Such Work
Only 6% of people on Earth can learn a foreign language perfectly. But both scientists and teachers assure: a motivated person of any age can master two or three or more foreign languages and actively use them at work. Proof? 40% of employees in South Korean companies study English, and 33% study two foreign languages at once in hopes of finding a more prestigious and higher-paying job. Preparing for the 2008 Olympics, more than 50% of Beijing police officers learned to communicate in English, and they were also offered to study German, French, and Arabic.
In some fields, career growth is directly linked to the ability to communicate in several foreign languages – for example, international relations, diplomacy, trade, transport, communications, journalism, organization of international events (exhibitions, fairs, conferences, sports competitions, tours, and world tours).
The abundance of official languages of the united Europe – and there are already 21 – does not frighten anyone. Moreover, the European Parliament has developed a program according to which every resident of the European Union must (!) master at least two foreign languages in order to fully exercise their rights and freedoms.
Switzerland, which has four official state languages, has long implemented school programs that support multilingualism. And the Swiss know-how for which foreign students come here is professional hotel management programs with two or three working languages. For example, the joint efforts of two Swiss schools, Surval Mont-Fleuri and Institut Villa Pierrefeu, have developed programs for girls over 15: 'Protocol and Etiquette,' 'International Etiquette,' 'Official and Diplomatic Protocol.' Teaching is conducted in English, the second mandatory language is French; to obtain a diploma, students must pass qualifying international exams in both. Additionally, one can study German, Spanish, Italian, Russian.
'At the Institute of Foreign Languages, I studied English, French, and Spanish, dreaming of becoming a guide-interpreter,' says Alexandra Porozhenko. 'But then an unexpected twist of fate – I graduate from the Swiss Glion Hotel School. I need to find a job. I send out resumes in a row, straight from the directory, to all hotels in Europe. And suddenly a reply from Cannes: the Radisson Hotel just needs a manager with English, French, Spanish, and Russian. Could my knowledge have come in handy? And my native Russian? Phone interview... Hurray! I'm suitable. A few months later, life in Cannes became habitual, ordinary, free time appeared... I think it should be spent on Italian.'
Learning is Light
Combined courses for adults, for example, two weeks of English, two of French, are very rarely ordered. And this is understandable: most students are concerned with bringing at least one foreign language up to Advanced level. Naturally, both the school and the student are interested in maximum results in a short time, which requires full immersion (both at school and outside – one language). It is a different matter if a person has already learned languages and needs specifically bilingual practice. Then he chooses courses, say, English in Spain or Sweden, German in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, etc.
For schoolchildren, international summer camps can be a good help, allowing them to combine studying one language in class with independent practice of another (or several) outside. 'In the Canadian sports camp Edphy, children from all over the world gathered: from the USA, South America, three from Russia, two from China, and almost half were local Canadian teenagers,' says Moscow schoolgirl Marina Katunskaya. 'In the morning we had English lessons, and then a sports program began, which was voiced in a hellish mixture of English, French, Spanish words and Russian... let's say, interjections. Strange as it may seem, everyone understood everything. All our coaches were bilingual: they switched from English to French and back without blinking. Believe it or not, but by the end of the session I could communicate decently with my roommate in her native Spanish, although before that I had only studied English and French.'
Studying several languages can be combined with obtaining the now necessary business education. A number of European business schools offer Bilingual MBA programs. For example, upon admission to IESE Business School (Spain, Barcelona), Spanish is not required – only TOEFL, but during the first year of study students master Spanish at a fairly advanced level, and in the second year a number of subjects are already taught in Spanish. The requirement for applicants to Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (France) for the MBA Sciences Po program is fluency in both English and French. Universidad Comercial de Deusto (Spain, Bilbao) trains personnel specifically for international trade, and here, for the MBA program The European Management Trilingual, only students who are confident in English, French, and Spanish are accepted.
Scientific Approach
Polyglots who have independently mastered dozens of languages claim that a person with average abilities can also learn five or six foreign languages. It is very important to be sociable: it's good for someone who, knowing only a few dozen words, easily engages in a conversation with a foreigner and achieves mutual understanding, while another studied grammar and reads without a dictionary but cannot utter the simplest phrase. Fortunately, communication skills are easily developed in appropriate trainings and courses.
The minimum level – 'survival language' – is accessible to everyone: it is just 50-100 everyday phrases and 400-500 words. Having mastered this basis, one must constantly use it and gradually build it up, not missing any chance to hear, read, or say something. One should not neglect even such a small thing as saying 'sorry' or 'cherchez la femme' at the right moment.
Psychologists have found: for new unfamiliar information to be consolidated in associative memory chains, it must be served 'with a side dish' of previously acquired knowledge. Moreover, the new should constitute 20-30% of what is already known. Consequently, the more a person knows, the more new information they can absorb. That is why learning a second, third, etc. language is easier and faster: each previously mastered language becomes a support for the next. It is not for nothing that Latin is studied in classical gymnasiums: European languages have largely inherited the Latin vocabulary and logical structure of the ancient language. For a polyglot, Latin is not a 'dead language' that has sunk into oblivion, but a reliable support when learning all languages of the Romance group.
What to do
A natural multilingual environment is the best means for polishing knowledge and skills acquired independently or in courses. If there is no opportunity for 'immersion', one has to be inspired by the experience of Cardinal Mezzofanti – the keeper of the Vatican Library, who fluently spoke 27 languages. He never left Italy, but never missed a chance to converse with library visitors: with Lord Byron in English, with Spanish priests in Spanish.
When several language systems interact, complex cross-associations are formed in memory, making it easier to find the right word and construct a phrase. But this ease has a downside – cross-linguistic interference, when the norms of one language are transferred to another. Lessons in comparative typology help minimize such errors. For those studying several languages in parallel, bilingual lessons are useful, the goal of which is to recognize and remember 'insidious traps' in the grammatical systems of two languages.
The main enemy of a polyglot is fatigue, because you need to study the language constantly, and sometimes you just want to drop everything... In this case, psychologists recommend taking a break: pick up a lighter detective novel to read, watch an undubbed comedy not particularly loaded with meaning, just flip through a dictionary, listen to new music from radio stations. But don't quit!
Briefly summarizing the experience of famous polyglots, one can say: patience and hard work will grind down anything. They all advise roughly the same thing: 1) study daily; 2) always have study materials with you and look into them every free minute; 3) do not memorize individual words in isolation from context – only in semantic links; 4) read as much as possible, selecting texts of an accessible level, watch undubbed films, listen to cassettes and radio; 5) first of all, learn a 'mini-phrasebook' – ready-made phrases and constructions most frequently used in everyday speech; 6) do not miss the slightest chance for language practice.