The following video is a mixture of very encouraging and incredibly humbling. A few years ago when attempting to understand my Swiss friend who grew up speaking two languages in her home, learned two more in school and was becoming fluent in two more during her gap year, I came across a video on polyglots. One of the people in this video was a young kid who was in New York and becoming very good at learning new languages. His name is Tim Doner and he is a polyglot. He has a debatable number of languages but more than 10 under his belt.
He touched on a couple of things which I know I wouldn't be able to do. The first of these is accents. He got to brag about all those accents he could do as a kid, I on the other hand have been told I speak Turkish with a Spanish accent and Spanish with an American accent. I just can't win with the accent game. Being able to place the pronunciation of words correctly in my mouth in relationship to how I hear them is just not in my skill set. Practice has helped in hearing differences, for example in how Brits pronounce Carrie and Kerry but not in actually verbalizing.
The second thing Tim mentioned regarding sound was the fact that he played with word association as a memory cue. He did it by memorizing words according to the sounds of the words. If words sound alike then in my brain they must be related. That isn't necessarily true, for tenses it may be but when it comes to nouns this is frequently false. For cognates this has been advantageous but their are some words this is not helpful. In Spanish there is 'el Papa', 'la papa', and 'el papá'. For a non native speaker of Spanish it is notoriously difficult to figure out the difference in pronouncing for 'the Pope', 'the potato' and 'the father'. Similarities can be distracting rather than helpful for me. Amusing sure but not helpful in learning a language.
That's not going to stop me from trying!
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