours drive away so we go often first of the days out and things and you keep things fresh that way a lot of the time also there's TV in the internet so if I've got some down time watching something in a language like before I came here I started getting panel AK which is hilarious and it's it's and it's free and Slover yeah it's a lot of fun so I like doing things like that but I think having the languages at work as well as being a language director I and come into contact with a number of languages I have to do quality assurance and give feedback on localizations and where comments are made and I have to vote either defend where a change has been made or not relating back to the original English so those kinds of tasks and those that kind of work really lends itself to be able to do this and then I take on these language projects now as I say I've got my kind of base of languages and now I flirt with other languages and do these projects so like Indonesian I just do you know maybe half an hour an hour a day max and and even actually I did two months had a break and I'm gonna get back to it again before I am go to Indonesia and then just use it there and not worry how good it is when I come back in the years you know and in a year's time how well I speak it I'm not I'm not so concerned first okay the radio my wife so my wife has a degree in South East Slavic languages and literature so she has read literature from all over the Slavic world in all of the languages pretty much and in addition to those languages that she understands and some actively speaks she also has a smattering of Spanish and obviously she speaks English too she lived in the UK with us for three years and she hears it and she understands bits of Spanish and French and German just because of the our family environment so she knows what's going on okay yeah so one so a question about how I cope with different accents in all of the languages and it's a good question some languages are pretty tough for that and I'm not thinking of any languages like suti dudes you know these sort of Swiss German dialects can get a bit a bit hairy sometimes sometimes of you if you listen to people from the back of beyond in in the middle of sort of the countryside in a country it can get quite difficult but I think it's also difficult for native speakers to I mean I know you know where where the sort of the you've got this continuum this is why learning languages and a family helps because you can get why people are using certain words and where they're coming from and so you know for example just to give you I've got a funny feeling that chupa is actually a word in Slovak as well and it's well they're the words similar to I've seen somewhere I heard someone but there's a there's a in in batala in Macedonia there's the word chip a is a girl but we don't use it in other other parts of the country some words like that you just don't know you have to learn them in addition but you do that in your own language too right I mean maybe you don't if you don't know a word or another meaning of the word I suppose with experience you just get used to it but there's no easy way of doing that it's just a long process not really I don't get recognized I don't get recognized in the street and I don't consider myself famous in any way and I guess I'm slightly known in language circles so people people who are in those circles might know who I am but I definitely don't see myself as some kind of celebrity or anything like that thank you and I hope to see lots of you in Reykjavik for the polyglot conference at the end of October which I'm busily putting together now with Alex Rawlings of what one minute left so can I take another question oh cool one more question anyone anything burning oh there we go yep okay okay so there are any daily routines that I have was a question and I guess having a child that my daily routine is dictated by my child and so yeah I we basically have our daily routine in our languages so I mean I speak so normally in French we go to school she studies in English but on the school route I meet lots of families from many many countries and we have our organized coffee mornings with them and things like that so we have like five ten minutes after school drop off have a chat I meet them as they're picking up their children as well or taking them to school so that's kind of part of the routine for the social aspect and then yeah during the day work really dominates so I'm using languages in a work environment and then in the evenings when we've not got a social event reason to go to which often also includes different languages I will crack open a book and read or watch something in a language but there's no strict routine I'm not I'm not sort of this person that has a diary of what I have to do I do have a reminder and someone pointed this out at work why do you have a reminder in your calendar to sleep couldn't answer thank you very very much for coming [Applause] you

Channel: Polyglot Gathering

Views: 31,185

Keywords: Polyglot, Gathering, Richard Simcott, languages

Id: Rc60XNsMMLE

Length: 42min 39sec (2559 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 07 2018